Crossroads - A Blue Gravel Path (7/13)
Title: A Blue Gravel Path
Characters: The Doctor, Rose Tyler, among others
Warnings: PG. Oh, and it’s baby!fic.
Spoilers: For the sake of this story, S4 never happens.
Beta: runriggers
Part of the Crossroads series
A now AU and non-S4 compliant story. Ah well.
Part One: Reflections
Part Two: One Day
Part Three: Choices and Chances
Part Four: A Blue Gravel Path - Chapter One ~ Chapter Two ~ Chapter Three ~ Chapter Four ~ Chapter Five ~ Chapter Six
Chapter Seven: The Etymology of Names..... Mickey Smith and Dr Jones listen to a tale neither can quite believe. The Doctor begins to accept a path he doesn’t want to travel.
Chapter Six: A Woman Not Rose
For some reason, Dr Jones went with them. Mickey hadn’t asked her along, and she hadn’t asked to accompany them, but all the same she buckled herself beside Mickey in his car, with Carissa sitting behind them, calm, serene, and pale.
“I want you to explain it to me,” said Mickey, gripping the steering wheel. He glanced at the reflection of Carissa in the rearview mirror as he carefully navigated the car out of the underground parking lot. “How is it you’re in this world? Why are there two of you? Why is the Doctor called Theta?”
“That was his name, when I knew him,” replied Carissa.
“Who’s the Doctor?” demanded Dr Jones.
“He’s the man who brought me here,” explained Mickey. “A Time Lord in a blue police box.”
“And you think she knows him?”
“I know she does,” said Mickey grimly. “I found a picture of them together, she and him. They’re the ones who convinced Queen Victoria to start Torchwood. In this world, anyway - in my world, it was the Doctor and Rose.”
Dr Jones put her hand on her forehead. “So if she’s from this world, how do you think she knows your world’s Doctor?”
Mickey hadn’t thought of that; he glared at the figure in the rear view mirror, as if daring her to explain.
“It’s a valid question,” said Carissa. “One to which I’d like the answer, please.”
“You called him the Doctor,” said Mickey stubbornly. “It was you, wasn’t it, brushing against my neck in the hospital? Every time I mentioned the Doctor, I felt something. It was you. All the records about him in Torchwood - they call him Theta. He was never the Doctor in this world. But you call him Doctor, same as I do. You know the same Doctor I do. I want to know how.”
Carissa smiled. “Oh, you are clever. He must have liked you.”
“He called me an idiot.”
“I doubt that.”
“Doctor Theta is an odd name,” said Dr Jones, and Carissa laughed.
“That wasn’t his name, not together like that. He didn’t take on the name Doctor until much later, after we were older and more experienced in the world. When I knew him best, he was Theta. That wasn’t his name either, you must understand, just as Carissa wasn’t mine. It’s only how we called each other. He had a love for all things human even then, you see - choosing a Greek letter as a name!” She laughed, lost in her memory.
“Theta was the symbol for death,” persisted Dr Jones.
Carissa looked approvingly at Dr Jones. “In Athens, yes, it was. But it also symbolized the Agathodaemon, a good spirit representing luck and wisdom. I believe he liked the duality of the symbol. It proved appropriate enough, in time.”
“He never told me about the name Theta,” said Mickey. “He never said anything about you.”
Carissa didn’t answer right away; she glanced out the window to the soggy streets of London whisking by. Mickey kept his gaze divided between the road and her reflection, waiting somewhat impatiently for her response.
“How much do you know about him?”
“He’s a Time Lord,” said Mickey. “An alien from some other planet. Nine hundred years old, he said.”
“Older than that.”
“Well, he said it, I’m not guessing. Has a ship he calls the TARDIS shaped like a blue police box. And he can change his appearance. The picture I found in the Torchwood library, it was of the first way I saw him, with no hair and big ears and a black jacket. Next time I saw him, it was sideburns and a brown pinstripe suit.”
Carissa closed her eyes. “Yes,” she murmured. “I knew him before all that, before he’d regenerated the first time. Did he ever tell you where he was from?”
“No.”
“We were childhood friends. Always together in the nursery, sitting next to each other in lessons. We were inseparable. There weren’t families as such on Gallifrey, you must understand, but I suppose you’d call us brother and sister, we were so close with each other.”
“You loved him,” said Dr Jones, and Carissa’s eyes snapped open to look at her.
