Something About Stars (5/20)
Title - Something About Stars (5/20)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - I've started to think I may reference events without thinking, so, to be safe: Through the specials.
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 - Four Time Lords and a Bad Wolf human, gallivanting through time and space. What could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Huge thanks to Kristin and chicklet73 , who talked through plot points. Special thanks to Kristin for coming up with the title. And even more thanks to jlrpuck and c73, who so graciously beta'd.
The icon was created by swankkat , commissioned by jlrpuck for my birthday.
Prologue - Ch 1 - Ch 2 - Ch 3
Chapter Four
“Knock, knock,” said Brem, sticking his head into the library on his parents’ TARDIS.
“Brem!” exclaimed his mother in delight, leaping up and dashing over to give him a hug. “What a lovely surprise! How are you?”
“I’m good.” He kissed her cheek. “I was slightly homesick for my mum’s speciality.”
“What, beans on toast?” said his father, also coming over.
Mum shoved him lightly. “Git,” she said, fondly.
“No, pancakes, with butterscotch sauce,” replied Brem.
“Of course. Shall I make some?”
“I’m ravenous,” Brem confessed.
“Of course you are.” Mum started walking down the hallway toward the kitchen, Brem following her. “You probably forget to eat half the time, just like your father.”
“Working on a thorny problem at the moment, Brem?” his father inquired, with studied casualness.
“Are you?” Brem rejoined, with the same studied casualness.
“Oh, stop it, you two,” said his mother. “You can talk about Athena and the time skips after we eat.”
“How does she do that?” Brem asked his father.
“Oh, she’s very good,” he answered.
“It’s true, I am,” she rejoined, as they entered the kitchen.
“I’ve gotten nowhere with the time skips,” said Brem, settling at the kitchen table. “I can’t even find evidence of them, never mind get pulled into any myself.”
“So you’re going around trying to get pulled into time skips?” said his father.
“Well, yeah. How else are we going to figure out why they’re happening to Athena?”
His father drew in breath, and Brem knew he was preparing for a scolding, but his mother, thankfully, inserted, mildly, “Don’t argue. Who wants a cuppa while I mix the batter?”
“I’ll have a cuppa,” responded Brem, absently. “Have you had any success getting pulled into time skips?”
“No,” his father admitted, sulkily. “And you’re right, I can’t find evidence of them, either. But they’re not like any other time skips I’ve ever heard of before. Your sister had one happen when she wasn’t even in her TARDIS.”
Brem lifted his eyebrows. “Really?”
“I can’t find any proof of any such skip ever being reported like that before. They tended to be the result of malfunctioning TARDISes most of the time. A virus in the system or something. To have it happen outside of a TARDIS...”
Mum slid plates in front of Brem. “Set the table,” she said to him.
He stood up and started setting it automatically, his mind still on the time skip problem.
“Tell him about the Void stuff,” said his mother.
“The Void stuff?” Brem echoed.
“Your sister’s covered in it.”
“But…” Brem looked at him quizzically. “That would mean she’d have to have been in the Void.”
“Exactly.”
“Has she been?”
“Not that I know of. Unless you know something I don’t.”
“No,” said Brem. “I don’t. But maybe we should ask Matt.”
“What does Matt have to do with it?” asked his father.
“Nothing, except that Athena pretty much tells him everything. If Athena were popping over to the Void, she’d have told Matt.”
“You don’t just ‘pop over’ to the Void, Brem. You remember.”
They skirted that issue. Brem sat back down at the table and looked at the dish in front of him for a second. “So what could it be then?”
“I don’t know,” his father admitted. “I’m…baffled. I’ve no clue.”
There was a moment of silence. “D’you think it’s dangerous?”
His father sighed. “Again, I’ve no clue. She checked out in perfect health, aside from the Void stuff, but I don’t like to think of how she’s getting drenched in Void stuff.”
“You’ll figure it out,” his mother said. “She’s got the best minds in the universe on the case, right? It’ll be okay.”
Brem watched his mother pour batter into the skillet and said, half-heartedly, “Yeah.”
***
Athena was not in her TARDIS when Brem landed inside of it. Brem was pleased. He wandered around her control room, read through her pilot log, pressed his hand against the central column. “What’s up, girl?” he crooned to the TARDIS who hummed at his touch. “Any trips into the Void for you lately?” The TARDIS’s hum was even. Or did it have the slightest skip to it? Was he imagining things?
He sat in her captain’s chair-white with a subtle pink plaid in it; ridiculous-and looked at the coral struts over his head and tried to think what it could possibly be about Athena that was different than the rest of them. He doubted she’d popped into the Void-it just was not the sort of thing that could easily be done, and Athena might have questionable judgment in boyfriends, but she definitely wasn’t a reckless pilot. She shared the same genetic make-up as the rest of them, and it wasn’t the female chromosomes making her susceptible, because Fortuna wasn’t having any issues. But it had to be something. It just had to be something.
He leaned over and scrolled through Athena’s pilot log again, scanning the Gallifreyan for any indications of mechanical trouble. Maybe she’d accidentally bumped through the Void? Could that have happened?
The only thing interesting about the pilot log was that she kept returning to Cunodys, but there was nothing special about Cunodys that he could think of. He sat back in the captain’s chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. Cunodys. Could Cunodys be at all important?
The door to the TARDIS opened and then shut, and Athena lifted her eyebrows at him.
“Hello,” he said, and took his feet off her console, where he’d propped them while he thought.
“You could’ve rung first,” she remarked.
“Figured I’d surprise you. Where’ve you been?”
Athena held up the box she was carrying. “Fetching pizza.”
Brem grinned. “Excellent.”
Athena sighed as she walked further into the control room. “I swear, I think you can smell pizza from three galaxies away.”
