Something About Stars (6/20)
Title - Something About Stars (6/20)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - I've started to think I may reference events without thinking, so, to be safe: Through the specials.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids, they're all mine.)
Summary - Four Time Lords and a Bad Wolf human, gallivanting through time and space. What could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Huge thanks to Kristin and chicklet73 , who talked through plot points. Special thanks to Kristin for coming up with the title. And even more thanks to jlrpuck and c73, who so graciously beta'd.
The icon was created by swankkat , commissioned by jlrpuck for my birthday.
Tomorrow is Kristin's birthday! Wish her birthday cheer!
Prologue - Ch 1 - Ch 2 - Ch 3 - Ch 4
Chapter Five
Athena arrived on her parents’ TARDIS at almost exactly the same relative time as Brem. In fact, she arrived so close that Brem was still in the landing room when she stepped out of her TARDIS.
“I heard your TARDIS coming, so I waited for you,” he explained.
“Didn’t believe I’d come here, did you?”
“No, I did believe you. I wanted to come, too. We’re going to figure it out, Theenie, we really are,” he said, solemnly.
She nodded and wished that they didn’t have to discuss it, that they could discuss anything but that, because she was so tired of discussing something for which she thought there was no solution.
They stepped out of the room together, finding their parents in the library with enough tea set out for all of them. Brem and Athena both looked at it.
“The two of you are bleeding panic all over the place, and you don’t even know it,” commented their father. “I figured a visit was just around the corner. And we’ve rung Fortuna, too, so we can all discuss it at once.”
“Come and have some tea, darling,” said Mum, very kindly, and Athena abruptly felt better just to be sitting on the couch, her family around her, drinking tea, every brilliant mind in the universe pitched toward one thing: her.
Fortuna bounced her way in, all blonde whirling energy. “Hello,” she said, descending upon each of them with a hug and a kiss.
“Tea, Fort?” Dad asked.
She nodded, sitting cross-legged on an ottoman that she pulled over, and cradled the cup Dad gave her. Then she looked expectant.
“Time has been skipping around Athena,” he announced, without preamble.
Fortuna looked at her in surprise. “What’s that mean?”
Athena shrugged a little bit, twisting her teacup in her lap nervously. “Just what he says: It’s been skipping. It…skips. I can’t think how else to…” She trailed off helplessly and looked down at her teacup.
“It skips,” Dad said. “It’s a recognized phenomenon. Rare, but recognized. Now we don’t really know what’s causing it, but the reason for this little family meeting is to come up with some theories and to figure it out.” He was speaking so calmly, as if this was nothing at all, and Athena recalled abruptly that the Doctor was her father. If anybody in the universe had to have a time-skipping problem, she might be the best equipped to solve it.
“There’s something else,” said Brem.
Dad lifted his eyebrows at him.
“I, uh…” Brem tugged at his earlobe. “I was spying a little bit.”
“Brem,” Mum sighed.
“And it was only a little bit of spying, and it was necessary.” He looked at Athena. “I read your pilot log, before you came in with the pizza.”
“I’d figured that out, Brem,” she informed him, drily.
“I read her pilot log, she came in, we had some pizza, we went back so I could look at the pilot log again.” He was talking to Dad now. “And it was different.”
“What do you mean it was different?” asked the Doctor.
“It was different. I think it’s re-writing itself. I asked Theenie to look, and she couldn’t find any evidence of the time skips anywhere in the log.”
Dad looked at her. “And had there been evidence?”
She nodded.
He considered. “It makes sense, really, when you think of it. Your TARDIS must be reeling. She’s probably trying to reconcile the missing time with her logs. Can I see her?”
Athena nodded again, and they all stood and walked to the landing rooms, where the three TARDISes where lined up now. They walked onto Athena’s, and they stood and watched as Dad whipped out his specs and peered through her pilot log. Then he leaned over and laid a hand on the central column, speaking soft Gallifreyan to her TARDIS, who hummed in response.
