This is What Happens When I Have Too Much Free Time
I have one week before I have to manage 35 teenagers on a routine basis while reforming to the basic demands of No Child Left Behind (by idiotic standardized testing not properly aligned to said standards and not teaching anything directly useful to the children it is not leaving behind). That is my political teaching blurb for the moment.
So, this is prequel fic for "Brain Child" which was supposed to be a one-shot and then bunnies began nibbling at my brain. And these bunnies did not fancy proper nouns.
Oh, this fic has Adult material (Shock! Awe!). Yes, fairly puritanical as far as such fic goes, but big enough for me. And, wow, I broke two of my long-standing rules with this.
Enough of me. Fic.
Disclaimers: I think the world would be depressed if I owned Doctor Who and it went this way. You'll be happier when it's back in the BBC's hands. Expert, however, is mine and can be borrowed with permission.
Note: And, for those of you who follow my writing - and this is notable - this contains adult material. Also, this is part of the Expert-universe and some parts will not make sense / will make much more sense if you have read the one-shot, Brain Child prior to this. This forms the back story of that particular one-shot.
Spoilers: For 4x13, Journey's End, as per my standard practice.
Half-Lives
~ sciathan file ~
i.
The first time it is merely reactionary - like the kiss on the beach - not happy or sad, just a sort of affirmation of existence.
It begins with Rose crying - looking at you as if you might swan off at the drop of a hat, too. You don't even tell her you don't have the means to, even if you were ever to even think of leaving her. You hold her, not knowing how else to explain that you are him, in a manner of speaking, and he is you. You think she gets caught up in the "manner of speaking" part - and truth be told, so do you - so you babble on about a strange case of identity theft in which you were involved somewhere in the banana groves of Bora Bora - the planet, not the island - and you manage to coax a small smile out of her.
You point her smile out - just like the last time you changed and couldn't properly explain. She remembers, as well, and, after a moment, a tear slips down her cheek, followed closely by many others and she sobs into your shirt until it is damp and clammy.
Her sobbing slows and, lifting her head to look you in the face and then back down at your sodden excuse for a shirt, she starts laughing at the mess she has made of your clothing - its now full of salty tears and probably snot…which, should it have been anyone's snot but Rose's you might find disgusting. But the snot is allowed. Love the girl, love the snot.
"That'll have to come off," she says, appraising the sorry state of your vestiture.
She's forgotten you don't have a convenient wardrobe to which you can run for more clothing at this time of night. Rose pulls the shirt over your head, nonetheless, and staring at you, also realizes that there is nothing to be done about this state of affairs until the morning - when you'll have to beg off a few shirts from Pete. And for all that you have an absolutely brilliant mind, you suddenly feel fairly stupid and tongue-tied when, not crying anymore, she buries her head on your bare shoulder, spreading out one human hand over your pounding human heart.
Rose, her hand still absorbing that new beating, looks up at you, eyes seemingly a million years away. Perhaps in another universe. But then something in them changes, absorbing the sound of your beating heart.
You know, abruptly, feeling stupider with each passing second, what she wants and, breaking the kiss she has drawn you into, you choke out, "I- I'm really not an expert at this - "
She laughs and reassures him "s'okay," and slowly continues on. You are drawn down to the pillow and as she's kissing your neck, you manage to say, "Well, you've had Mickey and all and - "
She stops and looks up at you, smirking and shaking her head as if she mostly can not believe that you've said that and then, moving close to you again, she whispers in your ear - lips tickling you with every word - "Finger on your lips - unless you want to remove all of the romance with that mouth of yours…or you want to be doing something else with that finger."
Your eyes widen and you decide that not talking might be the best thing for once in your life. You simply do. And so does she.
Your resulting effort is sloppy and a bit awkward - at some points frenzied and desperate in a manner that triggers static images of fireflies and mayflies and, somewhere in the middle you realize that this time, you are one of those fireflies and mayflies - burning impossibly brightly for a few ephemeral moments. And sometimes you wonder if you are both trying to affirm the there-ness of the other, getting as close to the centre of the other's being as possible - proclaiming "I am!" through each other while all the while being unsure of how to reconstitute each of your beings alone.
It is new, new, new, this. The beating of one heart. Two hearts. A compensation for and lack of one more.
You don't speak when it is over and you wonder if it is because neither knows what to say still. You fall asleep clinging to each other - clinging far more than embracing - and as you drop off to sleep you are momentarily unsettled by the forceful pounding of your heart in your ears.
ii.
He knows before Rose, but says nothing.
She will discover what he's done to her in time, when she begins blossoming and becomes overripe with painstaking slowness.
When the fifth month draws to a close, one night, still clinging to her and having a reason to this time, he feels the prick of awareness within her swollen abdomen - an insatiable, voracious, and frightened thirst to know that reaches out to him because he is the only (somewhat, he adds sadly) familiar feeling presence that she can find. He reaches back and, gingerly, touches his daughter with his mind and, somewhere where the golden rays cross and mix among their thoughts, a stray image of a man in a brown pin-striped suit, standing on another planet in another time (both he and his daughter know with complete certainty that this place is Woman Wept) spirals out. The man looks up for half a moment with uncertain awareness, before dismissing the brief mental caress and continues to look up at the star-strewn sky above him. Rose stirs in her sleep and makes a quiet moaning noise and the image is gone.
The ninth month comes in a wash of ill-placed anticipation and he tries to stay as close as possible and as far away as he dares from his flat with doors and carpets. As it passes, Rose looks at him with wide, almost frightened eyes (it is hard to imagine her wholly scared and so he is thankful for small kindnesses) and he tells her most of the truth.
Into the tenth month, Pete hires a doctor - plying him with large sums of money and perhaps other, less pleasant, incentives - to discreetly monitor his daughter's pregnancy.
Pete tries to talk to him once - because some form of him has always had all the answers before for them - about his grandchild and all he can do in response to his query is shake his head and say that he doesn't know. He doesn't add that he hopes he really doesn't know, for once.
He sleeps very little in the last months, a growing apprehension - one that Rose also shares and sometimes mentions and Jackie explains away as nerves due to the impending arrival - gnaws at him. The being that lies in his bed at night in what he has come to think of as the hollow space between Rose and him does not understand this fear, because for her what will come in simply the way of the universe - knowledge innate from ancient times.
We are loomed. Two genetic strands co-mingle over the essence of the Vortex. We break free into our lives.
She doesn't understand when he tells her, no, this is Rose, do you hear her singing to you when she thinks I can't hear? But she doesn't understand because his child has not become free to decide such things yet - she is acting on innate scripts encoded into the tri-helix of her DNA that she will not remember after she is born. To her, to his child, Rose is a physicality and looms are fact - without vulgar history and simply the way of the universe, the way of Gallifrey.
He doesn't even know how to tell her that neither Gallifrey nor that way of the universe exist anymore.
Near the end of the fifteenth month, she knows it is time to break out of her fleshy loom. He comes into the bedroom after showering to the tang of copper in the air and to Rose's truly frightened face.
