New fic: Five And A Half Hours
Title: Five and a half hours
Pairing: Nine/Rose (no surprises there)
Content: Graphic Sex; Drama; Humour; Angst; Romance; Everything else you can think of
Rating: Adult for later chapters
Chapters: 8/10
Disclaimer: Not mine, not even close. In fact, this one has written itself.
Author's Note: I need to say a huge thank you to my so-called technical consultant (she refuses to be co-author or collaborator) kitsunealyc for all her help on this story, although any complete cock-ups are my fault, and I can only apologise.
Summary: Life didn't have a rewind button. There wasn't any going back. Unless...
Chapter 8: Sheffield
He was hurting her arm. Plus, his eyes were shooting sparks at her, and he was more angry than she’d ever seen him in her life. With this Doctor, you always had to be prepared for the shouting. She cast around for an excuse.
‘The same way it knew me. The call of the wild maybe. I could just feel something as soon as we got inside the house but I wasn’t sure what it was.’
Gazing up at him with her eyes wide, deliberately unblinking, and she pasted the most innocent expression she could locate at short notice onto her face. That was actually a pretty good lie. She was getting pretty good at lying to him, she noted, with a little run of sadness that made her lower lip wobble. He squeezed her arm a bit more, but he seemed slightly less furious and he turned away from her to face the Queen.
‘Excuse me Ma’am; there are matters of personal security I need to discuss with my wife in some detail. Goodnight.’
He gave a little bow, and escorted Rose none too gently from the room, propelling her down corridors and up stairs with a hand crushing her elbow. Only ever so slightly less furious then. He slammed the door to their bedroom closed, and span her round to face him, leaving her to rub the feeling back into her arm.
‘How could you be so irresponsible?’ was his opening line, delivered in a hiss that quickly escalated in volume. ‘I told you to stop, but you don’t need to listen to me any more do you? You just take off with some enormous monster after you and a great big sign saying ‘chase me.’ What if I hadn’t worked out that machine? What if I’d been wrong?’
She tried to calm him down. ‘Oh come on - funny looking telescope, Queen’s husband with a suspicious fascination for diamonds? I’ve travelled with you long enough to spot a saving the world clue when I see one. And besides, I’ve never seen a machine you couldn’t work out.’
She smiled winningly. Sadly, his ego hadn’t returned from its last ego trip and flattery wasn’t working. He came closer, and now he was raising his voice right into her face. ‘Yeah, but it didn’t occur to you that I might need an explanation, did it? You just ran off. Put yourself in danger. You could have been killed and there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it.’
His face was a bit pink now, what with all the effort he was putting into the yelling. He made her feel guilty, and childish, and thoughtless too, for not considering his needs enough. Then anger, sudden and wild and devouring flashed across her face like a rash. The only thing she was thinking about was his need not to be dead or lost, and he was shouting at her loudly enough to wake up the people in the next estate, let alone the next room. She had so much responsibility it was making her sick, and as she stood there quivering with fury, she remembered that he’d never had the shouting at he deserved.
She clenched her fists, narrowed her eyes. ‘Because, of course, you’d never do that.’
He frowned, snapped, ‘What?’
‘Just dump me and run. You’d never catch the mighty great Time Lord swanning off without a word. Course not. That’s just what us stupid humans do.’
He straightened up a bit and his face was now white.
She folded her arms. ‘How did it go? Oh yeah - this is emergency programme one - blah blah blah - hope it’s a good death - see you round.’ She was so angry she had to dig her nails into the palms of her hands to stop herself crying, or slapping him.
She could see him building up to a tirade, his eyes like fiery coals beneath his brows, and his lips thinned into compressed lines of rage. ‘I had no choice.’ His tone was icy, bitter. ‘I had to keep you safe. I’d do it again if I had to.’
That was the final straw. He was asking for it. ‘You left me,’ she screamed, losing control entirely. ‘How could I have a fantastic life? How guilty did you want me to feel? You were just making it easier on yourself. What about what I wanted? What happened to my explanation? Why do you always leave me behind?’
He had advanced until his face was only inches away, his neck corded with tension, and his voice was so loud she was deafened. ‘I love you. I was saving your life.’
All she could see was red rage. ‘I love you too. I was saving yours.’
He hollered back with a slightly lower pitch. ‘So you did mean what you said last night then.’