“You are from this world, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Perceptive, though. Yes, I loved him. He loved me. I was a little older than he was, and I had my TARDIS first. I took him with me on its maiden trip, because how could I not take him? Oh, it was wonderful. We circled the planet and shot off across the galaxy. We were giddy with the thrill of it, being away from the elders, away from school, away from anyone who might dare tell us what to do and how to do it. We found ourselves circling Varicose 3 and threw the TARDIS doors open to watch a star burn away, and I remember sitting with our legs dangling out, popping nuts into our mouths and laughing.”
Carissa sighed, a long, lonely sound. Mickey thought he’d heard such a sigh once before, in a set of memories that hadn’t actually happened.
“There are moments in life when you realize that the world is simply a journey, and you are walking a path which might go off in a thousand different directions. That moment, sitting in my TARDIS, Theta at my side - that was such a moment. I kissed him, or he kissed me. A brush of his lips against mine, it might have lasted thirty seconds or a thousand years. In my dreams, it was longer, but I don’t know. When we pulled away from each other, the look in his eyes - oh, how they glowed. How his very thoughts shimmered! And I knew if I leaned in again for another kiss, it would be the end of it.
“But I didn’t, you see. I was afraid of that kiss, of what might follow. Such things - they were unheard of for us, for our people. I don’t think he was sorry for it, really. He smiled at me, a little sad, but so understanding. Perhaps he was a little afraid too - we were both so good then, you see. Such fine young students, so unwilling to break with tradition and try something new. We followed the paths laid out for us with unerring precision.”
“You weren’t allowed to love him?” asked Dr Jones, faintly horrified.
“Oh, love him, of course, I could love him. It was the rest that would have met with disapproval.”
Mickey remained silent, focused on the road as the rain began to fall. Dr Jones, however, was proving to be an excellent interrogator. “What happened?”
“Before we closed the TARDIS doors, we saw something just outside, floating in the vacuum of space. It was small and brightly blue, shimmering as if newly formed, which I suppose it was, since we’d never seen its like before. It appeared to be trying to find a shape, moving between something spherical to star-burst and finally settling into a cube with rounded edges. Neither of us could take our eyes from it, and even as it became solid, I felt such an intense longing to touch it - to take back my earlier decision, that I nearly fell out of the doors toward it. Theta had to pull me back into the ship to keep me safe, and slowly our orbit pulled us away from it. My longing decreased as our distance increased, and soon, I’d forgotten about the pull altogether.”
Mickey had trouble breathing. “A blue box.”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever find out what it was?” asked Dr Jones.
Mickey and Carissa spoke at the same time before staring at each other in the mirror. “A crossroads.”
*
The rustle of clothes distracted the Doctor as he stood over Genevieve’s cot, and he turned to see Elizabeth sit up on her settee, her eyes clouded and red, but her back straight and her mouth firm. “Doctor,” she said, staring at him. “What are you doing to my child?”
The Doctor ignored the question. “Why did you name her Genevieve?” he asked. His hand still rested on Dex’s head, mostly to hold the boy close to him. Dex’s hands wrapped around his father’s leg and he peered out from behind to the princess sitting on the other side of the baby’s cot. The baby began to wake, mewing softly, but Dex turned his gaze to her and she instantly quieted again.
Elizabeth frowned. “It’s her name. I thought it was pretty.”
“Interesting choice for the child of an English princess, that’s all. Germanic in origin, I believe.”
“It’s none of your concern,” replied Elizabeth. “You haven’t answered my question - what are you doing to my child.”
“She isn’t your child,” said the Doctor, and he flipped the cellular modifier open again and looked at it. “Nope. Not even human.” He snapped the modifier closed. “I know you found her somewhere, decided to keep her, started to love her. It’s what you were meant to do, really. But even you must realize there’s something wrong. More people are arriving every hour to sit with her, and they never go away. You’ve lost all will to leave the house, and in six months time your sister will die and you’ll be handed the crown - and do what? Give it up to raise a child who isn’t yours?”
Elizabeth stood, shaking. “How dare you. Genevieve is my child in every way that counts. She may not have been borne by me, but she is of me. She is as human as you or I.”
