Chaos Theory on Dimensionally Stable Objects on Earth College Campuses (17/27-ish)
Title - Chaos Theory on Dimensionally Stable Objects on Earth College Campuses (17/27-ish)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, OCs
Spoilers - None
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - Brem goes to university.
Author's Notes - Thanks tojlrpuck for the beta, insightful as always.
Many, many, many thanks to Kristin, for all the ideas. Thanks also tobouncy_castle79, who once again gave it the first outside-eyes read-through.
The gorgeous icon was created byswankkatfor me, commissioned byjlrpuckfor my birthday.
I'm trying to get back onto some semblance of a posting schedule. It's unclear how well that's working...
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16
Chapter Seventeen
“There you are.”
Brem opened his eyes and looked at his father. He’d been enjoying the artificial sunlight that flooded the TARDIS garden, sprawled on his back on the apple grass, listening idly to the high-pitched chatter of the miffgiffs, over in the mud by the pond. His father stood not far away, hands in his pockets and looking uncertain. Brem propped himself up on his elbows and wondered if he’d ever seen his father uncertain before.
“Unless you didn’t want to be found,” said Dad.
“Wouldn’t the TARDIS have kept me hidden, then?”
Dad scratched the back of his neck. “Not if she was being interfering.”
Brem laid back down on the grass and closed his eyes again. “I’m not hiding. I was just enjoying the sunlight. Can’t really do this in Boston right now.”
“Yes.” Brem felt his father drop to the grass beside him. “I could tell it must be cold from your choice of V’rulymin.”
Brem smiled. “Was a bit warm there, wasn’t it?”
“A bit, yes.” There was a long moment of silence. “You’ve been…” ventured his father, that same strange uncertainty lingering in his voice. “Quiet,” he finished, finally.
“Have I been?” Brem wondered how much he had his consciousness in check. The proximity of his sisters and father were throwing him off, reminding him how much closer to the vest he had to keep his emotions when he was on the TARDIS.
“Yes.” There was another moment. Brem could feel his father’s hesitation in his head. “You’re alright, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine.” Brem tried to think of something to say. “You forget it, you know. You stay put for long enough and you…forget what the TARDIS feels like inside your head.”
“I’ve been stationary before, you know,” said his father.
Brem opened his eyes in surprise and turned his head to look at Dad, who had laid on his back on the grass beside him and was squinting at the sunlight. “Were you? When?”
“Years before you were born. I was…Wellllllll, I was exiled to Earth. It was very…”
“Napoleonic?”
Dad chuckled into the artificial sky. “Yes. I suppose you could say. Able was I, ere I saw Elba.” He turned his head to look at Brem. “But I had the TARDIS, so I didn’t really forget what it felt like to be with her. And I spent every day I was stuck itching to leave. There you have it, Brem: one way you’re not like me. You’ve stayed put for several months now, and you seem fine.”
Brem wondered again how much his father knew. Dad had an uncanny way of knowing far, far more than he would ever let on. He looked back up in the direction of the ceiling, breaking their gaze. “I would miss it, every once in a while. I’d have a craving for buyn cups, or I’d want to see the Nuyum Kedryt, or we’d study the 1920s in a class and I’d want to go meet up with Charles Lindbergh again.” He looked back at his father, saying, honestly, “I missed you lot more than I missed travelling.”
Dad smiled at him. “We missed you. More than you can imagine.” He paused, reflectively. “There was a lot of pink around here.”
Brem laughed. “You did something to the jilxci lever.”
“You noticed,” said Dad, sounding pleased.
“Of course I did, there’s no comparison.”
“I found this oil on the bazaar on New Hyedrid,” explained his father, “it worked wonders to get it to stop sticking.”
And then he was off, on a babble about this particular oil and where it had come from, and Brem found himself interjecting into the monologue, asking questions, veering the conversation off into peculiar tangents, and he wondered where his weird discontent at Harvard had come from.
He could think of nowhere in the universe he’d rather be.
********
“Brem seems well,” said Jackie.
Rose smiled as she went about the task of stuffing the stockings. The kids were, obviously, long past the age where they believed in Father Christmas, but that didn’t mean she had stopped playing the part. The kids were always exiled to the TARDIS on Christmas Eve, while the presents were laid out by Rose and Jackie. The Doctor preferred to lie on the couch and perfect the ribbon-curling function on the sonic screwdriver using a spare piece of ribbon. “He does, doesn’t he?” She was pleased that her university suggestion seemed to have worked out so well.
“Better than he did when he came to visit last month. He was in a weird mood then,” continued Jackie.