‘Of course I did,’ she howled, but her anger was cracking. ‘Don’t you mean it too?’
‘From the bottom of my heart;’ he yelled. ‘So it counts twice.’
‘Fine,’ she snapped.
‘Fine,’ he retorted.
She glared at him. He glared at her.
The corner of his mouth twisted. ‘Up against the wall?’ he suggested.
She nodded. ‘It’d take ages to get this dress off.’
His mouth was on hers, and his tongue was halfway down her throat before she knew what had hit her, stumbling back against the wall as both pairs of hands struggled to lift her heavy skirts. He tossed the fabric up over her chest and she felt his fingers digging into the warm hollow between her legs. His hand shifted and he picked up her thigh, holding her steady as he thrust his hot, strong arousal up inside her. She straightened with a cry, grabbed his shoulders and held on for dear life, feeling him pull back and enter her again and again, with a demanding, unmerciful intensity that slammed her hips against the wall. He was fast, and he used all his weight to drive, deep and throbbing within her, rubbing her raw with the friction, leaving her with only a tiptoe on the floor for support. Brutal, rough, animal sex, the real call of the wild.
She’d never been taken harder. No one had ever forced their way inside her with such complete abandon, no one had ever given themselves to her so totally, with no holding back, no fear, no limits. It only didn’t hurt because she trusted him enough to utterly relax, and he only did it because he knew he had her trust.
His body thrashed against hers, out of control, unselfconscious and he tore his mouth away, pouring out a torrent of ‘ohs’ and grunts and husky cries while he hammered away between her thighs. She felt like she was burning, her hips engulfed in a sharp flame of passion, stoked by the fierce push-push-push of the penetration going on below. She held him tight, and she ached to come, she panted to come, she spread her legs wider to make herself come as quick and as hard and as strong as she possibly could. He forced her on, locked within the dripping heat she had become, rushing to bury himself within her as many times as he could stand before he had to let go.
Wrapped up in her overwhelming need for orgasm she only just felt him speed up, struggle through a few stokes so powerful they pushed her completely off the floor and then he was shouting in her ear and shuddering under her hands, while her fingers locked convulsively into his shoulders and a blistering climax spiked her groin. Her knees were actually trembling when he put her down.
She had to sit on the bed with her heart racing for some time while he unhooked the back of her dress and pulled it off. The rest of the night she spent lying naked in the Doctor’s arms. Waking, dozing, listening to him breathe, sighing herself into a dizzy cloud of pleasure when he ran his fingers over her body, making love to her with gentle care and an attention that took hours to exhaust. Every time she came he said ‘I love you’ and his words were a satisfaction that lingered, long after the physical reaction had died away. The something that had hidden in the shadow of his eyes was standing in the sunshine now, the love he felt open and on display every time he looked her way.
He said, ‘I’m sorry I left you. I’ll try not to do it again.’
‘Promise?’ she asked.
He didn’t know how important his answer was. She hoped it would be enough.
She was woken in the damp chill of the Scottish morning by a missed call on her phone and Mickey’s number. She got up to find the bathroom and returned wiping her mouth.
He stared at her, a sudden frown creasing his brow. ‘Have you just been sick again?’ he asked.
She had to reply truthfully: ‘Third morning this week.’
Hope like lightening arced across his face, followed immediately by confusion and denial. Digging out the sonic screwdriver from his jacket strewn across the floor he ran it over her, checked the readout, muttered, ‘Idiot,’ under his breath.
She shrugged, ‘Must be something I ate.’
She threw the phone into the pile of clothing on the floor, refusing to think about it anymore, and made herself breakfast. She’d heard that revenge was a dish best served cold, but she found it was best eaten warm, and sticky, and shot into the mouth at high velocity by a man promising faithfully never to make her come while lying on the console ever again. In fact, she made him promise so many times, with her tongue teasing that sensitive spot underneath his smooth, shining, dribbling head, that his knees were trembling against the bedsheets when he finally filled her throat with his thick release.
She didn’t mind not being knighted, and it was quite a relief to creep out of the house at first light, and start the long walk back to the TARDIS. She didn’t take off the ring. He didn’t ask for it back.