“I’ve got a setting on the sonic that detects it for me,” he said, following her as she headed into her kitchen.
“Of course you do,” she replied.
He paused. “I don’t, you know. That was a joke.” She lifted her eyebrows at him. “Okay, that doesn’t mean I don’t want one, but the sonic’s really bad at detecting food. If I set it for pepperoni, it kept directing me to pigs. And, on Ryyy, where the pigs are in charge, that was an awkward conversation.”
Athena chuckled and handled him a slice of pizza. “I can imagine.” She took a bite of her own slice. “So, what’s up?”
“Not much. Thought I’d pop in, see what’s up with you. Plus.” He waved his slice about. “I sensed you were getting pizza.”
“There’s not much that’s up,” she said. “What’s up with you?”
Brem shrugged.
“Well,” remarked Athena, into the silence that followed, “all of time and space to roam through, and we’ve run out of conversational topics.”
“Don’t tell Dad, he’d be alarmed. Where’s this pizza from, anyway?”
“Chicago, early twenty-third century.”
“Ah, that explains it.”
“Where’d you just come from?” she asked.
“A visit to Mum and Dad, actually.”
“Is this about the time skips?” she asked, bluntly.
“What? No. Of course not.” He paused. “But now that you bring them up…”
Athena sighed. “How can you not know what they are? You and Dad? This is all the two of you do, is read esoteric tomes about the functioning of time, and now I need help and I’m supposed to be related to the foremost bloody experts on time in the entire universe, and all any of you can tell me is to stop worrying about it, it will all be fine. When you’ve no idea what it is.”
He was surprised that she was angry. He knew she wasn’t angry with him so much as with the situation, but the extent of how much the situation was unnerving her alarmed him. “Theenie, how often is time skipping around you?”
He felt her close off a bit in his head, a sure sign that she was about to lie to him. Lying to a family member who could read your thoughts was a tricky business and had to be carefully done. Athena was too upset to pull it off properly at that moment. “It’s not that often. I told you when I told you about them, at Matt’s, that they’re unsettling. They affect you.”
He watched her walk over to her sink, fill a glass with water. “You’ve had them since the time we talked about them at Matt’s.”
She shook her head.
“Athena, even if you weren’t doing the worst job lying to me in the history of time right now, I would know because Matt told me that you showed up at his house after one. Dad told me you showed up at home after one that happened when you weren’t even in your TARDIS.”
“Look,” she said, turning to him and putting her glass of water on the counter, untouched. “Maybe it’s just something I’m going to have to live with, right? Maybe I’m just prone to time skips, the same way you’re allergic to brins.”
“It’s not the same thing, Theenie.”
“Why can’t it be? You don’t know that. Why can’t it be?”
Brem was silent for a second. “Tell me what readings your TARDIS gives you after a time skip.”
“They’re in the log,” Athena said, glumly, resignedly, and he followed her out into the control room. He’d already looked at the log, and he didn’t see where the TARDIS had hit anything that might be a time skip.
She sat on the captain’s chair while he skimmed through the log again. Then, frustrated, he turned to her. “Show me,” he said, gesturing to the log.
“What do you mean?” She looked surprised.
“I can’t find them, Athena. I can’t find anything in there that’s out of the ordinary.”
Athena leaned forward, reading the Gallifreyan on her log carefully, moving backward through time, and then sat back, dazed. “They’re not in there.”
Brem was staring at the Galifreyan on the screen. “Theenie, is this log accurate?”
“It should be. It was. They were there, I go over the read-outs after I hit the time skips, I swear I do, Brem, I’ve been trying to figure this out, I really have, and they…they…Who could be re-writing my pilot logs?”
Brem continued to stare at the Gallifreyan on the screen. “Athena,” he said, slowly. “I think your TARDIS is doing it.”
“What?”
“This log is different. This log has changed, since the last time I looked at it.” He leaned closer to the screen, as if he could understand it better that way.
Athena stared at him with the same intensity he was using to stare at the screen. “When did you look at my log last time?”
Brem didn’t answer. “She’s re-writing it. Your TARDIS is re-writing your pilot’s log. Why would a TARDIS do that?”
Athena had no answer for that. She had no answer for any of this. She took the pink ribbon out of her hair, shook her ponytail out, and re-tied it.
“It’s going to be okay,” Brem told her. “I swear it. Dad and I are going to figure this out and-”
Athena rubbed at her eyes. “Do you remember when Mum was gone?” They never talked about this. She could feel Brem freeze in her head.
“What about it?” he asked, carefully.
“All we kept saying-all anyone kept saying-was that it would be okay, we would figure it out, it would all work out-”
“And it did, Theenie,” he reminded her.
She laughed without humor, staring at her controls. “No one had any idea what they were doing. We lucked into it. And I feel like that’s what I’m surrounded by.” She looked at him finally. “No one has any idea what’s going on, you’re all telling me it’s going to be okay and you’re really just hoping that you’ll get lucky and figure out what’s going on before something terrible happens, but there’s no guarantee, who really knows?”
“We will never let anything in this universe harm you, Athena,” he told her, firmly. “I don’t care what this is, I don’t care if we never understand what we’re fighting, nothing terrible is going to happen, I promise you.”
“You’re so like Dad. If you’re not careful, you’re going to crumble someday under the burden of all of the promises you can’t keep.”
Brem was silent for a second. “I’m not sure you should be traveling alone right now.”
“Brem-”
“I mean it.”
There was a moment of silence. “I’ll stop.”
“Will you?” he said, his voice hard, demanding the promise from her.
She nodded. “I’m going to take the TARDIS to Mum and Dad’s. Maybe Dad will have an idea, now that we know she’s re-writing her logs.”
“Okay,” he said, after another moment of silence. He moved toward her, and she sensed what he was going to do and held up her hand.