Rose’s hand stilled in the middle of settling chocolate in Fortuna’s stocking. She looked over at her mother, pulling wrapping paper tight around a box with a new pink jumper for Athena. “Brem came to visit you?”
Jackie looked up. “Oh, no. He didn’t tell you? I thought he would. He seemed like he was in such a better mood when he left.”
“A better mood than what?” asked Rose.
“I don’t know. He was…weird, like I said. Spent the entire first day acting like, well, like a teenager, I suppose, but Brem’s never been sulky or pouty, really.”
“Time Lords don’t sulk,” the Doctor contributed, absently.
Jackie snorted and went back to wrapping her gift.
“What was he sulking about?”
“I’ve no idea. He was being…I dunno, Rose, he was being a teenager! Secretive and…You know what was weird?” Jackie flipped the wrapped box over, reached for a bow. “He asked me if I was happy.”
“Happy?” echoed Rose, watching her mother attach the bow.
“Happy here.”
“As opposed to where? On the TARDIS?”
“No. On the parallel world.”
Rose stared at her mother, Fortuna’s stocking entirely forgotten. “Brem was asking about the parallel world? Why?”
“I told you, he was in a weird mood. I didn’t understand everything he was saying. He was babbling, can’t think where he gets that from.”
Rose looked at the Doctor, who was still curling the ribbon and looked not the least bit concerned to hear that Brem was asking about the parallel world. But, in the fourteen (relative) years that she had been home, they had avoided mention of the parallel world at all costs. What did it mean that Brem was now asking questions about it, thinking about it? Possibly sulking over it?
“Anyway, Rose, I wouldn’t worry,” said her mother, brightly, as if this were all nothing. “He seems much better now. And he didn’t seem exactly unhappy when he was here. He’s tickled pink over his girlfriend, as far as I can tell.”
The Doctor sat up with a quickness that made both Rose and Jackie blink at him in surprise. “His what?” he said.
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Jackie. “Is this yet another secret I’ve let slip? Don’t tell Brem, he’ll never tell me anything ever again.”
“Brem has a girlfriend?” The Doctor looked at Rose, who made a big show of settling more chocolates in Fortuna’s stocking. “And you knew!” he accused.
Rose sighed. “He asked me to keep it a secret, and I did. He didn’t tell anyone, really. He didn’t even tell Athena, and you know how those two tell each other everything.”
“But why would he want it a secret?” demanded the Doctor. “Who is she? Is she human?”
“Her name’s Kate, and I would assume she’s human, but I’ve never specifically asked.”
“He got a human girlfriend, and he never told me about it?” The Doctor sounded hurt. “Asked for advice? I could have offered him advice. I know about human girlfriends! Time Lords and human girlfriends! I know about that!”
“This is my favorite topic,” drawled Rose. “All of your human girlfriends.”
“I mean you, of course,” he explained, impatiently.
“Oh, of course. And you have a ton of advice you could offer on how to catch a human girl, do you? Because I seem to recall I did most of the catching of you, and you just let me do all the work.”
“You’re misremembering,” said the Doctor. “It’s your feeble human memory, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Rose smiled but said nothing, turning back to the stockings.
“Not a single question,” grumbled the Doctor. “I do have good advice I could have offered him.”
“Maybe he doesn’t need advice,” commented Jackie. “He probably just tosses around that flashy grin of yours; you don’t need much more than that.”
The Doctor looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to be offended by that or not.
Rose sat, concentrating on the normal, human event of preparing for Christmas and trying not to think about Brem suddenly asking questions about the parallel world.
“I wouldn’t worry about Brem,” her mother said, as they put the finishing touches on the gifts under the tree. “He seems just fine now. As happy as I’ve ever seen him.”
Rose looked over at the Doctor, and thought how it was the happy ones you had to watch out for. There was more darkness dogging her happy, bubbly Doctor than had ever threatened her more-obviously dour Doctor.
The gifts done her mother went off to bed, and Rose wandered into the TARDIS. She found the kids in the library, clustered around a game of Martian Monopoly, and they were laughing over something, and they seemed, in that moment, so happy and well-adjusted, so much like normal children. She wondered suddenly what her life would have been like, had she married a normal man, had normal children, but the idea of a life that did not include the Doctor, of a life that had never created Brem or Athena or Fortuna, made her practically wince in pain. She had this life, and even worrying about little boys who’d had to save universes, she adored this life and would change none of it.
Athena caught sight of her. “Are the presents all set?”
“They are,” she responded, “but the humans in the family need to sleep for a few hours.”
“That’s perfect,” said Brem, “because I need to win back some of this money I’ve lost.”
