Fic: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 22: Time Warp
Title: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse, Chapter 22: Time Warp
Author: psyfi_geekgirl
BetaBabe: akkajemo
Characters/Pairings: Twelfth Doctor, Jack, River, Donna
Rating: PG-13
Excerpt: “Oi, Spacegit! What kind of barney rubble did you get into now?” She put her hands on her hips. “And where’d the TARDIS get to?”
Word count: 4,233
Disclaimer: Until she’s Jossed, Twelve is mine-but of course, based entirely on stuff that ain’t mine… All hail Auntie Beeb!
A/N*: Continuing Part II of Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse. Which, if you haven’t read yet, will give you important backstory and character details which are essential to this ‘verse (the link to the GitM masterlist is provided below). This series is a sort of Season Two. Also written before the end of DW season 6, so some details have gone AU.
Part I: Girl in the Mirror ‘Verse Masterlist
Part II: Pinstripes & Jacquard ‘Verse
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9
Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17
Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21
The air in Torchwood One hummed and shimmered in the area in front of the main computer terminals, just outside of the Med Bay. Somebody looked up and yelled, “Incoming!” Operatives hastily stood aside, expecting an imminent teleport exchange, but one woman stood up in anticipation and waited on the side for the arrival.
WHAZAAAAPOP!
Three figures suddenly appeared in a buzzing blue light. They were grimy. Their hair, skin and clothes were dirty and bloodstained.
“Whoa, Nellie!” exclaimed Jack as one of his traveling companions in the filthy brown coat wobbled unsteadily next to him. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted for a chair.
The woman who had been standing on the sidelines waiting for them rushed forward and helped Jack steady his friend. “Oi, Spacegit! What kind of barney rubble did you get into now?” She put her hands on her hips. “And where’d the TARDIS get to?”
Startled by the voice, the Twelfth Doctor’s head snapped up to find herself looking into the familiar golden brown/blue central heterochromia ringed eyes of Donna Noble!
Once again Twelve staggered, but this time in a backwards trajectory. “Whaaa the--!!” she yelped. Once again, Jack stabilised her.
“Easy, Doctor!” he said, trying to soothe Twelve. “Hey! Where’s that bloody chair I asked for?” he barked.
A black-clad grunt quickly pushed one over. Jack and River helped the Doctor into the chair while Donna stood aside, her concern starting to bleed through.
“What’s the matter with you, Doctor?” asked Donna. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!” She turned to Jack, “I told ja when she left the other day that she didn’t seem right, and now look at her! What have you guys been up to? You’re all a right mess! And is that blood on you, Doctor?!?”
Jack ignored Donna. “I don’t like this resurrection,” he muttered as he kneeled to fuss over the Doctor. “You aren’t strong enough yet. We never should have put you through the Vortex-“
“I can assure you, Captain, that despite my grubby and shaken appearance I am quite well-“
River snorted a small laugh. “Well, she called you “Captain,” Dad,” she smirked, “so I think it’s safe to say she’s ok…”
“Yeah,” breathed Jack, “but still…” He didn’t sound convinced.
The Doctor leaned over to mutter to Jack. “How is Donna here?” she asked, rubbing some warmth into her hands that still felt a bit half-dead to her.
“What do you mean, ‘how is Donna here?’ She works here, Doctor.”
Donna sighed. “Yeeeah… Hell-o,” she said impatiently, “Standing right here!”
“She’s been here all along,” said Jack. “She was here when you arrived after you regenerated into this form--”
“Donna hasn’t traveled with me for years…” Twelve said softly. She looked at Donna with tears in her eyes, “You haven’t traveled with me for years…”
“Yeah, I know,” Donna replied, not seeing the tears. “Got married, didn’t I?”
“To…uh…” the Doctor tried to remember his name, “Shaun… right?” She was still struggling with the concept of her best friend standing in front of her and remembering her without her mind burning.
“Who the bloody hell is Shaun?” snapped Donna. “No, prawn-to Paul.”