“Half right,” replied the Doctor. He flipped the modifier open again, and lifted it above his head, pressing the side button. Instantly the air above them began sparkling, glowing, and finally crystallized into a massive web, rising up from the baby in the cot, glowing golden as it arched through the room, connecting everyone to her but the Doctor and Nina in the corner. From her cot, Janie giggled, and tried to grab the strands. Dex laughed, watching her, and pressed his cheek to his father’s leg, grinning madly.
Elizabeth gasped, staring at the web above her. She reached up to brush her fingers through the golden strands that touched her face, and though the strands shifted, they did not break.
“What is this magic?” she asked, amazement in her voice.
“Genevieve is an old name,” explained the Doctor, gazing up at the golden web. “So old that most have forgotten its origins. All save for my people, who never forgot anything worth knowing in this world. It means woman of the people. You might have given her the name, princess, but she told you who she was when you first picked her up. She told you she was one of you. Genevieve.”
Elizabeth fingered the strands of gold for a moment, their glowing light shining onto her face. “I found her in the forest - I’d broken away from the rest of them, and turned a corner, and there she was, waiting beneath the trees. She hadn’t been there a moment before. I picked her up, and - Genevieve. And I brought her home.”
The Doctor didn’t take his eyes off Elizabeth. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? Is she dangerous?” Elizabeth turned her gaze from the golden web to him. “Is this web dangerous?”
“It’s the connection she formed with you,” explained the Doctor. “Genevieve is a Chamalien - and a very young one, at that. Chamaliens leave their young scattered across the universe, where they take the forms of the living being that finds them first. Deer, dog, worm - it doesn’t matter. They create a bond with that creature, so that they’ll be taken care of, they’ll live to maturity, and then they leave to find others of their kind. Genevieve found you.”
Elizabeth smiled. “She did.”
“But it’s too strong, princess. She’s cast the net too far, and it’s drawing in more people than it should. Even now, more are coming to this house, more people to sit and care for her. She doesn’t want it, but she can’t stop it. I can help her stop it. I can help her break the net.”
Elizabeth looked back up at the golden web. “What will happen if you don’t?”
The Doctor paused. “Every connection she makes stretches her a little bit further. If she’s stretched too far, her mind will snap. She’ll die.”
Dex gasped and his grip on the Doctor’s leg tightened. The Doctor glanced down at his son, knowing that the boy hadn’t expected his answer, knowing the child was suddenly afraid. That he should know this without also feeling it took the Doctor by surprise.
“I don’t want her to die,” said Elizabeth softly. She stepped forward and gazed into the cot, leaning in to touch the baby’s cheek softly. Janie looked up at her, blinking, and grabbed at her fingers, bringing them to her mouth. Elizabeth laughed softly, and leaned in to kiss the girl’s forehead.
“Princess?”
“Will it hurt?”
Dex turned his gaze up to his father, repeating Elizabeth’s question in a silent plea, and the Doctor pressed the boy’s head to his leg in an equally silent response. “No,” he said. “It won’t hurt. You’ll never know it happened, except you won’t feel the same tug, the same irrational need to protect and defend. She’ll be just another baby to you.”
Elizabeth leaned over the cot, and her shoulders shook once, and then were still. She swiftly stood and walked away from them, and when she spoke, her voice was thick. “If I don’t allow you to do this thing....”
“Two, three days,” said the Doctor. “No more.”
Elizabeth’s hands gripped the edges of the fireplace mantle. “Do it.”
*
“So you know about crossroads, then?” asked Carissa, amused.
“That’s what it was, wasn’t it?” demanded Mickey. “It was a crossroads. That blue box - it was a crossroads!”
Dr Jones stared at them both, her head whipping back between Mickey beside her and Carissa in the rear-view mirror. “What’s a crossroads?”
Mickey didn’t pay her any attention. “How did your crossroads get into Torchwood Tower?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean - I went back to Varicose 3 several hundred years later, and the crossroads was still there.”
“There’s a crossroads in a lock-down room at Torchwood Tower,” insisted Mickey. “Been there for thirty-one years. Rose Tyler fell into it thirty years ago to rejoin the Doctor in our original world.”
Carissa fell speechless, staring at Mickey in some sort of shock, and Dr Jones took advantage of the quiet to try again. “I’m sorry, but could someone explain to me what a crossroads is?”
Neither of them heard her. “She fell in?” whispered Carissa. “A human child fell into a crossroads?”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” said Mickey impatiently. “The Doctor left her here with us, thirty-one years ago, and a year later, pulled her back through the crossroads to his world.”