Athena finally voiced one of the plethora of fears she’d started fretting over. “Is she dying?”
Dad looked at her, taking off his glasses. “No,” he said, gently. “She’s not dying, Theenie. She’s a very young TARDIS, and you take very good care of her.”
“I don’t know, I thought maybe-”
“Whatever it is that’s going on, you didn’t cause it,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“I’m 927 years old. I know things.”
There was a pause.
“You’re 930,” said Mum.
“Anyway,” said Dad, looking back to the central column. “A TARDIS re-writing her logs.”
“Have you ever heard of it before?” asked Brem.
“No, but…” He trailed off, then admitted. “I, uh, really didn’t pay attention, in Academy, when they were talking about, well-”
“Anything,” finished Mum, wryly.
“I’ve done well enough for myself,” he replied, indignantly, and then looked at Athena. “You haven’t been in the Void, have you?”
Athena blinked, caught off-guard by the question. “The Void? No, I…I didn’t know you could just…go to the Void. I thought…”
“You can’t. Just go to the Void. But I needed to check. The thing about time is that…time works one way in this universe, and another way in another universe. I mean, for instance…” He cleared his throat and rushed out, “Mum had time to have Fortuna in the other universe, but you and I, we’d only lived a few months. You see? Her time was moving at a different relative rate, and normally that’s fine, because it’s another universe and it’s not relevant to us. But if you’re momentarily skipping into another universe, that would explain the fact that time is malfunctioning, as it were. It feels like it’s skipping, and it is, but at heart it’s really misbehaving.”
“But I’d have to go through the Void to get into another universe, wouldn’t I? I mean, it’s not like a past or future timeline bleeding through there, that wouldn’t cause this, it would have to be another universe. I would have to be flitting back and forth between other universes like…like it was nothing. I mean, that’s impossible, right?”
Dad had that look on his face, the one that meant things were more confusing than she’d realized.
“Right?” she said, again.
“It should be, yes. It wasn’t always. It’s why there’s not a lot out there about time skips. When there were more Time Lords in the universe, we flitted back and forth all the time, and you expected the time skips, so they weren’t characterized as time skips, they were characterized as universe-hopping.”
Athena felt sudden relief. “Well, there are more Time Lords in the universe, right?” She gestured around at all of them. “Maybe it’s just gotten easier to go back and forth, and we just didn’t realize it.”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “Maybe.” He pulled his hands through his hair, leaving it in disgruntled tufts. “Maybe it really is that simple, Theenie. Maybe it is. But to do it accidentally…I just…accidentally.”
“We did it,” said Mum, and he looked at her. “The first time we went to Pete’s World, when we left Mickey there, we crash-landed there. You skipped universes without meaning to.”
“Yeah,” he said, and he nodded. “Yes. So yes, I suppose it’s possible.”
Athena had never been so relieved in her life. Maybe, after all, this was nothing. But she had to ask the next nagging question. “But why isn’t it happening to the rest of you?”
Dad shrugged. “I dunno. Could be anything, could be…Why have you been going to Cunodys so often?”
“I noticed that, too,” said Brem.
“Oh, I’m dating someone on Cunodys,” she said. Lim. Who she hadn’t even thought of in forever. Should probably break up with Lim, come to think of it. “So I was dropping by a lot.”
“Who knows?” Dad shrugged again. “Could be something about Cunodys. It really could be anything, Theenie. The universe is…odd.”
Athena swallowed and ventured, “What if…What if I’m the only one who can feel them?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if…” She decided to just say it. She looked at Brem. “Time skipped, when you were visiting me. You didn’t even blink.”
“You had a time skip happen while I was there?”
Dad looked at him. “And you didn’t feel it?”
“I…I don’t know.” Brem looked dazed. “What would it have felt like?”
“You would have known,” Athena told him, wearily. “Trust me, you would have known.”
