Doctor Who - Time After Time: Part Five
Title: Time After Time
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of Dr Who or The Sarah Jane Adventures
Pairing/s: Tenth Doctor/Sarah Jane Smith, Liz Shaw/Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Rating: Teen
Summary: A call to return brings more then the Doctor bargained for.
Author's Note: Let me just say, the title for this part was going to be the title for the whole thing. But it kinda would have given the game away, so I moved it to here. Oh and... Italics with no quotation marks? Those are thoughts.
--
Part Five: The Second Last Time Lord
--
After a rather intimidating warning from Liz - something about how the Universe itself couldn’t hide him from her if he upset Sarah Jane - the Doctor cautiously opened the door to the bedroom. Contrary to when he left he found his best friend sitting cross-legged on the bed and fully dressed. Though her clothes were a little bigger they still fit her extremely well. “My Sarah...” He breathed out, unable to move past the doorway as he admired the features of the woman he had met so long ago. She looked exactly the same as the day he’d first met her, not that she’d really changed much over time, but he’d felt as though he’d gone back through time and picked her up exactly where he’d left her.
In bloody Aberdeen...
The Doctor flinched as he heard Sarah Jane’s voice clearly in his mind. “I did apologise for that,” he reminded her warily.
“In your own way,” She shrugged, her eyes watching him closely as he gradually crossed the room. It was odd to see him so cautious about something, particularly when it came to her. “I’m not going to bite, you know.”
“Right no... I just...” With his hands firmly in his pockets the Doctor glanced around the room before his eyes landed back on his best friend. He was trying, to the best of his ability, to contain his excitement. After all her regeneration meant he was no longer the last of his species, but at the same time he knew he had to work out why it had happened in the first place. “How are you feeling?” He asked as casually as he could.
“Considering I’ve been dead for a couple of days I’m feeling pretty good,” She admitted with a slight nod of her head. Her fingers absent-mindedly tapped a beat out on her ankles as they both tried to push past the awkwardness of the situation. “The whole regeneration process is quite... energising.” Her attempt at small talk was worse than his attempt at an apology, but it was the best she could do.
The Doctor nodded and took his final step towards the bed. “The first time tends to knock you around,” He offered with a shrug of his shoulders.
Becoming more and more frustrated with their dead end conversation, Sarah Jane stepped up to the plate and pushed herself up off the bed so that she stood next to him. “Doctor I need to know what you’ve done to me,” She demanded, crossing her arms over her chest as she looked up at him. While her height wasn’t necessarily threatening her demeanour definitely could be.
“What I’ve... Why is it always my fault?” The Doctor cried out, unsure what he’d done in the first place - if, in fact, he’d actually done something. But then he shook his head violently and took a step back from her. “The fact that you’re Gallifreyan is not my doing, I can honestly tell you I played no part in this. You’re full blooded Gallifreyan, this would all be the work of Barbara and Eddie... Smith...” He frowned then, staring at her for an excruciatingly long moment.
Sarah Jane tried not to look puzzled as she stared straight back at him, while also trying not to look down and become fascinated with her breasts. Not that there was anything particularly odd about it, but she hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to how much her body had changed. For all intents and purposes she was beginning to enjoy being her younger self again. “Stop staring at me it’s creepy,” She grumbled, not sure what he was looking at.
Ignoring her completely, interested purely in his own train of thought, the Doctor began to circle her. Trying to see if there was anything he hadn’t noticed before. Granted not much could be noticed when she was covered by all those clothes. Though it was very likely Sarah Jane would be appalled if he asked her to get her kit off without so much as a cup of tea first. No, that wouldn’t do. “You’re Barbara and Eddie’s daughter...” He muttered, still circling her.
“And you seem to be channelling a vulture,” She replied sarcastically, trying as best she could to keep an eye on him without moving. “As much as I’m enjoying this game of ‘State the Obvious’ I don’t see the problem. You knew about my parents.”
“Ah, I knew, but I didn’t know,” He told her matter-of-factly.
“Well no they died long before I met you...”
“No,” The Doctor grabbed her shoulders, holding her at arm’s length as he watched her expression closely. “I didn’t know them as much as I knew them. I know I would have known them had I known. No, no, I definitely knew, though I didn’t know them.”