Not knowing what to do, he mentally screams at his child in his mind, but she is also scared by the fact that what is happening to her is not the way she knows and does not follow the script. She is scared and does not understand and this makes her try to free herself all the more.
It is a battle he has no idea how to fight and which features participants that he can't talk out of it. Moreover, it is a battle of his own creation.
At hospital later on, a doctor gives him quiet, desperate news, one nearly faints as he comes into the room, and a nurse that is called to help clean up the blood is quietly sick in the rubbish bin. He sits next to Rose feeling more lost than he has ever before, wondering, for the first time, what he will do if…if…
Rose is barely hanging on as they cut her open and the child is free of its perceived loom, elbow deep in blood and, without scripts now, frightened beyond all measure by the carnage she now knows she has caused.
He holds Rose's hand for as much of the time as he can and his heart beats loudly in his ears. When the child - his child - his and Rose's child - cries, the dull thud of his heart beating almost drowns it out and he finds his chest hurts and it is difficult to stand. Ridiculously, he suddenly thinks of an entire myriad of civilizations flung across time and space that think time is configured as a circle - life and death the same point on a cyclical continuum - spiralling, spiralling, spiralling...
But despite the pounding, he takes his child - pronounced medically sound by Pete's doctor who almost knows what it means in this case and feels her two hearts beating without a word to the others. He knows that his daughter's first clear perceptions of "mother" and "father" are dyed red and awash with multifaceted pain. He feels the tendrils of her thought curling around his brain and offers what comfort he can.
Holding her later on, as Rose sleeps in a drug induced haze, he feels the old familiar beating of her two heart beats - her inheritance he doesn't want to contemplate - layered over his own erratic single heart.
Looking out the window for a moment, holding her to him, he thinks that he is no longer alone.
iii.
She knows better than Mum does that these are the last days he will live. She knows because, if ever she was an expert in such things - his Expert - she is an expert in her father. She knows what his inability to think quietly and the increased velocity of the memories that seep out of him like golden threads only she can see means, and the way his mind is so very far - dwelling on a planet with red grass and a burnt orange sky that always calls up an emptiness within her, too, and lying with Mum on grass that smells of apples on a clear blue day all mean he will not be here much longer.
Her father is burning and these golden threads are the smoke, and the Expert knows it. She knows she can stop it - like the Other Him would have done with Donna the First (this is not part of his memories, but a theoretical eventuality - a certainty - of one timeline), but that means rewriting him entirely. In the theoretical eventuality of Donna the First, she had previous data and memory structures…he does not. And a Time Lord is, in the end, the sum of their memories and nothing without them.
It is just a choice of deaths, she knows acutely. He does too, his memory is showing her even though his mind is fighting ghosts and Daleks and quickly spreading fire.
The pain in his chest is constant now. It has been since they returned from their pilgrimage to Bad Wolf Bay for that year, since he had told Rose of the cathedral that they will build there. However, he does not tell her they are building it in her honour - Our Lady of Sorrows - for the woman and her daughter that come each year and watch the waves together there.
"Ah, Doctor Noble," the physician says, leafing through his chart. "What seems to be the problem?"
He says it with finality, with certainty, "I'm burning."
They call it "heart failure with no recognizable cause." They don't say "failed human-Time Lord metacrisis" because that is beyond their vocabulary. They don't know that his mind is incinerating his heart and the clumsy metal one that they will install to keep him alive will not be enough.
He will burn and he knows it with full certainty.
Mum does not question the fact that she stays around him so often and she does not tell Mum that she is catching his soul in her mind - a mind that is fully supported by two hearts instead of one and one that knows when to say "I'm sorry" even if it breaks both of her hearts.
She reads a book about quantum mechanics so that Mum does not know what her brain is really doing. It was Dad's original plan to do so - literary misdirection, they name it, and she carries it out dutifully.
Now and then he wakes up - she knows when this is because he always places himself on the same planet and in the same time and month and year each time - and she shows him her four-dimensional calculations and he spots a glaring error and quips, "They would have tossed you out of the Academy for something like that."
She always sticks her nose up at him for such a comment, "You only passed with a 51%. On the second try. Really a brilliant academic record to come at me with, yeah?"
He yawns and closes his eyes again, "There are more important things in the universe than marks. Besides, didn't fancy the funny hats."
"Yes, funny philosophy, that." The Expert shoots back, "Especially in light of your recent commentary….funny hats, too. Might have liked them actually. Good ol' quality Time Lord millinery."
He chuckles, eyes still closed, breathing slightly laboured. "I stayed in the Academy - no mistakes in my algorithms that a whole fleet of Juldoon could march through - and my marked dislike for the hats has been well documented. Well, except for maybe my fourth self…"
His voice is wistful. On these days the memories are of lighter things. Not of walls and people and silver leaves and the smell of vellum and another man who looks identical to him.
When Rose has gotten exasperated with having to deal with disciplinary reports from the Expert's teachers at school, she does what he always considers a rather cruel thing for a human with no prior warning and invites them over for tea and a chat with "Doctor Noble."
Two Time Lords against one human dealing with matters of intellectual development…well, he would not lie and say he doesn't find the situation amusing. Even if it is patently unfair to the humans.
"You must be Donna Noble's father," each one would say and, although he always wants to deny this, he instead flashes them a grin and says, "Oh yes! Come in."
He wears his dressing gown and moves slowly, but he will argue with this silly woman, not wanting to because this meeting is already both physically painful and…really, he genuinely doesn't care about what she has to say. He's doing this to humour Rose…usually providing more humour than she probably intends and in an entirely different manner than she intends.
He calls for the Expert. She appears, grinning at him, dragging in a large quantity of books cheekily, just for show, sometimes bringing in algorithms that wouldn't be discovered by humans for another 2,000 years and intermittently asking about their solutions while munching on chocolate biscuits.
"Now, what is it that my daughter has been up to now?" He asks pleasantly.
"She is claiming to know quantum mechanics," one had said.
"Constantly correcting me in front of the other children," another had complained.
"Chatters on so no one can get a word in edgewise," commented another.
"Has an obsession with scarves. In all weathers. Strange child." He had laughed at this one and said in her defence that she got cold rather easily.
"A nightmare," this current one says with finality. "A veritable terror."
He sips his tea and asks with a healthy degree of bemusement, "What kind of terror?" Another sip. "Intellectual terror? Tells you to shove off on Clom? An Oncoming Storm-let?"
The woman stares at him before saying censoriously, "This is not a joke, Doctor Noble! Donna has no sense of discipline and no respect for my authority within the classroom…not to mention the fact that she is very, very rude."
"Just Doctor," he corrects, leaning back in his chair and observing the specimen in front of him. He definitely agrees that this last assessment of Donna is very accurate. And not badly off the mark for his daughter, either. These don't seem like an offence worth spoiling his tea for, however.
"And that is all well and good," her face sours further as what she no doubt construes as his cavalier attitude to her overblown notion of her own importance, "But is she clever?"
