Partners In Time
Title: Partners In Time
Series: An Impossible Child
Rating: G
Characters: Ten/Donna, Bella, and some familiar faces who I won’t give away
Spoilers: Mainly Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, Turn Left, Journey’s End
Summary: Sequel to When I Was Six and Something New. This can stand alone, but I strongly suggest reading the other stories first as they give all the necessary background. This is a TL/JE alternative (I won’t say fix, for various reasons, but When I Was Six is set not long after Midnight) and also … well, you’ll see in the end. Not giving it away yet, am I ;). This is my first full length chaptered fic, so I warn you it's going to be a long one!
The Doctor turned the page, his eyes intently scanning the words from behind his glasses. He shook his head, licked his finger, and turned another page, wriggling himself more comfortably into the worn leather of the Chesterfield. Another page rapidly flipped over. And another. This was gripping stuff. Really gripping. The best thing he’d read in ages.
If he had been paying attention to anything else (which he wasn't) he might have heard a little scuffling noise at the library door (which he didn't). He didn’t even notice the noise growing louder as whatever was making it scuffled closer.
The scuffling stopped.
A pair of small blue eyes popped up over the top of the book.
The Doctor waved them away like a fly, engrossed in the story. The eyes disappeared momentarily, then reappeared, this time under the book.
“Hello Daddy,” said Bella, her face grinning up at him from his knees. He made a vague sound, lowering a hand to ruffle her curly brown head. She tried to peep up at the pages. “What's happening?”
“Hmm?” he returned slowly. “Oh. Well, I think - I think Paddington’s about to break Mr Curry's watch doing a magic trick.” He whipped another page over, above her head. “This is intense, do you really read this stuff?”
“You want me to tell you what happens next? Well -”
“Oi!” he interjected, cupping a hand over her open mouth. “Spoilers. Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Irrarraye,” said Bella unintelligibly. The Doctor removed his hand, squinting.
“What?”
“It’s raining.”
“So it is. Your powers of observation astound me, Noble,” quipped the Doctor, listening contentedly to the gentle pattering on the TARDIS roof. Bella took the opportunity to snake a small arm up and knock the book from his fingers. He groaned. “What'd you do that for?”
“Take me somewhere where it isn’t rainy, right now,” she ordered as he reluctantly bent and stuck a bookmark in the crumpled pages. “So I can play outside.” She stuck out her lower lip.
The Doctor had to grin, as he always did when he saw his daughter clad in Donna’s old striped t-shirt and corduroy trousers. Bella looked so much like her mother at the same age, although Donna insisted that Bella had the firm set of the Doctor's mouth. Looking at the determined little chin resting on his knee right now, he couldn’t argue with that.
“The thing is,” he said solemnly, poking Bella’s nose, “playing outside would defeat the purpose of landing on a rainy day, wouldn’t it? Rainy days are good. Especially for reading. I always land on a rainy day when I want to read. Come to think of it - you've been very quiet all morning.” He ran his hand along Bella's bunches of hair - long and curly like Donna’s, topped with an unruly tuft like his. “What've you been up to?”
“Flying my TARDIS console,” she replied, scrambling up onto the Victorian sofa.
“Oh, that’s my brilliant girl,” he said fondly, helping to hoist her up under her arms. She settled herself neatly beside him, hands folded in her lap and little blue hi-top sneakers just managing to dangle over the edge of the seat, mirroring the Doctor's own white sneakers stretched out casually on the Louis XVI coffee table.
She looked up at him.
“You didn’t build it very well.”
“Thanks a lot,” he replied in mock indignation, tilting his head lazily down towards her. “And you could do better, could you?”
“Course I could,” she said, and the Doctor had to bite back a smile, her cockiness reminding him all too well of himself. “Parts keep falling off it,” she went on. “Like with your real one.”
“Yeah,” replied the Doctor. He rubbed his hand ruefully over his chin. “Remind me to teach you the meaning of tact, some time.”
“It’s all right, though,” she informed him seriously. “Cos I’ll sonic them back on. With this.” She fumbled in her pocket and dug out a plain wooden dowel, making believe that she was sonicking. The Doctor went cross-eyed as the dowel was brandished at his nose.