“Who’s Paul?!”
“You remember!” Her voice went up several octaves.
“No, Donna. I’m sorry. I really don’t.” Twelve was beginning to suspect that her hold on reality was slipping. Maybe Jack was right, maybe there was something wrong with the resurrection...
“You were at the wedding!” explained Donna. “Or at least the reception. Ate all the nibbles you did! What a pig! Never did understand how anything so damned skinny could eat so much and still be so painfully thin-“
“DON-NAAAH,” prompted Twelve.
“Oh, right. Paul…” said Donna, reminding herself of her point. “He was the guy I met when we went to the Libr-uh-“ Donna stuttered, surreptitiously glancing at River and back to the Doctor. She forced a laugh, “You know,” she made a silly face and waved her hand, “that place I could never pronounce-“
“Which one?” exclaimed the Doctor, one eyebrow sliding up in habit. “You never could say any of them…”
The Doctor had slipped so easily back into their familiar banter before she remembered herself-this version of Donna still remembered what had happened to River! The Doctor’s mouth twitched into a brief, half-smile: Donna, the girl he met who’d only cared about gossip rags, pub quizzes and X Factor, transformed into a companion who cried at the mistreatment of the Ood and had taken down the universe’s biggest evil with the skill of a SuperTemp!
Twelve took a moment to be silently grateful for Donna’s tact about River.
She sighed. The Doctor didn’t understand much right now, but she was beginning to piece a few things together.
Something was very, very wrong.
Donna glared at the Doctor. “Listen, you: Just cos you’re a woman doesn’t mean you’re too fragile for me to wallop anymore!”
“I know, I know,” said Twelve, relenting. “I remember the place you’re talking about. Remind me who Paul is?”
“Paul was the bloke I married when I was stuck in the parallel world inside the computer with Doctor Moon, ‘cept I thought his name was Lee McAvoy…”
“Oh! Right!” breathed the Doctor, “Lee!” Then her face fell. “Wait a minute. We couldn’t find Lee.”
“Sure we did! That’s how I stopped traveling with you. Married him for real. You gave me away. Of sorts... Don’t you remember?”
The Doctor stared at her hands that were still smudged by blood and the rock dust of her grave on Gallifrey. She concentrated on breathing as a theory took hold in her mind-a theory she didn’t much like at all, despite the reappearance of her best friend. “No, Donna,” the Doctor said apologetically, “I’m sorry. But if it’s any consolation, it’s been a really, really bad day today…”
“But I thought you were always all right?”
The Doctor looked up at her ginger-haired best friend-yet another old friend who was impossibly standing before her-and she felt a part of her newly resurrected body crumple and wither inside.
She’d thought her own death had been reparation enough. Apparently she was wrong.
“Yeah…” said the Doctor, sadly. “’Special Timelord code,’ remember?”
“Yeaaah,” Donna nodded back and reached down to grasp the Doctor’s hand. She gave it a squeeze-a squeeze that said so much: I remember that day, I remember everything, I love you, I’m concerned for you, I’m sorry you had a terrible day, I’m here for you.
The Doctor squeezed her eyes shut. It was so good to see her, but she just couldn’t let her in; because just like the visions she’d seen in Rassilon’s Tomb, none of this was real…
Because, this was a reality that was never meant to be…
Sensing that somehow Donna’s presence was shutting the Doctor down, Jack stood and asked her to run and get them all some Torchwood issue uniforms that they could wear whilst they and their clothes were cleaned.
“You’ll be mighty lucky if they can even get all those old rags cleaned,” she chastised. “Where’d you three go, Planet of the Blood Sacrifice?”
The Doctor’s eyes opened again and she squinted in thought at Donna’s offhand remark. There was something to it…
The other two kept their heads low as she continued, lest they draw her ire. Donna pointed an accusatory finger at the Doctor, “I swear you always have found the worst places to travel to. Would it kill you to go to a ClubMed every once in awhile?” She kept at them, “And something to eat shouldn’t be out of the question, either,” bossed Donna. “Looks like you lot have spent a week tunneling to China…”
And with that, she grasped the Doctor and pulled her into a hug.