Sniffing, she takes out a few sheets of paper with complex symbols scrawled all over in a childish hand. He takes them and examines a page. His face breaks into a bright smile.
"Cheeky girl," he says, turning to the Expert, who is trying to reach for another biscuit as nonchalantly as possible. "Care to explain this?"
Her attempt at extra biscuits momentarily frustrated, she looks annoyed and says, "You understand it perfectly."
"Expert…" he says warningly - he is really warning her not to take so many biscuits before supper and she knows this. She'll most likely ignore him for all intents and purposes, but displays of parental authority are what Rose wants him to show these people.
Knowing he can't say anything to undermine his current display, the Expert grabs a biscuit with impunity and then, stuffing it into her mouth, mumbles out, "Solution to the Riemann's Hypothesis - one hundred years too early."
He grins, re-examining her work with pride. "Now, there, you see? Perfectly clever. Not a problem with this at all."
The woman goggles at him and, incensed, exclaims, "Gibberish she is parroting from those books of hers!"
He plucks up the book she is reading - the cover in Ancient Greek - "Rather a balanced temporal education, I would say. Now, when she has done something genuinely unintelligent, like accidentally - and I'll be assuming it is not intentional as I should have taught her better despite her being her mother's child - blowing a temporal rift in the wall of your classroom, please waste my time further. Oh, and" he looked at her dead on with a very grave expression, "She is quite fond of dinosaurs, so if you see any, please run."
He is quite sure such comments will give him a reputation at the school. He hopes it does, so he can avoid making further threats of dinosaur related intervention over otherwise perfectly good tea.
The woman, infuriated, stands up, "I see you intend to be quite negligent in the matter of your daughter's education, Doctor Noble, and she will come to nothing for such -"
"-She is brilliant! She'll be fine - wonderful genetic stock, she has. You…oh, I worry about you."
He thinks this last bit should solidify his budding reputation as a difficult and incredibly rude parent.
She rather unwisely decides to say some quite unpleasant things to him then, and he decides that she is very lucky that he has left his sonic screwdriver in his other pyjama trousers and is too knackered to get it.
Rose does not even comment when, days later, with a bit of jiggery poke with the basic functions of his sonic screwdriver, the teacher quits, citing incidents of dinosaur astral projections (Clearly not being as clever, she used different terminology). He and his daughter try to keep their laughter inside their heads to avoid suspicion, but fail…which is fine, because Rose has been rather annoyed with the woman as well and laughs while all at once trying to be reproving of their behaviour.
But he has humoured her and he is pleased.
She makes another plate of chocolate biscuits and the Expert is jubilant. Afterwards he puts a stop to her sending her solution to the Riemann's Hypothesis off to an academic journal and gives her a stern lecture on her duty in preserving the timelines and the Laws of Time.
He hopes he isn't thinking loud enough that she knows he's probably broken almost every single one of those laws at least once.
These days he barely talks and his heartbeat beats an erratic and thready thump that accompanies the string of words she tries to read over and over. She knows, sometimes, that he does not have the capacity to control his brain and when he hears things, the paths twist and turn involuntarily.
Her mother walks in and calls, "Donna?"
A golden tendril spills out. The story is in fragments - products of associational thinking from a body that cannot cope with the processing speed of his consciousness and is destroying itself pondering the tilt of the world and the fate of the Aztecs and a billion possibilities and eventualities all at once.
Donna Noble.
A bride who glows.
Huon prticles.
Ancient.
Attracted to the TARDIS core.
My TARDIS.
His TARDIS.
He wakes up and looks at her blearily, momentarily in possession of himself. "No, not that one," he says cryptically. He closes his eyes again, trying to wave one hand vaguely, "Forget that one."
Textbook enigmatic. The phrase and a massive face with the name "Jack" attached to it swim into her brain.
He makes an effort and shows her the memory of her mother and him, laughing into the sky, smelling the scent of apple grass. She can feel his calm and wonders who he actually chooses that one for.
"That one is better."
The Expert agrees. However, she remembers the information about the bride clearly because he tells her not to, and for a while, the images that construct her father in her brain are him wearing a suit she has never seen and laughing into the sky with her mother, him reaching out into the sky on the last Bad Wolf Bay anniversary when he thinks she isn't watching, looking alone and infinitely sad, and the taboo image of Donna the First, the glowing bride.
The day he dies he makes her promise never to leave her mother behind, never to abandon her. He says this only in her mind, very loudly, because Mum is in the room and she is more important to him than anyone.
Mum is crying as he goes, and is holding his hand. The Expert is cradling his mind, feeding memories back into him as his light in her mind fades - a memory of dinosaurs, of other places and other times, of a plethora of hugs, having not paid Mum 10 quid for something to do with Queen Victoria, of falling down laughing onto the grates of his TARDIS when they had made a particularly bad landing…
Inexplicably, the last memories she gets from him are of the figure of a man in a brown pinstriped suit, looking up suddenly from what he is doing - he is wearing glasses and her father's facial expression when he is hocked by something, but somehow the Expert knows that this is something akin to paradox, but not quite. There is no commentary and this memory is just a strange, stray moving image before the world goes dark and she can't hear his heart beating anymore. His one frail human heart.
But she can hear her mother crying and they both curl up on the bed next to him until morning when he is cold and wet with their tears.
They bury him in the ocean - the most infinite place they can find in the whole wide Earth - at Bad Wolf Bay, where the foundations of a new cathedral are being set.
Her mother begins to mark out the years after by a visit on that day and this breaks the Expert's heart more than even the sudden numbing absence of anyone like her in this universe. Now it is only her mother clinging to her, and her embracing her back.
iv.
For more than half a decade she puts his memories behind a door in her mind, sealing them off and relying on her own cleverness and the factual content of her father's mind when she finds her own sources of information lacking.
She tells herself that figuring it all out on her own is more fun, really. She is fine on her own and there are only so many things that can happen on Earth.
When she turns twelve she finally takes his sonic screwdriver and, although she knows a number of things that can be done to improve the basic functions, she deliberately does nothing to improve upon it. She puts it in the pocket of her coat, and begins to occasionally follow her mother to work at Torchwood.
The Expert knows she is considered, even at such a young age, to be as anomalous as her father, who showed up one day with her already anomalous mother. And sometimes she is considered to be as rude as her father, too.
Although, the Expert isn't officially employed here and isn't likely to be dismissed over a shouting match involving the inappropriate use of certain Sontaran technology that later quite mysteriously disappeared without a trace (in her memories her father grins at her from just beyond the door and turns back to her Mum, saying with feigned incredulity, "Now, really, it just vanished?") Mum's co-workers know they can ask her questions when Mum herself has slipped off to do other work.
It is Jake - the man who Mum works with and who was there the first time she came to this universe - who tells her about the Doctor. The first one. When Mum has gone off into the field and isn't there to angrily shush him up - which, of course, makes his stories all the more interesting - she goads him for information and compares notes to what's in her head.