“Ha!” barked Athena at him. “You are done for, Bremsstrahlung. You’ll never make a comeback.”
“Never say never ever,” said Brem.
Athena glanced back over and said, “D’you want in?”
“No,” answered the Doctor, and Rose realized he had come up behind her. “At least, not just yet. I’ve got gifts of my own to smuggle under the tree.”
Fortuna leaned over to roll the dice, the game continuing, and Rose, smiling, walked to their bedroom and disappeared into the bathroom to get ready for bed. When she emerged from the bathroom, she found the Doctor sprawled on top of the bed, staring at the ceiling.
“I thought you had gifts to smuggle,” she said, pulling the covers back.
“I do, I…He’s fine, Rose. He is. I talked to him and he…He’s fine.”
Rose looked at him, still gazing steadfastly at the ceiling. “It’s habit,” she said. “A mother’s habit. I can’t stop. Do you ever stop?”
“No, but I…”
“Worry about everything.”
“It was the only choice he could make,” said the Doctor, suddenly. “Holding open the breach for me. He had no other choice. Surely he understands that. How can he possibly be wondering if it was the right choice? It was the only choice.”
“I can’t imagine,” drawled Rose, “where he gets his tendency to torture himself over things he can’t control.”
He rolled toward her abruptly, surprising her. “Thank you,” he said, fervently.
She blinked. “For…what?”
“The children. Thank you so much for the children. I was just thinking how…how different…how you could have…it could have been…” He leaned down suddenly, his head pillowed over the single steady thrum of her heart. “Oh, Rose. That day in Henrik’s. Every day you’ve given me since. Thank you. Do you have any clue what I’d be without you?”
She combed her hands through his hair. “A sad, lonely, self-indulgent Time Lord,” she answered.
There was a beat. “I meant that question rhetorically,” he mumbled against her.
********
The presents were opened, the detritus of the gift wrap tucked safely into bigger-on-the-inside trash bags. There was a turkey in the oven, and Brem sat with a ridiculous pink paper crown on his head from the pulling of the crackers and studied the drawings of birds in the book his father had given him. Audubon. He had mentioned off-handedly, in a conversation, that he ought to know more about Earth birds than he did, so he could recognize them, and his father had remembered. His mother had, a bit adorably, given him unfailingly practical things “that you will never think of,” as she told him.
He sprawled on the couch in his grandmother’s living room. Athena and Fortuna were trying to figure out which Earth ingredients they could substitute for the decidedly alien ingredients in one of the cookbooks Fortuna had received. It was almost ridiculously calm and relaxed. Which made it even weirder, looking back at it, that it should be the pivotal turning point of his life, the before and after divider, the fork in the road that burned more brightly than the one he’d chosen fourteen years earlier. It had seemed just like every other day.
Those were the days you had to watch out for.
He closed the book and looked down at his sisters, heads bent close together over the cookbook, discussing which of Fortuna’s latest recipes had been a success and which hadn’t. He could hear, dimly, the murmur of his mother and grandmother in the kitchen, and he was so perfectly happy at that moment that he thought how much he wanted nothing to change.
He stood up and wandered into the kitchen.
“Brem,” said his grandmother. “D’you want a cuppa?”
“Alright,” he agreed. His father was sitting at the kitchen table, and for once he wasn’t fiddling or tinkering or doing anything. His eyes were fastened on Mum, who was pretending that she knew how to cook, frowning over something she was doing on the stove. Brem sat opposite him at the kitchen table and said, “I was thinking about cellular manipulation.”
His father tore his eyes off his mother to look at him. He looked as if he’d been a million miles away. Brem suspected he had been. “What?” he asked, absently, his mind clearly still on other things.
Brem snapped his fingers in front of his father’s eyes, which provoked a frown out of him. “Focus, would you? I think I’m onto something. Cellular manipulation. On the genetic level. Re-writing DNA.”
“What about it?”
“I think it’s an option. We could re-write Mum’s DNA, I really think we could. On a purely cellular level. It would be tricky, to get the triple-helixing to work, but we could do it, you and I. And it would be painful, but it would be-”
“You know,” mused his father, a speculative light in his eyes, “that’s actually not a bad idea, Brem. That’s not…not a bad idea. We’ve got the technology in the TARDIS already, we’d just have to figure out how to reverse it. You’re right, it’d be tricky, the triple-helixing, but it could-”
“Stop it,” Mum cut in, suddenly, and both Time Lords at the kitchen table looked up at her in surprise. Her back was to them, she was leaning away from them, onto the sink. “Stop it,” she said again, and her voice was trembling.