“You know the really sad part?” Sarah Jane sighed. “I actually understood that.”
“Of course you did,” He shrugged as if there was nothing confusing about it, at least not to him.
“So what you’re telling me is that you knew who my parents were,” She began slowly, pausing as he nodded before continuing her line of thought. “But of course you didn’t know them because you’d never met them, but had you met them you would have known that you knew them.”
“Smith is a very common name,” He muttered more to himself then to her. “It appears great minds really do think alike.”
“And fools seldom differ,” Sarah Jane responded in annoyance. She paused briefly, not remembering where she learnt the rest of that particular quote. Remembering things she hadn’t known in the first place was a little off putting. “If you’re saying my parents were Time Lords, then why did they die? Why didn’t they take me with them? Surely leaving an alien child to grow up amongst humans would be more dangerous. Logically it makes no sense.”
“Search me, then again...” The Doctor ran his hand through his hair as he thought about it all. He could remember the stories when he was a child, stories that were exaggerated over time. It was hard to know in the end what held truth and what was purely myth. But there was no other possibility unless Sarah Jane’s parents had put her in a capsule as a baby and sent her to Earth before their planet was destroyed, resulting in their deaths. Though he was fairly certain he’d seen that particular scenario in a movie. No, there was really only one possible answer.
When the long silence between them seemed to have no ending Sarah Jane stepped closer and looked up into his brown eyes, searching them. “What are you thinking?” She asked, trying to work out how she’d managed to get inside his mind before. All she could see were closed doors. “You know something that you’re not telling me. Don’t you think I have the right to know? This is my life you’re messing with...”
“It really isn’t,” He said and took a quick step back when she glared at him. “That is to say, it is your life... but I’m not messing with it. I told you Sarah Jane, I had nothing to do with this...”
“But you know something and you’re keeping it from me,” She argued.
“It was long before my time,” He warned her as he thought over everything he had been told. “It became a legend of sorts, being passed down as a warning to us all, I can’t be sure how much of what I know is the truth. The Time Lords wanted it forgotten. They may have intentionally tarnished their images in order to hide the truth...”
“Who are you talking about?” Sarah Jane demanded.
He shook his head slowly and backed away from her. Memories from his childhood flooded his mind. Somewhere in the fading images he saw his mother warning him not to talk about them, just as he had warned his own children. By the time Susan was born the story had twisted and changed into some sort of horrific tale. The kind human children told each other in the middle of the night to see who scared easily. But there was no one around to stop him anymore. There would be no punishment if he were to yell what he knew across the far reaches of the galaxy.
“Doctor I need to know what’s going on,” Sarah Jane said quietly as she sat back down on her bed. “You’re the only person that can help me.” A thought occurred to her as she watched him and a smile spread across her lips. When he didn’t respond, not even moving to look at her, she leaned forward and sighed. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”
The Doctor looked up suddenly. He was somewhat shocked that Sarah Jane would quote one of his favourite films. It wasn’t particularly in her nature but then... she had regenerated. He was yet to find out what changes there were to her personality, so far everything seemed to the same. “I can only tell you what I know...”
“So tell me,” She urged him, crossing her legs as she got comfortable on the bed. “Don’t tread lightly around me, Doctor, you know how much I hate when you try to protect me. I need to know whatever it is that you believe is relevant, let me decide whether I can handle it or not.”
“We’re talking about a time, almost a Millennia, before I was born...”
“Please,” Sarah Jane pleaded with him.
He sighed heavily, knowing he had no choice from the moment he saw the hopeless look in her eyes. “We weren’t allowed to speak their names,” He began to explain as he moved to sit next to her on the bed. It would take a lot of explaining on his part, particularly to get around the gaps in his knowledge. “They were referred to as one. Alpha Omega we called them, the beginning and the end.”
“The beginning and the end of what?” She asked quietly, not wanting to interrupt him but at the same time needing to know more.
“Rebellion,” He responded a little more harshly than he would have liked. But he’d now experienced firsthand why it was wrong to mess with fixed points in time. Though that was the trouble when parts of history were slowly erased with each generation, the warning got lost in translation. The threat was no longer there. It was just a story that he wasn’t allowed to talk about. “They were charged with the corruption of Time itself, but they were the first Time Lords to try such a thing. Fixed points in history were changed forever, saving countless lives that were not meant to remain in that time.”