Dad scratched the back of his neck. “It’s possible,” he said. “It’s possible.”
“Is it, though?” She looked at him.
“I think I’ve finally learned to use the word ‘impossible’ a bit more sparingly,” he replied.
***
The family was sticking around, a solid family unit, and she knew they were doing it for her. It felt nice, really, all of them in one place and time, in a way they hadn’t been in years, with no event going on really, just general laziness. Dad and Brem were tinkering together in the control room, disagreeing over the proper sonic setting to fuse wires together, and Mum was sleeping, and Athena sat with Fortuna in the salon the TARDIS had made for them, painting nails.
“I didn’t know you were still dating Lim,” Fortuna commented.
“To be honest, I’d almost forgotten,” Athena admitted, touching up her big toenail. “I’m a terrible girlfriend.”
“It just seems to me you’ve been distracted lately,” said Fortuna.
“Well, yes, that’s a bit of an understatement,” agreed Athena.
“I’m sorry,” said Fortuna. “I wish you’d told me.”
Athena looked up at her. “I didn’t mean to…It wasn’t like I pointedly didn’t want to tell just you, or something, I just…I thought maybe it would go away on its own, and I didn’t want to worry everyone.”
“I know,” said Fortuna, and Athena knew that she did know. The word “forgiveness” barely existed for Fortuna, she had the type of personality for which nothing ever existed to forgive.
It was that simple acceptance out of Fortuna that made Athena blurt out, unexpectedly, “I’m frightened I’m going mad.”
Fortuna looked at her. “Why would you think that?”
“Because no one else can feel them, Fort. No one else can feel them, and when you read my TARDIS log there’s nothing in there that…Sometimes I wonder if I’m making everything up. If it’s all in my head.”
Fortuna leaned forward and squeezed her hand. “It’s not. It’s not, Athena.”
Athena nodded, trying to convince herself, and cleared her throat. “Anyway. I should break up with Lim, really. It’s totally unfair. Distracted or not, I really am a terrible girlfriend.”
***
The kids stayed nearly a week in Earth-time, and Rose got so used to having them around that the TARDIS was painfully silent when they finally left, Athena the last to go, off to go break up with Lim. The Doctor and Brem had been tinkering with her TARDIS all week. The Doctor claimed to be giving it antibiotics, which amused Rose a bit. The hope was that it would insulate against time skips. Athena was supposed to try it out and report back.
Rose heard the bedroom door open, felt the Doctor crawl heavily onto the bed with her. “Are you sleeping?” he murmured.
She rolled toward him. “No. It’s too quiet. How is she, in your head?”
“Fine,” he said. “She’s fine.”
Rose looked at him, in the dim glow of the room. He was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, frowning.
“It could be just because there are so many of you around now, right? It really could be?” she asked, hopefully.
He sighed. “It could be. It really could be.”
Rose paused, lying on her back next to him. “She thinks she’s going mad, you know. Fortuna told me. She thinks it might be all in her head.”
“It’s not. Time is…Time is…Oh, Rose, I don’t know.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I just don’t know what to make of it. It could be nothing or it could be everything, and I…When we fell into Pete’s World, accidentally…It wasn’t an accident, Rose. I treated it like that, I don’t know why I did, but it was a sign, that the walls were weak, that things could get through, that things…”
She looked at him, at this profile she knew so well now, well enough to recognize it as being worried just then. “You think it’s happening again? That the walls are breaking down? But you closed them, right? After you got me back? You sealed them, didn’t you?”
“I tried. I thought I did. I…You were back, and you had Fortuna, and maybe I didn’t do as good a job as I…Maybe I rushed it, I don’t know, I’ve been trying to remember and that time is just all such a blur. And, anyway, who’s to say that, if something more powerful than me wanted to break my seal, they couldn’t do it?”
“What’s more powerful than you?” she asked, fearfully. He didn’t answer. “Doctor.”
He looked at her for the first time. And he admitted, “I don’t know.”