Dad drew his eyebrows together. “Rose-”
“No. Stop it. The pair of you.” She turned then, clearly angry about something, and Brem blinked in surprise. “You can’t fight death. You need to stop this…this…unhealthy obsession with changing the way the universe works. It can’t possibly lead anywhere good. Here you are, talking about genetic manipulation, of me. Did either one of you even think to ask if I want you triple-helixing my DNA? For God’s sake, I could just about carry triple-helixed fetuses without dying.”
Brem was annoyed. “Mum, honestly, d’you really think we wouldn’t-”
“I don’t know what I think the two of you would and wouldn’t do,” she snapped at him. “Time Lords do mad, unthinkable things when they think they’re cornered.”
“That,” inserted his father, flatly, with that lethal edge in his voice, “is completely unfair.”
“Don’t you want to figure out a solution to this?” asked Brem, honestly perplexed. “Do you want to die and leave us?”
“Of course I don’t…” She scrubbed her hands over her face wearily. “Oh, Brem,” she sighed. “You were supposed to go to university and forget all of this.”
Brem stared. For what felt like an eternity. It was really, he knew, only a moment or two. But it felt like an eternity, as pieces clicked into place in his head. “That’s what university was about,” he breathed, softly.
“What?” she asked him.
And now he realized he was furious. He didn’t think he’d ever been so furious in his entire life. It was so unexpected, to feel this way, and such a relief, suddenly. He was furious. He was furious with everything. He stood, trying not to show how very, very furious he was. “That’s what university was about,” he accused, more loudly. “It had nothing to do with, oh, new experiences, or adventures, or even giving me a chance at a normal life. You were trying to distract me,” he spat out. “Like I’m some sort of toddler.”
“You have never been distractable,” she snapped back. “Not even when you were four years old.”
“How dare you suggest,” he shouted at her, and he would have been surprised to realize he was shouting if he had paused to think about it, “that I need to be distracted from these things? If it wasn’t for me, you and Fortuna would still be stuck in the other universe! I was the only one who could get you home, and I did it! I know you wish you had this perfectly normal little boy whose only worry was what bloody emo band he could sneak out of the house to watch on any given night, but I am too bloody busy trying to fix the enormous disaster we are all heading toward but that none of us but me is going to acknowledge because we’re too busy being-”
“That’s enough, Brem,” his father cut in, sharply.
“No, it’s not enough,” Brem bit out at him. “It is not nearly enough, do you understand me? It isn’t. It’s all very well and good to try to make me as normal as you can get me, but without me, we’d be all alone and Mum and Fortuna would be stuck in a world they never belonged in. You seem to take great delight in continuously setting us up for a life of endless loneliness. And would you rather that? Would you rather you left Fort there? Is that an option for you?”
“Stop it,” inserted Athena, shakily, and it was because it was so quiet, so shaky, that Brem took a moment to breathe, and looked over at her. She was crying, not hard, just a few tears that she wiped hastily away. Shouting was not something they did in their family, ever. And neither was Athena crying. For a moment Brem was so shocked by the sight that he couldn’t react. “Fortuna,” she whispered.
Everyone in the kitchen remembered her in that moment. Brem turned his head, suddenly horrified at himself. Fortuna was standing just past the doorway, and she was staring at him, her mouth agape. She looked shell-shocked. Another universe, he thought, running over his words in his head. Bloody hell. Fortuna had no idea about the other universe, about parallel worlds and breaches to hold open and a little family torn so to pieces that he wasn’t sure they’d ever managed to fix themselves properly.
“Fort,” he started, awkwardly, because there she was, his miracle, who Dad had given to him all those years ago, when she had been so small she’d fit in the crook of his arm, and he’d held her that day and promised himself that he would protect her always, this child whose existence in this particular universe he was basically responsible for, and now, out of nowhere, he had shouted out the basic secret of her life, after years of protecting her from it.
She shook her head at him, turned and ran, pausing to grab his sonic screwdriver where he’d left it on the coffee table, and then disappearing down the hallway. A door slammed, Brem assumed the one to Mum’s old bedroom, and he flinched as it echoed through the flat.
The silence in the kitchen was overwhelming. He dared not turn back. He could feel every eye on him. Misery dragged at him. Fourteen bloody years of keeping his temper in check, and he couldn’t have done it for a few more days? He moved, stiffly, as if forcing himself through vinimys gel, out into the living room, toward the front door of the flat. He had no clue where his coat was, and he didn’t have time to figure it out. It seemed to him he didn’t even have the ability to figure it out at that moment. He pulled the door open, dazedly. He thought it was possible that somebody said his name, but he stumbled into the bracing cold of the day.