So far, time was beating her two to nothing, and despite the everlasting support of the Doctor’s hand clasped around hers there was a bundle of nerves lodged in her guts that wouldn’t go away. In the evening, she drowned it with very strong cider, and covered it with chips, and fish, and tomato sauce, salt and vinegar and half a pickled egg, before she realised what she was eating and spat it out. It had amused her to send him to his room after lunch, with instructions to tidy it up, and a big box of cleaning products wrapped up in his favourite apron. True to form, he’d been gone for hours. She suspected the engine in the bath would be a lot more reassembled when she saw it again, although the bath itself was unlikely to be any cleaner.
She wanted some quiet time alone with the TARDIS, for some girl on girl - or girl on box - action. Or round two, she wasn’t sure which. She needed help. She was looking at death, probably not her own, but the total loss of the Doctor, and that felt like a little piece of her heart was dying with every minute that brought it nearer. A merciless fate was staring her in the face and as far as she could see, there were only three options - run, fight, or accept it. She wasn’t being allowed to run - the farthest they’d got from the original timeline was Barcelona, and she suspected that was only because it had been on his mind so much before he regenerated. Fighting hadn’t helped a lot either. She’d tried to make different choices, but abandoning innocent people, or even murdering not so innocent ones wasn’t part of who she was, not part of the person he loved. But she couldn’t just lie down and let time walk all over her either. A keening wail echoed in her mind any time she thought of being without him and her body was imprinted with his touch, so that even when he walked away she could feel him holding her hand.
She didn’t know what to do. She wanted a better answer, or a better plan than clicking her heels together three times and hoping for the best. Even though that hope was about the only weapon she seemed to have.
Her concept of how to access the ship’s databanks was flimsy at best, involving telepathy or something else flash and alien, but she also remembered that the TARDIS was frequently fixed with a rubber mallet, and had a bicycle pump as a key component. Mickey had a point about ET’s dustbin.
So she rescued the keyboard from underneath a new pile of junk and typed as if his life depended on it. ‘Timelines’ got more responses than she could have read in a lifetime, and the majority were incomprehensible. ‘Change future’ was the same, although there looked to be a lot more philosophy than temporal mechanics in that set of answers. She narrowed the search, tried looking for something specific on wounds or windows in time, Reapers, space/time vortex, or even what the ‘relative’ bit actually did mean. It was like looking for a needle buried under a haystack on a different planet. Eventually, she typed in ‘crossing’ by mistake instead of ‘crossing timelines’ and was rewarded with over a thousand varieties of the ‘why did the chicken cross the road’ gag. She had at least found the TARDIS’ sense of humour, and the ship was laughing at her. Revenge was definitely a dish best served cold, she realised, and there was nowhere colder than space. Or Dimension(s) In Space. She gave up, typed a mouthful of extremely rude words into the terminal and went off to find the only answer she trusted.
When she spoke, the Doctor looked up at her guiltily from the floor of the bathroom, a smear of oil staining his cheek. ‘What - now? Right this minute?’ he asked.
‘You said fun.’ She waved the wedding ring at him. ‘Love, honour and obey. And take me dancing. And feed me chips.’
So they went to Sheffield.
Sheffield in 1979 was a dump. Sheffield on November 22nd 1979 was particularly awful, especially when Ian Dury had played the night before and they’d missed him. She’d pleaded for ABBA, or the Jackson Five, or something else cheesy and fun, but he’d only compromise as far as the Beatles or Elvis and she wasn’t in a good enough mood to put on the outrageous pink skirt she’d found in the wardrobe room. She knew it would be Sheffield anyway.
She found the nearest off licence to the venue because she wanted alcohol, just to take the taste of her desperation away, and she found the nearest chip shop to the off licence, because nothing she ate seemed to be staying down. And then, because it was raining, she found the nearest bus shelter to the chip shop and she sat, surrounded by grey depression and waterlogged, storm lashed streets, and tried to think of a way to ask a question that was nearest to what she really wanted to know.
Waving around the pickled egg, she said, ‘So, what’s to stop us coming back yesterday and doing this again?’
He picked at the ancient chewing gum stuck to the plastic seat beside him. ‘Nothing. If you want to do this again.’
She sidled a bit nearer to the unanswered question. ‘And what’s to stop us coming back again, if the gig’s any good?’
He pulled his coat around him against the cold, and shrugged. ‘Can’t have two of us in the same place at the same time. You know that.’
She approached the question from behind, got right up close. ‘And why can’t you go back into the middle of last week and warn them?’ She took a bite of the pickled egg to camouflage her interest in his answer.