Sarah Jane frowned as she listened to him, unsure what was wrong with what she was hearing. Of course he’d explained countless times about fixed points in history, she knew that things shouldn’t be changed. “But once it’s changed it can’t be changed back,” She offered with a slight shrug of her shoulders. “So why not just allow for those lives to be saved? They were charged, so surely they wouldn’t have done it again.”
“One of the fixed points they changed was a disaster in London that would have killed 505 people when the Tower Bridge collapsed in 1912...”
“The Tower Bridge didn’t collapse,” Sarah Jane cut in, certain she would have remembered learning such a thing in school. They had gone on two field trips to study the bridge when she was a child, surely it would have been mentioned. Though there was something in the back of her mind that she couldn’t quite get a hold of. Something that suggested she had heard of it before.
“That’s just the point, Sarah, it didn’t collapse at all,” The Doctor jumped to his feet again, feeling the need to pace. “It didn’t collapse, those people didn’t die. Then two weeks later came the worst disaster in maritime history. 1,517 people died. 370 of those people had been on the Tower Bridge April 1st.”
“April 1912...” She felt as though she’d just been punched in the stomach. Images she’d seen over the years flooded her mind and she could feel a sharp pain in her chest. “...the Titanic.” She whispered.
“The number of deaths tripled from the accident that would have occurred on the Bridge,” He ran his hands through his hair. “They did that throughout Time - throughout the Universe, Sarah. They had altered over twenty-seven fixed points in time before they were caught and held accountable for their crimes.”
“Twenty-seven fixed points in time...” Sarah Jane let the information sink into her expanded mind, calculating the possible number of deaths. It stood to reason that if they were trying to save lives they would have focused on moments as big as the Tower Bridge collapse had been. Which would mean that if all the later events caused by the change were on the same scale as the Titanic disaster... “That’s roughly forty thousand, at the least. Forty thousand lives throughout Time and Space - men and women, children with no concept of what was happening. My parents were murderers.”
Seeing her begin to fade away into the depths of her mind with such knowledge, the Doctor pulled her to her feet and forced her to look at him. “Listen to me Sarah,” He said sharply to get her attention. “They believed they were doing the right thing. They were trying to make the Time Lords better, stronger. Make them do something other than observe.”
“At the cost of innocent lives!” Though she’d intended to yell, her voice came out quite hoarse and she struggled to stay relatively calm. She looked at him for a moment and then closed her eyes, blocking out the sad expression staring back at her. “What happened to them?” She asked after taking a deep breath. “It doesn’t explain how I ended up living like a human.”
“The story goes that when they were caught the male convinced the Time Lords that he’d done it all,” He told her honestly, brushing a stray tear from her cheek. “There’s no way of knowing whether what he said was the truth or not. But they took his word and... They took his lives.”
She opened her eyes then and frowned, looking at him curiously. “You mean they executed him?” But even as she said it the idea didn’t make sense. There was regeneration to consider, unless there was some way of making it stop. “It’s not that simple.” She said, responding to her own question before he had a chance. “What goes in to killing a Time Lord, stopping regeneration from occurring? What did they do to him?”
“Each day as the suns set they would read the charges against him and ask for his plea,” The Doctor continued. He held onto her, fingers gently moving in circles against her arms as he spoke. “They wanted him to give up his wife, for her to tell the truth, so that they could make an example out of them. Prevent others from following in their footsteps. Each day he would tell them that he was acting alone, and his wife refused to speak. So each day she would watch as he died and then regenerated. Over and over again, until there were none left, essentially he was human.”
“So what happened to them?” Sarah Jane asked slowly.
“Alpha Omega escaped,” He said with a slight shrug of his shoulders, as if it was the obvious conclusion. “The female forced her own regeneration and stole the body of another, which is a grave offence in itself. But in doing so it allowed her to walk straight out of her confinement and commandeer a TARDIS, though they weren’t called a TARDIS back then. She took her husband with her and they disappeared completely. The only Time Lords to ever do so. It’s the only explanation Sarah.”