“Aha!” he said with a grin, pulling out his own screwdriver from his breast pocket and tapping hers away with it. “Touché.”
There followed a brief but intense sonic screwdriver fight, from which Bella emerged victorious. The Doctor pulled a face and lifted her into his lap, her legs swinging over his knees.
“I always beat you,” said Bella, snuggling into him and playing with the buttons on his brown suit jacket.
“Well, you take after your Dad - I’ve done a bit of fencing myself,” replied the Doctor, scratching his nose nonchalantly. “Took on the leader of the Sycorax on top of his ship, you know. Won, too.”
Bella giggled. He put on a hurt expression.
“I did!”
“But it was me that won this time,” she preened. “What do I win?”
“Erm …” said the Doctor, casting about for an idea. “Oh. How about these.” He lifted off his thickly-rimmed glasses and placed them crookedly on her nose. His mouth twitched at her bug-eyed appearance. “Oh, now, don't you look lovely. They suit you.”
“Yeah, well, Mummy says you don’t need them. Why d’you wear them?”
“Because they're stylish, and Mummy, being Mummy, refuses to acknowledge that.”
Bella gave him a pitying look, the sort that Donna was fond of giving him.
“Mummy said … hmm, what did she say? Oh yeah. That you belong in the eighties, aaaaand … oh yeah, your ship belongs in the sixties.”
“Oh, she said that, did she?”
“I sort of like the glasses, though …”
“Keep them. Now you can be uncool.”
He tickled her and she thwacked him across the stomach as hard as she could, which fortunately for him - given her small size - wasn’t very hard at all. “Oof,” he said playfully, twitching the glasses from her nose. They shared a grin.
Both heads turned as Donna herself walked in; smoke-blackened, soaked, and carrying a fire extinguisher. She glared at the Doctor wordlessly and dumped the extinguisher on the wooden floor with an ominous thud; hand clenched on her hip, foot tapping.
“What did he do?” asked Bella, sitting up, wide-eyed.
“All right, why d’you assume it was me?” protested the Doctor, still slumped back. “Could’ve been you.”
Bella raised her eyebrows at him, folding her arms sternly.
“Don't try to get me into trouble. It’s always you.”
“She’s got a point,” spoke up Donna in obvious annoyance. “Honestly, sometimes I'm not sure she shouldn't actually be your parent, not the other way around.”
“I should,” agreed Bella, kicking her sneakers into the Doctor's brown-pinstriped leg.
The Doctor cast his mind back, trying to think of the latest thing that he might have done to warrant Donna’s wrath.
“Need your memory refreshed?” said Donna, and he jumped guiltily; she might not have Time Lord powers, but she often seemed like she had the ability to read his mind anyway. “Do you remember coming into the kitchen and saying the oven could do with a bit of sonicking?”
“Yep,” answered the Doctor with certainty.
“And do you remember me saying not to sonic the oven because I was putting Bella’s birthday cake in there?”
“Yep,” he repeated, seeing where this was going, and hoping that Bella made a cute enough shield for Donna not to kill him before he’d had the chance to make a distraction and run away.
“And then do you remember, I dunno, coming back in while I was out and sonicking the oven?”
“That bit’s more hazy,” said the Doctor, but at Donna’s glare he said “Yep” obediently.
Donna held up the extinguisher. “Cake, fire, smoke - do I have to paint you the rest of the picture? In case you're wondering, it's a portrait of me, screaming obscenities at your smoke alarm which I suppose you've also sonicked, because it doesn't work, and then getting deluged by your sprinkler system, which works like bloody Niagara Falls.”
“You burnt my cake?” said Bella to the Doctor, pouting. “My now-I’m-five cake? You - you dumbo.”
“Oi!” said Donna, reaching over and flicking one of Bella’s curly bunches. “Don’t call your father a dumbo, miss.”
She glared at him.
“I’ll do that.”
The Doctor tried to think of a convincing excuse, opened his mouth, couldn’t think of one, and closed it again.