“Don’t hug me,” she said. “You wouldn’t hug me under normal circumstances, you’d just tug my ponytail and call it even, please just do that.”
He hesitated. “Okay,” he said, and tugged on her ponytail, then stuck his hand in the pockets of his jeans. “Go see Mum and Dad.”
“I will,” she promised, and then listened to his footsteps fading down the hallway, heard the sound of his TARDIS as he de-materialized it. She was dizzy and queasy, and sat for a long time not moving, waiting for the world to right itself. She forced herself to uncurl from the captain’s chair, and walk over to the console, setting her flight path.
***
Matt had just closed the door behind him, was just checking to make sure it was locked, when he heard the TARDIS. He paused, torn, on the street in front of his apartment. He had to meet Kelly, he really did, and he didn’t have time to get distracted by complicated aliens with complicated problems, and he still unlocked his door and walked back into his living room.
Athena had just exited her TARDIS. She took in the fact that he was wearing a coat. “You’re just coming in?” she noted. “From work?”
“No,” he admitted. “Just going out. Is there something wrong?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head, then opened her eyes. Her breaths were odd and shaky. “No,” she said, with a bright smile. “It can wait.”
She looked a way he was not sure he’d ever seen her look before. Normally, Athena Tyler was the sort of woman you instinctively knew things about. She was small and slight and wore pink but you looked at her and you knew not to cross her, you knew she had seen six things before breakfast that would have given you nightmares for weeks, you knew if you tried to coddle her you would find yourself at the receiving end of a few well-placed jabs, not necessarily verbal. Matt had never looked at her and thought that she looked…Scared, he realized. Now that he’d placed it, it was obvious. It was written in everything about her. She was terrified.
“Athena,” he said, bewildered, and just like that she burst into tears, burying her face into her hands. It took him a second to even react, he was so shocked, and then he hurried over to her, pulled her against him. Her fingers closed into his coat, she turned her face into his chest and sobbed. “Shh,” he said, holding her very tightly, feeling that she was trembling. “Shh. Don’t cry, Theenie. Please don’t. What’s wrong? What can I do?”
“I’m scared, Matt,” she sobbed. “I’m so scared.”
“Shh,” he said. “But you’re okay. You’re okay, just now, right? Listen to me. You’re safe, you’re safe.”
“I’m not safe, I’m never safe, I can’t get safe, I’ve tried everything I can think of, everything, and I-”
“Shh,” he said, sharply. “Listen to me. You are safe, right now. Do you hear me? Just now, you are safe. We will stand here for as long as you need until you realize it. Understand?”
Her sobs subsided. She breathed against him, hands still clutched in his coat, nose against his chest and head fitting perfectly in the curve under his neck. He shifted, resting his cheek on the top of her head, and still clasping her to him. She was shuddering with every breath she took, but they were less intense now.
The room was silent, except for their breaths, hers gradually growing less heavy and tear-laden. And then finally she said, her voice tiny, “Thank you.”
“Oh, Theenie,” he said. He lifted his hands from the small of her back to her hair, combing through it. “What is it, sweetheart? Is it the time skips?”
“They won’t stop, Matt,” she said against him. “They won’t stop. They never stop. I can’t get time to-I can’t get it to-”
“Shh,” he said, leaning his head down so he could speak against her ear. She was talking in hiccups of speech, and he thought she was in danger of hyperventilation at this point, balancing on the thread of it. “Count with me, Athena. Ready? We’re going to count to ten. One, two-Do it with me-one, two…”
She counted with him, slowly to ten.
“Again,” he said. “To twenty now. Eleven, twelve…”
He kept her counting, the rhythm of the numbers soothing, until they reached sixty.
“That was a minute, right?” he said. “A minute of you and I, here, together, time doing exactly what it was supposed to do. Right?”
She was silent for a second, then she chuckled, lifted her head, gave him the most brilliant smile through her tears. “It was. It was.” She nodded.
“Good. You need, as your family would say, a cuppa. I’ll make you one. If you want, we can count the entire time, while waiting for the water to boil.”
She took a deep breath and let it out shakily, nodding. “Okay,” she said. “Yes.”
He reached down, took her hand, squeezed it. “Let’s go,” he said.
He counted with her, as he filled the kettle with water, as he busied himself pulling down mugs and finding the tea that someone-he thought possibly her mother-had given him for just such occasions as these. He shucked his jacket, laying it over the back of a chair, and looked at her. Her eyes were flickering between him and her complicated watch, as she counted, as if verifying that nothing was moving in an odd way. He smiled at her, and winked, hoping to relax her, as they counted, but she just looked back down at her watch, her expression anxious. He leaned against the counter, continuing to count with her, until the kettle whistled and he poured them tea and carried it out to the living room, setting it on the coffee table. She followed him, holding his sugar bowl, and they sat on the couch together, and he counted a number that she did not, and he looked at her in alarm.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s fine. We made it.” And she let out a breath he hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Of course, we may not make it all through this cuppa, but at least we made it this far, and that helps.” She reached for her tea, not looking at him, and steeped it.
He watched her. “How quickly are they coming now?”
She shook her head again, a small, nervous jerk. “I don’t even know. Matt, I can’t even feel time anymore, it’s so in flux around me.” Her voice was filled with tears again, and she put her cup down abruptly and sat back. “You don’t understand, we can always feel time, we can feel it purring, in the background, we can see it, and I can’t tell, Matt, I can’t tell where I am in the timelines, I can’t tell anything, I can’t-”
“Shh,” he murmured, reaching out and stroking a hand over her hair. She closed her eyes and caught her breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said, after a second. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He couldn’t imagine how terrified she was to be acting this way, but he also couldn’t imagine what it must feel like for her to be confused about time. He couldn’t comprehend the odd alien workings of these minds, but he knew that something was happening to her to turn her world upside-down, a sort of vertigo, and he could at least comprehend that it was terrifying.
