TLAWR Chapter Fifty-Two: The World is Wrong
An AU retelling of season 4, beginning with The Last of the Time Lords from season 3. First story in the All Roads Lead Home series. Rated teen.
10/Rose, Martha, Jack Harkness, Donna Noble, the Master, River Song, Sarah Jane Smith, and many more.
(Earlier Entries) ( Chapter Forty-Nine ) ( Chapter Fifty ) ( Chapter Fifty-One )
Nothing you recognize belongs to me! Quotes taken from "Turn Left!" Just as a warning, this chapter is very light Doctor/Rose and rather heavy River Song. Look forward to more Donna Noble in the next chapter!
River Song plugged in Jack Harkness's coordinates and touched the comlink nestled in her right ear cavity. "Control, this is River Song. I'm attempting another jump and I've received confirmation that the coordinates are correct." She smiled. "Courtesy of Jack Harkness."
"Roger that, River," Mickey Smith's voice rang out in her ear. "Good luck. I get the next jump, yeah? 'S a bit boring, sitting around here."
"Deal," she told him, and pushed the 'jump' button on the Dimension Cannon. Mickey Smith, she thought, was an uncommon sort of man. She'd never met him so young before, and she realized that she must be coming close to the end. She'd known him as Martha's husband, as Rose's best friend, a dependable, loyal man who just happened to be a whiz with a computer. She was glad that even this young he still possessed those core traits. She'd heard stories from Rose and the Doctor, stories of when he was, well, less than brave, but she forgave him. Everyone had to start somewhere. Her own beginnings were, after all, less than auspicious.
When the light cleared from her eyes she was standing on a street. It was dark and cold and she could see the Thames from where she stood. Bright fairy lights glittered in the windows of houses and shops and decorated pine trees peaked out from behind half-closed drapes. London, then, at Christmas. There was a flash from overhead and something white and glowing drifted through the air. It was getting larger, she realized. But no, it was getting closer. And as it drew near she realized when she was.
She'd heard the story of how Donna Noble saved the Doctor's life a thousand times. The ginger woman always tried to play it off as unimportant but River knew how it felt to lose someone vital, like the Doctor had when Rose was trapped in the alternate universe. She knew that he, at least, credited Donna with being the one to pull him back, to stop him from simply standing on the platform beneath the Thames and drowning along with the Racnoss. The star, but it wasn't a star, it was a web and a space ship, hovered in the sky for a moment, and then beams of crackling white energy arced towards the ground.
Donna Noble, newly-promoted personal assistant to Judal Chowdry, was in a pub. It was Christmas eve and she had something to celebrate, despite her general apathy toward the holiday. She bought another round of drinks for her friends because she could afford it and tried to ignore the way that Alice kept looking at her back. She'd caught other people doing it, strangers on the street, coworkers, and every time she went home and checked there was nothing there.
Someone poked their head inside, beaming. "Come and see! There's a star, a Christmas star!"
Of course it wasn't really a star. Donna figured that out when it started killing people. For a moment everything seemed so familiar, and she took off at a run towards the Thames, and the star. She didn't know why but something deep inside her seemed to think that it was the right thing to do, and as she had no evidence to the contrary, she obeyed.
She arrived by the Thames just in time to see a group of funny-looking soldiers load a cloth-covered body into a waiting ambulance. One soldier had a walkie, and seemed to be talking to someone he called 'Mr. Saxon.' That would be the minister for defense. As the paramedics lifted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance a suit-jacket clad arm came loose and a thin metallic cylinder with a blue tip clattered onto the ground. It went unnoticed amid the general hubbub. The soldier on the walkie mentioned someone called 'the Doctor,' presumably the dead man, and other strange things, something called a 'racnoss,' and 'regeneration,' whatever that was. She didn't know why, but seeing the body and the little metal thing made her want to cry.
The doors on the ambulance slammed shut, and it drove off. She turned to walk away and almost ran directly into a woman barreling towards her.