Next Chapter
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - I've started to think I may reference events without thinking, so, to be safe: Through the specials.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids, they're all mine.)
Summary - Four Time Lords and a Bad Wolf human, gallivanting through time and space. What could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Huge thanks to Kristin and chicklet73 , who talked through plot points. Special thanks to Kristin for coming up with the title. And even more thanks to jlrpuck and c73, who so graciously beta'd.
The icon was created by swankkat , commissioned by jlrpuck for my birthday.
Tomorrow is Kristin's birthday! Wish her birthday cheer!
Prologue - Ch 1 - Ch 2 - Ch 3 - Ch 4
Chapter Five
Athena arrived on her parents’ TARDIS at almost exactly the same relative time as Brem. In fact, she arrived so close that Brem was still in the landing room when she stepped out of her TARDIS.
“I heard your TARDIS coming, so I waited for you,” he explained.
“Didn’t believe I’d come here, did you?”
“No, I did believe you. I wanted to come, too. We’re going to figure it out, Theenie, we really are,” he said, solemnly.
She nodded and wished that they didn’t have to discuss it, that they could discuss anything but that, because she was so tired of discussing something for which she thought there was no solution.
They stepped out of the room together, finding their parents in the library with enough tea set out for all of them. Brem and Athena both looked at it.
“The two of you are bleeding panic all over the place, and you don’t even know it,” commented their father. “I figured a visit was just around the corner. And we’ve rung Fortuna, too, so we can all discuss it at once.”
“Come and have some tea, darling,” said Mum, very kindly, and Athena abruptly felt better just to be sitting on the couch, her family around her, drinking tea, every brilliant mind in the universe pitched toward one thing: her.
Fortuna bounced her way in, all blonde whirling energy. “Hello,” she said, descending upon each of them with a hug and a kiss.
“Tea, Fort?” Dad asked.
She nodded, sitting cross-legged on an ottoman that she pulled over, and cradled the cup Dad gave her. Then she looked expectant.
“Time has been skipping around Athena,” he announced, without preamble.
Fortuna looked at her in surprise. “What’s that mean?”
Athena shrugged a little bit, twisting her teacup in her lap nervously. “Just what he says: It’s been skipping. It…skips. I can’t think how else to…” She trailed off helplessly and looked down at her teacup.
“It skips,” Dad said. “It’s a recognized phenomenon. Rare, but recognized. Now we don’t really know what’s causing it, but the reason for this little family meeting is to come up with some theories and to figure it out.” He was speaking so calmly, as if this was nothing at all, and Athena recalled abruptly that the Doctor was her father. If anybody in the universe had to have a time-skipping problem, she might be the best equipped to solve it.
“There’s something else,” said Brem.
Dad lifted his eyebrows at him.
“I, uh…” Brem tugged at his earlobe. “I was spying a little bit.”
“Brem,” Mum sighed.
“And it was only a little bit of spying, and it was necessary.” He looked at Athena. “I read your pilot log, before you came in with the pizza.”
“I’d figured that out, Brem,” she informed him, drily.
“I read her pilot log, she came in, we had some pizza, we went back so I could look at the pilot log again.” He was talking to Dad now. “And it was different.”
“What do you mean it was different?” asked the Doctor.
“It was different. I think it’s re-writing itself. I asked Theenie to look, and she couldn’t find any evidence of the time skips anywhere in the log.”
Dad looked at her. “And had there been evidence?”
She nodded.
He considered. “It makes sense, really, when you think of it. Your TARDIS must be reeling. She’s probably trying to reconcile the missing time with her logs. Can I see her?”
Athena nodded again, and they all stood and walked to the landing rooms, where the three TARDISes where lined up now. They walked onto Athena’s, and they stood and watched as Dad whipped out his specs and peered through her pilot log. Then he leaned over and laid a hand on the central column, speaking soft Gallifreyan to her TARDIS, who hummed in response.