She opened her eyes and took a deep breath and looked at him. “Brem came to see me,” she said. “Time skipped, while he was there.” Her eyes filled up with tears. “He didn’t even blink, Matt. He didn’t even notice…” She wiped her tears away impatiently. “And the log is re-writing itself, the TARDIS log. No one else is feeling them, and there’s no evidence they’re happening, and maybe I’m mad, Matt. Maybe it’s all in my head and I’m going mad. Maybe I’m dying. Or maybe my TARDIS is dying, and this is what happens, in a Time Lord’s head, when your TARDIS dies. I don’t know. I don’t know. But they’re all trying to help, and they can’t, and I think it’s because maybe I’m just imagining all of it, Matt.”
“You’re not,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. I just know. You know how sometimes, Brem is explaining something, and I don’t get it, and he just says, ‘Just trust me’?”
She nodded.
“This is one time in my life where I get to play the all-knowing role of Brem Tyler: Just trust me.”
She regarded him. “You don’t pull it off as well as he does.”
He smiled a bit. “Was that a joke? A little joke you made just there?”
He was relieved when it coaxed a smile from her. “Maybe.”
“Well, I haven’t had as much practice at being smug as he has.”
“Yeah.” She reached for her teacup. He thought her hand was trembling a bit but he didn’t mention it and she steadied it, taking a firm sip and then turning to him and clearing her throat. “So,” she said. “What’s up with you?”
He actually burst out laughing, it was so incongruous a question, and she laughed, too, seeing the humor in it, and he was so relieved to see her laughing that he wanted her to never stop. He wished he knew a good joke or something, anything to keep her laughing, but he couldn’t come up with a single quip. He settled for tugging on her ponytail, leaving his hand there, letting the curls wrap around his fingers.
“Where were you going?” she asked.
He flipped his hand over, curled his fingers through the thickness of her hair, watched the strands fall through his fingers. “It wasn’t important.”
“Really?” she pressed.
He met her eyes. “Really.”
She relaxed a bit. “Just a silly little human errand?”
“Yes.” He snaked his hand up through the ponytail, to the pink ribbon holding it into place, watching the hair cascade past his wrist, dark hair against the cuff of the cream-colored shirt he was wearing.
“Mmm,” said Athena, startling him, and he looked at her. Her eyes were closed, her head leaned back against the couch. “You can run it, if you want. Your silly human errand. I don’t want to…”
“It’s fine,” he told her, and his voice sounded hoarse, so he cleared his throat. He looked at his fingers, now combing through her hair, apparently of their own volition. He forced them still, removed them.
“Aw, don’t stop that,” she protested, so he resumed. She yawned and snuggled a bit into his couch.
“Are you tired?” he realized.
“I haven’t slept in weeks, Matt,” she mumbled, drowsily. “I can’t. The time…I have to watch the time…”
“Sleep now,” he said. “You can sleep. I’ll watch the time for you.”
“Every second,” she murmured. “You have to watch every second.”
“Every second,” he promised. “I will. Sleep.” He counted, counted until her breaths evened out and her eyelashes stopped fluttering. He stopped stroking his hand over her hair, but she frowned in her sleep, made a soft unhappy squeak and moved restlessly, and he resumed it, waiting for the worry lines to fade back out of her forehead, before fumbling around to retrieve his cell phone from his pocket without disturbing her. He texted Kelly one-handed, an apology about a friend mid-crisis, and then looked back at the clock on his cable box. He didn’t know what exactly he was looking for, when being told to watch the time. If Brem couldn’t detect a time skip, then he had no hope of doing so. But he watched the minutes tick by, and they all seemed to be moving correctly to him.
She stirred, her breath catching into wakefulness, and he watched her blink him into focus. She sat up abruptly. “How long-”
“Eight minutes,” he said. “Eight very obedient, sixty-second minutes. See?” He gestured to the clock. “6:12. You fell asleep at 6:04. How’s that?”
She relaxed back against the couch and stretched like a cat, then sat up and briskly fixed her ponytail. He put his hand awkwardly on the back of the couch, feeling bereft of the feel of her. She looked at him. “I feel better,” she said, and her eyes were clearer. She looked more like the capable Athena Tyler he knew.
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad. Don’t run off just yet. Have you been eating? I’ll take you to dinner, we’ll count through the appetizers.”
“That’s sweet, but I interrupted something you were about to do, and, anyway, I have to go visit my parents, I have to tell them-” She stood up, and the world pitched. She lost her balance, tumbling into him, where he was still seated on the couch, and he caught her in surprise.
“Alright there?” he asked, his voice tinged with concern.
“Dizzy,” she said, and closed her eyes. “Matt, what time is it?”
He glanced at the clock on the cable box. “8:02,” he answered.
She nodded, eyes still closed. “8:02,” she said. “Yeah.” She wanted to point it out to him. It had just been 6:12, not two minutes before. How could he not realize? How could he not notice? How could he skip forward two hours and not notice? But none of them did, nobody around her, it was just her, and she couldn’t shake the idea that maybe she was just insane.
She opened her eyes and looked down at Matt, still looking concerned underneath her. “It’s okay,” she said, brightly. “You’ve been lovely. Thank you.” She kissed his cheek.
“You’re going straight to your parents’ from here, right?” he verified.
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good.”
She stood slowly, still slightly queasy, but she was spending most of her time queasy these days. She walked to her TARDIS and opened it and looked back at Matt, still sitting on the couch and watching her, looking like he thought she might just collapse to the floor. And who knew? Maybe she just might.
She waved and stepped onto her TARDIS.