“Is this just because it was a lime cake?” asked Donna in exasperation. “You and your lime phobia, honestly, you're like a child. Worse than Bella. Is it because you wanted to make her a banana cake instead?”
“No,” said the Doctor in unconvincing tones, but at Donna’s glare he said “Yep” obediently.
She tapped him on the knee. “We’ll discuss this later, all right?” She turned to go, then swivelled back. “And I nearly broke my foot out there, can you pick up your gadgets lying all over the corridor?”
“Who?” chorused two voices.
“Both of you, then,” she said, throwing up her hands. “You’re as bad as each other, with all your sonicking and dismantling. And by the way, Miss Bella Noble … I want my toaster back.”
The Doctor eyed Bella. “You took her toaster?”
Bella eyed him unrepentantly. “Needed it.”
“For …?”
“The interfield feedback loop.”
The Doctor looked at Donna, shrugging. “Oh, she’s right. I would have taken the toaster for that too.”
Donna rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Spaceman. Bella, be careful, it’s all electric. And just make sure it’s back in the kitchen in one piece, yeah?”
“Mm-hmm, now when you say one piece -”
“Bella!”
Bella blew out a sigh. “Yeah yeah, one piece.”
“Good girl,” said Donna. Two identical grins flashed at her and she couldn’t help laughing, folding her arms quizzically at the Doctor and his tiny alike companion perched on his lap. “You two make a pair, I tell you.”
“Of course we do,” said the Doctor, wrapping Bella in a bear hug. “Partners in time.”
“Crime, more like,” retorted Donna with a wry chuckle.
“Time,” insisted the Doctor. “Right, Space-munchkin?”
“Oi!” complained Bella, wriggling as he nuzzled her. “Don’t call me that.”
“Isn’t there anything I can call either of you?” said the Doctor, looking quite crestfallen.
Donna adopted a wondering expression.
“Hum, let’s see - oh, I dunno - how’s about our names for once?”
Nevertheless, she bent down and kissed first the Doctor and then Bella before squelching back out of the library, dragging the fire extinguisher behind her in a trail of black marks.
The Doctor let out a sigh. Bella flopped back against him.
“That,” she said, “was a close one.”
“Tell me about it,” he agreed, resting his chin on her head. “You know, one of these days you’re actually going to have to tell her you don't like limes. I can’t keep burning her cakes forever. She’s going to get suspicious.”
Bella ignored him. “Daddy, what’s your name? Apart from Daddy. Like, how Bella’s my name, and Donna is Mummy’s other name, and Paddington is Paddington’s name …”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“I’m not telling.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to,” he said, nearly laughing as he remembered the last time he’d had this conversation - it had ended in a very pregnant Donna guffawing so hard at his name that it had triggered the birth of their equally curious daughter.
Bella didn’t press the point, though.
“I know you’re a Time Lord. The only one. There aren’t any others. All gone.”
“Hmm,” said the Doctor. “So there aren’t. Thanks for reminding me. And who told you that?”
“Uncle Jack said it. When I was staying with him and Uncle Ianto.” She leaned back and eyed the Doctor. “What’s a Time Lord?”
He looked at her carefully, but kept his tone light. “What do you think?”
She took a deep breath. “Well. Is it like how I can make the time rotor start with my eyes?”
“Weeeeell, not exactly. You’re a bit different from a Time Lord - for one thing, Mummy has one heart, and I have two, which means you have three. If I could do the time rotor thing with my eyes too, I wouldn’t have had to put a special temporal lock on it to stop you whirling us off to a different Wiggles concert every few minutes.” He paused. “Incidentally, I never want to see that green spotty dinosaur again. Besides, the anatomy’s just all wrong.”
“You’re from Gallifrey,” went on Bella, putting her hands around his neck. She sighed, a sad little sound. “No more Gallifrey.”
“Mm-hmm,” said the Doctor slowly, feeling a gut-deep twinge at the mere mention of the name. “Uncle Jack’s really been spouting off about me, hasn’t he? What happened to just playing fifty-first century Monopoly and eating lots and lots of ice cream until you were sick, like he said you were going to do?”
Bella looked at him knowingly.