As she slowly nodded her understanding she stepped away from him and moved slowly around her room. “The only explanation,” She repeated absentmindedly, running her fingers along the edge of her chest of drawers. Every tiny groove in the wood seemed to stand out against her skin, though she hardly noticed. It was all too much in one day. “It’s the only explanation, Sarah Jane. The only explanation... it’s the only explanation.” She continued to mutter the words over and over as she studied everything around her with her hands. A million different feelings seemed to explode within her as her fingertips brushed over anything she could find. She studied each little detail of her bedroom, letting her mind continue to expand as she continued on her path of self discovery. The unseen paint strokes on the wall, the heat still emanating from the bathroom door, it all seemed to linger as though it had always been there - as though she had just never taken the time to notice it.
Without warning she pulled back and raised her hands to her head. “Oh God make it stop,” She growled out, cringing as she lurched backwards into the Doctor.
Instinctively he put his arms around her, stopping her from moving any further. He’d seen such a reaction before in rare cases on Gallifrey, children whose minds had not been properly stimulated during their development thus making their first regeneration a traumatic experience. It had been considered an act of abuse. “Your mind is expanding Sarah and it’s going to hurt but you can’t fight it,” He warned her quickly, tightening his grip on her as she tried to break free. “Trying to stop it will just make it worse. Sarah Jane, listen to me.”
She let out an ear piercing scream as her body dropped to the ground, the Doctor falling with her as he attempted to calm her. But nothing would put an end to the agony she was in. Her mind was expanding at a rate of knots as the awakened Time Lord engulfed her human bred brain, demanding complete submission. Hundreds of voices echoed in her head gaining in volume as the pain intensified. She wanted it all gone, she wanted them all to just shut up. But the more she tried to stop it the worse it became. “Go away, go away,” She cried as she curled up on the floor and covered her head with her hands. “Go away, I don’t want to hear you!”
“You just need to relax Sarah...”
“JUST STOP!” She screamed as a bust of energy shot out from her body.
The Doctor was thrown backwards, but he was quick to scramble back to her as she continued screaming. “It’s for your own good Sarah,” He said apologetically. The second her face turned up from the floor he let his fist connect firmly with her jaw, knocking her out cold.
--
Part Six
--
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of Dr Who or The Sarah Jane Adventures
Pairing/s: Tenth Doctor/Sarah Jane Smith, Liz Shaw/Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Rating: Teen
Summary: A call to return brings more then the Doctor bargained for.
Author's Note: Let me just say, the title for this part was going to be the title for the whole thing. But it kinda would have given the game away, so I moved it to here. Oh and... Italics with no quotation marks? Those are thoughts.
--
Part Five: The Second Last Time Lord
--
After a rather intimidating warning from Liz - something about how the Universe itself couldn’t hide him from her if he upset Sarah Jane - the Doctor cautiously opened the door to the bedroom. Contrary to when he left he found his best friend sitting cross-legged on the bed and fully dressed. Though her clothes were a little bigger they still fit her extremely well. “My Sarah...” He breathed out, unable to move past the doorway as he admired the features of the woman he had met so long ago. She looked exactly the same as the day he’d first met her, not that she’d really changed much over time, but he’d felt as though he’d gone back through time and picked her up exactly where he’d left her.
In bloody Aberdeen...
The Doctor flinched as he heard Sarah Jane’s voice clearly in his mind. “I did apologise for that,” he reminded her warily.
“In your own way,” She shrugged, her eyes watching him closely as he gradually crossed the room. It was odd to see him so cautious about something, particularly when it came to her. “I’m not going to bite, you know.”
“Right no... I just...” With his hands firmly in his pockets the Doctor glanced around the room before his eyes landed back on his best friend. He was trying, to the best of his ability, to contain his excitement. After all her regeneration meant he was no longer the last of his species, but at the same time he knew he had to work out why it had happened in the first place. “How are you feeling?” He asked as casually as he could.
“Considering I’ve been dead for a couple of days I’m feeling pretty good,” She admitted with a slight nod of her head. Her fingers absent-mindedly tapped a beat out on her ankles as they both tried to push past the awkwardness of the situation. “The whole regeneration process is quite... energising.” Her attempt at small talk was worse than his attempt at an apology, but it was the best she could do.