"What happened?" she panted, brushing sandy blond curls back from a tan face and bright blue eyes. "Did they find someone?"
"I dunno," Donna replied. There was something oddly familiar about the woman.
River Song had to stop herself from staring. The woman in front of her, the woman who most definitely was not in a wedding dress or anywhere near where she should be-was Donna Noble. She realized with a start that the other woman had continued speaking.
"Sorry, what?" she asked.
"Some bloke called the Doctor," Donna reiterated.
River glanced around expectantly. "Well, where is he?"
Donna bit her lip. "He's dead. I'm sorry."
River turned white. No, no no no no no. It wasn't possible. The Doctor couldn't die now. She'd seen him die, and it definitely wasn't underneath the Thames! But then she saw, lying on the cobbled street, the sonic screwdriver. She felt like the floor had just dropped out from under her.
"Did you know him?" Donna asked sympathetically. "I mean, they never mentioned his name. Could have been any doctor."
"No," River whispered, and sank down on her knees besides the little metal tube. She picked it up, holding it reverently, like he did. "The world is wrong, Donna Noble." Then she pocketed the device, stood, and walked away. Donna ran after her, wanting to know what she meant by that, and more importantly, how the woman had known her name, but by the time she rounded the corner-the woman was gone.
It was possible that Jack got the coordinates wrong, she figured, so River Song jumped ahead, to when the Doctor first met Martha Jones. Except that he didn't. The Royal Hope hospital disappeared, all right, but the Doctor was nowhere in sight, nor was the TARDIS. The Dimension Cannon was designed to find him, to go to him, but there was no trace. Nothing registered on her monitor. The Hospital vanished and returned, but Sarah Jane Smith was the one who thwarted the plasmavore and lost her life in the bargain, as did her young friends. The sole survivor was a young man training to be a doctor. He had only lived because Martha Jones gave him the last oxygen tank-and then died.
But that was wrong. It was all wrong. Where was the Doctor?
Everywhere she jumped the world was wrong. The timeline was twisted, altered, changed completely. She felt nauseous, like she wanted to crawl out of her skin. There was no sign anywhere, not of Rose, nor the Doctor. People didn't just disappear. It wasn't possible; even when they were taken by the Rift there was a residual energy, a sign of their presence. But Rose-there was no sign that she'd ever made it back from Pete's World and the Doctor's body was apparently cryogenically frozen at UNIT headquarters. She hit the recall button. It was time to figure out what the hell was going on.
She'd reprogrammed the quick recall button as soon as Mickey had accepted her offer of help. It wouldn't do to be jumping around between universes-according to the new time line he hadn't gone back, and she intended to keep it that way. Their base of operations was a threadbare apartment in 51st century Califrax Minor. It was small and more than a little scruffy, but it was cheap and the landlord didn't ask questions.
Mickey was fuming when the light cleared. "What the hell was that?" he demanded. "You jumped five times, River! I thought you said those coordinates were good!"
She shook her head. "Something is wrong, Mickey. Something big. The coordinates should have been perfect-but when I used them-" She shuddered. "He was dead, Mickey. The Doctor was dead."
He frowned, lines creasing his forehead. "But I thought you said you knew him, in the future."
"I do!" she yelled and began to pace. "The whole thing doesn't make any sense!
"Could you have got the stories wrong?" he ventured, but she shook her head fiercely.
"Not possible," she told him. "According to what I saw, he died before he met Donna Noble, and I'm not talking about regeneration, I'm talking about real, proper death, and I know for a fact that didn't happen." She stopped pacing and sank down abruptly onto one of the chairs that littered the room. "This," she said with great emphasis, "is wrong. If the Doctor never met Donna, than I would never have been born, but I'm still here! And I still remember! And here-now-everything is as it should be! It's like hopping into a different universe, but there were no alternate Time Lords. They only ever existed once." And then she paused, eyes wide.
"What?" Mickey asked. "What is it?"
"Oh," she said. "Oh! Of course!"