Stunned, the Doctor allowed her face to be swallowed by Donna’s red mane and fought with her insides as her head was a whirl of thoughts, questions and feelings. Little things hit her that she’d forgotten, like Donna’s sweetly familiar shampoo of ginger pear and the warmth of her flattened hand against her mid-back when she hugged. And yet, despite all of her doubts and silently sounding alarms, while she couldn’t believe Donna should actually be here, the Doctor decided to enjoy it, if only for a while.
But then, Donna pushed her off. “Euccch!” she complained, wiping her hands on her trousers, and looking suspiciously at the state of the Doctor’s clothing. “Missus, you need a bath you do!” She shook her head and turned to walk away. “And I’m tellin’ cook to give you an extra helping of mash,” she said with a wave of her hand, “I don’t care if you do wear lipstick now-you’re still too damn skinny!”
As soon as she was gone, Jack led the Doctor back to her seat and crouched down in front of her. “Spill it. What’s wrong? Why are you so spooked to see Donna, of all people?”
“Don’t you think you ought to show your daughter around Torchwood?” Twelve asked in a monotone, hooking her chin towards River. She was trying to buy herself some time to think things through.
Jack shrugged. “She’s been here before,” he said, earning him a startled look from the Doctor.
“I came here to collect him after my bracelet activated, just like you asked,” replied River.
At least she did one thing I asked, thought Twelve, ruefully. She took a breath before going on.
“Jack, where’s Martha?” asked Twelve.
Jack and River exchanged another look of concern.
“What do you mean?” asked Jack, cautiously.
Twelve narrowed her eyes at him. “Martha, Jack…”
He swallowed.
The Doctor tried another angle. “Fine. Mickey then.”
His eyebrows lifted.
The Doctor was growing impatient. “Where are they, Jack?”
Jack’s worry about the Doctor escalated. His voice was quiet, apprehensive, “Mickey’s in the parallel world, Doctor. He’s been there for years-“
The Doctor’s alarm heightened-“And Rose?”
“Is still there, too...”
Only slightly less alarmed, the Doctor stared hard at Jack. Her question was more of a statement: “With another version of Ten?”
Jack’s eyebrows creased. “Of course…”
Alarmed, the Doctor swiveled towards Jack, “How is that possible if Donna wasn’t there to activate the metacrisis?”
“Donna? No, it was me,” said Jack. “I was there. I got locked in the TARDIS while you and Rose faced Davros, don’t you remember?”
“What about the Timelord consciousness?”
“Oh that killed me stone dead. Burned out my brain.” He shrugged, “But it’s me! So I just popped back up. Don’t remember any of that gobbledygook now. Fixed point, right? Just reset back to plain old human---Well,” he waggled his eyebrows, “plain old human, plus…”
“But you’re sure Rose and the other one made it back to Pete’s World?”
“I was with you when you dropped them off.”
Twelve exhaled. “Then he hasn’t got it right yet,” she muttered to herself, almost in relief before asking: “Where’s Martha then?”
Jack cocked his head at the Doctor. “I’d really like Carly to take a look at you, Doctor. Run some scans, see if-“
“Who??” she blurted, incredulous. “Carly?? Did you say, Carly?”
“Yeah, you know Carly, our Med Technician…”
“Where’s Martha??” Twelve demanded.
“You know what happened to Martha, Doctor-She died!” Jack finally blurted out. “She died during the last Dalek attack, when Davros had us all in that ship! She was wiped out with all the UNIT forces in New York.”
The Doctor took a moment to register what Jack had just said, finally understanding the reference at Gallifrey after she’d been resurrected-part of his rationale for Ten’s ungluing. She was quickly coming up with a reason why her friends seemed to remember an event that clearly hadn’t happened…
Meanwhile, Jack stood up and called for Carly before turning back to the Doctor. “I’m sorry, but I think something’s happened with this resurrection and I want you checked out…”
The Doctor waved him off. “There’s nothing wrong with me, I keep telling you.” Twelve turned to River. “You knew this about Martha?”