Carissa closed her eyes. “The poor child….oh dear. The poor girl….”
“Oi!” shouted Dr Jones finally. “What’s a crossroads?”
“It’s a way to move between parallel worlds,” said Mickey, but Carissa’s eyes flew open.
“No,” she corrected him. “It’s a chance not taken. It’s the turn on the path you didn’t travel, the way life might have gone had you done something differently in that single moment where the fate of the world balanced on your shoulders. There are a thousand such moments, and I witnessed one created before my eyes, when I chose to break the kiss with Theta, and return home to Gallifrey. I don’t know what chance was lost at Torchwood Tower, Mr Smith, but it certainly was not mine. If your Rose Tyler fell through it, and you know she was met by the Doctor at the other end, and that she lived, then I am very glad for her-" Carissa’s voice caught, and it took a moment before she could steady herself enough to continue. “But I cannot speak to your crossroads, Mr Smith. I can only tell you about mine.”
“So tell,” said Mickey.
“Please,” added Dr Jones, with a stern glance at him.
“It was years before I thought about the crossroads again. I think Theta might have forgotten all about it - and it wasn’t long afterwards that we both grew up a little more, and he had his first TARDIS. We followed our paths, never diverging, until - well. He left Gallifrey, he jumped from his path as surely as if pushed, and he didn’t return to Gallifrey for years. When he did, he wasn’t Theta any longer, but the Doctor. He’d lived through several regenerations, had many companions, most of them human, and he was as in love with the planet Earth and its people as I’d ever known him to be.
“Not that I knew him, then. He was lost to me, and I was just afraid enough of my friend, who’d agreed to remain on the proper path until he’d left it so abruptly, turning renegade and racing through the world, as unlike a Time Lord as any. Perhaps that is why, when Gallifrey faced certain death, he was the one chosen to end it all.”
“You’re talking about the Time War,” interrupted Mickey.
Carissa paused and nodded carefully. “He told you about it?”
“A little bit,” said Mickey. “Rose told me more. There were Daleks, and the Doctor - he destroyed them. Not just the Daleks, but the Time Lords, too.” Mickey frowned. “You’re a Time Lord.”
“The proper term is Time Lady, but yes.”
“You should have died with them.”
“I did,” said Carissa.
“But you’re sitting here,” said Dr Jones, and Carissa chuckled.
“In a way. You see, I watched Theta go off the chosen path, take a different journey from that which we’d assumed was set. It made me wonder what might have happened had I let him kiss me again, that day on my TARDIS. I knew there was little time left before the Time War was ended. I went to Varicose 3, and found the crossroads there. I could still feel the pull of it - just as strong as I remembered. This time, there was no Theta to pull me back. It was as I reached for it that he did whatever it was he was meant to do - and just as I touched the crossroads, felt my hand coated in blue, that was when I died. My body simply vanished.
“My mind, however, did not. I watched my body disappear into nothing, into never having been, and I felt myself sucked further into the crossroads, until I found myself sitting once more on the TARDIS floor, a ghostly, barely possible being, watching as a young Theta and Carissa kissed a second, a third, a fourth time while orbiting Varicose 3.”
“You went back in time?” asked Dr Jones, barely breathing.
“That’s what I thought, at first,” said Carissa. “But no. The crossroads took my mind with it, back through time, and sent me down the other path. The one not taken - the one where I had kissed Theta again, and he had kissed me. Where we did not return to Gallifrey - instead, we left the set path together, and remained together - lovers - for the next thousand years. I was not her, that pretty young thing who captivated and seduced him in a TARDIS I barely remembered. But I watched her with him, every moment reminding of the chance I had lost.
“I remember the Doctor, yes - fine, noble man, who destroyed the planet he came from to save the people he loved. I saw what might have become of him, in the parallel world I created in a single moment of indecision, in a world where I fell prey to my weakness and kissed him again. I’ve walked both paths of my life, Mr. Smith. How many can say they’ve done the same?”
The rain beat down on the little car, with the windshield wipers racing quickly across them. The tears were running down Dr Jones’s cheeks; Mickey gripped the steering wheel hard. He didn’t dare look away from the road to check Carissa’s reflection; he had no doubt she was sitting completely still and careful in the backseat.
“At least one,” Mickey replied. “And we’re going to see her mother.”