“Gallifrey … with silver trees.”
“Yeah - what?” His voice became suddenly suspicious, deepening. “How do you know that?”
“And orange skies,” she continued in a sing-song voice.
The Doctor looked back at her sharply. Her eyes, round and blue like Donna's, were a little unfocused. He grabbed her by the chin and peered into them.
“Bella,” he said intensely. “Are you all right? How do you know that?”
“Orange skies,” she repeated. She paused. “Paddington … marmalade skies … kaleidoscope eyes … Bella in the sky with diamonds … sapphires … Midnight … anti-gravity … moonshine … twenties … Agatha … a … a … Donna …. a … a … no, Bella … Time War … jelly babies … bananas … cake …”
She stopped chanting and blinked, her eyes swimming back into focus. The Doctor stared, his face frozen. He knew what she was doing; he couldn’t help reading people’s thoughts sometimes either. He supposed he ought to have expected that his daughter might share his ability. Still, it came as a shock after so long without any contact with his people. For some reason, of which he was unsure, he was hesitant to tell Bella what she was doing. There was something a bit uncanny about it.
“Oh, I can hear your real name now,” she began. “It’s funny -”
“Yeah,” he said, cutting her off. “Just don’t tell Uncle Jack, whatever you do.”
Bella hopped off his lap with a little sigh, patting him on the knee. “We’ll discuss Paddington later,” she said, the Doctor stifling a chuckle at her unconscious imitation of Donna. “I’m going to go work on decoding the interfield feedback loop a bit more.” She trundled off with hands shoved in her pockets like him, tuft and curls bouncing.
The Doctor sat back soberly, turning his eyes up in thought. There was something else bothering him - what was it …
“Time War?” he suddenly said out loud, head snapping back to the door that Bella had just exited. “But I wasn’t thinking that … or was I?”
He scrunched his face up, pondering.
Then he shrugged philosophically and plucked the bookmark from Paddington, tossing it across the room, and reclined back on the couch with nose firmly planted once more in book. Outside, it began to thunder.
Chapter 2: Bella Noble Is In The Library
Series: An Impossible Child
Rating: G
Characters: Ten/Donna, Bella, and some familiar faces who I won’t give away
Spoilers: Mainly Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, Turn Left, Journey’s End
Summary: Sequel to When I Was Six and Something New. This can stand alone, but I strongly suggest reading the other stories first as they give all the necessary background. This is a TL/JE alternative (I won’t say fix, for various reasons, but When I Was Six is set not long after Midnight) and also … well, you’ll see in the end. Not giving it away yet, am I ;). This is my first full length chaptered fic, so I warn you it's going to be a long one!
The Doctor turned the page, his eyes intently scanning the words from behind his glasses. He shook his head, licked his finger, and turned another page, wriggling himself more comfortably into the worn leather of the Chesterfield. Another page rapidly flipped over. And another. This was gripping stuff. Really gripping. The best thing he’d read in ages.
If he had been paying attention to anything else (which he wasn't) he might have heard a little scuffling noise at the library door (which he didn't). He didn’t even notice the noise growing louder as whatever was making it scuffled closer.
The scuffling stopped.
A pair of small blue eyes popped up over the top of the book.
The Doctor waved them away like a fly, engrossed in the story. The eyes disappeared momentarily, then reappeared, this time under the book.
“Hello Daddy,” said Bella, her face grinning up at him from his knees. He made a vague sound, lowering a hand to ruffle her curly brown head. She tried to peep up at the pages. “What's happening?”
“Hmm?” he returned slowly. “Oh. Well, I think - I think Paddington’s about to break Mr Curry's watch doing a magic trick.” He whipped another page over, above her head. “This is intense, do you really read this stuff?”
“You want me to tell you what happens next? Well -”
“Oi!” he interjected, cupping a hand over her open mouth. “Spoilers. Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Irrarraye,” said Bella unintelligibly. The Doctor removed his hand, squinting.
“What?”
“It’s raining.”
“So it is. Your powers of observation astound me, Noble,” quipped the Doctor, listening contentedly to the gentle pattering on the TARDIS roof. Bella took the opportunity to snake a small arm up and knock the book from his fingers. He groaned. “What'd you do that for?”
