Chaos Theory on Dimensionally Stable Objects on Earth College Campuses (18/27-ish)
Title - Chaos Theory on Dimensionally Stable Objects on Earth College Campuses (18/27-ish)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, OCs
Spoilers - None
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - Brem goes to university.
Author's Notes - Thanks tojlrpuck for the beta, on a very busy day for her!
Many, many, many thanks to Kristin, for all the ideas. Thanks also tobouncy_castle79, who once again gave it the first outside-eyes read-through.
The gorgeous icon was created byswankkatfor me, commissioned byjlrpuckfor my birthday.
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17
Chapter Eighteen
You could have heard a pin drop in the kitchen. Rose stood, frozen into place, the slams of doors reverberating through her, her hands clutching around the porcelain of the sink behind her, and thought. Everything Brem was, and what had she done? She had forced him to go to university, to pretend he was normal. She had done exactly what he had accused her of. Maybe she had, all along, just wanted a normal little boy and not the complicated Gallifreyan she had gotten, and what sort of mother did that make her? “Oh, God,” she choked out, and Athena and Jackie both looked at her but the Doctor did not. He sat in the kitchen chair, staring at the table, listless and still. She moved through the kitchen, toward the TARDIS, and disappeared onto it.
Athena looked at her unmoving father, then after her mother who had disappeared. She walked down the hall to her mother’s old bedroom and tried the door. Locked. “Fortuna?” she called. “Open up.” She got no reply and went back to the kitchen, trying to think logically, to pick up the pieces. It occurred to her that she was numb at the moment, but, if she hadn’t been, she would have been angry with Brem for shattering Christmas this way. “The door’s locked,” she told her father, who didn’t look at her. “I think she may have deadlock sealed it. She took Brem’s screwdriver in there with her.” The silence was suffocating. Things were never silent. “I should find Brem-”
“Don’t,” her father interrupted her. “It’s what he needs, a little time alone.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” retorted Grandma. “I think it’s what had you so messed up, all that time alone.”
Dad lifted his head then, fixing Grandma with that Oncoming Storm glare that made Athena gulp. “I’m well aware of all of my many failings as a father, but he is still my son, and they are still my mistakes to make.” He stood, looking now at Athena, not quite so Oncoming Storm and more exhausted. And old. Athena suddenly recalled that her father was over nine hundred years old. “Leave him. Leave Fortuna. We all need a little bit of time alone, and then we’ll…Then we’ll…” He didn’t even bother trying to come up with what they would do next, trailing off and also dragging himself into the other room and onto the TARDIS.
Athena felt bereft and close to panic. Every Time Lord presence in her head had closed themselves completely down. They were so remote, everything was so empty and cavernous around her, she wanted to shake all of them out of it.
“Oh, Theenie,” said Grandma, and squeezed her hand. “I’ll make us a cuppa, and we’ll see what’s on the telly, and we’ll wait for all of them to come to their senses.”
Athena nodded mutely.
The Doctor, once on the TARDIS, did exactly what he had told Athena not to do, but he could not bear to be alone. Brem, in his head, had drawn so entirely in on himself as to be anonymous. There was a presence there, but it could have been any random Time Lord in the universe, and the shocking emptiness of the space that lacked Brem pained him physically. Fortuna was smaller than usual as well, but she was not nearly so adept as Brem at cutting herself completely off. She was there, confused and hurt and miserable. It was Brem who was missing, and he reached toward him gently and found himself up against an impenetrable wall of cold.
He went in search of Rose, desperately in need of her, finding her in their bedroom. She was sitting on their bed, back against the headboard, knees drawn up to her chest and arms around them, looking shocked. Only hours earlier, he had lain on this bed with her and thanked her for this wondrous gift of children, and then it had all seemed so terribly happily-ever-after he couldn’t bear it.
She looked at him as he entered, and said, immediately, anguished, “We ruined him. Oh, God, we ruined him.”
“Rose-” he began, although what protest could he offer, because his thoughts had been running along the same lines.
“We had this perfect little boy and we…I…You should never have made him hold open the breach,” she told him, suddenly vicious.
He blinked in startled surprised, having not braced himself for the attack. “What?”
“The breach. When he was four. There was no way a four-year-old should have been made to do that, forced to save universes and his mother and his sister. We started him on this path, and then we tried to pretend we didn’t, and it’s made him all mixed up and confused about who he is and who he thinks he ought to be. You can’t make a little boy save the universe and then tell him the next day that you want him to be normal when he already knows he isn’t. You just can’t do it.”
“I didn’t do that,” retorted the Doctor. “I’ve never wanted Brem to be ‘normal,’ sending him off to university and letting him have girlfriends and pretending he-”
“You can’t keep him locked in the TARDIS all his life! How is that a realistic solution to this? You’ve tried to make him your definition of normal. Fiddle with this and tinker with that and let’s pretend that your life isn’t flooded with danger and you’ll never have to make all of these impossible decisions. Do you think that helped him? He’s so unbearably clever, he knows that isn’t true, bloody hell, you forced him into it when he was four-”
“I’m not,” bit out the Doctor, furiously, “being yelled at for that. D’you think I don’t know? You cannot imagine how much I know. I had these children, and I thought how I would do so much better with these than I did with the first round of kids I had. I wouldn’t turn them over to the Academy, I wouldn’t make them into pompous, foolish, damaged Time Lords. And what did I do? I was worse. I didn’t even wait until Brem was eight to traumatize him, I did it before he’d stopped being a baby. I know, Rose! I know he was four! I know it destroyed him! I know I should never have done it! I didn’t have a choice! And I thought we could fix it! I thought you and I, we would love him so desperately, together, that we would fix the fact that I’d failed all of us, all those years ago. I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so sorry that all of it happened, but it’s what happens to me, it’s what follows me around, and I’ve never been adept enough to stop things falling apart around me. That’s, apparently, what I use my son to do.” The Doctor tore his hands through his hair and tried to catch his breath. He looked up at Rose, who was silent.