Jump to Chapter Eight
Characters: The Doctor, Rose Tyler, among others
Warnings: PG. Oh, and it’s baby!fic.
Spoilers: For the sake of this story, S4 never happens.
Beta: runriggers
Part of the Crossroads series
A now AU and non-S4 compliant story. Ah well.
Part One: Reflections
Part Two: One Day
Part Three: Choices and Chances
Part Four: A Blue Gravel Path - Chapter One ~ Chapter Two ~ Chapter Three ~ Chapter Four ~ Chapter Five ~ Chapter Six
Chapter Seven: The Etymology of Names..... Mickey Smith and Dr Jones listen to a tale neither can quite believe. The Doctor begins to accept a path he doesn’t want to travel.
Chapter Six: A Woman Not Rose
For some reason, Dr Jones went with them. Mickey hadn’t asked her along, and she hadn’t asked to accompany them, but all the same she buckled herself beside Mickey in his car, with Carissa sitting behind them, calm, serene, and pale.
“I want you to explain it to me,” said Mickey, gripping the steering wheel. He glanced at the reflection of Carissa in the rearview mirror as he carefully navigated the car out of the underground parking lot. “How is it you’re in this world? Why are there two of you? Why is the Doctor called Theta?”
“That was his name, when I knew him,” replied Carissa.
“Who’s the Doctor?” demanded Dr Jones.
“He’s the man who brought me here,” explained Mickey. “A Time Lord in a blue police box.”
“And you think she knows him?”
“I know she does,” said Mickey grimly. “I found a picture of them together, she and him. They’re the ones who convinced Queen Victoria to start Torchwood. In this world, anyway - in my world, it was the Doctor and Rose.”
Dr Jones put her hand on her forehead. “So if she’s from this world, how do you think she knows your world’s Doctor?”
Mickey hadn’t thought of that; he glared at the figure in the rear view mirror, as if daring her to explain.
“It’s a valid question,” said Carissa. “One to which I’d like the answer, please.”
“You called him the Doctor,” said Mickey stubbornly. “It was you, wasn’t it, brushing against my neck in the hospital? Every time I mentioned the Doctor, I felt something. It was you. All the records about him in Torchwood - they call him Theta. He was never the Doctor in this world. But you call him Doctor, same as I do. You know the same Doctor I do. I want to know how.”
Carissa smiled. “Oh, you are clever. He must have liked you.”
“He called me an idiot.”
“I doubt that.”
“Doctor Theta is an odd name,” said Dr Jones, and Carissa laughed.
“That wasn’t his name, not together like that. He didn’t take on the name Doctor until much later, after we were older and more experienced in the world. When I knew him best, he was Theta. That wasn’t his name either, you must understand, just as Carissa wasn’t mine. It’s only how we called each other. He had a love for all things human even then, you see - choosing a Greek letter as a name!” She laughed, lost in her memory.
“Theta was the symbol for death,” persisted Dr Jones.
Carissa looked approvingly at Dr Jones. “In Athens, yes, it was. But it also symbolized the Agathodaemon, a good spirit representing luck and wisdom. I believe he liked the duality of the symbol. It proved appropriate enough, in time.”
“He never told me about the name Theta,” said Mickey. “He never said anything about you.”
Carissa didn’t answer right away; she glanced out the window to the soggy streets of London whisking by. Mickey kept his gaze divided between the road and her reflection, waiting somewhat impatiently for her response.
“How much do you know about him?”
“He’s a Time Lord,” said Mickey. “An alien from some other planet. Nine hundred years old, he said.”
“Older than that.”
“Well, he said it, I’m not guessing. Has a ship he calls the TARDIS shaped like a blue police box. And he can change his appearance. The picture I found in the Torchwood library, it was of the first way I saw him, with no hair and big ears and a black jacket. Next time I saw him, it was sideburns and a brown pinstripe suit.”
Carissa closed her eyes. “Yes,” she murmured. “I knew him before all that, before he’d regenerated the first time. Did he ever tell you where he was from?”
“No.”
“We were childhood friends. Always together in the nursery, sitting next to each other in lessons. We were inseparable. There weren’t families as such on Gallifrey, you must understand, but I suppose you’d call us brother and sister, we were so close with each other.”
“You loved him,” said Dr Jones, and Carissa’s eyes snapped open to look at her.