Mickey rolled his eyes. "Honestly, you sound just like him. Out with it, then."
"What if," she began, her eyes bright. "What if it wasn't another universe, but another time line? What if someone pulled Donna out of the main time line, the real one, and put her in an alternate time line, a might-have-been? And Jack knew about it, so he gave me coordinates that would take me where I needed to go?"
"Hold on a tick," he interrupted. "How would Jack know about that?"
"It had already happened for him," she explained. "I got there a bit late, and he said it, oh that clever man!" She laughed, delighted. Mickey still looked confused. "Donna Noble is one of the most important women in the universe," she continued, "because she kept the Doctor alive. He met her just after he managed to say goodbye to Rose, and if she hadn't been there to pull him back, he would have drowned underneath the Thames and not regenerated." She paused. "He might have chosen not to."
Mickey's eyes were wide. "He can do that?"
She nodded. "The Doctor's never had a very strong grasp on regeneration, but even he could stop the process from occurring. He almost did, after the Time War, but something gave him pause." She smiled. "He said he heard a wolf howling, and it reminded him that life was all around him."
"So," he began. "What are we going to do?"
River Song stood. "We're going to get Donna Noble out of that alternate timeline and back where she belongs."
Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart could not sleep. It was an unusual situation for him. His days in UNIT taught him early on to grab sleep whenever and wherever possible, despite anything that was happening around him. Doris quite frequently told him that he slept like the dead. It was a stray thought, but enough to send him over to the liquor cabinet in the corner of the room. His hands shook as he poured himself a glass of brandy. A scrap of paper sat on the desk, a note from Brigadier Bambera.
I regret to inform you that the confirmation is irrefutable-the Doctor is dead.
He didn't want to believe it. His relationship with the Doctor was complex, and often difficult. The alien was as infuriating as he was brilliant, but he had to admit that his life had changed irrevocably when Alistair met him. They'd been friends of a sort for most of his life, and apparently most of the Doctor's as well. He'd known him in every incarnation except for this latest one. The last time he saw the Doctor it was just after the Time War. He had shown up on their doorstep one day, half dead and barely coherent. It had taken days for him to recover physically, and weeks before he started talking again. And then he'd left. They'd offered their home to him, assured he could stay as long as he needed, but he'd brushed them off with a grin and a wave.
Alistair had reports of sightings. There was the thing with the Slitheen and Downing street, and that had the Doctor's fingerprints all over it, although he still wondered how the alien managed to get ahold of a submarine missile. Later there was the Sycorax and the spaceship over London. Torchwood destroyed it but the UNIT liaison to Prime Minister Harriet Jones had reported that the Doctor's intervention had them leaving first. In both instances there were rumors of a companion, a young woman named Rose. Apparently UNIT had been building a file on her, but it was wiped from the system by the BADWOLF virus.
He walked back to his desk and sank down into the comfortable chair. Next to the paper was a small pile of seemingly random items. As the Doctor was the sole survivor of his race, he had no living relatives, no one to claim his personal affects-no one but Alistair. So he had. It was a strange collection, apparently found in the alien's pockets. Although he drowned there was no sign of water damage to the packs of gum, ball of string, three Euros and five pence, kazoo, 3-D glasses, cassette tape of Ian Dury's greatest hits, the copy of William Butler Yeat's The Wind Among the Rushes, and most curiously, three photographs.
The first was of three people-two men and a young woman. The man on the left was the Doctor as Alistair last saw him, except that he was wearing a leather jacket and an ear-splitting grin. The man on the right was Jack Harkness, of Torchwood. Captain Jack, as he preffered to be called, was not Alistair's favorite person, but that was largely due to his employment. Torchwood always left a rather bitter taste in his mouth. He knew their kind and he knew their aim, and he disagreed with both entirely.
But it was the woman in the middle, the same woman who was in all three pictures, that gave him pause. She had one arm wrapped around the Doctor and the other wrapped around Jack, but whilst the two of them were looking at the camera, the Doctor was looking at her. On the back of the picture, in precise, neat handwriting, was: The Doctor, Me, and Jack: Cardiff, 21st Century.