She was watching him. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a small voice, when she met his eyes.
“What?”
“I didn’t mean to blame you, I’m sorry, I…You didn’t have a choice. I know you didn’t. And he is my son. When he was born, I promised that I would put his well-being ahead of anything else in the universe. But you made him hold open the breach, so I could get home, and I’ve always been so grateful for that. I should have been horrified, for Brem’s sake, but I wanted you. I wanted you, so badly, and I…I let Brem…I would have done exactly what you did. I would have.” She wiped at her eyes, and rested her head against her knees.
The Doctor moved toward the bed, dropping onto it next to her. “Rose,” he said. “I need you to tell me what we should do. Please. You’re so much better at this than I am, and you need to tell me what we should do to…”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “I know. I know you want me to have the answer to this, but I don’t know if I do. I don’t know if I…”
“We’ll fix it. We can fix anything. We’re the Doctor and Rose. Look at the things we’ve done.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” She sniffed and gathered herself. The Doctor could see her mind working. “We’ll just talk to him,” she decided. “About everything. That’s what we did wrong. We made him feel like he couldn’t really talk to us, about all of it, everything, and I didn’t realize we were doing it, so we’ll just fix it. We’ll talk to him and we’ll fix it. When he comes back. We’ll talk to him.”
“If he comes back,” said the Doctor, and then wished he hadn’t said it.
Rose looked at him in alarm. “Why do you say that?”
“When I ran away from being a Time Lord…” The Doctor took a deep breath. “Wellll, I’ve never stopped running.”
********
Brem slid to the cement, leaning on the wall next to his grandmother’s front door, and stared out over the estate. He was bloody freezing, but he could not bring himself to open the front door and go inside. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come back in the first place, except that he didn’t know where else to go, and he didn’t like being on his own. It was never what he wanted; it was the very opposite of what he wanted.
Brem looked up, at the stars that were visible, and tried to think what his next step should be. What was one’s course of action after one had cut to the quick every member of one’s family? He’d spent the entire day trying to figure it out and had gotten nowhere. He had finally called Kate but her mobile went straight to answerphone and he’d ended up leaving her a stammering message wishing her a happy Christmas.
The door opened, startling him, and his mother handed him his coat wordlessly. He took it, grateful, and huddled into it. She slid to the cement, beside him, leaning against the door. He tried to think of something to say.
“I was so worried you wouldn’t come back,” she choked out, suddenly, and he looked at her.
“Mum-”
“I’m so sorry, Brem,” she said, desperately. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you-”
“I never meant to make you feel like you weren’t everything I ever wanted. You. Just as you are. I never wanted ‘normal,’ whatever you think that is.” She managed a smile. “It’s way overrated.”
Brem looked away. “Is it?” He took a deep breath and confessed it out loud for the first time, “It doesn’t seem that way to me.”
His mother said nothing. He looked back at her. She was watching him, and she did not look shocked or horrified or anything other than…the way she usually looked at him.
“The thing is, Mum,” he continued, turning to her now, earnest, anxious that she understand, “I never got a chance, to be normal. Never. Everything has always been…Everything has always depended on me.”
“We didn’t mean to make you feel that way, Brem.”
“What are you talking about? It isn’t some sort of impression I’m getting. It’s true. It wasn’t just the Void thing, although it was, it’s everything. It’s everything. I’m so tired of being…being…just like Dad.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because, Mum! Do you think he’s happy? Do you? Maybe you do. Maybe you…Your life is so short. It’s so short. He’s happy now, but he’s normally not. He tries to shield it from us, but it’s so much a part of him that he can’t succeed. When you were trapped, in the other universe, he was so sad it was killing me to feel it. I would have done anything to get out from under that, anything. I mean, I wanted you back myself, you know that I did, I missed you terribly, but it was Dad, feeling Dad, finally, suddenly, truthfully, what he is when you’re not around and you’re not going to be around, for such a very long period of time, you’re not going to be around. We broke when we lost you, Mum. We broke into pieces. I don’t know how he thinks we’re going to be able to do it again. He’s so lonely…He’s so lonely that it…And he’s condemned all of us to this life of loneliness…”
“What would you rather, Brem? Would you rather you’d never been born?”
“No, I…No, of course not, Mum.” He ruffled his hair.
“I can’t make it easier for you, Brem. This is who you are. And I’m sorry. But running away isn’t the answer. It doesn’t work. Believe me, I think your father’s tried it. A lot.”
“I don’t want to run away, I don’t…I…I want to be happy. Is it too much to ask to be happy? I
mean, I guess it is. Dad would probably tell me that it is. Dad loves to embrace the idea of being punished for things you can’t help.” He heard the bitterness in his own voice and looked back up at the stars.
“You blame him,” his mother realized. “You blame him for everything.”
Brem took a deep breath. “I don’t have anyone else to blame.”