Although Jake seems to think that her father is the same Doctor he tells the Expert stories about, she knows better innately. She remembers the last picture of the paradox that she had been given. Paradox and anomaly are as innate to her as breathing and she knows - like she knows her grandmother and her mum are wrong here and Uncle Tony is something she can't parse (she doesn't think about her own existence if she can help it) - that there is a discontinuity between Jake's Doctor and the Doctor she loves.
That is when she begins to search her father's memories, at first for only a few minutes a day, lest the loss of him overwhelm her. Slowly, she finds that the one memory she wants is in a thousand pieces and has a scrambled thing that floats around in her mind under the name "Bad Wolf" (and that feels like her mother and her father told her about it and seeing what it has done she believes that something truly fierce and wonderful still lives within Mum). This means that she has to piece the memory together bit by bit...which, if it weren't so important, she would look at as rather a bother.
Although her reconstruction is passable given what Bad Wolf has done to the basic particulate qualities of the memory during the act of transmission, large gaps are still missing.
She sees two of her father, side by side, one in blue and one in brown. She sees her mother waffling between them. She sees the spectre of the glowing bride, blazing dangerously.
She knows that this man who looks like Dad is important. Possibly to her. Definitely to her mother. And her mother is the most important thing to her - the only one who understands her reality, really - so she thinks she had better act accordingly.
At the age of thirteen, for the first time, she does something she is absolutely sure her father would have been very angry at her for doing. She waits until Mum falls asleep after a long, exhausting piece of field work and, placing her hands carefully on her temples, reads her memories of one day on Bad Wolf Bay when time split off into an anomaly and the one with two hearts - the one who is most like her - leaves and the one she loves - the more humanly human one - stays. They are differentiated only by wounded time in flux and stray human DNA and a single beating heart.
But now, she knows, time has healed itself and burnt the extraneous paths, and left a gash in her mother's heart (she tries not to think of her own hearts) in its wake. In the most elementary of principles in action, timelines have been preserved. Sometimes she wonders - and she is pretty sure this is the small bits of human in her - if time ever cares what it has to do and who it has to hurt as it goes about its acts of preservation.
However, she then tries to dismiss this as a vulgar representation of the principles that govern the universe.
She decides that, whatever it takes, she will talk to the Doctor. The first one. The one who left her father and mother here. The one who might also be her father in some way, missing some time. She tries not to think about the Other One very much, because she feels something dark stir as she does, sometimes. If she were to sum him up succinctly, she'd claim he is a bit of an ass.
But, that opinion aside, she swears to find him.
And the glowing bride who she should not remember leads the way, like Hansel and Gretel going through the forest, leaving her deadly, golden crumbs. Once she eats them, she knows she will have no choice but to find him.
Knowing that she does not have the capacity to manufacture Huon on her own and this Torchwood has no foreseeable plans (she has scanned the files one day with her sonic screwdriver, during five minutes when her mother is looking away before going back to grinning innocently and poring over an Agatha Christi novel) to make mischief in that direction, she needs to improvise.
She decides that what she needs was a bit of manipulation of timelines - and, as a by-product, a solution to the growing planetary warming crisis this world is going through as a result of far too much dimension crashing for one planet's lifetime. Although, she doesn't think she should criticize the path that has brought them to this global warming crisis, because without the jumping she would not be here and she also needs to do some dimension jumping of her own. The solution is, of course, Huon particles in regulated use - for saving the planet energy-wise while also serving her own purposes.
Drawing up a plan, she sticks official looking files on key program coordinators' desks with complex chemical formulas and attributes it to another species - she chooses the Pshfi - the archivist aliens - because they have the best reputation for being the trivia traps of the alien world and any random knowledge can be attributed to something that they have absorbed along their travels. Humans like official-y things and don't often question these documents and undertake elaborate efforts to translate them from the archaic languages she translated the data into. After a short while, the program begins and, for a while they argue over who should take credit for this plan.
She can't because no one would believe that even a fifteen-year-old prodigy would be able to do something that brilliant.
…That and Time Lords are gone and, as she always thinks that they are the likely suspects when something immensely clever occurs, in this case it is good that very few know there is one left. Well, Time Lady - but that is an issue of semantics, not cleverness.
There is also that her mother would simply kill her. And she is Bad Wolf, so this is a very legitimate concern for this entire process.
There is one last hurdle for her brilliance to overcome and all the memories that she has caught (and of those, the ones she can see) are useless to her, because it is the one thing that her father could never do - how, even with Huon particles, does one cross the Void to the proper universe?
It will take five years for the Huon particles to be developed and she has no TARDIS and a Void ship would be both unforgivable and impossible - before or after breakfast, no matter how many impossibilities she saves up.
But there are rifts that shift and are unstable like earthquake plates - one minute open and the next gone, like fireworks in the space-time continuum. There is a rift at Bad Wolf Bay, which cries out to her in her dreams, sometimes, because it is a place that has been broken and healed far too often. But she does not have the knowledge or the skill to open it.
She, like her father, is trapped with whatever resources this world and these humans have. She has no TARDIS, no Gallifrey, and no recourse. And even if she can find a one-way ticket out, she needs to come back for her mother. That was her one promise.
She also needs to bring him. The Other One. That is a promise she makes to herself.
The solution to the Void comes from a very odd combination of luck, a conveniently placed memory, and her own blasphemous intellect.
The Expert rarely sleeps - her physiology doesn't necessitate it and she would rather read or tinker about with things she's nicked from Torchwood - but when she does, she dreams in memories that aren't her own. Tonight, she sees two women - one turning to stone and the other Donna the First. She is always better at seeing things with Donna here but, still, everything is hazy and the edges of this world are tinged with fire and ash. She is seeing everything through her father's eyes, in his brain, and she no longer knows if this one's brain is the same as her father's or if it is that of the Other One. The woman speaks, and the words are muddled and blurred. "The word is false." She does not know which word and the only thing that she can detect in this brain is surprise, incredulity, and a hint of interest. "Your real name….it burns in the stars…in…you are a Lord of Time."
She feels the name burning in her. Her name that no one knows, that she was born with. She wakes from the dream and knows what to do.
If she succeeds she has absolutely no idea what will happen, at best. If she fails she will be nameless and stranded, and eventually alone as the world withers about her and her two hearts beat on. She might even be torn apart.
And that is just her, personally. All these eventualities still leave her mother alone. That is to say nothing, she thinks darkly, about the possibility that her name will collapse two universes and she will only be able to offer up one human as explanation for her actions.
She is glad she is alone in this universe for once, as she thinks that if any other Time Lords still existed, they would have had her shot by now. And shot again in case she has the potential to regenerate (her mother has never exactly allowed her to find out and she is in no hurry to do so either). Her father…she doesn't want to think about what her father thinks. But she may find out if the Other One is the same as he claims to be.
Although, in thinking about what either thinks and knowing the possible and real implications of what she is about to do, the Expert takes sudden and perverse comfort in the fact that they both share an extreme abhorrence for guns.
Fin
A/N: So this is the prequel part of the series, and it will follow with the sequel part, which will hopefully be a bit lighter than this fare. Please go eat chocolate now on my behalf to regain your happy endorphins.