The second picture contained only two people, the woman again and the Doctor in his last form. They were both wearing paper crowns: hers pink, and his red, and they were standing in front of a Christmas tree, beaming. The caption on that picture read, The New New Doctor and Me: Mum's, Christmas 2006. It was a strange image, so domestic for an alien who scorned anything resembling every-day human life.
The third image was a candid shot. The woman was lying on her back, propped up on her forearms on what looked like a long brown coat. Her eyes were closed and her face was tilted up towards the sun. A small smile tugged at her lips and the wind blew her hair wildly around her. The writing on the back of the photo was different, angled more sharply and less tidy. Rose, it read simply. New Earth.
That was the mysterious Rose, the Doctor's latest companion. Where was she, he wondered, when the Doctor died? He couldn't believe that she would have left him alone. There was a great deal of affection obvious in each of the photos, and perhaps something more. He emptied the glass and deposited it next to the pictures.
A flash of light left him as good as blind. When the spots finally cleared he was staring at a strange woman with sandy curls and bright blue eyes. "Who in blazes are you?" he demanded, quietly, as Doris had already gone to bed. "And what do you think you're doing here?"
The woman only smiled. "Hello, Alistair. I'm Professor River Song. You haven't met me yet, and if you don't help me, than you never will." She leaned forward. "I'm here about the Doctor."
He sighed. "I'm sorry, but the Doctor is dead."
River shook her head. "I know that you feel it, Alistair." There was a fierce urgency in her voice that compelled him to listen to her. "This isn't what's supposed to happen. I'm from the future, the Doctor's personal future." She leaned forward. "Alistair-the world is wrong."
He studied her appraisingly. "Even if I believe you, Professor Song, what do you propose to do about it?"
She began to pace. "Someone has altered the time line, but the Vortex is fighting back. If the Time Lords were still around they'd be here in a heartsbeat to correct it, because this isn't what's supposed to happen. We need to find out when the change occurred, and how it was done."
"How?" he asked.
"The TARDIS," she replied. "Does UNIT still have it in storage?"
"Of course," he told her. "But you'll never get in. The Doctor was the only one able to open it."
River grinned, and held up a key attached to a thin chain. "I was a resident for some time, Alistair, and I never go anywhere without my TARDIS key."
Convincing Bambera that River Song wasn't crazy took a bit of doing, but in the end Alistair's remaining UNIT clout as Brigadier and a close associate of the Doctor won out. When River entered the TARDIS she fought the urge to cry. It was dark and the air was stale-musty. There was no welcoming hum, no warm presence in the back of her mind. It felt like stepping into a tomb. She ran a hand over the console and up to the Time Rotor. It wheezed and shifted a few times, but the emptiness remained.
"I know," she murmured. "I'm going to fix it. Please, help me fix it." The monitor flickered to life. "Thank you."
"What are you doing?" Alistair asked as she typed away, eyes fixed on the monitor in front of her.
"Scanning for interference. This whole situation centers around a woman named Donna Noble," she replied.
He frowned. "Who is she?"
A small smile spread River's lips. "One of the most important women in all of creation. She saved the Doctor's life when he wanted to die, but someone kept her from meeting him. In my timeline, the real timeline, the Doctor is alive and well, and jaunting around the universe with Rose." He blinked and she noticed. "You've met. Of course, not yet, but you will. She speaks very highly of you."
He really had nothing to say to that. "I see," he finally settled on.
She laughed. "No you don't, but you will." There was a stuttering sort of electrical sound, and then a slot beneath the console spat out several sheets of paper. River collected them and handed the bundle to Alistair. "Right. Get your people working on this. It needs to be ready by September 2008."
"Any particular reason why?" he wanted to know.
"This is what's going to send Donna Noble back, so she can make the right choice, and wipe this timeline out of existence," River explained. "And according to what I've seen, three weeks into September of 2008 is when Donna Noble dies."