“There are many things that you can blame us for, your father and me. But you can’t blame him for the fact that he’s lonely. Ending the Time War was the last thing he wanted to do, and you’re right to point out that he’s punished himself for it ever since. And he didn’t lose me, that day that I fell through to the parallel world. He did everything he could to get me safe. That was my fault. You should have blamed me for having to be in the position of holding the breach open for him.”
Brem said nothing for a moment. Then he looked at his mother. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m being…”
“Stop it, and listen to me. I gave him you. I gave him all of you, and all of you have him, and I need the four of you to remember that for me, always. You have each other. It’s so much more than he’s ever had before, you lot. He loves you so furiously, and he needs you so much, so much more than he’ll ever admit. Please, Brem. Please don’t blame him for things he can’t help, or shut him out. He already punishes himself so much, he already thinks he’s done so much wrong in being your father. And he’s just tried, Brem, tried so hard to give you everything you could ever want.”
“I know,” said Brem, and he felt miserably ungrateful for taking this fit in the first place. “I know.”
His mother leaned over and gathered him into a hug, as if he were still a child. “Please talk to him,” she whispered. “Please.”
He nodded against her, and she ruffled his hair and then released him, standing. “As for Fortuna.”
Brem winced. “Mum-”
“That’s your story for you to tell. You find her when you’re ready.”
********
It took Brem a great deal of mental persuasion to get himself up and into the flat. It was simply that he wasn’t sure how to move on from there, how to be normal. Luckily, everyone was in the kitchen, and no one bothered him as he walked onto the TARDIS.
He knew that his father would be on the TARDIS, but he hadn’t quite expected him to be right in the control room. He wasn’t working. He was sitting in the captain’s chair, staring at the console vacantly, and he looked up when Brem clicked the door shut.
“Brem,” he said, surprise evident on his face.
Brem walked to the opposite side of the console and leaned on it. Then he suggested, hopefully, “Tea?”
His father’s face broke out into a wide, delighted smile. “Yes. Absolutely. What an excellent idea. I’ve got something to show you.”
Brem followed his father into the kitchen, where the Doctor filled two mugs with water from the tap. “Watch this,” he said to Brem, looking pleased with himself, and then aiming the screwdriver at the water. Brem leaned over so he could see into the mugs, and the water within began bubbling.
“Boiling?” asked Brem.
“Uh-huh.” His father twirled the screwdriver between his fingers. “Dead useful, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Brem agreed, admiringly. “Why haven’t I thought to do that with my screwdriver? It would make tea in the dorm room so much easier.”
“It’s a simple setting, too,” said the Doctor, dropping tea leaves into infusers and then transferring them to their cups. “No effort at all.” He carried the mugs over to the table.
Brem grabbed sugar and carried it over to the table as well. “I made Kate a kind-of sonic screwdriver of her own,” he ventured. He didn’t know why he thought his father knew about Kate now; it just seemed like a shift in his father’s consciousness indicated it to him. “For Christmas. Just a few settings, that I thought she would like.” Brem hesitated, then asked the question he’d wanted to ask but hadn’t because his father hadn’t known about Kate. “It boils an egg at fifty paces. Whether you want it to or not. I can’t figure out why.”
“Oh,” responded his father, pouring sugar into his mug. “That happens sometimes. I don’t know why. Seems to be an especially common side effect when I try to build timey-wimey detectors.”
“What do those do?” asked Brem. “Ding when there’s stuff?”
“Exactly,” answered his father, and sipped his tea and leaned back in his seat. Brem was spooning sugar into his mug. “What did Kate get you for Christmas?”
“Oh.” Brem, looking pleased, shifted to pull something out of his pocket, which he handed across the table to his father.
A pocket watch. Old and delicate and very pretty. The Doctor smiled and turned it over, reading the inscription. “This suits you,” he said, and handed it back.
“She says it reminds her of my handwriting. Apparently I have weird handwriting.”
“I’ve never noticed that.” There was a moment of silence. “Why didn’t you tell me about her?”
“I…” Brem took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I don’t have a good reason, I…I wanted to be normal. I just wanted to be normal, with her, for her, and I…”
“And I’m the least normal thing in your life,” finished his father.
“That’s…That’s…I don’t know if I can do it,” he blurted out suddenly.
“Do what?”
“All the good-byes, Dad. All the good-byes. Don’t you see them, piling up in front of you? I know you must, I know you do, and I can’t believe how well you keep moving forward because I don’t think…I don’t think I’m nearly that strong.”
“Most of my good-byes have piled up behind me, Brem,” said his father, on a sigh. “And you’re underestimating yourself. You’re much, much stronger than I am.”
Brem began to make a sound of protest.
“You’re sitting here having this conversation with me, aren’t you?” Dad cut him off. “It took me hundreds of years before I let anybody get close enough to me that I lost my ability to control the whens and wheres and whys of the good-bye. You’re eighteen, and you’re surrounded by this situation, and I wish I could tell you how you’re going to get through it all. I don’t. I just know you will.”
“How?” asked Brem.
One side of his father’s mouth tipped in a smile. “Because you’re half of me and half of your mother. You’re the best thing the universe has ever created.”
Brem was not entirely convinced. He looked down into his mug. “I need to tell you something,” he blurted out.
“What?”
He kept his gaze in his mug. “When I saved Mum…When I was four years old and I…I didn’t want to do it.” It was the first time he’d ever said it out loud, and it was a huge relief. “I told you that day I was terrified, and I wanted you to tell me I didn’t have to do it, that’s what I wanted. And you didn’t, and I did it, and everyone thinks it’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life and I didn’t want to do it.”