“Take me somewhere where it isn’t rainy, right now,” she ordered as he reluctantly bent and stuck a bookmark in the crumpled pages. “So I can play outside.” She stuck out her lower lip.
The Doctor had to grin, as he always did when he saw his daughter clad in Donna’s old striped t-shirt and corduroy trousers. Bella looked so much like her mother at the same age, although Donna insisted that Bella had the firm set of the Doctor's mouth. Looking at the determined little chin resting on his knee right now, he couldn’t argue with that.
“The thing is,” he said solemnly, poking Bella’s nose, “playing outside would defeat the purpose of landing on a rainy day, wouldn’t it? Rainy days are good. Especially for reading. I always land on a rainy day when I want to read. Come to think of it - you've been very quiet all morning.” He ran his hand along Bella's bunches of hair - long and curly like Donna’s, topped with an unruly tuft like his. “What've you been up to?”
“Flying my TARDIS console,” she replied, scrambling up onto the Victorian sofa.
“Oh, that’s my brilliant girl,” he said fondly, helping to hoist her up under her arms. She settled herself neatly beside him, hands folded in her lap and little blue hi-top sneakers just managing to dangle over the edge of the seat, mirroring the Doctor's own white sneakers stretched out casually on the Louis XVI coffee table.
She looked up at him.
“You didn’t build it very well.”
“Thanks a lot,” he replied in mock indignation, tilting his head lazily down towards her. “And you could do better, could you?”
“Course I could,” she said, and the Doctor had to bite back a smile, her cockiness reminding him all too well of himself. “Parts keep falling off it,” she went on. “Like with your real one.”
“Yeah,” replied the Doctor. He rubbed his hand ruefully over his chin. “Remind me to teach you the meaning of tact, some time.”
“It’s all right, though,” she informed him seriously. “Cos I’ll sonic them back on. With this.” She fumbled in her pocket and dug out a plain wooden dowel, making believe that she was sonicking. The Doctor went cross-eyed as the dowel was brandished at his nose.
“Aha!” he said with a grin, pulling out his own screwdriver from his breast pocket and tapping hers away with it. “Touché.”
There followed a brief but intense sonic screwdriver fight, from which Bella emerged victorious. The Doctor pulled a face and lifted her into his lap, her legs swinging over his knees.
“I always beat you,” said Bella, snuggling into him and playing with the buttons on his brown suit jacket.
“Well, you take after your Dad - I’ve done a bit of fencing myself,” replied the Doctor, scratching his nose nonchalantly. “Took on the leader of the Sycorax on top of his ship, you know. Won, too.”
Bella giggled. He put on a hurt expression.
“I did!”
“But it was me that won this time,” she preened. “What do I win?”
“Erm …” said the Doctor, casting about for an idea. “Oh. How about these.” He lifted off his thickly-rimmed glasses and placed them crookedly on her nose. His mouth twitched at her bug-eyed appearance. “Oh, now, don't you look lovely. They suit you.”
“Yeah, well, Mummy says you don’t need them. Why d’you wear them?”
“Because they're stylish, and Mummy, being Mummy, refuses to acknowledge that.”
Bella gave him a pitying look, the sort that Donna was fond of giving him.
“Mummy said … hmm, what did she say? Oh yeah. That you belong in the eighties, aaaaand … oh yeah, your ship belongs in the sixties.”
“Oh, she said that, did she?”
“I sort of like the glasses, though …”
“Keep them. Now you can be uncool.”
He tickled her and she thwacked him across the stomach as hard as she could, which fortunately for him - given her small size - wasn’t very hard at all. “Oof,” he said playfully, twitching the glasses from her nose. They shared a grin.
Both heads turned as Donna herself walked in; smoke-blackened, soaked, and carrying a fire extinguisher. She glared at the Doctor wordlessly and dumped the extinguisher on the wooden floor with an ominous thud; hand clenched on her hip, foot tapping.
“What did he do?” asked Bella, sitting up, wide-eyed.