( Chapter Fifty-Three )
10/Rose, Martha, Jack Harkness, Donna Noble, the Master, River Song, Sarah Jane Smith, and many more.
(Earlier Entries) ( Chapter Forty-Nine ) ( Chapter Fifty ) ( Chapter Fifty-One )
Nothing you recognize belongs to me! Quotes taken from "Turn Left!" Just as a warning, this chapter is very light Doctor/Rose and rather heavy River Song. Look forward to more Donna Noble in the next chapter!
River Song plugged in Jack Harkness's coordinates and touched the comlink nestled in her right ear cavity. "Control, this is River Song. I'm attempting another jump and I've received confirmation that the coordinates are correct." She smiled. "Courtesy of Jack Harkness."
"Roger that, River," Mickey Smith's voice rang out in her ear. "Good luck. I get the next jump, yeah? 'S a bit boring, sitting around here."
"Deal," she told him, and pushed the 'jump' button on the Dimension Cannon. Mickey Smith, she thought, was an uncommon sort of man. She'd never met him so young before, and she realized that she must be coming close to the end. She'd known him as Martha's husband, as Rose's best friend, a dependable, loyal man who just happened to be a whiz with a computer. She was glad that even this young he still possessed those core traits. She'd heard stories from Rose and the Doctor, stories of when he was, well, less than brave, but she forgave him. Everyone had to start somewhere. Her own beginnings were, after all, less than auspicious.
When the light cleared from her eyes she was standing on a street. It was dark and cold and she could see the Thames from where she stood. Bright fairy lights glittered in the windows of houses and shops and decorated pine trees peaked out from behind half-closed drapes. London, then, at Christmas. There was a flash from overhead and something white and glowing drifted through the air. It was getting larger, she realized. But no, it was getting closer. And as it drew near she realized when she was.
She'd heard the story of how Donna Noble saved the Doctor's life a thousand times. The ginger woman always tried to play it off as unimportant but River knew how it felt to lose someone vital, like the Doctor had when Rose was trapped in the alternate universe. She knew that he, at least, credited Donna with being the one to pull him back, to stop him from simply standing on the platform beneath the Thames and drowning along with the Racnoss. The star, but it wasn't a star, it was a web and a space ship, hovered in the sky for a moment, and then beams of crackling white energy arced towards the ground.
Donna Noble, newly-promoted personal assistant to Judal Chowdry, was in a pub. It was Christmas eve and she had something to celebrate, despite her general apathy toward the holiday. She bought another round of drinks for her friends because she could afford it and tried to ignore the way that Alice kept looking at her back. She'd caught other people doing it, strangers on the street, coworkers, and every time she went home and checked there was nothing there.
Someone poked their head inside, beaming. "Come and see! There's a star, a Christmas star!"
Of course it wasn't really a star. Donna figured that out when it started killing people. For a moment everything seemed so familiar, and she took off at a run towards the Thames, and the star. She didn't know why but something deep inside her seemed to think that it was the right thing to do, and as she had no evidence to the contrary, she obeyed.
She arrived by the Thames just in time to see a group of funny-looking soldiers load a cloth-covered body into a waiting ambulance. One soldier had a walkie, and seemed to be talking to someone he called 'Mr. Saxon.' That would be the minister for defense. As the paramedics lifted the stretcher into the back of the ambulance a suit-jacket clad arm came loose and a thin metallic cylinder with a blue tip clattered onto the ground. It went unnoticed amid the general hubbub. The soldier on the walkie mentioned someone called 'the Doctor,' presumably the dead man, and other strange things, something called a 'racnoss,' and 'regeneration,' whatever that was. She didn't know why, but seeing the body and the little metal thing made her want to cry.
The doors on the ambulance slammed shut, and it drove off. She turned to walk away and almost ran directly into a woman barreling towards her.
"What happened?" she panted, brushing sandy blond curls back from a tan face and bright blue eyes. "Did they find someone?"