Okay, back to hand tacking trim to a costume. Least it's not 16 yards of lace this time. Yes, not 16 yards.
So, this is prequel fic for "Brain Child" which was supposed to be a one-shot and then bunnies began nibbling at my brain. And these bunnies did not fancy proper nouns.
Oh, this fic has Adult material (Shock! Awe!). Yes, fairly puritanical as far as such fic goes, but big enough for me. And, wow, I broke two of my long-standing rules with this.
Enough of me. Fic.
Disclaimers: I think the world would be depressed if I owned Doctor Who and it went this way. You'll be happier when it's back in the BBC's hands. Expert, however, is mine and can be borrowed with permission.
Note: And, for those of you who follow my writing - and this is notable - this contains adult material. Also, this is part of the Expert-universe and some parts will not make sense / will make much more sense if you have read the one-shot, Brain Child prior to this. This forms the back story of that particular one-shot.
Spoilers: For 4x13, Journey's End, as per my standard practice.
Half-Lives
~ sciathan file ~
i.
The first time it is merely reactionary - like the kiss on the beach - not happy or sad, just a sort of affirmation of existence.
It begins with Rose crying - looking at you as if you might swan off at the drop of a hat, too. You don't even tell her you don't have the means to, even if you were ever to even think of leaving her. You hold her, not knowing how else to explain that you are him, in a manner of speaking, and he is you. You think she gets caught up in the "manner of speaking" part - and truth be told, so do you - so you babble on about a strange case of identity theft in which you were involved somewhere in the banana groves of Bora Bora - the planet, not the island - and you manage to coax a small smile out of her.
You point her smile out - just like the last time you changed and couldn't properly explain. She remembers, as well, and, after a moment, a tear slips down her cheek, followed closely by many others and she sobs into your shirt until it is damp and clammy.
Her sobbing slows and, lifting her head to look you in the face and then back down at your sodden excuse for a shirt, she starts laughing at the mess she has made of your clothing - its now full of salty tears and probably snot…which, should it have been anyone's snot but Rose's you might find disgusting. But the snot is allowed. Love the girl, love the snot.
"That'll have to come off," she says, appraising the sorry state of your vestiture.
She's forgotten you don't have a convenient wardrobe to which you can run for more clothing at this time of night. Rose pulls the shirt over your head, nonetheless, and staring at you, also realizes that there is nothing to be done about this state of affairs until the morning - when you'll have to beg off a few shirts from Pete. And for all that you have an absolutely brilliant mind, you suddenly feel fairly stupid and tongue-tied when, not crying anymore, she buries her head on your bare shoulder, spreading out one human hand over your pounding human heart.
Rose, her hand still absorbing that new beating, looks up at you, eyes seemingly a million years away. Perhaps in another universe. But then something in them changes, absorbing the sound of your beating heart.
You know, abruptly, feeling stupider with each passing second, what she wants and, breaking the kiss she has drawn you into, you choke out, "I- I'm really not an expert at this - "
She laughs and reassures him "s'okay," and slowly continues on. You are drawn down to the pillow and as she's kissing your neck, you manage to say, "Well, you've had Mickey and all and - "
She stops and looks up at you, smirking and shaking her head as if she mostly can not believe that you've said that and then, moving close to you again, she whispers in your ear - lips tickling you with every word - "Finger on your lips - unless you want to remove all of the romance with that mouth of yours…or you want to be doing something else with that finger."
Your eyes widen and you decide that not talking might be the best thing for once in your life. You simply do. And so does she.
Your resulting effort is sloppy and a bit awkward - at some points frenzied and desperate in a manner that triggers static images of fireflies and mayflies and, somewhere in the middle you realize that this time, you are one of those fireflies and mayflies - burning impossibly brightly for a few ephemeral moments. And sometimes you wonder if you are both trying to affirm the there-ness of the other, getting as close to the centre of the other's being as possible - proclaiming "I am!" through each other while all the while being unsure of how to reconstitute each of your beings alone.
It is new, new, new, this. The beating of one heart. Two hearts. A compensation for and lack of one more.
You don't speak when it is over and you wonder if it is because neither knows what to say still. You fall asleep clinging to each other - clinging far more than embracing - and as you drop off to sleep you are momentarily unsettled by the forceful pounding of your heart in your ears.
ii.
He knows before Rose, but says nothing.
She will discover what he's done to her in time, when she begins blossoming and becomes overripe with painstaking slowness.
When the fifth month draws to a close, one night, still clinging to her and having a reason to this time, he feels the prick of awareness within her swollen abdomen - an insatiable, voracious, and frightened thirst to know that reaches out to him because he is the only (somewhat, he adds sadly) familiar feeling presence that she can find. He reaches back and, gingerly, touches his daughter with his mind and, somewhere where the golden rays cross and mix among their thoughts, a stray image of a man in a brown pin-striped suit, standing on another planet in another time (both he and his daughter know with complete certainty that this place is Woman Wept) spirals out. The man looks up for half a moment with uncertain awareness, before dismissing the brief mental caress and continues to look up at the star-strewn sky above him. Rose stirs in her sleep and makes a quiet moaning noise and the image is gone.
The ninth month comes in a wash of ill-placed anticipation and he tries to stay as close as possible and as far away as he dares from his flat with doors and carpets. As it passes, Rose looks at him with wide, almost frightened eyes (it is hard to imagine her wholly scared and so he is thankful for small kindnesses) and he tells her most of the truth.
Into the tenth month, Pete hires a doctor - plying him with large sums of money and perhaps other, less pleasant, incentives - to discreetly monitor his daughter's pregnancy.
Pete tries to talk to him once - because some form of him has always had all the answers before for them - about his grandchild and all he can do in response to his query is shake his head and say that he doesn't know. He doesn't add that he hopes he really doesn't know, for once.
He sleeps very little in the last months, a growing apprehension - one that Rose also shares and sometimes mentions and Jackie explains away as nerves due to the impending arrival - gnaws at him. The being that lies in his bed at night in what he has come to think of as the hollow space between Rose and him does not understand this fear, because for her what will come in simply the way of the universe - knowledge innate from ancient times.
We are loomed. Two genetic strands co-mingle over the essence of the Vortex. We break free into our lives.
She doesn't understand when he tells her, no, this is Rose, do you hear her singing to you when she thinks I can't hear? But she doesn't understand because his child has not become free to decide such things yet - she is acting on innate scripts encoded into the tri-helix of her DNA that she will not remember after she is born. To her, to his child, Rose is a physicality and looms are fact - without vulgar history and simply the way of the universe, the way of Gallifrey.
He doesn't even know how to tell her that neither Gallifrey nor that way of the universe exist anymore.
Near the end of the fifteenth month, she knows it is time to break out of her fleshy loom. He comes into the bedroom after showering to the tang of copper in the air and to Rose's truly frightened face.
Not knowing what to do, he mentally screams at his child in his mind, but she is also scared by the fact that what is happening to her is not the way she knows and does not follow the script. She is scared and does not understand and this makes her try to free herself all the more.