And then he ran.
Next Chapter
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, OCs
Spoilers - None
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - Brem goes to university.
Author's Notes - Thanks tojlrpuck for the beta, insightful as always.
Many, many, many thanks to Kristin, for all the ideas. Thanks also tobouncy_castle79, who once again gave it the first outside-eyes read-through.
The gorgeous icon was created byswankkatfor me, commissioned byjlrpuckfor my birthday.
I'm trying to get back onto some semblance of a posting schedule. It's unclear how well that's working...
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16
Chapter Seventeen
“There you are.”
Brem opened his eyes and looked at his father. He’d been enjoying the artificial sunlight that flooded the TARDIS garden, sprawled on his back on the apple grass, listening idly to the high-pitched chatter of the miffgiffs, over in the mud by the pond. His father stood not far away, hands in his pockets and looking uncertain. Brem propped himself up on his elbows and wondered if he’d ever seen his father uncertain before.
“Unless you didn’t want to be found,” said Dad.
“Wouldn’t the TARDIS have kept me hidden, then?”
Dad scratched the back of his neck. “Not if she was being interfering.”
Brem laid back down on the grass and closed his eyes again. “I’m not hiding. I was just enjoying the sunlight. Can’t really do this in Boston right now.”
“Yes.” Brem felt his father drop to the grass beside him. “I could tell it must be cold from your choice of V’rulymin.”
Brem smiled. “Was a bit warm there, wasn’t it?”
“A bit, yes.” There was a long moment of silence. “You’ve been…” ventured his father, that same strange uncertainty lingering in his voice. “Quiet,” he finished, finally.
“Have I been?” Brem wondered how much he had his consciousness in check. The proximity of his sisters and father were throwing him off, reminding him how much closer to the vest he had to keep his emotions when he was on the TARDIS.
“Yes.” There was another moment. Brem could feel his father’s hesitation in his head. “You’re alright, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine.” Brem tried to think of something to say. “You forget it, you know. You stay put for long enough and you…forget what the TARDIS feels like inside your head.”
“I’ve been stationary before, you know,” said his father.
Brem opened his eyes in surprise and turned his head to look at Dad, who had laid on his back on the grass beside him and was squinting at the sunlight. “Were you? When?”
“Years before you were born. I was…Wellllllll, I was exiled to Earth. It was very…”
“Napoleonic?”
Dad chuckled into the artificial sky. “Yes. I suppose you could say. Able was I, ere I saw Elba.” He turned his head to look at Brem. “But I had the TARDIS, so I didn’t really forget what it felt like to be with her. And I spent every day I was stuck itching to leave. There you have it, Brem: one way you’re not like me. You’ve stayed put for several months now, and you seem fine.”
Brem wondered again how much his father knew. Dad had an uncanny way of knowing far, far more than he would ever let on. He looked back up in the direction of the ceiling, breaking their gaze. “I would miss it, every once in a while. I’d have a craving for buyn cups, or I’d want to see the Nuyum Kedryt, or we’d study the 1920s in a class and I’d want to go meet up with Charles Lindbergh again.” He looked back at his father, saying, honestly, “I missed you lot more than I missed travelling.”
Dad smiled at him. “We missed you. More than you can imagine.” He paused, reflectively. “There was a lot of pink around here.”
Brem laughed. “You did something to the jilxci lever.”
“You noticed,” said Dad, sounding pleased.
“Of course I did, there’s no comparison.”
“I found this oil on the bazaar on New Hyedrid,” explained his father, “it worked wonders to get it to stop sticking.”
And then he was off, on a babble about this particular oil and where it had come from, and Brem found himself interjecting into the monologue, asking questions, veering the conversation off into peculiar tangents, and he wondered where his weird discontent at Harvard had come from.
He could think of nowhere in the universe he’d rather be.
********
“Brem seems well,” said Jackie.
Rose smiled as she went about the task of stuffing the stockings. The kids were, obviously, long past the age where they believed in Father Christmas, but that didn’t mean she had stopped playing the part. The kids were always exiled to the TARDIS on Christmas Eve, while the presents were laid out by Rose and Jackie. The Doctor preferred to lie on the couch and perfect the ribbon-curling function on the sonic screwdriver using a spare piece of ribbon. “He does, doesn’t he?” She was pleased that her university suggestion seemed to have worked out so well.
“Better than he did when he came to visit last month. He was in a weird mood then,” continued Jackie.
Rose’s hand stilled in the middle of settling chocolate in Fortuna’s stocking. She looked over at her mother, pulling wrapping paper tight around a box with a new pink jumper for Athena. “Brem came to visit you?”