"I dunno," Donna replied. There was something oddly familiar about the woman.
River Song had to stop herself from staring. The woman in front of her, the woman who most definitely was not in a wedding dress or anywhere near where she should be-was Donna Noble. She realized with a start that the other woman had continued speaking.
"Sorry, what?" she asked.
"Some bloke called the Doctor," Donna reiterated.
River glanced around expectantly. "Well, where is he?"
Donna bit her lip. "He's dead. I'm sorry."
River turned white. No, no no no no no. It wasn't possible. The Doctor couldn't die now. She'd seen him die, and it definitely wasn't underneath the Thames! But then she saw, lying on the cobbled street, the sonic screwdriver. She felt like the floor had just dropped out from under her.
"Did you know him?" Donna asked sympathetically. "I mean, they never mentioned his name. Could have been any doctor."
"No," River whispered, and sank down on her knees besides the little metal tube. She picked it up, holding it reverently, like he did. "The world is wrong, Donna Noble." Then she pocketed the device, stood, and walked away. Donna ran after her, wanting to know what she meant by that, and more importantly, how the woman had known her name, but by the time she rounded the corner-the woman was gone.
It was possible that Jack got the coordinates wrong, she figured, so River Song jumped ahead, to when the Doctor first met Martha Jones. Except that he didn't. The Royal Hope hospital disappeared, all right, but the Doctor was nowhere in sight, nor was the TARDIS. The Dimension Cannon was designed to find him, to go to him, but there was no trace. Nothing registered on her monitor. The Hospital vanished and returned, but Sarah Jane Smith was the one who thwarted the plasmavore and lost her life in the bargain, as did her young friends. The sole survivor was a young man training to be a doctor. He had only lived because Martha Jones gave him the last oxygen tank-and then died.
But that was wrong. It was all wrong. Where was the Doctor?
Everywhere she jumped the world was wrong. The timeline was twisted, altered, changed completely. She felt nauseous, like she wanted to crawl out of her skin. There was no sign anywhere, not of Rose, nor the Doctor. People didn't just disappear. It wasn't possible; even when they were taken by the Rift there was a residual energy, a sign of their presence. But Rose-there was no sign that she'd ever made it back from Pete's World and the Doctor's body was apparently cryogenically frozen at UNIT headquarters. She hit the recall button. It was time to figure out what the hell was going on.
She'd reprogrammed the quick recall button as soon as Mickey had accepted her offer of help. It wouldn't do to be jumping around between universes-according to the new time line he hadn't gone back, and she intended to keep it that way. Their base of operations was a threadbare apartment in 51st century Califrax Minor. It was small and more than a little scruffy, but it was cheap and the landlord didn't ask questions.
Mickey was fuming when the light cleared. "What the hell was that?" he demanded. "You jumped five times, River! I thought you said those coordinates were good!"
She shook her head. "Something is wrong, Mickey. Something big. The coordinates should have been perfect-but when I used them-" She shuddered. "He was dead, Mickey. The Doctor was dead."
He frowned, lines creasing his forehead. "But I thought you said you knew him, in the future."
"I do!" she yelled and began to pace. "The whole thing doesn't make any sense!
"Could you have got the stories wrong?" he ventured, but she shook her head fiercely.
"Not possible," she told him. "According to what I saw, he died before he met Donna Noble, and I'm not talking about regeneration, I'm talking about real, proper death, and I know for a fact that didn't happen." She stopped pacing and sank down abruptly onto one of the chairs that littered the room. "This," she said with great emphasis, "is wrong. If the Doctor never met Donna, than I would never have been born, but I'm still here! And I still remember! And here-now-everything is as it should be! It's like hopping into a different universe, but there were no alternate Time Lords. They only ever existed once." And then she paused, eyes wide.
"What?" Mickey asked. "What is it?"
"Oh," she said. "Oh! Of course!"
Mickey rolled his eyes. "Honestly, you sound just like him. Out with it, then."