River nodded, but as usual, picked up on the Doctor’s underlying train of thought: “You said there was nothing wrong with you-“
“There isn’t!!” insisted Twelve.
“I believe you, Sweetie,” she reassured. “That implies something else is wrong… Is it the timelines? Is this different than how you remember? It is, isn’t it?”
Twelve nodded grimly.
River looked to Jack and put her hand on his arm. “The Doctor said she could feel the timelines had changed-were changing-before we left Gallifrey. This timeline now is different than she remembers, which means something’s already happened. Things have changed. We don’t notice it, but she does. The resurrection process was still working on the Doctor when things changed, which kept her outside and made her even more sensitive to noticing the difference.” Putting it together, she turned to the Doctor, “Which means that Donna isn’t meant to be here and Martha is. Is that right, Doctor?”
“Yes,” groaned Twelve, her head in her hands. “Mickey, too.”
“Y’mean it’s Ten?”
“The Valeyard,” corrected Twelve, “yes…”
“But I don’t understand,” said Jack, “why would he let Donna live and Martha die?”
“He wouldn’t,” replied Twelve, stonily. “And Donna didn’t die, it was a memory wipe-she was supposed to forget us. She would never be here, working for you, in the original timeline.”
Jack turned and waved Carly off as she headed over towards them, resending his order. The Doctor caught a glimpse of her-young and beautiful, her whole life ahead of her-and absolutely not supposed to be there. She felt ill putting together her next thoughts, “No, obviously he’s gone and done something, but somehow things didn’t turn out as he’d intended, not if Martha’s dead. I’m sure whatever he’s done, once he figures out it didn’t work, he’ll try and twist it back to how he intended.”
“But isn’t that dangerous?” gaped River.
“Of course it is-terribly so!” she bleated. She paused, looking briefly for an apt metaphor. “Look,” she continued, “time behaves like cake batter,” she explained, “if you overwork it, the final timeline will split and crack. Just like a cake with a split top, the excess bubbles from the overworked batter will rise and ruin the surface-“
Jack looked puzzled. “Time is a cake?”
Twelve stared at him. “Now that’s the kind of question I’d expect to hear from Mickey at this point… But yes, think of it like that, if it helps. And it looks like whatever he’s done has begun to strain the timelines and resulted in unintended consequences…”
“Like Martha being dead?”
The Doctor paused, hating to hear those words. “I’m sure he doesn’t know about that,” she said softly, “And once he does, like I said, he’ll try to correct it.”
“And that would just put more cracks in time?”
“Yep.” She felt a wave of sadness saying the word: Her Tenth self wasn’t there to share their in-joke.
Suddenly the Earth shook, just as it had been doing before she’d left to find her Eighth self on Gallifrey. Alarms sounded again throughout Torchwood, although nobody snapped to attention or ran to do anything. By now, they were all used to it. Her death was supposed to have fixed this, but the Valeyard had only made things worse.
“See?” said the Doctor, gesturing around them, “Unintended consequences…”
River and Jack glanced at each other in understanding.
“So he has to be stopped before he does any more harm,” said River, steeling herself for what she thought might be next.
Jack shook his head in frustration. “But he has the TARDIS! He has all of time and space! We don’t even know where he is, what he’s up to or what he intends to do.”
“When has that ever stopped us before?” asked Twelve dryly with a sly smirk.
Jack gave a sad laugh.
“Besides, we’re not that badly off,” said Twelve. “We have me, and I’m just as good as him-fundamentally we’re the same person. We think the same.”
“You know where he is?”
“I know one place the Valeyard’s been: Transboolian. He was there the night of the Death Winds.”
River was aghast. “Death Winds?? You survived Death Winds?”