“Brem-”
“You left it up to me. And I knew I couldn’t let you down. But I wanted you to tell me not to do it. I wanted you to…I wanted you to…”
There was a very long silence. “I’m sorry,” his father said, finally.
“It’s just…You left it up to me. You made it my choice. And the only reason I made the choice I did was because I felt like you didn’t give me another choice. You know? I didn’t want to. I was so terrified.”
“You were four years old, Brem. Of course you were terrified. I should never have left the decision with you. You’re right. I should have forbidden you from doing it.”
“And then we wouldn’t have Mum and Fort, so it’s just…It’s just…It’s just all so…Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“If you were…If you had to make a choice…If it was us or a planet…us or this planet…”
“Oh, Brem.” His father looked out over the kitchen, fidgeting a bit. “You,” he said, after a moment. “I would choose you. How could you ever doubt that?”
“I don’t know. Your capacity for sacrifice is-”
“Exhausted, Brem, is what it is. It’s exhausted. I should never have allowed myself to have all of you in the first place, but I did, because I was tired and because it was happiness, on a silver platter, and after a while, you can’t bring yourself to turn it down. I would choose you and your sisters over anything and everything, and that is a secret that can never get out, Brem, do you understand me? The only way I can keep any of you even the littlest bit safe is to make sure people don’t understand how very much of a weak spot you are for me. They need to doubt, the way you were doubting.”
Brem nodded.
“When you were a baby,” his father continued, “only, oh, six weeks old or so, I was holding you in my arms one day, while your mother was sleeping, just rocking you, in the nursery. And you weren’t doing much of anything, you were just laying there, looking at me, as I rocked you back and forth, and you were so…happy…it was astonishing. I’d never felt anything like it. All I could think was how badly I wanted to keep you that happy, how I never wanted you to feel how cruel and heartless and unkind the universe can be. I told your mother…” He trailed off, and Brem looked up at him, as he stood and filled his mug with more water, zapping it to boiling, sitting back down. “I told your mother that she ought to raise you here, on Earth, as a thoroughly normal little boy. That there was no need for you to ever know who or what you were.”
Brem stared at him. “But I have two hearts,” he pointed out.
“There were flaws in this plan,” his father admitted. “But the point was that you would be here, and you would be normal. Isn’t that what you’re so desperate for now? And I would have made the decision for you, Brem. I would have done it. For you.”
Brem swallowed. “Do you wish you’d done it?”
His father held his gaze. “Do you wish I had?”
Brem thought. And the truth was…he was never going to be normal. He would have been trying desperately to pretend he was, but he would always have been aware of the things about him that were decidedly not normal, and that he would be too scared, he knew, to mention to his mother. He knew, now, exactly who and what he was, and none of it was normal, but it was all completely right. “No,” he said, honestly. “No. I don’t know why I’m…No. I would miss this life. I wouldn’t be me.”
“I could make you human, you know.”
Brem blinked. “You could what?”
“You were talking, earlier, about DNA manipulation. I can do that, I have the capability, I always have. You could be perfectly human, Brem, you could go off and live a perfectly normal, human life, with Kate or whatever girl you might eventually choose, with thoroughly human children in a thoroughly human lifespan and it might all be a spectacular adventure. Would you like it?”
Brem stared at him. “You can re-write my DNA?”
“Yes.”
“To become human?”
“Yes.”
“Could you re-write yours?”
“Yes.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
His father paused, thinking.
“Exactly,” said Brem. “Exactly. No, it isn’t what I want. I don’t want to be human. I…I don’t even want to be normal, really. I want to be happy.” He realized it all at once. He didn’t want to turn his back, not on any of this. He loved all of them, and he loved the complicated, Gallifreyan life he was going to end up leading, difficult as it was going to be. He didn’t want to do away with any of it, he just wanted to find a way to make things like Kate and Harvard fit into it.
“And you know that I will do whatever it takes to make you happy. Just not…Being the most powerful creatures in the universe doesn’t mean we get what we want, Brem. It means we know when we have to let it go. And I want you to play at being human for as long as you want to, for as long as…But the truth is you’re really a Time Lord, and I…I need you. I really do. I can’t go back to being the last of the Time Lords again, Brem, I really don’t think I can. You’re right, about all the good-byes, and the toll it takes, and I need you and Athena and Fortuna.”
Brem looked across at him. He thought of his mother, saying she’d given his father them, that the four of them had to stick together. For all the loneliness that terrified Brem, it had to loom a thousand times worse for his father. And yet he had sat and offered to lose Brem forever, to re-write his DNA, if it would make him happy.
Brem made the decision, right at that moment, that he was never going to regret being a Time Lord ever again. It would be the four of them, against the universe, he would make sure of it. His father would never again worry that the very presence of his triple-helix DNA was making his kids unhappy, would never fret over the possibility of being alone. If the girls wanted to be human, they could do it, thought Brem. For far, far too long, everything in the universe had depended on the Doctor; it was time, Brem thought, for him to never carry that burden alone, ever again.
He smiled suddenly. “Didn’t I tell you, once before, long, long ago, that you’re not the last of the Time Lords? You’re the first. So.” Brem took a deep breath. “Tell me to stop being terrified and we’ll figure it out together.”
“We will.”
“Of course we will.”
“Figure what out?”
Brem laughed. “Oh, Dad. Everything in the universe, by the time we’re done. It’s just a matter of time, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t everything?"