Next Chapter
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - I've started to think I may reference events without thinking, so, to be safe: Through the specials.
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 - Four Time Lords and a Bad Wolf human, gallivanting through time and space. What could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Huge thanks to Kristin and chicklet73 , who talked through plot points. Special thanks to Kristin for coming up with the title. And even more thanks to jlrpuck and c73, who so graciously beta'd.
The icon was created by swankkat , commissioned by jlrpuck for my birthday.
Prologue - Ch 1 - Ch 2 - Ch 3
Chapter Four
“Knock, knock,” said Brem, sticking his head into the library on his parents’ TARDIS.
“Brem!” exclaimed his mother in delight, leaping up and dashing over to give him a hug. “What a lovely surprise! How are you?”
“I’m good.” He kissed her cheek. “I was slightly homesick for my mum’s speciality.”
“What, beans on toast?” said his father, also coming over.
Mum shoved him lightly. “Git,” she said, fondly.
“No, pancakes, with butterscotch sauce,” replied Brem.
“Of course. Shall I make some?”
“I’m ravenous,” Brem confessed.
“Of course you are.” Mum started walking down the hallway toward the kitchen, Brem following her. “You probably forget to eat half the time, just like your father.”
“Working on a thorny problem at the moment, Brem?” his father inquired, with studied casualness.
“Are you?” Brem rejoined, with the same studied casualness.
“Oh, stop it, you two,” said his mother. “You can talk about Athena and the time skips after we eat.”
“How does she do that?” Brem asked his father.
“Oh, she’s very good,” he answered.
“It’s true, I am,” she rejoined, as they entered the kitchen.
“I’ve gotten nowhere with the time skips,” said Brem, settling at the kitchen table. “I can’t even find evidence of them, never mind get pulled into any myself.”
“So you’re going around trying to get pulled into time skips?” said his father.
“Well, yeah. How else are we going to figure out why they’re happening to Athena?”
His father drew in breath, and Brem knew he was preparing for a scolding, but his mother, thankfully, inserted, mildly, “Don’t argue. Who wants a cuppa while I mix the batter?”
“I’ll have a cuppa,” responded Brem, absently. “Have you had any success getting pulled into time skips?”
“No,” his father admitted, sulkily. “And you’re right, I can’t find evidence of them, either. But they’re not like any other time skips I’ve ever heard of before. Your sister had one happen when she wasn’t even in her TARDIS.”
Brem lifted his eyebrows. “Really?”
“I can’t find any proof of any such skip ever being reported like that before. They tended to be the result of malfunctioning TARDISes most of the time. A virus in the system or something. To have it happen outside of a TARDIS...”
Mum slid plates in front of Brem. “Set the table,” she said to him.
He stood up and started setting it automatically, his mind still on the time skip problem.
“Tell him about the Void stuff,” said his mother.
“The Void stuff?” Brem echoed.
“Your sister’s covered in it.”
“But…” Brem looked at him quizzically. “That would mean she’d have to have been in the Void.”
“Exactly.”
“Has she been?”
“Not that I know of. Unless you know something I don’t.”
“No,” said Brem. “I don’t. But maybe we should ask Matt.”
“What does Matt have to do with it?” asked his father.
“Nothing, except that Athena pretty much tells him everything. If Athena were popping over to the Void, she’d have told Matt.”
“You don’t just ‘pop over’ to the Void, Brem. You remember.”
They skirted that issue. Brem sat back down at the table and looked at the dish in front of him for a second. “So what could it be then?”
“I don’t know,” his father admitted. “I’m…baffled. I’ve no clue.”
There was a moment of silence. “D’you think it’s dangerous?”
His father sighed. “Again, I’ve no clue. She checked out in perfect health, aside from the Void stuff, but I don’t like to think of how she’s getting drenched in Void stuff.”
“You’ll figure it out,” his mother said. “She’s got the best minds in the universe on the case, right? It’ll be okay.”
Brem watched his mother pour batter into the skillet and said, half-heartedly, “Yeah.”
***
Athena was not in her TARDIS when Brem landed inside of it. Brem was pleased. He wandered around her control room, read through her pilot log, pressed his hand against the central column. “What’s up, girl?” he crooned to the TARDIS who hummed at his touch. “Any trips into the Void for you lately?” The TARDIS’s hum was even. Or did it have the slightest skip to it? Was he imagining things?
He sat in her captain’s chair-white with a subtle pink plaid in it; ridiculous-and looked at the coral struts over his head and tried to think what it could possibly be about Athena that was different than the rest of them. He doubted she’d popped into the Void-it just was not the sort of thing that could easily be done, and Athena might have questionable judgment in boyfriends, but she definitely wasn’t a reckless pilot. She shared the same genetic make-up as the rest of them, and it wasn’t the female chromosomes making her susceptible, because Fortuna wasn’t having any issues. But it had to be something. It just had to be something.
He leaned over and scrolled through Athena’s pilot log again, scanning the Gallifreyan for any indications of mechanical trouble. Maybe she’d accidentally bumped through the Void? Could that have happened?
The only thing interesting about the pilot log was that she kept returning to Cunodys, but there was nothing special about Cunodys that he could think of. He sat back in the captain’s chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. Cunodys. Could Cunodys be at all important?
The door to the TARDIS opened and then shut, and Athena lifted her eyebrows at him.
“Hello,” he said, and took his feet off her console, where he’d propped them while he thought.
“You could’ve rung first,” she remarked.
“Figured I’d surprise you. Where’ve you been?”
Athena held up the box she was carrying. “Fetching pizza.”
Brem grinned. “Excellent.”
Athena sighed as she walked further into the control room. “I swear, I think you can smell pizza from three galaxies away.”
“I’ve got a setting on the sonic that detects it for me,” he said, following her as she headed into her kitchen.