Jackie looked up. “Oh, no. He didn’t tell you? I thought he would. He seemed like he was in such a better mood when he left.”
“A better mood than what?” asked Rose.
“I don’t know. He was…weird, like I said. Spent the entire first day acting like, well, like a teenager, I suppose, but Brem’s never been sulky or pouty, really.”
“Time Lords don’t sulk,” the Doctor contributed, absently.
Jackie snorted and went back to wrapping her gift.
“What was he sulking about?”
“I’ve no idea. He was being…I dunno, Rose, he was being a teenager! Secretive and…You know what was weird?” Jackie flipped the wrapped box over, reached for a bow. “He asked me if I was happy.”
“Happy?” echoed Rose, watching her mother attach the bow.
“Happy here.”
“As opposed to where? On the TARDIS?”
“No. On the parallel world.”
Rose stared at her mother, Fortuna’s stocking entirely forgotten. “Brem was asking about the parallel world? Why?”
“I told you, he was in a weird mood. I didn’t understand everything he was saying. He was babbling, can’t think where he gets that from.”
Rose looked at the Doctor, who was still curling the ribbon and looked not the least bit concerned to hear that Brem was asking about the parallel world. But, in the fourteen (relative) years that she had been home, they had avoided mention of the parallel world at all costs. What did it mean that Brem was now asking questions about it, thinking about it? Possibly sulking over it?
“Anyway, Rose, I wouldn’t worry,” said her mother, brightly, as if this were all nothing. “He seems much better now. And he didn’t seem exactly unhappy when he was here. He’s tickled pink over his girlfriend, as far as I can tell.”
The Doctor sat up with a quickness that made both Rose and Jackie blink at him in surprise. “His what?” he said.
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Jackie. “Is this yet another secret I’ve let slip? Don’t tell Brem, he’ll never tell me anything ever again.”
“Brem has a girlfriend?” The Doctor looked at Rose, who made a big show of settling more chocolates in Fortuna’s stocking. “And you knew!” he accused.
Rose sighed. “He asked me to keep it a secret, and I did. He didn’t tell anyone, really. He didn’t even tell Athena, and you know how those two tell each other everything.”
“But why would he want it a secret?” demanded the Doctor. “Who is she? Is she human?”
“Her name’s Kate, and I would assume she’s human, but I’ve never specifically asked.”
“He got a human girlfriend, and he never told me about it?” The Doctor sounded hurt. “Asked for advice? I could have offered him advice. I know about human girlfriends! Time Lords and human girlfriends! I know about that!”
“This is my favorite topic,” drawled Rose. “All of your human girlfriends.”
“I mean you, of course,” he explained, impatiently.
“Oh, of course. And you have a ton of advice you could offer on how to catch a human girl, do you? Because I seem to recall I did most of the catching of you, and you just let me do all the work.”
“You’re misremembering,” said the Doctor. “It’s your feeble human memory, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Rose smiled but said nothing, turning back to the stockings.
“Not a single question,” grumbled the Doctor. “I do have good advice I could have offered him.”
“Maybe he doesn’t need advice,” commented Jackie. “He probably just tosses around that flashy grin of yours; you don’t need much more than that.”
The Doctor looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to be offended by that or not.
Rose sat, concentrating on the normal, human event of preparing for Christmas and trying not to think about Brem suddenly asking questions about the parallel world.
“I wouldn’t worry about Brem,” her mother said, as they put the finishing touches on the gifts under the tree. “He seems just fine now. As happy as I’ve ever seen him.”
Rose looked over at the Doctor, and thought how it was the happy ones you had to watch out for. There was more darkness dogging her happy, bubbly Doctor than had ever threatened her more-obviously dour Doctor.
The gifts done her mother went off to bed, and Rose wandered into the TARDIS. She found the kids in the library, clustered around a game of Martian Monopoly, and they were laughing over something, and they seemed, in that moment, so happy and well-adjusted, so much like normal children. She wondered suddenly what her life would have been like, had she married a normal man, had normal children, but the idea of a life that did not include the Doctor, of a life that had never created Brem or Athena or Fortuna, made her practically wince in pain. She had this life, and even worrying about little boys who’d had to save universes, she adored this life and would change none of it.
Athena caught sight of her. “Are the presents all set?”
“They are,” she responded, “but the humans in the family need to sleep for a few hours.”
“That’s perfect,” said Brem, “because I need to win back some of this money I’ve lost.”
“Ha!” barked Athena at him. “You are done for, Bremsstrahlung. You’ll never make a comeback.”