"What if," she began, her eyes bright. "What if it wasn't another universe, but another time line? What if someone pulled Donna out of the main time line, the real one, and put her in an alternate time line, a might-have-been? And Jack knew about it, so he gave me coordinates that would take me where I needed to go?"
"Hold on a tick," he interrupted. "How would Jack know about that?"
"It had already happened for him," she explained. "I got there a bit late, and he said it, oh that clever man!" She laughed, delighted. Mickey still looked confused. "Donna Noble is one of the most important women in the universe," she continued, "because she kept the Doctor alive. He met her just after he managed to say goodbye to Rose, and if she hadn't been there to pull him back, he would have drowned underneath the Thames and not regenerated." She paused. "He might have chosen not to."
Mickey's eyes were wide. "He can do that?"
She nodded. "The Doctor's never had a very strong grasp on regeneration, but even he could stop the process from occurring. He almost did, after the Time War, but something gave him pause." She smiled. "He said he heard a wolf howling, and it reminded him that life was all around him."
"So," he began. "What are we going to do?"
River Song stood. "We're going to get Donna Noble out of that alternate timeline and back where she belongs."
Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart could not sleep. It was an unusual situation for him. His days in UNIT taught him early on to grab sleep whenever and wherever possible, despite anything that was happening around him. Doris quite frequently told him that he slept like the dead. It was a stray thought, but enough to send him over to the liquor cabinet in the corner of the room. His hands shook as he poured himself a glass of brandy. A scrap of paper sat on the desk, a note from Brigadier Bambera.
I regret to inform you that the confirmation is irrefutable-the Doctor is dead.
He didn't want to believe it. His relationship with the Doctor was complex, and often difficult. The alien was as infuriating as he was brilliant, but he had to admit that his life had changed irrevocably when Alistair met him. They'd been friends of a sort for most of his life, and apparently most of the Doctor's as well. He'd known him in every incarnation except for this latest one. The last time he saw the Doctor it was just after the Time War. He had shown up on their doorstep one day, half dead and barely coherent. It had taken days for him to recover physically, and weeks before he started talking again. And then he'd left. They'd offered their home to him, assured he could stay as long as he needed, but he'd brushed them off with a grin and a wave.
Alistair had reports of sightings. There was the thing with the Slitheen and Downing street, and that had the Doctor's fingerprints all over it, although he still wondered how the alien managed to get ahold of a submarine missile. Later there was the Sycorax and the spaceship over London. Torchwood destroyed it but the UNIT liaison to Prime Minister Harriet Jones had reported that the Doctor's intervention had them leaving first. In both instances there were rumors of a companion, a young woman named Rose. Apparently UNIT had been building a file on her, but it was wiped from the system by the BADWOLF virus.
He walked back to his desk and sank down into the comfortable chair. Next to the paper was a small pile of seemingly random items. As the Doctor was the sole survivor of his race, he had no living relatives, no one to claim his personal affects-no one but Alistair. So he had. It was a strange collection, apparently found in the alien's pockets. Although he drowned there was no sign of water damage to the packs of gum, ball of string, three Euros and five pence, kazoo, 3-D glasses, cassette tape of Ian Dury's greatest hits, the copy of William Butler Yeat's The Wind Among the Rushes, and most curiously, three photographs.
The first was of three people-two men and a young woman. The man on the left was the Doctor as Alistair last saw him, except that he was wearing a leather jacket and an ear-splitting grin. The man on the right was Jack Harkness, of Torchwood. Captain Jack, as he preffered to be called, was not Alistair's favorite person, but that was largely due to his employment. Torchwood always left a rather bitter taste in his mouth. He knew their kind and he knew their aim, and he disagreed with both entirely.
But it was the woman in the middle, the same woman who was in all three pictures, that gave him pause. She had one arm wrapped around the Doctor and the other wrapped around Jack, but whilst the two of them were looking at the camera, the Doctor was looking at her. On the back of the picture, in precise, neat handwriting, was: The Doctor, Me, and Jack: Cardiff, 21st Century.