Athena finally voiced one of the plethora of fears she’d started fretting over. “Is she dying?”
Dad looked at her, taking off his glasses. “No,” he said, gently. “She’s not dying, Theenie. She’s a very young TARDIS, and you take very good care of her.”
“I don’t know, I thought maybe-”
“Whatever it is that’s going on, you didn’t cause it,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“I’m 927 years old. I know things.”
There was a pause.
“You’re 930,” said Mum.
“Anyway,” said Dad, looking back to the central column. “A TARDIS re-writing her logs.”
“Have you ever heard of it before?” asked Brem.
“No, but…” He trailed off, then admitted. “I, uh, really didn’t pay attention, in Academy, when they were talking about, well-”
“Anything,” finished Mum, wryly.
“I’ve done well enough for myself,” he replied, indignantly, and then looked at Athena. “You haven’t been in the Void, have you?”
Athena blinked, caught off-guard by the question. “The Void? No, I…I didn’t know you could just…go to the Void. I thought…”
“You can’t. Just go to the Void. But I needed to check. The thing about time is that…time works one way in this universe, and another way in another universe. I mean, for instance…” He cleared his throat and rushed out, “Mum had time to have Fortuna in the other universe, but you and I, we’d only lived a few months. You see? Her time was moving at a different relative rate, and normally that’s fine, because it’s another universe and it’s not relevant to us. But if you’re momentarily skipping into another universe, that would explain the fact that time is malfunctioning, as it were. It feels like it’s skipping, and it is, but at heart it’s really misbehaving.”
“But I’d have to go through the Void to get into another universe, wouldn’t I? I mean, it’s not like a past or future timeline bleeding through there, that wouldn’t cause this, it would have to be another universe. I would have to be flitting back and forth between other universes like…like it was nothing. I mean, that’s impossible, right?”
Dad had that look on his face, the one that meant things were more confusing than she’d realized.
“Right?” she said, again.
“It should be, yes. It wasn’t always. It’s why there’s not a lot out there about time skips. When there were more Time Lords in the universe, we flitted back and forth all the time, and you expected the time skips, so they weren’t characterized as time skips, they were characterized as universe-hopping.”
Athena felt sudden relief. “Well, there are more Time Lords in the universe, right?” She gestured around at all of them. “Maybe it’s just gotten easier to go back and forth, and we just didn’t realize it.”
“Maybe,” he admitted. “Maybe.” He pulled his hands through his hair, leaving it in disgruntled tufts. “Maybe it really is that simple, Theenie. Maybe it is. But to do it accidentally…I just…accidentally.”
“We did it,” said Mum, and he looked at her. “The first time we went to Pete’s World, when we left Mickey there, we crash-landed there. You skipped universes without meaning to.”
“Yeah,” he said, and he nodded. “Yes. So yes, I suppose it’s possible.”
Athena had never been so relieved in her life. Maybe, after all, this was nothing. But she had to ask the next nagging question. “But why isn’t it happening to the rest of you?”
Dad shrugged. “I dunno. Could be anything, could be…Why have you been going to Cunodys so often?”
“I noticed that, too,” said Brem.
“Oh, I’m dating someone on Cunodys,” she said. Lim. Who she hadn’t even thought of in forever. Should probably break up with Lim, come to think of it. “So I was dropping by a lot.”
“Who knows?” Dad shrugged again. “Could be something about Cunodys. It really could be anything, Theenie. The universe is…odd.”
Athena swallowed and ventured, “What if…What if I’m the only one who can feel them?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if…” She decided to just say it. She looked at Brem. “Time skipped, when you were visiting me. You didn’t even blink.”
“You had a time skip happen while I was there?”
Dad looked at him. “And you didn’t feel it?”
“I…I don’t know.” Brem looked dazed. “What would it have felt like?”
“You would have known,” Athena told him, wearily. “Trust me, you would have known.”
Dad scratched the back of his neck. “It’s possible,” he said. “It’s possible.”