“Of course you do,” she replied.
He paused. “I don’t, you know. That was a joke.” She lifted her eyebrows at him. “Okay, that doesn’t mean I don’t want one, but the sonic’s really bad at detecting food. If I set it for pepperoni, it kept directing me to pigs. And, on Ryyy, where the pigs are in charge, that was an awkward conversation.”
Athena chuckled and handled him a slice of pizza. “I can imagine.” She took a bite of her own slice. “So, what’s up?”
“Not much. Thought I’d pop in, see what’s up with you. Plus.” He waved his slice about. “I sensed you were getting pizza.”
“There’s not much that’s up,” she said. “What’s up with you?”
Brem shrugged.
“Well,” remarked Athena, into the silence that followed, “all of time and space to roam through, and we’ve run out of conversational topics.”
“Don’t tell Dad, he’d be alarmed. Where’s this pizza from, anyway?”
“Chicago, early twenty-third century.”
“Ah, that explains it.”
“Where’d you just come from?” she asked.
“A visit to Mum and Dad, actually.”
“Is this about the time skips?” she asked, bluntly.
“What? No. Of course not.” He paused. “But now that you bring them up…”
Athena sighed. “How can you not know what they are? You and Dad? This is all the two of you do, is read esoteric tomes about the functioning of time, and now I need help and I’m supposed to be related to the foremost bloody experts on time in the entire universe, and all any of you can tell me is to stop worrying about it, it will all be fine. When you’ve no idea what it is.”
He was surprised that she was angry. He knew she wasn’t angry with him so much as with the situation, but the extent of how much the situation was unnerving her alarmed him. “Theenie, how often is time skipping around you?”
He felt her close off a bit in his head, a sure sign that she was about to lie to him. Lying to a family member who could read your thoughts was a tricky business and had to be carefully done. Athena was too upset to pull it off properly at that moment. “It’s not that often. I told you when I told you about them, at Matt’s, that they’re unsettling. They affect you.”
He watched her walk over to her sink, fill a glass with water. “You’ve had them since the time we talked about them at Matt’s.”
She shook her head.
“Athena, even if you weren’t doing the worst job lying to me in the history of time right now, I would know because Matt told me that you showed up at his house after one. Dad told me you showed up at home after one that happened when you weren’t even in your TARDIS.”
“Look,” she said, turning to him and putting her glass of water on the counter, untouched. “Maybe it’s just something I’m going to have to live with, right? Maybe I’m just prone to time skips, the same way you’re allergic to brins.”
“It’s not the same thing, Theenie.”
“Why can’t it be? You don’t know that. Why can’t it be?”
Brem was silent for a second. “Tell me what readings your TARDIS gives you after a time skip.”
“They’re in the log,” Athena said, glumly, resignedly, and he followed her out into the control room. He’d already looked at the log, and he didn’t see where the TARDIS had hit anything that might be a time skip.
She sat on the captain’s chair while he skimmed through the log again. Then, frustrated, he turned to her. “Show me,” he said, gesturing to the log.
“What do you mean?” She looked surprised.
“I can’t find them, Athena. I can’t find anything in there that’s out of the ordinary.”
Athena leaned forward, reading the Gallifreyan on her log carefully, moving backward through time, and then sat back, dazed. “They’re not in there.”
Brem was staring at the Galifreyan on the screen. “Theenie, is this log accurate?”
“It should be. It was. They were there, I go over the read-outs after I hit the time skips, I swear I do, Brem, I’ve been trying to figure this out, I really have, and they…they…Who could be re-writing my pilot logs?”
Brem continued to stare at the Gallifreyan on the screen. “Athena,” he said, slowly. “I think your TARDIS is doing it.”
“What?”
“This log is different. This log has changed, since the last time I looked at it.” He leaned closer to the screen, as if he could understand it better that way.
Athena stared at him with the same intensity he was using to stare at the screen. “When did you look at my log last time?”
Brem didn’t answer. “She’s re-writing it. Your TARDIS is re-writing your pilot’s log. Why would a TARDIS do that?”
Athena had no answer for that. She had no answer for any of this. She took the pink ribbon out of her hair, shook her ponytail out, and re-tied it.
“It’s going to be okay,” Brem told her. “I swear it. Dad and I are going to figure this out and-”
Athena rubbed at her eyes. “Do you remember when Mum was gone?” They never talked about this. She could feel Brem freeze in her head.
“What about it?” he asked, carefully.
“All we kept saying-all anyone kept saying-was that it would be okay, we would figure it out, it would all work out-”
“And it did, Theenie,” he reminded her.
She laughed without humor, staring at her controls. “No one had any idea what they were doing. We lucked into it. And I feel like that’s what I’m surrounded by.” She looked at him finally. “No one has any idea what’s going on, you’re all telling me it’s going to be okay and you’re really just hoping that you’ll get lucky and figure out what’s going on before something terrible happens, but there’s no guarantee, who really knows?”
“We will never let anything in this universe harm you, Athena,” he told her, firmly. “I don’t care what this is, I don’t care if we never understand what we’re fighting, nothing terrible is going to happen, I promise you.”
“You’re so like Dad. If you’re not careful, you’re going to crumble someday under the burden of all of the promises you can’t keep.”
Brem was silent for a second. “I’m not sure you should be traveling alone right now.”
“Brem-”
“I mean it.”
There was a moment of silence. “I’ll stop.”
“Will you?” he said, his voice hard, demanding the promise from her.
She nodded. “I’m going to take the TARDIS to Mum and Dad’s. Maybe Dad will have an idea, now that we know she’s re-writing her logs.”
“Okay,” he said, after another moment of silence. He moved toward her, and she sensed what he was going to do and held up her hand.