The second picture contained only two people, the woman again and the Doctor in his last form. They were both wearing paper crowns: hers pink, and his red, and they were standing in front of a Christmas tree, beaming. The caption on that picture read, The New New Doctor and Me: Mum's, Christmas 2006. It was a strange image, so domestic for an alien who scorned anything resembling every-day human life.
The third image was a candid shot. The woman was lying on her back, propped up on her forearms on what looked like a long brown coat. Her eyes were closed and her face was tilted up towards the sun. A small smile tugged at her lips and the wind blew her hair wildly around her. The writing on the back of the photo was different, angled more sharply and less tidy. Rose, it read simply. New Earth.
That was the mysterious Rose, the Doctor's latest companion. Where was she, he wondered, when the Doctor died? He couldn't believe that she would have left him alone. There was a great deal of affection obvious in each of the photos, and perhaps something more. He emptied the glass and deposited it next to the pictures.
A flash of light left him as good as blind. When the spots finally cleared he was staring at a strange woman with sandy curls and bright blue eyes. "Who in blazes are you?" he demanded, quietly, as Doris had already gone to bed. "And what do you think you're doing here?"
The woman only smiled. "Hello, Alistair. I'm Professor River Song. You haven't met me yet, and if you don't help me, than you never will." She leaned forward. "I'm here about the Doctor."
He sighed. "I'm sorry, but the Doctor is dead."
River shook her head. "I know that you feel it, Alistair." There was a fierce urgency in her voice that compelled him to listen to her. "This isn't what's supposed to happen. I'm from the future, the Doctor's personal future." She leaned forward. "Alistair-the world is wrong."
He studied her appraisingly. "Even if I believe you, Professor Song, what do you propose to do about it?"
She began to pace. "Someone has altered the time line, but the Vortex is fighting back. If the Time Lords were still around they'd be here in a heartsbeat to correct it, because this isn't what's supposed to happen. We need to find out when the change occurred, and how it was done."
"How?" he asked.
"The TARDIS," she replied. "Does UNIT still have it in storage?"
"Of course," he told her. "But you'll never get in. The Doctor was the only one able to open it."
River grinned, and held up a key attached to a thin chain. "I was a resident for some time, Alistair, and I never go anywhere without my TARDIS key."
Convincing Bambera that River Song wasn't crazy took a bit of doing, but in the end Alistair's remaining UNIT clout as Brigadier and a close associate of the Doctor won out. When River entered the TARDIS she fought the urge to cry. It was dark and the air was stale-musty. There was no welcoming hum, no warm presence in the back of her mind. It felt like stepping into a tomb. She ran a hand over the console and up to the Time Rotor. It wheezed and shifted a few times, but the emptiness remained.
"I know," she murmured. "I'm going to fix it. Please, help me fix it." The monitor flickered to life. "Thank you."
"What are you doing?" Alistair asked as she typed away, eyes fixed on the monitor in front of her.
"Scanning for interference. This whole situation centers around a woman named Donna Noble," she replied.
He frowned. "Who is she?"
A small smile spread River's lips. "One of the most important women in all of creation. She saved the Doctor's life when he wanted to die, but someone kept her from meeting him. In my timeline, the real timeline, the Doctor is alive and well, and jaunting around the universe with Rose." He blinked and she noticed. "You've met. Of course, not yet, but you will. She speaks very highly of you."
He really had nothing to say to that. "I see," he finally settled on.
She laughed. "No you don't, but you will." There was a stuttering sort of electrical sound, and then a slot beneath the console spat out several sheets of paper. River collected them and handed the bundle to Alistair. "Right. Get your people working on this. It needs to be ready by September 2008."
"Any particular reason why?" he wanted to know.
"This is what's going to send Donna Noble back, so she can make the right choice, and wipe this timeline out of existence," River explained. "And according to what I've seen, three weeks into September of 2008 is when Donna Noble dies."
( Chapter Fifty-Three )