The Doctor nodded and took his final step towards the bed. “The first time tends to knock you around,” He offered with a shrug of his shoulders.
Becoming more and more frustrated with their dead end conversation, Sarah Jane stepped up to the plate and pushed herself up off the bed so that she stood next to him. “Doctor I need to know what you’ve done to me,” She demanded, crossing her arms over her chest as she looked up at him. While her height wasn’t necessarily threatening her demeanour definitely could be.
“What I’ve... Why is it always my fault?” The Doctor cried out, unsure what he’d done in the first place - if, in fact, he’d actually done something. But then he shook his head violently and took a step back from her. “The fact that you’re Gallifreyan is not my doing, I can honestly tell you I played no part in this. You’re full blooded Gallifreyan, this would all be the work of Barbara and Eddie... Smith...” He frowned then, staring at her for an excruciatingly long moment.
Sarah Jane tried not to look puzzled as she stared straight back at him, while also trying not to look down and become fascinated with her breasts. Not that there was anything particularly odd about it, but she hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to how much her body had changed. For all intents and purposes she was beginning to enjoy being her younger self again. “Stop staring at me it’s creepy,” She grumbled, not sure what he was looking at.
Ignoring her completely, interested purely in his own train of thought, the Doctor began to circle her. Trying to see if there was anything he hadn’t noticed before. Granted not much could be noticed when she was covered by all those clothes. Though it was very likely Sarah Jane would be appalled if he asked her to get her kit off without so much as a cup of tea first. No, that wouldn’t do. “You’re Barbara and Eddie’s daughter...” He muttered, still circling her.
“And you seem to be channelling a vulture,” She replied sarcastically, trying as best she could to keep an eye on him without moving. “As much as I’m enjoying this game of ‘State the Obvious’ I don’t see the problem. You knew about my parents.”
“Ah, I knew, but I didn’t know,” He told her matter-of-factly.
“Well no they died long before I met you...”
“No,” The Doctor grabbed her shoulders, holding her at arm’s length as he watched her expression closely. “I didn’t know them as much as I knew them. I know I would have known them had I known. No, no, I definitely knew, though I didn’t know them.”
“You know the really sad part?” Sarah Jane sighed. “I actually understood that.”
“Of course you did,” He shrugged as if there was nothing confusing about it, at least not to him.
“So what you’re telling me is that you knew who my parents were,” She began slowly, pausing as he nodded before continuing her line of thought. “But of course you didn’t know them because you’d never met them, but had you met them you would have known that you knew them.”
“Smith is a very common name,” He muttered more to himself then to her. “It appears great minds really do think alike.”
“And fools seldom differ,” Sarah Jane responded in annoyance. She paused briefly, not remembering where she learnt the rest of that particular quote. Remembering things she hadn’t known in the first place was a little off putting. “If you’re saying my parents were Time Lords, then why did they die? Why didn’t they take me with them? Surely leaving an alien child to grow up amongst humans would be more dangerous. Logically it makes no sense.”
“Search me, then again...” The Doctor ran his hand through his hair as he thought about it all. He could remember the stories when he was a child, stories that were exaggerated over time. It was hard to know in the end what held truth and what was purely myth. But there was no other possibility unless Sarah Jane’s parents had put her in a capsule as a baby and sent her to Earth before their planet was destroyed, resulting in their deaths. Though he was fairly certain he’d seen that particular scenario in a movie. No, there was really only one possible answer.
When the long silence between them seemed to have no ending Sarah Jane stepped closer and looked up into his brown eyes, searching them. “What are you thinking?” She asked, trying to work out how she’d managed to get inside his mind before. All she could see were closed doors. “You know something that you’re not telling me. Don’t you think I have the right to know? This is my life you’re messing with...”
“It really isn’t,” He said and took a quick step back when she glared at him. “That is to say, it is your life... but I’m not messing with it. I told you Sarah Jane, I had nothing to do with this...”
“But you know something and you’re keeping it from me,” She argued.
“It was long before my time,” He warned her as he thought over everything he had been told. “It became a legend of sorts, being passed down as a warning to us all, I can’t be sure how much of what I know is the truth. The Time Lords wanted it forgotten. They may have intentionally tarnished their images in order to hide the truth...”
“Who are you talking about?” Sarah Jane demanded.