Next Chapter
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jackie, OCs
Spoilers - None
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - Brem goes to university.
Author's Notes - Thanks tojlrpuck for the beta, on a very busy day for her!
Many, many, many thanks to Kristin, for all the ideas. Thanks also tobouncy_castle79, who once again gave it the first outside-eyes read-through.
The gorgeous icon was created byswankkatfor me, commissioned byjlrpuckfor my birthday.
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17
Chapter Eighteen
You could have heard a pin drop in the kitchen. Rose stood, frozen into place, the slams of doors reverberating through her, her hands clutching around the porcelain of the sink behind her, and thought. Everything Brem was, and what had she done? She had forced him to go to university, to pretend he was normal. She had done exactly what he had accused her of. Maybe she had, all along, just wanted a normal little boy and not the complicated Gallifreyan she had gotten, and what sort of mother did that make her? “Oh, God,” she choked out, and Athena and Jackie both looked at her but the Doctor did not. He sat in the kitchen chair, staring at the table, listless and still. She moved through the kitchen, toward the TARDIS, and disappeared onto it.
Athena looked at her unmoving father, then after her mother who had disappeared. She walked down the hall to her mother’s old bedroom and tried the door. Locked. “Fortuna?” she called. “Open up.” She got no reply and went back to the kitchen, trying to think logically, to pick up the pieces. It occurred to her that she was numb at the moment, but, if she hadn’t been, she would have been angry with Brem for shattering Christmas this way. “The door’s locked,” she told her father, who didn’t look at her. “I think she may have deadlock sealed it. She took Brem’s screwdriver in there with her.” The silence was suffocating. Things were never silent. “I should find Brem-”
“Don’t,” her father interrupted her. “It’s what he needs, a little time alone.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” retorted Grandma. “I think it’s what had you so messed up, all that time alone.”
Dad lifted his head then, fixing Grandma with that Oncoming Storm glare that made Athena gulp. “I’m well aware of all of my many failings as a father, but he is still my son, and they are still my mistakes to make.” He stood, looking now at Athena, not quite so Oncoming Storm and more exhausted. And old. Athena suddenly recalled that her father was over nine hundred years old. “Leave him. Leave Fortuna. We all need a little bit of time alone, and then we’ll…Then we’ll…” He didn’t even bother trying to come up with what they would do next, trailing off and also dragging himself into the other room and onto the TARDIS.
Athena felt bereft and close to panic. Every Time Lord presence in her head had closed themselves completely down. They were so remote, everything was so empty and cavernous around her, she wanted to shake all of them out of it.
“Oh, Theenie,” said Grandma, and squeezed her hand. “I’ll make us a cuppa, and we’ll see what’s on the telly, and we’ll wait for all of them to come to their senses.”
Athena nodded mutely.
The Doctor, once on the TARDIS, did exactly what he had told Athena not to do, but he could not bear to be alone. Brem, in his head, had drawn so entirely in on himself as to be anonymous. There was a presence there, but it could have been any random Time Lord in the universe, and the shocking emptiness of the space that lacked Brem pained him physically. Fortuna was smaller than usual as well, but she was not nearly so adept as Brem at cutting herself completely off. She was there, confused and hurt and miserable. It was Brem who was missing, and he reached toward him gently and found himself up against an impenetrable wall of cold.
He went in search of Rose, desperately in need of her, finding her in their bedroom. She was sitting on their bed, back against the headboard, knees drawn up to her chest and arms around them, looking shocked. Only hours earlier, he had lain on this bed with her and thanked her for this wondrous gift of children, and then it had all seemed so terribly happily-ever-after he couldn’t bear it.
She looked at him as he entered, and said, immediately, anguished, “We ruined him. Oh, God, we ruined him.”
“Rose-” he began, although what protest could he offer, because his thoughts had been running along the same lines.
“We had this perfect little boy and we…I…You should never have made him hold open the breach,” she told him, suddenly vicious.
He blinked in startled surprised, having not braced himself for the attack. “What?”
“The breach. When he was four. There was no way a four-year-old should have been made to do that, forced to save universes and his mother and his sister. We started him on this path, and then we tried to pretend we didn’t, and it’s made him all mixed up and confused about who he is and who he thinks he ought to be. You can’t make a little boy save the universe and then tell him the next day that you want him to be normal when he already knows he isn’t. You just can’t do it.”
“I didn’t do that,” retorted the Doctor. “I’ve never wanted Brem to be ‘normal,’ sending him off to university and letting him have girlfriends and pretending he-”
“You can’t keep him locked in the TARDIS all his life! How is that a realistic solution to this? You’ve tried to make him your definition of normal. Fiddle with this and tinker with that and let’s pretend that your life isn’t flooded with danger and you’ll never have to make all of these impossible decisions. Do you think that helped him? He’s so unbearably clever, he knows that isn’t true, bloody hell, you forced him into it when he was four-”
“I’m not,” bit out the Doctor, furiously, “being yelled at for that. D’you think I don’t know? You cannot imagine how much I know. I had these children, and I thought how I would do so much better with these than I did with the first round of kids I had. I wouldn’t turn them over to the Academy, I wouldn’t make them into pompous, foolish, damaged Time Lords. And what did I do? I was worse. I didn’t even wait until Brem was eight to traumatize him, I did it before he’d stopped being a baby. I know, Rose! I know he was four! I know it destroyed him! I know I should never have done it! I didn’t have a choice! And I thought we could fix it! I thought you and I, we would love him so desperately, together, that we would fix the fact that I’d failed all of us, all those years ago. I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so sorry that all of it happened, but it’s what happens to me, it’s what follows me around, and I’ve never been adept enough to stop things falling apart around me. That’s, apparently, what I use my son to do.” The Doctor tore his hands through his hair and tried to catch his breath. He looked up at Rose, who was silent.