“We both did,” she corrected. “And of course we did-It’s me!” She grinned before growing serious again and she shook her head. “But that’s not the point. The point is he went back there-during the Death Winds, but after my death on Gallifrey. He must have. He was wearing my black coat, the one he took off me. I didn’t know it at the time, thought he was the Master-the details aren’t important right now-but what is important is that I know why he was there, now. He must have been after the Gem of Salvation…”
“Oooh! I’ve heard of the Gem of Salvation,” breathed River. “Read about it in archeology school. It was supposed to lead the bearer to their greatest desire.”
“How would a rock know a person’s greatest desire?” asked Jack.
“When it’s not just a rock,” replied Twelve. “My bet is that it’s made up of some sort of organic, telepathic element like Crystallized Chronosium or something.”
“That’s entirely possible,” agreed River. “That’s what’s been theorized at least, but nobody’s ever found it.”
“I bet I know someone who has,” Twelve said, grimly.
“Ten-I mean, er, the Valeyard?”
Twelve nodded.
“Then what would be his greatest desire?”
“I can think of two,” answered Twelve.
“Rose,” answered Jack.
Twelve nodded solemnly. “That’s one.”
“And what else?” asked River, and then she thought a second-“Oh… Of course: Stopping the Time War...”
Twelve nodded again. “Better yet, stopping it from happening in the first place. That’s what I’d want.”
“But how would the gem accomplish that?”
“I’m not sure,” answered the Doctor, “but once he gets the gem, I’m sure it could lead him to something that could.”
“But erasing the Time War would be temporal change on a massive scale,” breathed River, “Even if he found something that could work, with what you’re talking about, it would require applying the method with precision to avoid the total collapse of the time continuum. How would he do it?”
“He’d go to the Gallifreyan Matrix,” answered Twelve.
River and Jack stared at each other in confusion.
“But you’ve always told us the Matrix was destroyed?” said Jack, startled.
“No, I didn’t. The Matrix was never destroyed, just our access points to it were. Remember, Jack, I said the Matrix itself was never located on Gallifrey-it’s extradimensionally located-it could be anywhere. We never really knew precisely where it was, it was just there and we had access to it. It had been set up so long before living memory that nobody knew exactly where it was, it just existed. Like you lot and the Grand Canyon-you never saw it get made, it was just there when you noticed it.” She stared down at her refurbished hand and traced a finger over the bloodstains that showed where her old wound was, like dotted lines on a sewing pattern. “I’m betting the Matrix has other access points, ones we never knew about-and he’ll be scouring the universe for one.”
“So he’ll use the Gem of Salvation to find an access point to the Matrix and then what?”
“If he can gain access then he’ll insert himself and attempt to alter the Matrix to erase the Time War and set up an alternate timeline: One where the Time War never happened. And honestly, he’s capable of doing it, as a Timelord.”
Jack was puzzled. “Then why haven’t you done it before?”
“Because it’s wrong,” she answered straightforwardly. “Believe me, Jack, I’ve thought of it-it’s crossed my mind often these last long years-which is why I know what he’s up to. But ultimately it’s something that shouldn’t be messed with! There are simply too many other timelines that hang off that one, too many events that have unfolded the way they have precisely because the Time War existed. No, you start messing with stuff like that and all kinds of unintended consequences come bubbling up.”
Jack nodded, understanding. “Leading to too many bubbles… If I’m understanding the earlier time/cake metaphor?”
“Precisely.” She started to run her fingers through her grimy hair in frustration but abandoned the exercise once she felt how gritty it was. “Imagine he were to figure out about Martha, but by trying to save her he accidentally brings about the death of another companion-or another historical figure, or even alters a few fixed points in time?” She wiped her hands on her black trousers as she continued, “Then he has to go back and try and fix that… However time has a way of taking care of itself, and some threads would become lost forever, they’d atrophy and collapse. Pretty soon, the threads of what needs to be fixed and their unintended consequences becomes so tangled that he can no longer see how to change things or what might happen if he does. To go back to the cake/time metaphor, he could literally pull time apart-and make the cake fall.”