He frowned, grinding someone else’s discarded cigarette end beneath his boot. ‘What - go back and warn ourselves not to bother? Good idea.’
She spat out the egg. ‘No, with the Daleks. You said you couldn’t go back and warn anyone because you’d be caught in events.’ She tapped the question on its shoulder and waited for it to look round.
‘Well, I couldn’t because I’d be stuck. Say I jumped back a couple of days, and told somebody what was going to happen. Time would just go on for a bit, and things would change, but eventually the paradox would catch up. Or something like the Reapers would get in first. I already know what’s going to happen, but if I skip back and change the timeline, the part where I find out what happened never existed. So I can’t go back and warn anyone because I don’t know anything, because it never happened. But I’ve already done it, so it’s a circle - see?’
He looked at her doubtfully. The cider fizzed comfortingly in her mouth.
‘I’m stuck in events. After a couple of days I’ll get to the same point in time I started from and I’ll have to go back and warn everyone all over again. I’m in a loop, I can just go round and round but I’m stuck.’
She stared the question right in the eye. ‘Yeah, but the first timeline never happened, so no one needs warning anyway. And what if you don’t go back?’
He looked at her seriously. ‘The first timeline still exists. By going back, I’ve made a new timeline, but it’s like a parasite on the back of the first one - the first one creates it, dominates it. You can’t have the second without the first. That’s why you can’t change your own history without risking things going bad, getting stuck in events, or a parallel universe, or completely annihilating yourself, or anything. But if I don’t go back, if I don’t warn anyone, the first timeline just snaps back into place and all I get is a nasty headache.’
She asked it. ‘So how do you break the circle? How do you change the timeline and keep it changed?’
All her hopes, everything she wanted, her very existence hung on his answer.
‘You can’t. Unless…’
Chapter 7: Claw and more claw
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11209.html
Chapter 6: A mechanically minded man
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10823.html
Chapter 5: New new Earth
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10690.html
Chapter 4: Barcelona
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10275.html
Chapter 3: The Christmas invasion
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10233.html
Chapter 2: Unparting the ways
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/9740.html
Chapter 1: The girl in the TARDIS
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/9627.html
Pairing: Nine/Rose (no surprises there)
Content: Graphic Sex; Drama; Humour; Angst; Romance; Everything else you can think of
Rating: Adult for later chapters
Chapters: 8/10
Disclaimer: Not mine, not even close. In fact, this one has written itself.
Author's Note: I need to say a huge thank you to my so-called technical consultant (she refuses to be co-author or collaborator) kitsunealyc for all her help on this story, although any complete cock-ups are my fault, and I can only apologise.
Summary: Life didn't have a rewind button. There wasn't any going back. Unless...
Chapter 8: Sheffield
He was hurting her arm. Plus, his eyes were shooting sparks at her, and he was more angry than she’d ever seen him in her life. With this Doctor, you always had to be prepared for the shouting. She cast around for an excuse.
‘The same way it knew me. The call of the wild maybe. I could just feel something as soon as we got inside the house but I wasn’t sure what it was.’
Gazing up at him with her eyes wide, deliberately unblinking, and she pasted the most innocent expression she could locate at short notice onto her face. That was actually a pretty good lie. She was getting pretty good at lying to him, she noted, with a little run of sadness that made her lower lip wobble. He squeezed her arm a bit more, but he seemed slightly less furious and he turned away from her to face the Queen.
‘Excuse me Ma’am; there are matters of personal security I need to discuss with my wife in some detail. Goodnight.’
He gave a little bow, and escorted Rose none too gently from the room, propelling her down corridors and up stairs with a hand crushing her elbow. Only ever so slightly less furious then. He slammed the door to their bedroom closed, and span her round to face him, leaving her to rub the feeling back into her arm.
‘How could you be so irresponsible?’ was his opening line, delivered in a hiss that quickly escalated in volume. ‘I told you to stop, but you don’t need to listen to me any more do you? You just take off with some enormous monster after you and a great big sign saying ‘chase me.’ What if I hadn’t worked out that machine? What if I’d been wrong?’
She tried to calm him down. ‘Oh come on - funny looking telescope, Queen’s husband with a suspicious fascination for diamonds? I’ve travelled with you long enough to spot a saving the world clue when I see one. And besides, I’ve never seen a machine you couldn’t work out.’