“Don’t hug me,” she said. “You wouldn’t hug me under normal circumstances, you’d just tug my ponytail and call it even, please just do that.”
He hesitated. “Okay,” he said, and tugged on her ponytail, then stuck his hand in the pockets of his jeans. “Go see Mum and Dad.”
“I will,” she promised, and then listened to his footsteps fading down the hallway, heard the sound of his TARDIS as he de-materialized it. She was dizzy and queasy, and sat for a long time not moving, waiting for the world to right itself. She forced herself to uncurl from the captain’s chair, and walk over to the console, setting her flight path.
***
Matt had just closed the door behind him, was just checking to make sure it was locked, when he heard the TARDIS. He paused, torn, on the street in front of his apartment. He had to meet Kelly, he really did, and he didn’t have time to get distracted by complicated aliens with complicated problems, and he still unlocked his door and walked back into his living room.
Athena had just exited her TARDIS. She took in the fact that he was wearing a coat. “You’re just coming in?” she noted. “From work?”
“No,” he admitted. “Just going out. Is there something wrong?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head, then opened her eyes. Her breaths were odd and shaky. “No,” she said, with a bright smile. “It can wait.”
She looked a way he was not sure he’d ever seen her look before. Normally, Athena Tyler was the sort of woman you instinctively knew things about. She was small and slight and wore pink but you looked at her and you knew not to cross her, you knew she had seen six things before breakfast that would have given you nightmares for weeks, you knew if you tried to coddle her you would find yourself at the receiving end of a few well-placed jabs, not necessarily verbal. Matt had never looked at her and thought that she looked…Scared, he realized. Now that he’d placed it, it was obvious. It was written in everything about her. She was terrified.
“Athena,” he said, bewildered, and just like that she burst into tears, burying her face into her hands. It took him a second to even react, he was so shocked, and then he hurried over to her, pulled her against him. Her fingers closed into his coat, she turned her face into his chest and sobbed. “Shh,” he said, holding her very tightly, feeling that she was trembling. “Shh. Don’t cry, Theenie. Please don’t. What’s wrong? What can I do?”
“I’m scared, Matt,” she sobbed. “I’m so scared.”
“Shh,” he said. “But you’re okay. You’re okay, just now, right? Listen to me. You’re safe, you’re safe.”
“I’m not safe, I’m never safe, I can’t get safe, I’ve tried everything I can think of, everything, and I-”
“Shh,” he said, sharply. “Listen to me. You are safe, right now. Do you hear me? Just now, you are safe. We will stand here for as long as you need until you realize it. Understand?”
Her sobs subsided. She breathed against him, hands still clutched in his coat, nose against his chest and head fitting perfectly in the curve under his neck. He shifted, resting his cheek on the top of her head, and still clasping her to him. She was shuddering with every breath she took, but they were less intense now.
The room was silent, except for their breaths, hers gradually growing less heavy and tear-laden. And then finally she said, her voice tiny, “Thank you.”
“Oh, Theenie,” he said. He lifted his hands from the small of her back to her hair, combing through it. “What is it, sweetheart? Is it the time skips?”
“They won’t stop, Matt,” she said against him. “They won’t stop. They never stop. I can’t get time to-I can’t get it to-”
“Shh,” he said, leaning his head down so he could speak against her ear. She was talking in hiccups of speech, and he thought she was in danger of hyperventilation at this point, balancing on the thread of it. “Count with me, Athena. Ready? We’re going to count to ten. One, two-Do it with me-one, two…”
She counted with him, slowly to ten.
“Again,” he said. “To twenty now. Eleven, twelve…”
He kept her counting, the rhythm of the numbers soothing, until they reached sixty.
“That was a minute, right?” he said. “A minute of you and I, here, together, time doing exactly what it was supposed to do. Right?”
She was silent for a second, then she chuckled, lifted her head, gave him the most brilliant smile through her tears. “It was. It was.” She nodded.
“Good. You need, as your family would say, a cuppa. I’ll make you one. If you want, we can count the entire time, while waiting for the water to boil.”
She took a deep breath and let it out shakily, nodding. “Okay,” she said. “Yes.”
He reached down, took her hand, squeezed it. “Let’s go,” he said.
He counted with her, as he filled the kettle with water, as he busied himself pulling down mugs and finding the tea that someone-he thought possibly her mother-had given him for just such occasions as these. He shucked his jacket, laying it over the back of a chair, and looked at her. Her eyes were flickering between him and her complicated watch, as she counted, as if verifying that nothing was moving in an odd way. He smiled at her, and winked, hoping to relax her, as they counted, but she just looked back down at her watch, her expression anxious. He leaned against the counter, continuing to count with her, until the kettle whistled and he poured them tea and carried it out to the living room, setting it on the coffee table. She followed him, holding his sugar bowl, and they sat on the couch together, and he counted a number that she did not, and he looked at her in alarm.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s fine. We made it.” And she let out a breath he hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “Of course, we may not make it all through this cuppa, but at least we made it this far, and that helps.” She reached for her tea, not looking at him, and steeped it.
He watched her. “How quickly are they coming now?”
She shook her head again, a small, nervous jerk. “I don’t even know. Matt, I can’t even feel time anymore, it’s so in flux around me.” Her voice was filled with tears again, and she put her cup down abruptly and sat back. “You don’t understand, we can always feel time, we can feel it purring, in the background, we can see it, and I can’t tell, Matt, I can’t tell where I am in the timelines, I can’t tell anything, I can’t-”
“Shh,” he murmured, reaching out and stroking a hand over her hair. She closed her eyes and caught her breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said, after a second. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He couldn’t imagine how terrified she was to be acting this way, but he also couldn’t imagine what it must feel like for her to be confused about time. He couldn’t comprehend the odd alien workings of these minds, but he knew that something was happening to her to turn her world upside-down, a sort of vertigo, and he could at least comprehend that it was terrifying.