She was watching him. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a small voice, when she met his eyes.
“What?”
“I didn’t mean to blame you, I’m sorry, I…You didn’t have a choice. I know you didn’t. And he is my son. When he was born, I promised that I would put his well-being ahead of anything else in the universe. But you made him hold open the breach, so I could get home, and I’ve always been so grateful for that. I should have been horrified, for Brem’s sake, but I wanted you. I wanted you, so badly, and I…I let Brem…I would have done exactly what you did. I would have.” She wiped at her eyes, and rested her head against her knees.
The Doctor moved toward the bed, dropping onto it next to her. “Rose,” he said. “I need you to tell me what we should do. Please. You’re so much better at this than I am, and you need to tell me what we should do to…”
She lifted her head and looked at him. “I know. I know you want me to have the answer to this, but I don’t know if I do. I don’t know if I…”
“We’ll fix it. We can fix anything. We’re the Doctor and Rose. Look at the things we’ve done.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” She sniffed and gathered herself. The Doctor could see her mind working. “We’ll just talk to him,” she decided. “About everything. That’s what we did wrong. We made him feel like he couldn’t really talk to us, about all of it, everything, and I didn’t realize we were doing it, so we’ll just fix it. We’ll talk to him and we’ll fix it. When he comes back. We’ll talk to him.”
“If he comes back,” said the Doctor, and then wished he hadn’t said it.
Rose looked at him in alarm. “Why do you say that?”
“When I ran away from being a Time Lord…” The Doctor took a deep breath. “Wellll, I’ve never stopped running.”
********
Brem slid to the cement, leaning on the wall next to his grandmother’s front door, and stared out over the estate. He was bloody freezing, but he could not bring himself to open the front door and go inside. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come back in the first place, except that he didn’t know where else to go, and he didn’t like being on his own. It was never what he wanted; it was the very opposite of what he wanted.
Brem looked up, at the stars that were visible, and tried to think what his next step should be. What was one’s course of action after one had cut to the quick every member of one’s family? He’d spent the entire day trying to figure it out and had gotten nowhere. He had finally called Kate but her mobile went straight to answerphone and he’d ended up leaving her a stammering message wishing her a happy Christmas.
The door opened, startling him, and his mother handed him his coat wordlessly. He took it, grateful, and huddled into it. She slid to the cement, beside him, leaning against the door. He tried to think of something to say.
“I was so worried you wouldn’t come back,” she choked out, suddenly, and he looked at her.
“Mum-”
“I’m so sorry, Brem,” she said, desperately. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you-”
“I never meant to make you feel like you weren’t everything I ever wanted. You. Just as you are. I never wanted ‘normal,’ whatever you think that is.” She managed a smile. “It’s way overrated.”
Brem looked away. “Is it?” He took a deep breath and confessed it out loud for the first time, “It doesn’t seem that way to me.”
His mother said nothing. He looked back at her. She was watching him, and she did not look shocked or horrified or anything other than…the way she usually looked at him.
“The thing is, Mum,” he continued, turning to her now, earnest, anxious that she understand, “I never got a chance, to be normal. Never. Everything has always been…Everything has always depended on me.”
“We didn’t mean to make you feel that way, Brem.”
“What are you talking about? It isn’t some sort of impression I’m getting. It’s true. It wasn’t just the Void thing, although it was, it’s everything. It’s everything. I’m so tired of being…being…just like Dad.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because, Mum! Do you think he’s happy? Do you? Maybe you do. Maybe you…Your life is so short. It’s so short. He’s happy now, but he’s normally not. He tries to shield it from us, but it’s so much a part of him that he can’t succeed. When you were trapped, in the other universe, he was so sad it was killing me to feel it. I would have done anything to get out from under that, anything. I mean, I wanted you back myself, you know that I did, I missed you terribly, but it was Dad, feeling Dad, finally, suddenly, truthfully, what he is when you’re not around and you’re not going to be around, for such a very long period of time, you’re not going to be around. We broke when we lost you, Mum. We broke into pieces. I don’t know how he thinks we’re going to be able to do it again. He’s so lonely…He’s so lonely that it…And he’s condemned all of us to this life of loneliness…”
“What would you rather, Brem? Would you rather you’d never been born?”
“No, I…No, of course not, Mum.” He ruffled his hair.
“I can’t make it easier for you, Brem. This is who you are. And I’m sorry. But running away isn’t the answer. It doesn’t work. Believe me, I think your father’s tried it. A lot.”
“I don’t want to run away, I don’t…I…I want to be happy. Is it too much to ask to be happy? I
mean, I guess it is. Dad would probably tell me that it is. Dad loves to embrace the idea of being punished for things you can’t help.” He heard the bitterness in his own voice and looked back up at the stars.
“You blame him,” his mother realized. “You blame him for everything.”
Brem took a deep breath. “I don’t have anyone else to blame.”