“Is it, though?” She looked at him.
“I think I’ve finally learned to use the word ‘impossible’ a bit more sparingly,” he replied.
***
The family was sticking around, a solid family unit, and she knew they were doing it for her. It felt nice, really, all of them in one place and time, in a way they hadn’t been in years, with no event going on really, just general laziness. Dad and Brem were tinkering together in the control room, disagreeing over the proper sonic setting to fuse wires together, and Mum was sleeping, and Athena sat with Fortuna in the salon the TARDIS had made for them, painting nails.
“I didn’t know you were still dating Lim,” Fortuna commented.
“To be honest, I’d almost forgotten,” Athena admitted, touching up her big toenail. “I’m a terrible girlfriend.”
“It just seems to me you’ve been distracted lately,” said Fortuna.
“Well, yes, that’s a bit of an understatement,” agreed Athena.
“I’m sorry,” said Fortuna. “I wish you’d told me.”
Athena looked up at her. “I didn’t mean to…It wasn’t like I pointedly didn’t want to tell just you, or something, I just…I thought maybe it would go away on its own, and I didn’t want to worry everyone.”
“I know,” said Fortuna, and Athena knew that she did know. The word “forgiveness” barely existed for Fortuna, she had the type of personality for which nothing ever existed to forgive.
It was that simple acceptance out of Fortuna that made Athena blurt out, unexpectedly, “I’m frightened I’m going mad.”
Fortuna looked at her. “Why would you think that?”
“Because no one else can feel them, Fort. No one else can feel them, and when you read my TARDIS log there’s nothing in there that…Sometimes I wonder if I’m making everything up. If it’s all in my head.”
Fortuna leaned forward and squeezed her hand. “It’s not. It’s not, Athena.”
Athena nodded, trying to convince herself, and cleared her throat. “Anyway. I should break up with Lim, really. It’s totally unfair. Distracted or not, I really am a terrible girlfriend.”
***
The kids stayed nearly a week in Earth-time, and Rose got so used to having them around that the TARDIS was painfully silent when they finally left, Athena the last to go, off to go break up with Lim. The Doctor and Brem had been tinkering with her TARDIS all week. The Doctor claimed to be giving it antibiotics, which amused Rose a bit. The hope was that it would insulate against time skips. Athena was supposed to try it out and report back.
Rose heard the bedroom door open, felt the Doctor crawl heavily onto the bed with her. “Are you sleeping?” he murmured.
She rolled toward him. “No. It’s too quiet. How is she, in your head?”
“Fine,” he said. “She’s fine.”
Rose looked at him, in the dim glow of the room. He was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, frowning.
“It could be just because there are so many of you around now, right? It really could be?” she asked, hopefully.
He sighed. “It could be. It really could be.”
Rose paused, lying on her back next to him. “She thinks she’s going mad, you know. Fortuna told me. She thinks it might be all in her head.”
“It’s not. Time is…Time is…Oh, Rose, I don’t know.” He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I just don’t know what to make of it. It could be nothing or it could be everything, and I…When we fell into Pete’s World, accidentally…It wasn’t an accident, Rose. I treated it like that, I don’t know why I did, but it was a sign, that the walls were weak, that things could get through, that things…”
She looked at him, at this profile she knew so well now, well enough to recognize it as being worried just then. “You think it’s happening again? That the walls are breaking down? But you closed them, right? After you got me back? You sealed them, didn’t you?”
“I tried. I thought I did. I…You were back, and you had Fortuna, and maybe I didn’t do as good a job as I…Maybe I rushed it, I don’t know, I’ve been trying to remember and that time is just all such a blur. And, anyway, who’s to say that, if something more powerful than me wanted to break my seal, they couldn’t do it?”
“What’s more powerful than you?” she asked, fearfully. He didn’t answer. “Doctor.”
He looked at her for the first time. And he admitted, “I don’t know.”
Next Chapter