She smiled winningly. Sadly, his ego hadn’t returned from its last ego trip and flattery wasn’t working. He came closer, and now he was raising his voice right into her face. ‘Yeah, but it didn’t occur to you that I might need an explanation, did it? You just ran off. Put yourself in danger. You could have been killed and there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it.’
His face was a bit pink now, what with all the effort he was putting into the yelling. He made her feel guilty, and childish, and thoughtless too, for not considering his needs enough. Then anger, sudden and wild and devouring flashed across her face like a rash. The only thing she was thinking about was his need not to be dead or lost, and he was shouting at her loudly enough to wake up the people in the next estate, let alone the next room. She had so much responsibility it was making her sick, and as she stood there quivering with fury, she remembered that he’d never had the shouting at he deserved.
She clenched her fists, narrowed her eyes. ‘Because, of course, you’d never do that.’
He frowned, snapped, ‘What?’
‘Just dump me and run. You’d never catch the mighty great Time Lord swanning off without a word. Course not. That’s just what us stupid humans do.’
He straightened up a bit and his face was now white.
She folded her arms. ‘How did it go? Oh yeah - this is emergency programme one - blah blah blah - hope it’s a good death - see you round.’ She was so angry she had to dig her nails into the palms of her hands to stop herself crying, or slapping him.
She could see him building up to a tirade, his eyes like fiery coals beneath his brows, and his lips thinned into compressed lines of rage. ‘I had no choice.’ His tone was icy, bitter. ‘I had to keep you safe. I’d do it again if I had to.’
That was the final straw. He was asking for it. ‘You left me,’ she screamed, losing control entirely. ‘How could I have a fantastic life? How guilty did you want me to feel? You were just making it easier on yourself. What about what I wanted? What happened to my explanation? Why do you always leave me behind?’
He had advanced until his face was only inches away, his neck corded with tension, and his voice was so loud she was deafened. ‘I love you. I was saving your life.’
All she could see was red rage. ‘I love you too. I was saving yours.’
He hollered back with a slightly lower pitch. ‘So you did mean what you said last night then.’
‘Of course I did,’ she howled, but her anger was cracking. ‘Don’t you mean it too?’
‘From the bottom of my heart;’ he yelled. ‘So it counts twice.’
‘Fine,’ she snapped.
‘Fine,’ he retorted.
She glared at him. He glared at her.
The corner of his mouth twisted. ‘Up against the wall?’ he suggested.
She nodded. ‘It’d take ages to get this dress off.’
His mouth was on hers, and his tongue was halfway down her throat before she knew what had hit her, stumbling back against the wall as both pairs of hands struggled to lift her heavy skirts. He tossed the fabric up over her chest and she felt his fingers digging into the warm hollow between her legs. His hand shifted and he picked up her thigh, holding her steady as he thrust his hot, strong arousal up inside her. She straightened with a cry, grabbed his shoulders and held on for dear life, feeling him pull back and enter her again and again, with a demanding, unmerciful intensity that slammed her hips against the wall. He was fast, and he used all his weight to drive, deep and throbbing within her, rubbing her raw with the friction, leaving her with only a tiptoe on the floor for support. Brutal, rough, animal sex, the real call of the wild.
She’d never been taken harder. No one had ever forced their way inside her with such complete abandon, no one had ever given themselves to her so totally, with no holding back, no fear, no limits. It only didn’t hurt because she trusted him enough to utterly relax, and he only did it because he knew he had her trust.
His body thrashed against hers, out of control, unselfconscious and he tore his mouth away, pouring out a torrent of ‘ohs’ and grunts and husky cries while he hammered away between her thighs. She felt like she was burning, her hips engulfed in a sharp flame of passion, stoked by the fierce push-push-push of the penetration going on below. She held him tight, and she ached to come, she panted to come, she spread her legs wider to make herself come as quick and as hard and as strong as she possibly could. He forced her on, locked within the dripping heat she had become, rushing to bury himself within her as many times as he could stand before he had to let go.
Wrapped up in her overwhelming need for orgasm she only just felt him speed up, struggle through a few stokes so powerful they pushed her completely off the floor and then he was shouting in her ear and shuddering under her hands, while her fingers locked convulsively into his shoulders and a blistering climax spiked her groin. Her knees were actually trembling when he put her down.