“Never say never ever,” said Brem.
Athena glanced back over and said, “D’you want in?”
“No,” answered the Doctor, and Rose realized he had come up behind her. “At least, not just yet. I’ve got gifts of my own to smuggle under the tree.”
Fortuna leaned over to roll the dice, the game continuing, and Rose, smiling, walked to their bedroom and disappeared into the bathroom to get ready for bed. When she emerged from the bathroom, she found the Doctor sprawled on top of the bed, staring at the ceiling.
“I thought you had gifts to smuggle,” she said, pulling the covers back.
“I do, I…He’s fine, Rose. He is. I talked to him and he…He’s fine.”
Rose looked at him, still gazing steadfastly at the ceiling. “It’s habit,” she said. “A mother’s habit. I can’t stop. Do you ever stop?”
“No, but I…”
“Worry about everything.”
“It was the only choice he could make,” said the Doctor, suddenly. “Holding open the breach for me. He had no other choice. Surely he understands that. How can he possibly be wondering if it was the right choice? It was the only choice.”
“I can’t imagine,” drawled Rose, “where he gets his tendency to torture himself over things he can’t control.”
He rolled toward her abruptly, surprising her. “Thank you,” he said, fervently.
She blinked. “For…what?”
“The children. Thank you so much for the children. I was just thinking how…how different…how you could have…it could have been…” He leaned down suddenly, his head pillowed over the single steady thrum of her heart. “Oh, Rose. That day in Henrik’s. Every day you’ve given me since. Thank you. Do you have any clue what I’d be without you?”
She combed her hands through his hair. “A sad, lonely, self-indulgent Time Lord,” she answered.
There was a beat. “I meant that question rhetorically,” he mumbled against her.
********
The presents were opened, the detritus of the gift wrap tucked safely into bigger-on-the-inside trash bags. There was a turkey in the oven, and Brem sat with a ridiculous pink paper crown on his head from the pulling of the crackers and studied the drawings of birds in the book his father had given him. Audubon. He had mentioned off-handedly, in a conversation, that he ought to know more about Earth birds than he did, so he could recognize them, and his father had remembered. His mother had, a bit adorably, given him unfailingly practical things “that you will never think of,” as she told him.
He sprawled on the couch in his grandmother’s living room. Athena and Fortuna were trying to figure out which Earth ingredients they could substitute for the decidedly alien ingredients in one of the cookbooks Fortuna had received. It was almost ridiculously calm and relaxed. Which made it even weirder, looking back at it, that it should be the pivotal turning point of his life, the before and after divider, the fork in the road that burned more brightly than the one he’d chosen fourteen years earlier. It had seemed just like every other day.
Those were the days you had to watch out for.
He closed the book and looked down at his sisters, heads bent close together over the cookbook, discussing which of Fortuna’s latest recipes had been a success and which hadn’t. He could hear, dimly, the murmur of his mother and grandmother in the kitchen, and he was so perfectly happy at that moment that he thought how much he wanted nothing to change.
He stood up and wandered into the kitchen.
“Brem,” said his grandmother. “D’you want a cuppa?”
“Alright,” he agreed. His father was sitting at the kitchen table, and for once he wasn’t fiddling or tinkering or doing anything. His eyes were fastened on Mum, who was pretending that she knew how to cook, frowning over something she was doing on the stove. Brem sat opposite him at the kitchen table and said, “I was thinking about cellular manipulation.”
His father tore his eyes off his mother to look at him. He looked as if he’d been a million miles away. Brem suspected he had been. “What?” he asked, absently, his mind clearly still on other things.
Brem snapped his fingers in front of his father’s eyes, which provoked a frown out of him. “Focus, would you? I think I’m onto something. Cellular manipulation. On the genetic level. Re-writing DNA.”
“What about it?”
“I think it’s an option. We could re-write Mum’s DNA, I really think we could. On a purely cellular level. It would be tricky, to get the triple-helixing to work, but we could do it, you and I. And it would be painful, but it would be-”
“You know,” mused his father, a speculative light in his eyes, “that’s actually not a bad idea, Brem. That’s not…not a bad idea. We’ve got the technology in the TARDIS already, we’d just have to figure out how to reverse it. You’re right, it’d be tricky, the triple-helixing, but it could-”
“Stop it,” Mum cut in, suddenly, and both Time Lords at the kitchen table looked up at her in surprise. Her back was to them, she was leaning away from them, onto the sink. “Stop it,” she said again, and her voice was trembling.