“You are from this world, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Perceptive, though. Yes, I loved him. He loved me. I was a little older than he was, and I had my TARDIS first. I took him with me on its maiden trip, because how could I not take him? Oh, it was wonderful. We circled the planet and shot off across the galaxy. We were giddy with the thrill of it, being away from the elders, away from school, away from anyone who might dare tell us what to do and how to do it. We found ourselves circling Varicose 3 and threw the TARDIS doors open to watch a star burn away, and I remember sitting with our legs dangling out, popping nuts into our mouths and laughing.”
Carissa sighed, a long, lonely sound. Mickey thought he’d heard such a sigh once before, in a set of memories that hadn’t actually happened.
“There are moments in life when you realize that the world is simply a journey, and you are walking a path which might go off in a thousand different directions. That moment, sitting in my TARDIS, Theta at my side - that was such a moment. I kissed him, or he kissed me. A brush of his lips against mine, it might have lasted thirty seconds or a thousand years. In my dreams, it was longer, but I don’t know. When we pulled away from each other, the look in his eyes - oh, how they glowed. How his very thoughts shimmered! And I knew if I leaned in again for another kiss, it would be the end of it.
“But I didn’t, you see. I was afraid of that kiss, of what might follow. Such things - they were unheard of for us, for our people. I don’t think he was sorry for it, really. He smiled at me, a little sad, but so understanding. Perhaps he was a little afraid too - we were both so good then, you see. Such fine young students, so unwilling to break with tradition and try something new. We followed the paths laid out for us with unerring precision.”
“You weren’t allowed to love him?” asked Dr Jones, faintly horrified.
“Oh, love him, of course, I could love him. It was the rest that would have met with disapproval.”
Mickey remained silent, focused on the road as the rain began to fall. Dr Jones, however, was proving to be an excellent interrogator. “What happened?”
“Before we closed the TARDIS doors, we saw something just outside, floating in the vacuum of space. It was small and brightly blue, shimmering as if newly formed, which I suppose it was, since we’d never seen its like before. It appeared to be trying to find a shape, moving between something spherical to star-burst and finally settling into a cube with rounded edges. Neither of us could take our eyes from it, and even as it became solid, I felt such an intense longing to touch it - to take back my earlier decision, that I nearly fell out of the doors toward it. Theta had to pull me back into the ship to keep me safe, and slowly our orbit pulled us away from it. My longing decreased as our distance increased, and soon, I’d forgotten about the pull altogether.”
Mickey had trouble breathing. “A blue box.”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever find out what it was?” asked Dr Jones.
Mickey and Carissa spoke at the same time before staring at each other in the mirror. “A crossroads.”
*
The rustle of clothes distracted the Doctor as he stood over Genevieve’s cot, and he turned to see Elizabeth sit up on her settee, her eyes clouded and red, but her back straight and her mouth firm. “Doctor,” she said, staring at him. “What are you doing to my child?”
The Doctor ignored the question. “Why did you name her Genevieve?” he asked. His hand still rested on Dex’s head, mostly to hold the boy close to him. Dex’s hands wrapped around his father’s leg and he peered out from behind to the princess sitting on the other side of the baby’s cot. The baby began to wake, mewing softly, but Dex turned his gaze to her and she instantly quieted again.
Elizabeth frowned. “It’s her name. I thought it was pretty.”
“Interesting choice for the child of an English princess, that’s all. Germanic in origin, I believe.”
“It’s none of your concern,” replied Elizabeth. “You haven’t answered my question - what are you doing to my child.”
“She isn’t your child,” said the Doctor, and he flipped the cellular modifier open again and looked at it. “Nope. Not even human.” He snapped the modifier closed. “I know you found her somewhere, decided to keep her, started to love her. It’s what you were meant to do, really. But even you must realize there’s something wrong. More people are arriving every hour to sit with her, and they never go away. You’ve lost all will to leave the house, and in six months time your sister will die and you’ll be handed the crown - and do what? Give it up to raise a child who isn’t yours?”
Elizabeth stood, shaking. “How dare you. Genevieve is my child in every way that counts. She may not have been borne by me, but she is of me. She is as human as you or I.”