It is a battle he has no idea how to fight and which features participants that he can't talk out of it. Moreover, it is a battle of his own creation.
At hospital later on, a doctor gives him quiet, desperate news, one nearly faints as he comes into the room, and a nurse that is called to help clean up the blood is quietly sick in the rubbish bin. He sits next to Rose feeling more lost than he has ever before, wondering, for the first time, what he will do if…if…
Rose is barely hanging on as they cut her open and the child is free of its perceived loom, elbow deep in blood and, without scripts now, frightened beyond all measure by the carnage she now knows she has caused.
He holds Rose's hand for as much of the time as he can and his heart beats loudly in his ears. When the child - his child - his and Rose's child - cries, the dull thud of his heart beating almost drowns it out and he finds his chest hurts and it is difficult to stand. Ridiculously, he suddenly thinks of an entire myriad of civilizations flung across time and space that think time is configured as a circle - life and death the same point on a cyclical continuum - spiralling, spiralling, spiralling...
But despite the pounding, he takes his child - pronounced medically sound by Pete's doctor who almost knows what it means in this case and feels her two hearts beating without a word to the others. He knows that his daughter's first clear perceptions of "mother" and "father" are dyed red and awash with multifaceted pain. He feels the tendrils of her thought curling around his brain and offers what comfort he can.
Holding her later on, as Rose sleeps in a drug induced haze, he feels the old familiar beating of her two heart beats - her inheritance he doesn't want to contemplate - layered over his own erratic single heart.
Looking out the window for a moment, holding her to him, he thinks that he is no longer alone.
iii.
She knows better than Mum does that these are the last days he will live. She knows because, if ever she was an expert in such things - his Expert - she is an expert in her father. She knows what his inability to think quietly and the increased velocity of the memories that seep out of him like golden threads only she can see means, and the way his mind is so very far - dwelling on a planet with red grass and a burnt orange sky that always calls up an emptiness within her, too, and lying with Mum on grass that smells of apples on a clear blue day all mean he will not be here much longer.
Her father is burning and these golden threads are the smoke, and the Expert knows it. She knows she can stop it - like the Other Him would have done with Donna the First (this is not part of his memories, but a theoretical eventuality - a certainty - of one timeline), but that means rewriting him entirely. In the theoretical eventuality of Donna the First, she had previous data and memory structures…he does not. And a Time Lord is, in the end, the sum of their memories and nothing without them.
It is just a choice of deaths, she knows acutely. He does too, his memory is showing her even though his mind is fighting ghosts and Daleks and quickly spreading fire.
The pain in his chest is constant now. It has been since they returned from their pilgrimage to Bad Wolf Bay for that year, since he had told Rose of the cathedral that they will build there. However, he does not tell her they are building it in her honour - Our Lady of Sorrows - for the woman and her daughter that come each year and watch the waves together there.
"Ah, Doctor Noble," the physician says, leafing through his chart. "What seems to be the problem?"
He says it with finality, with certainty, "I'm burning."
They call it "heart failure with no recognizable cause." They don't say "failed human-Time Lord metacrisis" because that is beyond their vocabulary. They don't know that his mind is incinerating his heart and the clumsy metal one that they will install to keep him alive will not be enough.
He will burn and he knows it with full certainty.
Mum does not question the fact that she stays around him so often and she does not tell Mum that she is catching his soul in her mind - a mind that is fully supported by two hearts instead of one and one that knows when to say "I'm sorry" even if it breaks both of her hearts.
She reads a book about quantum mechanics so that Mum does not know what her brain is really doing. It was Dad's original plan to do so - literary misdirection, they name it, and she carries it out dutifully.
Now and then he wakes up - she knows when this is because he always places himself on the same planet and in the same time and month and year each time - and she shows him her four-dimensional calculations and he spots a glaring error and quips, "They would have tossed you out of the Academy for something like that."
She always sticks her nose up at him for such a comment, "You only passed with a 51%. On the second try. Really a brilliant academic record to come at me with, yeah?"
He yawns and closes his eyes again, "There are more important things in the universe than marks. Besides, didn't fancy the funny hats."
"Yes, funny philosophy, that." The Expert shoots back, "Especially in light of your recent commentary….funny hats, too. Might have liked them actually. Good ol' quality Time Lord millinery."
He chuckles, eyes still closed, breathing slightly laboured. "I stayed in the Academy - no mistakes in my algorithms that a whole fleet of Juldoon could march through - and my marked dislike for the hats has been well documented. Well, except for maybe my fourth self…"
His voice is wistful. On these days the memories are of lighter things. Not of walls and people and silver leaves and the smell of vellum and another man who looks identical to him.
When Rose has gotten exasperated with having to deal with disciplinary reports from the Expert's teachers at school, she does what he always considers a rather cruel thing for a human with no prior warning and invites them over for tea and a chat with "Doctor Noble."
Two Time Lords against one human dealing with matters of intellectual development…well, he would not lie and say he doesn't find the situation amusing. Even if it is patently unfair to the humans.
"You must be Donna Noble's father," each one would say and, although he always wants to deny this, he instead flashes them a grin and says, "Oh yes! Come in."
He wears his dressing gown and moves slowly, but he will argue with this silly woman, not wanting to because this meeting is already both physically painful and…really, he genuinely doesn't care about what she has to say. He's doing this to humour Rose…usually providing more humour than she probably intends and in an entirely different manner than she intends.
He calls for the Expert. She appears, grinning at him, dragging in a large quantity of books cheekily, just for show, sometimes bringing in algorithms that wouldn't be discovered by humans for another 2,000 years and intermittently asking about their solutions while munching on chocolate biscuits.
"Now, what is it that my daughter has been up to now?" He asks pleasantly.
"She is claiming to know quantum mechanics," one had said.
"Constantly correcting me in front of the other children," another had complained.
"Chatters on so no one can get a word in edgewise," commented another.
"Has an obsession with scarves. In all weathers. Strange child." He had laughed at this one and said in her defence that she got cold rather easily.
"A nightmare," this current one says with finality. "A veritable terror."
He sips his tea and asks with a healthy degree of bemusement, "What kind of terror?" Another sip. "Intellectual terror? Tells you to shove off on Clom? An Oncoming Storm-let?"
The woman stares at him before saying censoriously, "This is not a joke, Doctor Noble! Donna has no sense of discipline and no respect for my authority within the classroom…not to mention the fact that she is very, very rude."
"Just Doctor," he corrects, leaning back in his chair and observing the specimen in front of him. He definitely agrees that this last assessment of Donna is very accurate. And not badly off the mark for his daughter, either. These don't seem like an offence worth spoiling his tea for, however.
"And that is all well and good," her face sours further as what she no doubt construes as his cavalier attitude to her overblown notion of her own importance, "But is she clever?"
Sniffing, she takes out a few sheets of paper with complex symbols scrawled all over in a childish hand. He takes them and examines a page. His face breaks into a bright smile.