“There are many things that you can blame us for, your father and me. But you can’t blame him for the fact that he’s lonely. Ending the Time War was the last thing he wanted to do, and you’re right to point out that he’s punished himself for it ever since. And he didn’t lose me, that day that I fell through to the parallel world. He did everything he could to get me safe. That was my fault. You should have blamed me for having to be in the position of holding the breach open for him.”
Brem said nothing for a moment. Then he looked at his mother. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m being…”
“Stop it, and listen to me. I gave him you. I gave him all of you, and all of you have him, and I need the four of you to remember that for me, always. You have each other. It’s so much more than he’s ever had before, you lot. He loves you so furiously, and he needs you so much, so much more than he’ll ever admit. Please, Brem. Please don’t blame him for things he can’t help, or shut him out. He already punishes himself so much, he already thinks he’s done so much wrong in being your father. And he’s just tried, Brem, tried so hard to give you everything you could ever want.”
“I know,” said Brem, and he felt miserably ungrateful for taking this fit in the first place. “I know.”
His mother leaned over and gathered him into a hug, as if he were still a child. “Please talk to him,” she whispered. “Please.”
He nodded against her, and she ruffled his hair and then released him, standing. “As for Fortuna.”
Brem winced. “Mum-”
“That’s your story for you to tell. You find her when you’re ready.”
********
It took Brem a great deal of mental persuasion to get himself up and into the flat. It was simply that he wasn’t sure how to move on from there, how to be normal. Luckily, everyone was in the kitchen, and no one bothered him as he walked onto the TARDIS.
He knew that his father would be on the TARDIS, but he hadn’t quite expected him to be right in the control room. He wasn’t working. He was sitting in the captain’s chair, staring at the console vacantly, and he looked up when Brem clicked the door shut.
“Brem,” he said, surprise evident on his face.
Brem walked to the opposite side of the console and leaned on it. Then he suggested, hopefully, “Tea?”
His father’s face broke out into a wide, delighted smile. “Yes. Absolutely. What an excellent idea. I’ve got something to show you.”
Brem followed his father into the kitchen, where the Doctor filled two mugs with water from the tap. “Watch this,” he said to Brem, looking pleased with himself, and then aiming the screwdriver at the water. Brem leaned over so he could see into the mugs, and the water within began bubbling.
“Boiling?” asked Brem.
“Uh-huh.” His father twirled the screwdriver between his fingers. “Dead useful, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Brem agreed, admiringly. “Why haven’t I thought to do that with my screwdriver? It would make tea in the dorm room so much easier.”
“It’s a simple setting, too,” said the Doctor, dropping tea leaves into infusers and then transferring them to their cups. “No effort at all.” He carried the mugs over to the table.
Brem grabbed sugar and carried it over to the table as well. “I made Kate a kind-of sonic screwdriver of her own,” he ventured. He didn’t know why he thought his father knew about Kate now; it just seemed like a shift in his father’s consciousness indicated it to him. “For Christmas. Just a few settings, that I thought she would like.” Brem hesitated, then asked the question he’d wanted to ask but hadn’t because his father hadn’t known about Kate. “It boils an egg at fifty paces. Whether you want it to or not. I can’t figure out why.”
“Oh,” responded his father, pouring sugar into his mug. “That happens sometimes. I don’t know why. Seems to be an especially common side effect when I try to build timey-wimey detectors.”
“What do those do?” asked Brem. “Ding when there’s stuff?”
“Exactly,” answered his father, and sipped his tea and leaned back in his seat. Brem was spooning sugar into his mug. “What did Kate get you for Christmas?”
“Oh.” Brem, looking pleased, shifted to pull something out of his pocket, which he handed across the table to his father.
A pocket watch. Old and delicate and very pretty. The Doctor smiled and turned it over, reading the inscription. “This suits you,” he said, and handed it back.
“She says it reminds her of my handwriting. Apparently I have weird handwriting.”
“I’ve never noticed that.” There was a moment of silence. “Why didn’t you tell me about her?”
“I…” Brem took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I don’t have a good reason, I…I wanted to be normal. I just wanted to be normal, with her, for her, and I…”
“And I’m the least normal thing in your life,” finished his father.
“That’s…That’s…I don’t know if I can do it,” he blurted out suddenly.
“Do what?”
“All the good-byes, Dad. All the good-byes. Don’t you see them, piling up in front of you? I know you must, I know you do, and I can’t believe how well you keep moving forward because I don’t think…I don’t think I’m nearly that strong.”
“Most of my good-byes have piled up behind me, Brem,” said his father, on a sigh. “And you’re underestimating yourself. You’re much, much stronger than I am.”
Brem began to make a sound of protest.
“You’re sitting here having this conversation with me, aren’t you?” Dad cut him off. “It took me hundreds of years before I let anybody get close enough to me that I lost my ability to control the whens and wheres and whys of the good-bye. You’re eighteen, and you’re surrounded by this situation, and I wish I could tell you how you’re going to get through it all. I don’t. I just know you will.”
“How?” asked Brem.
One side of his father’s mouth tipped in a smile. “Because you’re half of me and half of your mother. You’re the best thing the universe has ever created.”
Brem was not entirely convinced. He looked down into his mug. “I need to tell you something,” he blurted out.
“What?”
He kept his gaze in his mug. “When I saved Mum…When I was four years old and I…I didn’t want to do it.” It was the first time he’d ever said it out loud, and it was a huge relief. “I told you that day I was terrified, and I wanted you to tell me I didn’t have to do it, that’s what I wanted. And you didn’t, and I did it, and everyone thinks it’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life and I didn’t want to do it.”