“Half right,” replied the Doctor. He flipped the modifier open again, and lifted it above his head, pressing the side button. Instantly the air above them began sparkling, glowing, and finally crystallized into a massive web, rising up from the baby in the cot, glowing golden as it arched through the room, connecting everyone to her but the Doctor and Nina in the corner. From her cot, Janie giggled, and tried to grab the strands. Dex laughed, watching her, and pressed his cheek to his father’s leg, grinning madly.
Elizabeth gasped, staring at the web above her. She reached up to brush her fingers through the golden strands that touched her face, and though the strands shifted, they did not break.
“What is this magic?” she asked, amazement in her voice.
“Genevieve is an old name,” explained the Doctor, gazing up at the golden web. “So old that most have forgotten its origins. All save for my people, who never forgot anything worth knowing in this world. It means woman of the people. You might have given her the name, princess, but she told you who she was when you first picked her up. She told you she was one of you. Genevieve.”
Elizabeth fingered the strands of gold for a moment, their glowing light shining onto her face. “I found her in the forest - I’d broken away from the rest of them, and turned a corner, and there she was, waiting beneath the trees. She hadn’t been there a moment before. I picked her up, and - Genevieve. And I brought her home.”
The Doctor didn’t take his eyes off Elizabeth. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? Is she dangerous?” Elizabeth turned her gaze from the golden web to him. “Is this web dangerous?”
“It’s the connection she formed with you,” explained the Doctor. “Genevieve is a Chamalien - and a very young one, at that. Chamaliens leave their young scattered across the universe, where they take the forms of the living being that finds them first. Deer, dog, worm - it doesn’t matter. They create a bond with that creature, so that they’ll be taken care of, they’ll live to maturity, and then they leave to find others of their kind. Genevieve found you.”
Elizabeth smiled. “She did.”
“But it’s too strong, princess. She’s cast the net too far, and it’s drawing in more people than it should. Even now, more are coming to this house, more people to sit and care for her. She doesn’t want it, but she can’t stop it. I can help her stop it. I can help her break the net.”
Elizabeth looked back up at the golden web. “What will happen if you don’t?”
The Doctor paused. “Every connection she makes stretches her a little bit further. If she’s stretched too far, her mind will snap. She’ll die.”
Dex gasped and his grip on the Doctor’s leg tightened. The Doctor glanced down at his son, knowing that the boy hadn’t expected his answer, knowing the child was suddenly afraid. That he should know this without also feeling it took the Doctor by surprise.
“I don’t want her to die,” said Elizabeth softly. She stepped forward and gazed into the cot, leaning in to touch the baby’s cheek softly. Janie looked up at her, blinking, and grabbed at her fingers, bringing them to her mouth. Elizabeth laughed softly, and leaned in to kiss the girl’s forehead.
“Princess?”
“Will it hurt?”
Dex turned his gaze up to his father, repeating Elizabeth’s question in a silent plea, and the Doctor pressed the boy’s head to his leg in an equally silent response. “No,” he said. “It won’t hurt. You’ll never know it happened, except you won’t feel the same tug, the same irrational need to protect and defend. She’ll be just another baby to you.”
Elizabeth leaned over the cot, and her shoulders shook once, and then were still. She swiftly stood and walked away from them, and when she spoke, her voice was thick. “If I don’t allow you to do this thing....”
“Two, three days,” said the Doctor. “No more.”
Elizabeth’s hands gripped the edges of the fireplace mantle. “Do it.”
*
“So you know about crossroads, then?” asked Carissa, amused.
“That’s what it was, wasn’t it?” demanded Mickey. “It was a crossroads. That blue box - it was a crossroads!”
Dr Jones stared at them both, her head whipping back between Mickey beside her and Carissa in the rear-view mirror. “What’s a crossroads?”
Mickey didn’t pay her any attention. “How did your crossroads get into Torchwood Tower?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean - I went back to Varicose 3 several hundred years later, and the crossroads was still there.”
“There’s a crossroads in a lock-down room at Torchwood Tower,” insisted Mickey. “Been there for thirty-one years. Rose Tyler fell into it thirty years ago to rejoin the Doctor in our original world.”
Carissa fell speechless, staring at Mickey in some sort of shock, and Dr Jones took advantage of the quiet to try again. “I’m sorry, but could someone explain to me what a crossroads is?”
Neither of them heard her. “She fell in?” whispered Carissa. “A human child fell into a crossroads?”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” said Mickey impatiently. “The Doctor left her here with us, thirty-one years ago, and a year later, pulled her back through the crossroads to his world.”