“All right, why d’you assume it was me?” protested the Doctor, still slumped back. “Could’ve been you.”
Bella raised her eyebrows at him, folding her arms sternly.
“Don't try to get me into trouble. It’s always you.”
“She’s got a point,” spoke up Donna in obvious annoyance. “Honestly, sometimes I'm not sure she shouldn't actually be your parent, not the other way around.”
“I should,” agreed Bella, kicking her sneakers into the Doctor's brown-pinstriped leg.
The Doctor cast his mind back, trying to think of the latest thing that he might have done to warrant Donna’s wrath.
“Need your memory refreshed?” said Donna, and he jumped guiltily; she might not have Time Lord powers, but she often seemed like she had the ability to read his mind anyway. “Do you remember coming into the kitchen and saying the oven could do with a bit of sonicking?”
“Yep,” answered the Doctor with certainty.
“And do you remember me saying not to sonic the oven because I was putting Bella’s birthday cake in there?”
“Yep,” he repeated, seeing where this was going, and hoping that Bella made a cute enough shield for Donna not to kill him before he’d had the chance to make a distraction and run away.
“And then do you remember, I dunno, coming back in while I was out and sonicking the oven?”
“That bit’s more hazy,” said the Doctor, but at Donna’s glare he said “Yep” obediently.
Donna held up the extinguisher. “Cake, fire, smoke - do I have to paint you the rest of the picture? In case you're wondering, it's a portrait of me, screaming obscenities at your smoke alarm which I suppose you've also sonicked, because it doesn't work, and then getting deluged by your sprinkler system, which works like bloody Niagara Falls.”
“You burnt my cake?” said Bella to the Doctor, pouting. “My now-I’m-five cake? You - you dumbo.”
“Oi!” said Donna, reaching over and flicking one of Bella’s curly bunches. “Don’t call your father a dumbo, miss.”
She glared at him.
“I’ll do that.”
The Doctor tried to think of a convincing excuse, opened his mouth, couldn’t think of one, and closed it again.
“Is this just because it was a lime cake?” asked Donna in exasperation. “You and your lime phobia, honestly, you're like a child. Worse than Bella. Is it because you wanted to make her a banana cake instead?”
“No,” said the Doctor in unconvincing tones, but at Donna’s glare he said “Yep” obediently.
She tapped him on the knee. “We’ll discuss this later, all right?” She turned to go, then swivelled back. “And I nearly broke my foot out there, can you pick up your gadgets lying all over the corridor?”
“Who?” chorused two voices.
“Both of you, then,” she said, throwing up her hands. “You’re as bad as each other, with all your sonicking and dismantling. And by the way, Miss Bella Noble … I want my toaster back.”
The Doctor eyed Bella. “You took her toaster?”
Bella eyed him unrepentantly. “Needed it.”
“For …?”
“The interfield feedback loop.”
The Doctor looked at Donna, shrugging. “Oh, she’s right. I would have taken the toaster for that too.”
Donna rolled her eyes. “Whatever, Spaceman. Bella, be careful, it’s all electric. And just make sure it’s back in the kitchen in one piece, yeah?”
“Mm-hmm, now when you say one piece -”
“Bella!”
Bella blew out a sigh. “Yeah yeah, one piece.”
“Good girl,” said Donna. Two identical grins flashed at her and she couldn’t help laughing, folding her arms quizzically at the Doctor and his tiny alike companion perched on his lap. “You two make a pair, I tell you.”
“Of course we do,” said the Doctor, wrapping Bella in a bear hug. “Partners in time.”
“Crime, more like,” retorted Donna with a wry chuckle.
“Time,” insisted the Doctor. “Right, Space-munchkin?”
“Oi!” complained Bella, wriggling as he nuzzled her. “Don’t call me that.”
“Isn’t there anything I can call either of you?” said the Doctor, looking quite crestfallen.
Donna adopted a wondering expression.
“Hum, let’s see - oh, I dunno - how’s about our names for once?”
Nevertheless, she bent down and kissed first the Doctor and then Bella before squelching back out of the library, dragging the fire extinguisher behind her in a trail of black marks.