He shook his head slowly and backed away from her. Memories from his childhood flooded his mind. Somewhere in the fading images he saw his mother warning him not to talk about them, just as he had warned his own children. By the time Susan was born the story had twisted and changed into some sort of horrific tale. The kind human children told each other in the middle of the night to see who scared easily. But there was no one around to stop him anymore. There would be no punishment if he were to yell what he knew across the far reaches of the galaxy.
“Doctor I need to know what’s going on,” Sarah Jane said quietly as she sat back down on her bed. “You’re the only person that can help me.” A thought occurred to her as she watched him and a smile spread across her lips. When he didn’t respond, not even moving to look at her, she leaned forward and sighed. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”
The Doctor looked up suddenly. He was somewhat shocked that Sarah Jane would quote one of his favourite films. It wasn’t particularly in her nature but then... she had regenerated. He was yet to find out what changes there were to her personality, so far everything seemed to the same. “I can only tell you what I know...”
“So tell me,” She urged him, crossing her legs as she got comfortable on the bed. “Don’t tread lightly around me, Doctor, you know how much I hate when you try to protect me. I need to know whatever it is that you believe is relevant, let me decide whether I can handle it or not.”
“We’re talking about a time, almost a Millennia, before I was born...”
“Please,” Sarah Jane pleaded with him.
He sighed heavily, knowing he had no choice from the moment he saw the hopeless look in her eyes. “We weren’t allowed to speak their names,” He began to explain as he moved to sit next to her on the bed. It would take a lot of explaining on his part, particularly to get around the gaps in his knowledge. “They were referred to as one. Alpha Omega we called them, the beginning and the end.”
“The beginning and the end of what?” She asked quietly, not wanting to interrupt him but at the same time needing to know more.
“Rebellion,” He responded a little more harshly than he would have liked. But he’d now experienced firsthand why it was wrong to mess with fixed points in time. Though that was the trouble when parts of history were slowly erased with each generation, the warning got lost in translation. The threat was no longer there. It was just a story that he wasn’t allowed to talk about. “They were charged with the corruption of Time itself, but they were the first Time Lords to try such a thing. Fixed points in history were changed forever, saving countless lives that were not meant to remain in that time.”
Sarah Jane frowned as she listened to him, unsure what was wrong with what she was hearing. Of course he’d explained countless times about fixed points in history, she knew that things shouldn’t be changed. “But once it’s changed it can’t be changed back,” She offered with a slight shrug of her shoulders. “So why not just allow for those lives to be saved? They were charged, so surely they wouldn’t have done it again.”
“One of the fixed points they changed was a disaster in London that would have killed 505 people when the Tower Bridge collapsed in 1912...”
“The Tower Bridge didn’t collapse,” Sarah Jane cut in, certain she would have remembered learning such a thing in school. They had gone on two field trips to study the bridge when she was a child, surely it would have been mentioned. Though there was something in the back of her mind that she couldn’t quite get a hold of. Something that suggested she had heard of it before.
“That’s just the point, Sarah, it didn’t collapse at all,” The Doctor jumped to his feet again, feeling the need to pace. “It didn’t collapse, those people didn’t die. Then two weeks later came the worst disaster in maritime history. 1,517 people died. 370 of those people had been on the Tower Bridge April 1st.”
“April 1912...” She felt as though she’d just been punched in the stomach. Images she’d seen over the years flooded her mind and she could feel a sharp pain in her chest. “...the Titanic.” She whispered.
“The number of deaths tripled from the accident that would have occurred on the Bridge,” He ran his hands through his hair. “They did that throughout Time - throughout the Universe, Sarah. They had altered over twenty-seven fixed points in time before they were caught and held accountable for their crimes.”
“Twenty-seven fixed points in time...” Sarah Jane let the information sink into her expanded mind, calculating the possible number of deaths. It stood to reason that if they were trying to save lives they would have focused on moments as big as the Tower Bridge collapse had been. Which would mean that if all the later events caused by the change were on the same scale as the Titanic disaster... “That’s roughly forty thousand, at the least. Forty thousand lives throughout Time and Space - men and women, children with no concept of what was happening. My parents were murderers.”