"Cheeky girl," he says, turning to the Expert, who is trying to reach for another biscuit as nonchalantly as possible. "Care to explain this?"
Her attempt at extra biscuits momentarily frustrated, she looks annoyed and says, "You understand it perfectly."
"Expert…" he says warningly - he is really warning her not to take so many biscuits before supper and she knows this. She'll most likely ignore him for all intents and purposes, but displays of parental authority are what Rose wants him to show these people.
Knowing he can't say anything to undermine his current display, the Expert grabs a biscuit with impunity and then, stuffing it into her mouth, mumbles out, "Solution to the Riemann's Hypothesis - one hundred years too early."
He grins, re-examining her work with pride. "Now, there, you see? Perfectly clever. Not a problem with this at all."
The woman goggles at him and, incensed, exclaims, "Gibberish she is parroting from those books of hers!"
He plucks up the book she is reading - the cover in Ancient Greek - "Rather a balanced temporal education, I would say. Now, when she has done something genuinely unintelligent, like accidentally - and I'll be assuming it is not intentional as I should have taught her better despite her being her mother's child - blowing a temporal rift in the wall of your classroom, please waste my time further. Oh, and" he looked at her dead on with a very grave expression, "She is quite fond of dinosaurs, so if you see any, please run."
He is quite sure such comments will give him a reputation at the school. He hopes it does, so he can avoid making further threats of dinosaur related intervention over otherwise perfectly good tea.
The woman, infuriated, stands up, "I see you intend to be quite negligent in the matter of your daughter's education, Doctor Noble, and she will come to nothing for such -"
"-She is brilliant! She'll be fine - wonderful genetic stock, she has. You…oh, I worry about you."
He thinks this last bit should solidify his budding reputation as a difficult and incredibly rude parent.
She rather unwisely decides to say some quite unpleasant things to him then, and he decides that she is very lucky that he has left his sonic screwdriver in his other pyjama trousers and is too knackered to get it.
Rose does not even comment when, days later, with a bit of jiggery poke with the basic functions of his sonic screwdriver, the teacher quits, citing incidents of dinosaur astral projections (Clearly not being as clever, she used different terminology). He and his daughter try to keep their laughter inside their heads to avoid suspicion, but fail…which is fine, because Rose has been rather annoyed with the woman as well and laughs while all at once trying to be reproving of their behaviour.
But he has humoured her and he is pleased.
She makes another plate of chocolate biscuits and the Expert is jubilant. Afterwards he puts a stop to her sending her solution to the Riemann's Hypothesis off to an academic journal and gives her a stern lecture on her duty in preserving the timelines and the Laws of Time.
He hopes he isn't thinking loud enough that she knows he's probably broken almost every single one of those laws at least once.
These days he barely talks and his heartbeat beats an erratic and thready thump that accompanies the string of words she tries to read over and over. She knows, sometimes, that he does not have the capacity to control his brain and when he hears things, the paths twist and turn involuntarily.
Her mother walks in and calls, "Donna?"
A golden tendril spills out. The story is in fragments - products of associational thinking from a body that cannot cope with the processing speed of his consciousness and is destroying itself pondering the tilt of the world and the fate of the Aztecs and a billion possibilities and eventualities all at once.
Donna Noble.
A bride who glows.
Huon prticles.
Ancient.
Attracted to the TARDIS core.
My TARDIS.
His TARDIS.
He wakes up and looks at her blearily, momentarily in possession of himself. "No, not that one," he says cryptically. He closes his eyes again, trying to wave one hand vaguely, "Forget that one."
Textbook enigmatic. The phrase and a massive face with the name "Jack" attached to it swim into her brain.
He makes an effort and shows her the memory of her mother and him, laughing into the sky, smelling the scent of apple grass. She can feel his calm and wonders who he actually chooses that one for.
"That one is better."
The Expert agrees. However, she remembers the information about the bride clearly because he tells her not to, and for a while, the images that construct her father in her brain are him wearing a suit she has never seen and laughing into the sky with her mother, him reaching out into the sky on the last Bad Wolf Bay anniversary when he thinks she isn't watching, looking alone and infinitely sad, and the taboo image of Donna the First, the glowing bride.
The day he dies he makes her promise never to leave her mother behind, never to abandon her. He says this only in her mind, very loudly, because Mum is in the room and she is more important to him than anyone.
Mum is crying as he goes, and is holding his hand. The Expert is cradling his mind, feeding memories back into him as his light in her mind fades - a memory of dinosaurs, of other places and other times, of a plethora of hugs, having not paid Mum 10 quid for something to do with Queen Victoria, of falling down laughing onto the grates of his TARDIS when they had made a particularly bad landing…
Inexplicably, the last memories she gets from him are of the figure of a man in a brown pinstriped suit, looking up suddenly from what he is doing - he is wearing glasses and her father's facial expression when he is hocked by something, but somehow the Expert knows that this is something akin to paradox, but not quite. There is no commentary and this memory is just a strange, stray moving image before the world goes dark and she can't hear his heart beating anymore. His one frail human heart.
But she can hear her mother crying and they both curl up on the bed next to him until morning when he is cold and wet with their tears.
They bury him in the ocean - the most infinite place they can find in the whole wide Earth - at Bad Wolf Bay, where the foundations of a new cathedral are being set.
Her mother begins to mark out the years after by a visit on that day and this breaks the Expert's heart more than even the sudden numbing absence of anyone like her in this universe. Now it is only her mother clinging to her, and her embracing her back.
iv.
For more than half a decade she puts his memories behind a door in her mind, sealing them off and relying on her own cleverness and the factual content of her father's mind when she finds her own sources of information lacking.
She tells herself that figuring it all out on her own is more fun, really. She is fine on her own and there are only so many things that can happen on Earth.
When she turns twelve she finally takes his sonic screwdriver and, although she knows a number of things that can be done to improve the basic functions, she deliberately does nothing to improve upon it. She puts it in the pocket of her coat, and begins to occasionally follow her mother to work at Torchwood.
The Expert knows she is considered, even at such a young age, to be as anomalous as her father, who showed up one day with her already anomalous mother. And sometimes she is considered to be as rude as her father, too.
Although, the Expert isn't officially employed here and isn't likely to be dismissed over a shouting match involving the inappropriate use of certain Sontaran technology that later quite mysteriously disappeared without a trace (in her memories her father grins at her from just beyond the door and turns back to her Mum, saying with feigned incredulity, "Now, really, it just vanished?") Mum's co-workers know they can ask her questions when Mum herself has slipped off to do other work.
It is Jake - the man who Mum works with and who was there the first time she came to this universe - who tells her about the Doctor. The first one. When Mum has gone off into the field and isn't there to angrily shush him up - which, of course, makes his stories all the more interesting - she goads him for information and compares notes to what's in her head.
Although Jake seems to think that her father is the same Doctor he tells the Expert stories about, she knows better innately. She remembers the last picture of the paradox that she had been given. Paradox and anomaly are as innate to her as breathing and she knows - like she knows her grandmother and her mum are wrong here and Uncle Tony is something she can't parse (she doesn't think about her own existence if she can help it) - that there is a discontinuity between Jake's Doctor and the Doctor she loves.