She opened her eyes and took a deep breath and looked at him. “Brem came to see me,” she said. “Time skipped, while he was there.” Her eyes filled up with tears. “He didn’t even blink, Matt. He didn’t even notice…” She wiped her tears away impatiently. “And the log is re-writing itself, the TARDIS log. No one else is feeling them, and there’s no evidence they’re happening, and maybe I’m mad, Matt. Maybe it’s all in my head and I’m going mad. Maybe I’m dying. Or maybe my TARDIS is dying, and this is what happens, in a Time Lord’s head, when your TARDIS dies. I don’t know. I don’t know. But they’re all trying to help, and they can’t, and I think it’s because maybe I’m just imagining all of it, Matt.”
“You’re not,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know. I just know. You know how sometimes, Brem is explaining something, and I don’t get it, and he just says, ‘Just trust me’?”
She nodded.
“This is one time in my life where I get to play the all-knowing role of Brem Tyler: Just trust me.”
She regarded him. “You don’t pull it off as well as he does.”
He smiled a bit. “Was that a joke? A little joke you made just there?”
He was relieved when it coaxed a smile from her. “Maybe.”
“Well, I haven’t had as much practice at being smug as he has.”
“Yeah.” She reached for her teacup. He thought her hand was trembling a bit but he didn’t mention it and she steadied it, taking a firm sip and then turning to him and clearing her throat. “So,” she said. “What’s up with you?”
He actually burst out laughing, it was so incongruous a question, and she laughed, too, seeing the humor in it, and he was so relieved to see her laughing that he wanted her to never stop. He wished he knew a good joke or something, anything to keep her laughing, but he couldn’t come up with a single quip. He settled for tugging on her ponytail, leaving his hand there, letting the curls wrap around his fingers.
“Where were you going?” she asked.
He flipped his hand over, curled his fingers through the thickness of her hair, watched the strands fall through his fingers. “It wasn’t important.”
“Really?” she pressed.
He met her eyes. “Really.”
She relaxed a bit. “Just a silly little human errand?”
“Yes.” He snaked his hand up through the ponytail, to the pink ribbon holding it into place, watching the hair cascade past his wrist, dark hair against the cuff of the cream-colored shirt he was wearing.
“Mmm,” said Athena, startling him, and he looked at her. Her eyes were closed, her head leaned back against the couch. “You can run it, if you want. Your silly human errand. I don’t want to…”
“It’s fine,” he told her, and his voice sounded hoarse, so he cleared his throat. He looked at his fingers, now combing through her hair, apparently of their own volition. He forced them still, removed them.
“Aw, don’t stop that,” she protested, so he resumed. She yawned and snuggled a bit into his couch.
“Are you tired?” he realized.
“I haven’t slept in weeks, Matt,” she mumbled, drowsily. “I can’t. The time…I have to watch the time…”
“Sleep now,” he said. “You can sleep. I’ll watch the time for you.”
“Every second,” she murmured. “You have to watch every second.”
“Every second,” he promised. “I will. Sleep.” He counted, counted until her breaths evened out and her eyelashes stopped fluttering. He stopped stroking his hand over her hair, but she frowned in her sleep, made a soft unhappy squeak and moved restlessly, and he resumed it, waiting for the worry lines to fade back out of her forehead, before fumbling around to retrieve his cell phone from his pocket without disturbing her. He texted Kelly one-handed, an apology about a friend mid-crisis, and then looked back at the clock on his cable box. He didn’t know what exactly he was looking for, when being told to watch the time. If Brem couldn’t detect a time skip, then he had no hope of doing so. But he watched the minutes tick by, and they all seemed to be moving correctly to him.
She stirred, her breath catching into wakefulness, and he watched her blink him into focus. She sat up abruptly. “How long-”
“Eight minutes,” he said. “Eight very obedient, sixty-second minutes. See?” He gestured to the clock. “6:12. You fell asleep at 6:04. How’s that?”
She relaxed back against the couch and stretched like a cat, then sat up and briskly fixed her ponytail. He put his hand awkwardly on the back of the couch, feeling bereft of the feel of her. She looked at him. “I feel better,” she said, and her eyes were clearer. She looked more like the capable Athena Tyler he knew.
“Good,” he said. “I’m glad. Don’t run off just yet. Have you been eating? I’ll take you to dinner, we’ll count through the appetizers.”
“That’s sweet, but I interrupted something you were about to do, and, anyway, I have to go visit my parents, I have to tell them-” She stood up, and the world pitched. She lost her balance, tumbling into him, where he was still seated on the couch, and he caught her in surprise.
“Alright there?” he asked, his voice tinged with concern.
“Dizzy,” she said, and closed her eyes. “Matt, what time is it?”
He glanced at the clock on the cable box. “8:02,” he answered.
She nodded, eyes still closed. “8:02,” she said. “Yeah.” She wanted to point it out to him. It had just been 6:12, not two minutes before. How could he not realize? How could he not notice? How could he skip forward two hours and not notice? But none of them did, nobody around her, it was just her, and she couldn’t shake the idea that maybe she was just insane.
She opened her eyes and looked down at Matt, still looking concerned underneath her. “It’s okay,” she said, brightly. “You’ve been lovely. Thank you.” She kissed his cheek.
“You’re going straight to your parents’ from here, right?” he verified.
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good.”
She stood slowly, still slightly queasy, but she was spending most of her time queasy these days. She walked to her TARDIS and opened it and looked back at Matt, still sitting on the couch and watching her, looking like he thought she might just collapse to the floor. And who knew? Maybe she just might.
She waved and stepped onto her TARDIS.
Next Chapter