Carissa closed her eyes. “The poor child….oh dear. The poor girl….”
“Oi!” shouted Dr Jones finally. “What’s a crossroads?”
“It’s a way to move between parallel worlds,” said Mickey, but Carissa’s eyes flew open.
“No,” she corrected him. “It’s a chance not taken. It’s the turn on the path you didn’t travel, the way life might have gone had you done something differently in that single moment where the fate of the world balanced on your shoulders. There are a thousand such moments, and I witnessed one created before my eyes, when I chose to break the kiss with Theta, and return home to Gallifrey. I don’t know what chance was lost at Torchwood Tower, Mr Smith, but it certainly was not mine. If your Rose Tyler fell through it, and you know she was met by the Doctor at the other end, and that she lived, then I am very glad for her-" Carissa’s voice caught, and it took a moment before she could steady herself enough to continue. “But I cannot speak to your crossroads, Mr Smith. I can only tell you about mine.”
“So tell,” said Mickey.
“Please,” added Dr Jones, with a stern glance at him.
“It was years before I thought about the crossroads again. I think Theta might have forgotten all about it - and it wasn’t long afterwards that we both grew up a little more, and he had his first TARDIS. We followed our paths, never diverging, until - well. He left Gallifrey, he jumped from his path as surely as if pushed, and he didn’t return to Gallifrey for years. When he did, he wasn’t Theta any longer, but the Doctor. He’d lived through several regenerations, had many companions, most of them human, and he was as in love with the planet Earth and its people as I’d ever known him to be.
“Not that I knew him, then. He was lost to me, and I was just afraid enough of my friend, who’d agreed to remain on the proper path until he’d left it so abruptly, turning renegade and racing through the world, as unlike a Time Lord as any. Perhaps that is why, when Gallifrey faced certain death, he was the one chosen to end it all.”
“You’re talking about the Time War,” interrupted Mickey.
Carissa paused and nodded carefully. “He told you about it?”
“A little bit,” said Mickey. “Rose told me more. There were Daleks, and the Doctor - he destroyed them. Not just the Daleks, but the Time Lords, too.” Mickey frowned. “You’re a Time Lord.”
“The proper term is Time Lady, but yes.”
“You should have died with them.”
“I did,” said Carissa.
“But you’re sitting here,” said Dr Jones, and Carissa chuckled.
“In a way. You see, I watched Theta go off the chosen path, take a different journey from that which we’d assumed was set. It made me wonder what might have happened had I let him kiss me again, that day on my TARDIS. I knew there was little time left before the Time War was ended. I went to Varicose 3, and found the crossroads there. I could still feel the pull of it - just as strong as I remembered. This time, there was no Theta to pull me back. It was as I reached for it that he did whatever it was he was meant to do - and just as I touched the crossroads, felt my hand coated in blue, that was when I died. My body simply vanished.
“My mind, however, did not. I watched my body disappear into nothing, into never having been, and I felt myself sucked further into the crossroads, until I found myself sitting once more on the TARDIS floor, a ghostly, barely possible being, watching as a young Theta and Carissa kissed a second, a third, a fourth time while orbiting Varicose 3.”
“You went back in time?” asked Dr Jones, barely breathing.
“That’s what I thought, at first,” said Carissa. “But no. The crossroads took my mind with it, back through time, and sent me down the other path. The one not taken - the one where I had kissed Theta again, and he had kissed me. Where we did not return to Gallifrey - instead, we left the set path together, and remained together - lovers - for the next thousand years. I was not her, that pretty young thing who captivated and seduced him in a TARDIS I barely remembered. But I watched her with him, every moment reminding of the chance I had lost.
“I remember the Doctor, yes - fine, noble man, who destroyed the planet he came from to save the people he loved. I saw what might have become of him, in the parallel world I created in a single moment of indecision, in a world where I fell prey to my weakness and kissed him again. I’ve walked both paths of my life, Mr. Smith. How many can say they’ve done the same?”
The rain beat down on the little car, with the windshield wipers racing quickly across them. The tears were running down Dr Jones’s cheeks; Mickey gripped the steering wheel hard. He didn’t dare look away from the road to check Carissa’s reflection; he had no doubt she was sitting completely still and careful in the backseat.
“At least one,” Mickey replied. “And we’re going to see her mother.”
Jump to Chapter Eight