That is when she begins to search her father's memories, at first for only a few minutes a day, lest the loss of him overwhelm her. Slowly, she finds that the one memory she wants is in a thousand pieces and has a scrambled thing that floats around in her mind under the name "Bad Wolf" (and that feels like her mother and her father told her about it and seeing what it has done she believes that something truly fierce and wonderful still lives within Mum). This means that she has to piece the memory together bit by bit...which, if it weren't so important, she would look at as rather a bother.
Although her reconstruction is passable given what Bad Wolf has done to the basic particulate qualities of the memory during the act of transmission, large gaps are still missing.
She sees two of her father, side by side, one in blue and one in brown. She sees her mother waffling between them. She sees the spectre of the glowing bride, blazing dangerously.
She knows that this man who looks like Dad is important. Possibly to her. Definitely to her mother. And her mother is the most important thing to her - the only one who understands her reality, really - so she thinks she had better act accordingly.
At the age of thirteen, for the first time, she does something she is absolutely sure her father would have been very angry at her for doing. She waits until Mum falls asleep after a long, exhausting piece of field work and, placing her hands carefully on her temples, reads her memories of one day on Bad Wolf Bay when time split off into an anomaly and the one with two hearts - the one who is most like her - leaves and the one she loves - the more humanly human one - stays. They are differentiated only by wounded time in flux and stray human DNA and a single beating heart.
But now, she knows, time has healed itself and burnt the extraneous paths, and left a gash in her mother's heart (she tries not to think of her own hearts) in its wake. In the most elementary of principles in action, timelines have been preserved. Sometimes she wonders - and she is pretty sure this is the small bits of human in her - if time ever cares what it has to do and who it has to hurt as it goes about its acts of preservation.
However, she then tries to dismiss this as a vulgar representation of the principles that govern the universe.
She decides that, whatever it takes, she will talk to the Doctor. The first one. The one who left her father and mother here. The one who might also be her father in some way, missing some time. She tries not to think about the Other One very much, because she feels something dark stir as she does, sometimes. If she were to sum him up succinctly, she'd claim he is a bit of an ass.
But, that opinion aside, she swears to find him.
And the glowing bride who she should not remember leads the way, like Hansel and Gretel going through the forest, leaving her deadly, golden crumbs. Once she eats them, she knows she will have no choice but to find him.
Knowing that she does not have the capacity to manufacture Huon on her own and this Torchwood has no foreseeable plans (she has scanned the files one day with her sonic screwdriver, during five minutes when her mother is looking away before going back to grinning innocently and poring over an Agatha Christi novel) to make mischief in that direction, she needs to improvise.
She decides that what she needs was a bit of manipulation of timelines - and, as a by-product, a solution to the growing planetary warming crisis this world is going through as a result of far too much dimension crashing for one planet's lifetime. Although, she doesn't think she should criticize the path that has brought them to this global warming crisis, because without the jumping she would not be here and she also needs to do some dimension jumping of her own. The solution is, of course, Huon particles in regulated use - for saving the planet energy-wise while also serving her own purposes.
Drawing up a plan, she sticks official looking files on key program coordinators' desks with complex chemical formulas and attributes it to another species - she chooses the Pshfi - the archivist aliens - because they have the best reputation for being the trivia traps of the alien world and any random knowledge can be attributed to something that they have absorbed along their travels. Humans like official-y things and don't often question these documents and undertake elaborate efforts to translate them from the archaic languages she translated the data into. After a short while, the program begins and, for a while they argue over who should take credit for this plan.
She can't because no one would believe that even a fifteen-year-old prodigy would be able to do something that brilliant.
…That and Time Lords are gone and, as she always thinks that they are the likely suspects when something immensely clever occurs, in this case it is good that very few know there is one left. Well, Time Lady - but that is an issue of semantics, not cleverness.
There is also that her mother would simply kill her. And she is Bad Wolf, so this is a very legitimate concern for this entire process.
There is one last hurdle for her brilliance to overcome and all the memories that she has caught (and of those, the ones she can see) are useless to her, because it is the one thing that her father could never do - how, even with Huon particles, does one cross the Void to the proper universe?
It will take five years for the Huon particles to be developed and she has no TARDIS and a Void ship would be both unforgivable and impossible - before or after breakfast, no matter how many impossibilities she saves up.
But there are rifts that shift and are unstable like earthquake plates - one minute open and the next gone, like fireworks in the space-time continuum. There is a rift at Bad Wolf Bay, which cries out to her in her dreams, sometimes, because it is a place that has been broken and healed far too often. But she does not have the knowledge or the skill to open it.
She, like her father, is trapped with whatever resources this world and these humans have. She has no TARDIS, no Gallifrey, and no recourse. And even if she can find a one-way ticket out, she needs to come back for her mother. That was her one promise.
She also needs to bring him. The Other One. That is a promise she makes to herself.
The solution to the Void comes from a very odd combination of luck, a conveniently placed memory, and her own blasphemous intellect.
The Expert rarely sleeps - her physiology doesn't necessitate it and she would rather read or tinker about with things she's nicked from Torchwood - but when she does, she dreams in memories that aren't her own. Tonight, she sees two women - one turning to stone and the other Donna the First. She is always better at seeing things with Donna here but, still, everything is hazy and the edges of this world are tinged with fire and ash. She is seeing everything through her father's eyes, in his brain, and she no longer knows if this one's brain is the same as her father's or if it is that of the Other One. The woman speaks, and the words are muddled and blurred. "The word is false." She does not know which word and the only thing that she can detect in this brain is surprise, incredulity, and a hint of interest. "Your real name….it burns in the stars…in…you are a Lord of Time."
She feels the name burning in her. Her name that no one knows, that she was born with. She wakes from the dream and knows what to do.
If she succeeds she has absolutely no idea what will happen, at best. If she fails she will be nameless and stranded, and eventually alone as the world withers about her and her two hearts beat on. She might even be torn apart.
And that is just her, personally. All these eventualities still leave her mother alone. That is to say nothing, she thinks darkly, about the possibility that her name will collapse two universes and she will only be able to offer up one human as explanation for her actions.
She is glad she is alone in this universe for once, as she thinks that if any other Time Lords still existed, they would have had her shot by now. And shot again in case she has the potential to regenerate (her mother has never exactly allowed her to find out and she is in no hurry to do so either). Her father…she doesn't want to think about what her father thinks. But she may find out if the Other One is the same as he claims to be.
Although, in thinking about what either thinks and knowing the possible and real implications of what she is about to do, the Expert takes sudden and perverse comfort in the fact that they both share an extreme abhorrence for guns.
Fin
A/N: So this is the prequel part of the series, and it will follow with the sequel part, which will hopefully be a bit lighter than this fare. Please go eat chocolate now on my behalf to regain your happy endorphins.
Okay, back to hand tacking trim to a costume. Least it's not 16 yards of lace this time. Yes, not 16 yards.