“Brem-”
“You left it up to me. And I knew I couldn’t let you down. But I wanted you to tell me not to do it. I wanted you to…I wanted you to…”
There was a very long silence. “I’m sorry,” his father said, finally.
“It’s just…You left it up to me. You made it my choice. And the only reason I made the choice I did was because I felt like you didn’t give me another choice. You know? I didn’t want to. I was so terrified.”
“You were four years old, Brem. Of course you were terrified. I should never have left the decision with you. You’re right. I should have forbidden you from doing it.”
“And then we wouldn’t have Mum and Fort, so it’s just…It’s just…It’s just all so…Can I ask you something?”
“Yes.”
“If you were…If you had to make a choice…If it was us or a planet…us or this planet…”
“Oh, Brem.” His father looked out over the kitchen, fidgeting a bit. “You,” he said, after a moment. “I would choose you. How could you ever doubt that?”
“I don’t know. Your capacity for sacrifice is-”
“Exhausted, Brem, is what it is. It’s exhausted. I should never have allowed myself to have all of you in the first place, but I did, because I was tired and because it was happiness, on a silver platter, and after a while, you can’t bring yourself to turn it down. I would choose you and your sisters over anything and everything, and that is a secret that can never get out, Brem, do you understand me? The only way I can keep any of you even the littlest bit safe is to make sure people don’t understand how very much of a weak spot you are for me. They need to doubt, the way you were doubting.”
Brem nodded.
“When you were a baby,” his father continued, “only, oh, six weeks old or so, I was holding you in my arms one day, while your mother was sleeping, just rocking you, in the nursery. And you weren’t doing much of anything, you were just laying there, looking at me, as I rocked you back and forth, and you were so…happy…it was astonishing. I’d never felt anything like it. All I could think was how badly I wanted to keep you that happy, how I never wanted you to feel how cruel and heartless and unkind the universe can be. I told your mother…” He trailed off, and Brem looked up at him, as he stood and filled his mug with more water, zapping it to boiling, sitting back down. “I told your mother that she ought to raise you here, on Earth, as a thoroughly normal little boy. That there was no need for you to ever know who or what you were.”
Brem stared at him. “But I have two hearts,” he pointed out.
“There were flaws in this plan,” his father admitted. “But the point was that you would be here, and you would be normal. Isn’t that what you’re so desperate for now? And I would have made the decision for you, Brem. I would have done it. For you.”
Brem swallowed. “Do you wish you’d done it?”
His father held his gaze. “Do you wish I had?”
Brem thought. And the truth was…he was never going to be normal. He would have been trying desperately to pretend he was, but he would always have been aware of the things about him that were decidedly not normal, and that he would be too scared, he knew, to mention to his mother. He knew, now, exactly who and what he was, and none of it was normal, but it was all completely right. “No,” he said, honestly. “No. I don’t know why I’m…No. I would miss this life. I wouldn’t be me.”
“I could make you human, you know.”
Brem blinked. “You could what?”
“You were talking, earlier, about DNA manipulation. I can do that, I have the capability, I always have. You could be perfectly human, Brem, you could go off and live a perfectly normal, human life, with Kate or whatever girl you might eventually choose, with thoroughly human children in a thoroughly human lifespan and it might all be a spectacular adventure. Would you like it?”
Brem stared at him. “You can re-write my DNA?”
“Yes.”
“To become human?”
“Yes.”
“Could you re-write yours?”
“Yes.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
His father paused, thinking.
“Exactly,” said Brem. “Exactly. No, it isn’t what I want. I don’t want to be human. I…I don’t even want to be normal, really. I want to be happy.” He realized it all at once. He didn’t want to turn his back, not on any of this. He loved all of them, and he loved the complicated, Gallifreyan life he was going to end up leading, difficult as it was going to be. He didn’t want to do away with any of it, he just wanted to find a way to make things like Kate and Harvard fit into it.
“And you know that I will do whatever it takes to make you happy. Just not…Being the most powerful creatures in the universe doesn’t mean we get what we want, Brem. It means we know when we have to let it go. And I want you to play at being human for as long as you want to, for as long as…But the truth is you’re really a Time Lord, and I…I need you. I really do. I can’t go back to being the last of the Time Lords again, Brem, I really don’t think I can. You’re right, about all the good-byes, and the toll it takes, and I need you and Athena and Fortuna.”
Brem looked across at him. He thought of his mother, saying she’d given his father them, that the four of them had to stick together. For all the loneliness that terrified Brem, it had to loom a thousand times worse for his father. And yet he had sat and offered to lose Brem forever, to re-write his DNA, if it would make him happy.
Brem made the decision, right at that moment, that he was never going to regret being a Time Lord ever again. It would be the four of them, against the universe, he would make sure of it. His father would never again worry that the very presence of his triple-helix DNA was making his kids unhappy, would never fret over the possibility of being alone. If the girls wanted to be human, they could do it, thought Brem. For far, far too long, everything in the universe had depended on the Doctor; it was time, Brem thought, for him to never carry that burden alone, ever again.
He smiled suddenly. “Didn’t I tell you, once before, long, long ago, that you’re not the last of the Time Lords? You’re the first. So.” Brem took a deep breath. “Tell me to stop being terrified and we’ll figure it out together.”
“We will.”
“Of course we will.”
“Figure what out?”
Brem laughed. “Oh, Dad. Everything in the universe, by the time we’re done. It’s just a matter of time, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t everything?"
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