Both River and Jack looked at the Doctor slack jawed, with matching horrified expressions, their feelings of dread rising as she detailed the ghastly possibilities.
The Doctor continued: “Ultimately, the timelines could become so fractured that the only way he’d be able to exist would be to lock himself inside his TARDIS, in the Vortex, outside time as the rest of us evaporated. Even then, the TARDIS is temporally based, so she would only be a temporary lifeboat for him at best. No, what he seems to be up to is so dangerous, so potentially unstable, that nothing good could come from it at all…”
Torchwood was rocked by another small-scale quake.
“More bubbles in the batter…” muttered Jack. The Doctor nodded. “Then why is he attempting it??” gasped Jack. “If Ten’s the same as you and you’ve both had these thoughts and know these same things, then why is he trying?”
“Because he’s hurting,” answered River simply, the sadness in her voice, still empathising with the version of the Doctor that could never love her.
Twelve nodded. “Because he’s hurting,” she agreed. “And he’s broken. And he’s not Ten anymore. He’s the Valeyard now. And the Valeyard is a sad, broken little boy who’s all on his own and wants to rig the universe up to play by his rules.”
“So that nobody will ever leave him again…” finished Jack.
Twelve nodded, sadly. “Yeah...”
“You still haven’t answered my other question,” said Jack. “How do we know where to find him?”
“Homing device,” answered River again. She turned to the Doctor, “Right?”
Twelve grimaced. “Ordinarily, yes,” she replied, “But in this case, no.”
Jack looked puzzled, “You lost me, Doc…”
River turned to her father, “The Doctor can find the TARDIS with the sonic if they become separated. Like if she’s on a spaceship that breaks apart in flight, the TARDIS has an Automatic Emergency Landing function that will lock onto the nearest centre of gravity and land.”
“Except the Valeyard is not on Earth,” said the Doctor, rubbing the bridge of her nose in frustration. “If he wants to reverse the Time War he can’t to it from here. And before you ask, yes-I’ve already checked.” She pulled out her sonic and rattled it before stuffing it back into her pocket.
Jack rubbed the short shorn hair on the back of his head. “So now what?”
Twelve turned to look back up at Jack. “Please tell me that in this new timeline you still have all those old scrap pieces of TARDIS parts we salvaged off House.”
“Of course! They’re safely in storage.”
Twelve looked away. “I know you won’t remember this, but Mickey dragged those pieces out of the TARDIS for me…”
“We’ll get him back, Doctor,” River said gently, “We’ll fix the timelines and put everything to rights. We’ll get Martha and Mickey back.”
The Doctor sighed and looked off into the distance. “Yeah, but then I’ll lose Donna all over again…” She tipped back in her chair, squeezing her head between her hands she groaned in frustration, “And this is why this is all so wrong. It isn’t evil-what the Valeyard’s doing-it’s just misguided, and dangerous. Cos I’d give anything to have Donna back-but within reason…” She looked up at them. “Does that make me horrible?”
River reached out and caressed the Doctor’s cheek. “No, Sweetie. It makes you human…”
******
The trio washed up and ate Donna’s tea. By then, the Doctor had formulated a plan.
Once Donna left to meet Paul for dinner reservations, the Doctor sat down with River and Jack to listen to her plan, and what she’d need from both of them next.
Not only was the universe still in danger, but also the timelines were hanging by a thread. If left to his selfish, misguided devices-no matter how well intentioned they were-the Valeyard could quickly undo all of reality and plunge the entire universe into a chaotic, splintered, abomination of existence.
And the Doctor had a plan to stop it.
But before she told them, she made them both agree not to interrupt, dissuade or disagree with her.
Because she was about to ask each of them to do something very difficult indeed…
To be continued in Chapter 23: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow…
* In addition to the usual Nu Who and Classic references, the chilling DW audiobook, “He Jests at Scars,” shows the precise danger of the Valeyard mucking about with the timelines to suit his own needs.