Seeing her begin to fade away into the depths of her mind with such knowledge, the Doctor pulled her to her feet and forced her to look at him. “Listen to me Sarah,” He said sharply to get her attention. “They believed they were doing the right thing. They were trying to make the Time Lords better, stronger. Make them do something other than observe.”
“At the cost of innocent lives!” Though she’d intended to yell, her voice came out quite hoarse and she struggled to stay relatively calm. She looked at him for a moment and then closed her eyes, blocking out the sad expression staring back at her. “What happened to them?” She asked after taking a deep breath. “It doesn’t explain how I ended up living like a human.”
“The story goes that when they were caught the male convinced the Time Lords that he’d done it all,” He told her honestly, brushing a stray tear from her cheek. “There’s no way of knowing whether what he said was the truth or not. But they took his word and... They took his lives.”
She opened her eyes then and frowned, looking at him curiously. “You mean they executed him?” But even as she said it the idea didn’t make sense. There was regeneration to consider, unless there was some way of making it stop. “It’s not that simple.” She said, responding to her own question before he had a chance. “What goes in to killing a Time Lord, stopping regeneration from occurring? What did they do to him?”
“Each day as the suns set they would read the charges against him and ask for his plea,” The Doctor continued. He held onto her, fingers gently moving in circles against her arms as he spoke. “They wanted him to give up his wife, for her to tell the truth, so that they could make an example out of them. Prevent others from following in their footsteps. Each day he would tell them that he was acting alone, and his wife refused to speak. So each day she would watch as he died and then regenerated. Over and over again, until there were none left, essentially he was human.”
“So what happened to them?” Sarah Jane asked slowly.
“Alpha Omega escaped,” He said with a slight shrug of his shoulders, as if it was the obvious conclusion. “The female forced her own regeneration and stole the body of another, which is a grave offence in itself. But in doing so it allowed her to walk straight out of her confinement and commandeer a TARDIS, though they weren’t called a TARDIS back then. She took her husband with her and they disappeared completely. The only Time Lords to ever do so. It’s the only explanation Sarah.”
As she slowly nodded her understanding she stepped away from him and moved slowly around her room. “The only explanation,” She repeated absentmindedly, running her fingers along the edge of her chest of drawers. Every tiny groove in the wood seemed to stand out against her skin, though she hardly noticed. It was all too much in one day. “It’s the only explanation, Sarah Jane. The only explanation... it’s the only explanation.” She continued to mutter the words over and over as she studied everything around her with her hands. A million different feelings seemed to explode within her as her fingertips brushed over anything she could find. She studied each little detail of her bedroom, letting her mind continue to expand as she continued on her path of self discovery. The unseen paint strokes on the wall, the heat still emanating from the bathroom door, it all seemed to linger as though it had always been there - as though she had just never taken the time to notice it.
Without warning she pulled back and raised her hands to her head. “Oh God make it stop,” She growled out, cringing as she lurched backwards into the Doctor.
Instinctively he put his arms around her, stopping her from moving any further. He’d seen such a reaction before in rare cases on Gallifrey, children whose minds had not been properly stimulated during their development thus making their first regeneration a traumatic experience. It had been considered an act of abuse. “Your mind is expanding Sarah and it’s going to hurt but you can’t fight it,” He warned her quickly, tightening his grip on her as she tried to break free. “Trying to stop it will just make it worse. Sarah Jane, listen to me.”
She let out an ear piercing scream as her body dropped to the ground, the Doctor falling with her as he attempted to calm her. But nothing would put an end to the agony she was in. Her mind was expanding at a rate of knots as the awakened Time Lord engulfed her human bred brain, demanding complete submission. Hundreds of voices echoed in her head gaining in volume as the pain intensified. She wanted it all gone, she wanted them all to just shut up. But the more she tried to stop it the worse it became. “Go away, go away,” She cried as she curled up on the floor and covered her head with her hands. “Go away, I don’t want to hear you!”
“You just need to relax Sarah...”
“JUST STOP!” She screamed as a bust of energy shot out from her body.
The Doctor was thrown backwards, but he was quick to scramble back to her as she continued screaming. “It’s for your own good Sarah,” He said apologetically. The second her face turned up from the floor he let his fist connect firmly with her jaw, knocking her out cold.
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Part Six
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