Dad drew his eyebrows together. “Rose-”
“No. Stop it. The pair of you.” She turned then, clearly angry about something, and Brem blinked in surprise. “You can’t fight death. You need to stop this…this…unhealthy obsession with changing the way the universe works. It can’t possibly lead anywhere good. Here you are, talking about genetic manipulation, of me. Did either one of you even think to ask if I want you triple-helixing my DNA? For God’s sake, I could just about carry triple-helixed fetuses without dying.”
Brem was annoyed. “Mum, honestly, d’you really think we wouldn’t-”
“I don’t know what I think the two of you would and wouldn’t do,” she snapped at him. “Time Lords do mad, unthinkable things when they think they’re cornered.”
“That,” inserted his father, flatly, with that lethal edge in his voice, “is completely unfair.”
“Don’t you want to figure out a solution to this?” asked Brem, honestly perplexed. “Do you want to die and leave us?”
“Of course I don’t…” She scrubbed her hands over her face wearily. “Oh, Brem,” she sighed. “You were supposed to go to university and forget all of this.”
Brem stared. For what felt like an eternity. It was really, he knew, only a moment or two. But it felt like an eternity, as pieces clicked into place in his head. “That’s what university was about,” he breathed, softly.
“What?” she asked him.
And now he realized he was furious. He didn’t think he’d ever been so furious in his entire life. It was so unexpected, to feel this way, and such a relief, suddenly. He was furious. He was furious with everything. He stood, trying not to show how very, very furious he was. “That’s what university was about,” he accused, more loudly. “It had nothing to do with, oh, new experiences, or adventures, or even giving me a chance at a normal life. You were trying to distract me,” he spat out. “Like I’m some sort of toddler.”
“You have never been distractable,” she snapped back. “Not even when you were four years old.”
“How dare you suggest,” he shouted at her, and he would have been surprised to realize he was shouting if he had paused to think about it, “that I need to be distracted from these things? If it wasn’t for me, you and Fortuna would still be stuck in the other universe! I was the only one who could get you home, and I did it! I know you wish you had this perfectly normal little boy whose only worry was what bloody emo band he could sneak out of the house to watch on any given night, but I am too bloody busy trying to fix the enormous disaster we are all heading toward but that none of us but me is going to acknowledge because we’re too busy being-”
“That’s enough, Brem,” his father cut in, sharply.
“No, it’s not enough,” Brem bit out at him. “It is not nearly enough, do you understand me? It isn’t. It’s all very well and good to try to make me as normal as you can get me, but without me, we’d be all alone and Mum and Fortuna would be stuck in a world they never belonged in. You seem to take great delight in continuously setting us up for a life of endless loneliness. And would you rather that? Would you rather you left Fort there? Is that an option for you?”
“Stop it,” inserted Athena, shakily, and it was because it was so quiet, so shaky, that Brem took a moment to breathe, and looked over at her. She was crying, not hard, just a few tears that she wiped hastily away. Shouting was not something they did in their family, ever. And neither was Athena crying. For a moment Brem was so shocked by the sight that he couldn’t react. “Fortuna,” she whispered.
Everyone in the kitchen remembered her in that moment. Brem turned his head, suddenly horrified at himself. Fortuna was standing just past the doorway, and she was staring at him, her mouth agape. She looked shell-shocked. Another universe, he thought, running over his words in his head. Bloody hell. Fortuna had no idea about the other universe, about parallel worlds and breaches to hold open and a little family torn so to pieces that he wasn’t sure they’d ever managed to fix themselves properly.
“Fort,” he started, awkwardly, because there she was, his miracle, who Dad had given to him all those years ago, when she had been so small she’d fit in the crook of his arm, and he’d held her that day and promised himself that he would protect her always, this child whose existence in this particular universe he was basically responsible for, and now, out of nowhere, he had shouted out the basic secret of her life, after years of protecting her from it.
She shook her head at him, turned and ran, pausing to grab his sonic screwdriver where he’d left it on the coffee table, and then disappearing down the hallway. A door slammed, Brem assumed the one to Mum’s old bedroom, and he flinched as it echoed through the flat.
The silence in the kitchen was overwhelming. He dared not turn back. He could feel every eye on him. Misery dragged at him. Fourteen bloody years of keeping his temper in check, and he couldn’t have done it for a few more days? He moved, stiffly, as if forcing himself through vinimys gel, out into the living room, toward the front door of the flat. He had no clue where his coat was, and he didn’t have time to figure it out. It seemed to him he didn’t even have the ability to figure it out at that moment. He pulled the door open, dazedly. He thought it was possible that somebody said his name, but he stumbled into the bracing cold of the day.
And then he ran.
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