She had to sit on the bed with her heart racing for some time while he unhooked the back of her dress and pulled it off. The rest of the night she spent lying naked in the Doctor’s arms. Waking, dozing, listening to him breathe, sighing herself into a dizzy cloud of pleasure when he ran his fingers over her body, making love to her with gentle care and an attention that took hours to exhaust. Every time she came he said ‘I love you’ and his words were a satisfaction that lingered, long after the physical reaction had died away. The something that had hidden in the shadow of his eyes was standing in the sunshine now, the love he felt open and on display every time he looked her way.
He said, ‘I’m sorry I left you. I’ll try not to do it again.’
‘Promise?’ she asked.
He didn’t know how important his answer was. She hoped it would be enough.
She was woken in the damp chill of the Scottish morning by a missed call on her phone and Mickey’s number. She got up to find the bathroom and returned wiping her mouth.
He stared at her, a sudden frown creasing his brow. ‘Have you just been sick again?’ he asked.
She had to reply truthfully: ‘Third morning this week.’
Hope like lightening arced across his face, followed immediately by confusion and denial. Digging out the sonic screwdriver from his jacket strewn across the floor he ran it over her, checked the readout, muttered, ‘Idiot,’ under his breath.
She shrugged, ‘Must be something I ate.’
She threw the phone into the pile of clothing on the floor, refusing to think about it anymore, and made herself breakfast. She’d heard that revenge was a dish best served cold, but she found it was best eaten warm, and sticky, and shot into the mouth at high velocity by a man promising faithfully never to make her come while lying on the console ever again. In fact, she made him promise so many times, with her tongue teasing that sensitive spot underneath his smooth, shining, dribbling head, that his knees were trembling against the bedsheets when he finally filled her throat with his thick release.
She didn’t mind not being knighted, and it was quite a relief to creep out of the house at first light, and start the long walk back to the TARDIS. She didn’t take off the ring. He didn’t ask for it back.
So far, time was beating her two to nothing, and despite the everlasting support of the Doctor’s hand clasped around hers there was a bundle of nerves lodged in her guts that wouldn’t go away. In the evening, she drowned it with very strong cider, and covered it with chips, and fish, and tomato sauce, salt and vinegar and half a pickled egg, before she realised what she was eating and spat it out. It had amused her to send him to his room after lunch, with instructions to tidy it up, and a big box of cleaning products wrapped up in his favourite apron. True to form, he’d been gone for hours. She suspected the engine in the bath would be a lot more reassembled when she saw it again, although the bath itself was unlikely to be any cleaner.
She wanted some quiet time alone with the TARDIS, for some girl on girl - or girl on box - action. Or round two, she wasn’t sure which. She needed help. She was looking at death, probably not her own, but the total loss of the Doctor, and that felt like a little piece of her heart was dying with every minute that brought it nearer. A merciless fate was staring her in the face and as far as she could see, there were only three options - run, fight, or accept it. She wasn’t being allowed to run - the farthest they’d got from the original timeline was Barcelona, and she suspected that was only because it had been on his mind so much before he regenerated. Fighting hadn’t helped a lot either. She’d tried to make different choices, but abandoning innocent people, or even murdering not so innocent ones wasn’t part of who she was, not part of the person he loved. But she couldn’t just lie down and let time walk all over her either. A keening wail echoed in her mind any time she thought of being without him and her body was imprinted with his touch, so that even when he walked away she could feel him holding her hand.
She didn’t know what to do. She wanted a better answer, or a better plan than clicking her heels together three times and hoping for the best. Even though that hope was about the only weapon she seemed to have.
Her concept of how to access the ship’s databanks was flimsy at best, involving telepathy or something else flash and alien, but she also remembered that the TARDIS was frequently fixed with a rubber mallet, and had a bicycle pump as a key component. Mickey had a point about ET’s dustbin.
So she rescued the keyboard from underneath a new pile of junk and typed as if his life depended on it. ‘Timelines’ got more responses than she could have read in a lifetime, and the majority were incomprehensible. ‘Change future’ was the same, although there looked to be a lot more philosophy than temporal mechanics in that set of answers. She narrowed the search, tried looking for something specific on wounds or windows in time, Reapers, space/time vortex, or even what the ‘relative’ bit actually did mean. It was like looking for a needle buried under a haystack on a different planet. Eventually, she typed in ‘crossing’ by mistake instead of ‘crossing timelines’ and was rewarded with over a thousand varieties of the ‘why did the chicken cross the road’ gag. She had at least found the TARDIS’ sense of humour, and the ship was laughing at her. Revenge was definitely a dish best served cold, she realised, and there was nowhere colder than space. Or Dimension(s) In Space. She gave up, typed a mouthful of extremely rude words into the terminal and went off to find the only answer she trusted.