The Doctor let out a sigh. Bella flopped back against him.
“That,” she said, “was a close one.”
“Tell me about it,” he agreed, resting his chin on her head. “You know, one of these days you’re actually going to have to tell her you don't like limes. I can’t keep burning her cakes forever. She’s going to get suspicious.”
Bella ignored him. “Daddy, what’s your name? Apart from Daddy. Like, how Bella’s my name, and Donna is Mummy’s other name, and Paddington is Paddington’s name …”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“I’m not telling.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to,” he said, nearly laughing as he remembered the last time he’d had this conversation - it had ended in a very pregnant Donna guffawing so hard at his name that it had triggered the birth of their equally curious daughter.
Bella didn’t press the point, though.
“I know you’re a Time Lord. The only one. There aren’t any others. All gone.”
“Hmm,” said the Doctor. “So there aren’t. Thanks for reminding me. And who told you that?”
“Uncle Jack said it. When I was staying with him and Uncle Ianto.” She leaned back and eyed the Doctor. “What’s a Time Lord?”
He looked at her carefully, but kept his tone light. “What do you think?”
She took a deep breath. “Well. Is it like how I can make the time rotor start with my eyes?”
“Weeeeell, not exactly. You’re a bit different from a Time Lord - for one thing, Mummy has one heart, and I have two, which means you have three. If I could do the time rotor thing with my eyes too, I wouldn’t have had to put a special temporal lock on it to stop you whirling us off to a different Wiggles concert every few minutes.” He paused. “Incidentally, I never want to see that green spotty dinosaur again. Besides, the anatomy’s just all wrong.”
“You’re from Gallifrey,” went on Bella, putting her hands around his neck. She sighed, a sad little sound. “No more Gallifrey.”
“Mm-hmm,” said the Doctor slowly, feeling a gut-deep twinge at the mere mention of the name. “Uncle Jack’s really been spouting off about me, hasn’t he? What happened to just playing fifty-first century Monopoly and eating lots and lots of ice cream until you were sick, like he said you were going to do?”
Bella looked at him knowingly.
“Gallifrey … with silver trees.”
“Yeah - what?” His voice became suddenly suspicious, deepening. “How do you know that?”
“And orange skies,” she continued in a sing-song voice.
The Doctor looked back at her sharply. Her eyes, round and blue like Donna's, were a little unfocused. He grabbed her by the chin and peered into them.
“Bella,” he said intensely. “Are you all right? How do you know that?”
“Orange skies,” she repeated. She paused. “Paddington … marmalade skies … kaleidoscope eyes … Bella in the sky with diamonds … sapphires … Midnight … anti-gravity … moonshine … twenties … Agatha … a … a … Donna …. a … a … no, Bella … Time War … jelly babies … bananas … cake …”
She stopped chanting and blinked, her eyes swimming back into focus. The Doctor stared, his face frozen. He knew what she was doing; he couldn’t help reading people’s thoughts sometimes either. He supposed he ought to have expected that his daughter might share his ability. Still, it came as a shock after so long without any contact with his people. For some reason, of which he was unsure, he was hesitant to tell Bella what she was doing. There was something a bit uncanny about it.
“Oh, I can hear your real name now,” she began. “It’s funny -”
“Yeah,” he said, cutting her off. “Just don’t tell Uncle Jack, whatever you do.”
Bella hopped off his lap with a little sigh, patting him on the knee. “We’ll discuss Paddington later,” she said, the Doctor stifling a chuckle at her unconscious imitation of Donna. “I’m going to go work on decoding the interfield feedback loop a bit more.” She trundled off with hands shoved in her pockets like him, tuft and curls bouncing.
The Doctor sat back soberly, turning his eyes up in thought. There was something else bothering him - what was it …
“Time War?” he suddenly said out loud, head snapping back to the door that Bella had just exited. “But I wasn’t thinking that … or was I?”
He scrunched his face up, pondering.
Then he shrugged philosophically and plucked the bookmark from Paddington, tossing it across the room, and reclined back on the couch with nose firmly planted once more in book. Outside, it began to thunder.
Chapter 2: Bella Noble Is In The Library