When she spoke, the Doctor looked up at her guiltily from the floor of the bathroom, a smear of oil staining his cheek. ‘What - now? Right this minute?’ he asked.
‘You said fun.’ She waved the wedding ring at him. ‘Love, honour and obey. And take me dancing. And feed me chips.’
So they went to Sheffield.
Sheffield in 1979 was a dump. Sheffield on November 22nd 1979 was particularly awful, especially when Ian Dury had played the night before and they’d missed him. She’d pleaded for ABBA, or the Jackson Five, or something else cheesy and fun, but he’d only compromise as far as the Beatles or Elvis and she wasn’t in a good enough mood to put on the outrageous pink skirt she’d found in the wardrobe room. She knew it would be Sheffield anyway.
She found the nearest off licence to the venue because she wanted alcohol, just to take the taste of her desperation away, and she found the nearest chip shop to the off licence, because nothing she ate seemed to be staying down. And then, because it was raining, she found the nearest bus shelter to the chip shop and she sat, surrounded by grey depression and waterlogged, storm lashed streets, and tried to think of a way to ask a question that was nearest to what she really wanted to know.
Waving around the pickled egg, she said, ‘So, what’s to stop us coming back yesterday and doing this again?’
He picked at the ancient chewing gum stuck to the plastic seat beside him. ‘Nothing. If you want to do this again.’
She sidled a bit nearer to the unanswered question. ‘And what’s to stop us coming back again, if the gig’s any good?’
He pulled his coat around him against the cold, and shrugged. ‘Can’t have two of us in the same place at the same time. You know that.’
She approached the question from behind, got right up close. ‘And why can’t you go back into the middle of last week and warn them?’ She took a bite of the pickled egg to camouflage her interest in his answer.
He frowned, grinding someone else’s discarded cigarette end beneath his boot. ‘What - go back and warn ourselves not to bother? Good idea.’
She spat out the egg. ‘No, with the Daleks. You said you couldn’t go back and warn anyone because you’d be caught in events.’ She tapped the question on its shoulder and waited for it to look round.
‘Well, I couldn’t because I’d be stuck. Say I jumped back a couple of days, and told somebody what was going to happen. Time would just go on for a bit, and things would change, but eventually the paradox would catch up. Or something like the Reapers would get in first. I already know what’s going to happen, but if I skip back and change the timeline, the part where I find out what happened never existed. So I can’t go back and warn anyone because I don’t know anything, because it never happened. But I’ve already done it, so it’s a circle - see?’
He looked at her doubtfully. The cider fizzed comfortingly in her mouth.
‘I’m stuck in events. After a couple of days I’ll get to the same point in time I started from and I’ll have to go back and warn everyone all over again. I’m in a loop, I can just go round and round but I’m stuck.’
She stared the question right in the eye. ‘Yeah, but the first timeline never happened, so no one needs warning anyway. And what if you don’t go back?’
He looked at her seriously. ‘The first timeline still exists. By going back, I’ve made a new timeline, but it’s like a parasite on the back of the first one - the first one creates it, dominates it. You can’t have the second without the first. That’s why you can’t change your own history without risking things going bad, getting stuck in events, or a parallel universe, or completely annihilating yourself, or anything. But if I don’t go back, if I don’t warn anyone, the first timeline just snaps back into place and all I get is a nasty headache.’
She asked it. ‘So how do you break the circle? How do you change the timeline and keep it changed?’
All her hopes, everything she wanted, her very existence hung on his answer.
‘You can’t. Unless…’
Chapter 7: Claw and more claw
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/11209.html
Chapter 6: A mechanically minded man
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10823.html
Chapter 5: New new Earth
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10690.html
Chapter 4: Barcelona
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10275.html
Chapter 3: The Christmas invasion
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/10233.html
Chapter 2: Unparting the ways
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/9740.html
Chapter 1: The girl in the TARDIS
http://sap1066.livejournal.com/9627.html