WARNING: This is the sixth instalment in the "One Moment in Time" series, following on from "One Moment in Time", "Portal of Eternity", "So Many Things Should Have Been Different", "Return to The Valiant" and "The Master's Rose". You will DEFINITELY need to read from the beginning to make sense of it all.

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who or anything remotely related to it.

- CHAPTER ONE -

"People fall out of the world sometimes, but they always leave traces. Little things we can't quite account for. Faces in photographs, luggage, half eaten meals... rings... Nothing is ever forgotten, not completely. And if something can be remembered, it can come back..."

- The Doctor, The Pandorica Opens.

The flames in the torches held aloft by the Roman soldiers flickered and danced madly, glowing eerily through the hissing rain. Cold, white mist was rising out of the ground, coiling clammy fingers around their ankles and drifting from the darkness between the ancient standing stones. Now that the harsh strobing lights of the alien space fleet had vanished, Stonehenge was once more a brooding, haunted place of sacrifice and mystery.

As Tejana faced the Doctor, a strange weakness spread along her limbs, an odd, numbing sort of exhaustion like nothing she had ever experienced before. She felt unexpectedly light-headed, all the colour draining from her face. The surrounding stones were tall and forbidding, dark watchers looming over her in an unbroken, claustrophobic circle. No gaps, no breaks, no escape from their reaching shadows. They seemed to be crowding in around her, starting to spin, whirling around and around and around, like a giant wheel. Her knees buckled uncontrollably under her and she almost fell.

Leaping forward, the Doctor caught her before she hit the ground. "Whoa! Steady!" he exclaimed in concern. "Are you all right?"

"Yes," she gasped, trying to focus her gaze on the white blur of her father's face. "I'm fine. Just...a little giddy. The vortex manipulator..." Her voice trailed away. As far as she knew, there could be only one possible reason why she felt so ill. And even though that reason was exactly why she had come to see her father in the first place, now that she was actually standing in front of him, the idea of explaining it all to him seemed incredibly daunting.

The Doctor slid his arm around her waist, easily taking and supporting her slight weight. "What happened to you, Tejana? Why did you regenerate? Why are you travelling around by vortex manipulator? And where's the Master? Why isn't he with you? What's he done this time?"

Tejana put her hands up in a defensive gesture, as if to ward off the storm of rapid-fire questions.

"Slow down a little, would you? And stop jumping to conclusions. He hasn't done anything!" she snapped, resenting his immediate assumption that the Master was somehow at fault. "Everything's OK. I'm OK. He's OK. We're all OK!"

"All...?" The Doctor's eyes sharpened, homing in on the tiny slip, almost as if he anticipated exactly what she was here to tell him. "You, the Master and who else...?"

Tejana sighed. Perhaps he had already guessed about the baby, who knew? The Doctor was a man who usually concentrated exclusively on the bigger picture of life. But sometimes he also had a disconcerting knack for picking up on smaller details at the most awkward and unexpected moments. Of course, if he had already guessed, it would make the process of actually telling him a little bit easier, which could only be a good thing.

"That's part of what I need to speak to you about. It's kind of a long story."

He hesitated for a few seconds. For the first time, she noticed the little worry lines etched around his eyes as he looked at her. It was clear he was still not completely reconciled to the idea of her relationship with the Master. Perhaps, given the length and depth of their enmity, he never would be. An unaccustomed pang of guilt twisted inside her. As dysfunctional as they tended to be as a family unit, she was still his daughter and she knew he loved her. Looking into his steady, blue-green eyes, it slowly dawned on her that he was afraid for her. She had been so determined to have her own way in this, so determined to defy anyone or anything that tried to come between her and the Master, to be with him come hell or high water, that she had never even tried to see it from the Doctor's point of view. She had never once stopped to think of the anxiety she was causing her father - anxiety that he had every right to feel, given the Master's less-than-stellar track record. Now that she was preparing to be a parent herself, it was as though her perspective had dynamically shifted and she could see her own actions in an entirely different light.

Shamed by the sudden understanding of her own selfishness, a wave of uncertainty assailed her. Perhaps this was a mistake. After all, she'd just rushed impulsively down here in a tearing hurry, without really planning what she was going to say. Perhaps she should wait until she had it all worked out, word for word, exactly how she should break it to her father, with tact and diplomacy. Or at least she should wait until she was feeling a bit better. Or maybe until the Master was with her, for moral support. The baby wasn't due for ages yet, there was no need to rush into anything, was there?

However, before she could give in to her rising panic and back away, the Doctor said briskly, "Right, then. Long story it is! I love a good long story. Did I ever tell you the one about the moth that went to the podiatrist? No? A dwarf recited the whole thing to me once, in a bar on Clom. Now there's a people who like a long story – took nearly a whole night and a cartload of drinks to get to the end! Remind me to tell it to you some time. But first, let's get you in out of this rain."

As he spoke, he was hustling her firmly away, giving her no chance to object. Misdirection, she realised. Distracting me with his rambling nonsense, so I won't notice what the rest of him is doing. He'd always done that, for as long as she could remember, across all his incarnations. It was one of his best-loved tricks, since people consistently fell for it, time after time, even those who should really know better. In the back of her mind, the cool, logical part of her brain couldn't help observing that this particular regeneration seemed to be especially good at it. Nonetheless, she couldn't seem to gather the energy to protest, finding herself grateful instead for his assistance. Her legs felt oddly rubbery, as though she didn't even have the strength to stand up properly. If this is pregnancy, she reflected dubiously, I'm not sure I like it much.

Without giving it a lot of thought, she had automatically expected the Doctor to usher her into the warm, familiar, brightly-lit interior of his TARDIS. But as she looked around, she quickly realised there was no evidence of the tall, blue police box anywhere inside the stone circle. Instead, he was guiding her across to a set of roughly-hewn stone stairs, leading down deep into the earth. Seeing the alarmed expression crossing her face, he waved his hand cheerfully towards the dark, ominous-looking entrance. "Welcome to the Underhenge!" he announced in a proud voice, as if it was something he had personally excavated.

"Yeah...OK..." she responded, more reluctant than ever now. Dark holes in the ground were really not her thing. "Um...look...I can see you're pretty busy here...invasion fleet, Romans, creepy tunnels under Stonehenge, that sort of thing... Maybe I should come back another time, when it's a bit more convenient?"

But the Doctor just kept going, mercilessly propelling her down the stairs at his side. "No need for that, we've got plenty of time. According to my calculations, the Pandorica shouldn't be opening for quite a while yet."

"The Pandorica?" she exclaimed. "You mean you really do have the Pandorica? It wasn't just a lie you were telling the invasion fleet?"

The Doctor gave her a hurt look. "A lie? When have you ever known me to lie?"

Tejana didn't even bother to answer that one. She merely raised her eyebrows and gave him a meaningful stare.

"Well, OK, maybe I bend the truth a little sometimes," he admitted. "But only when it's totally necessary. And, in answer to your question, yes, I do have the Pandorica. It's down here. Come and have a look."

As they moved further into the darkness of the Underhenge, a cold breeze seemed to shiver across the back of Tejana's neck. For a fraction of a second, she felt a wave of unease, as if someone was standing too close, directly behind her. She turned her head sharply, expecting to see the Doctor's Roman officer friend, following them down the stairs. But to her surprise, there was no-one there and she could hear the young centurion still shouting orders to his men far away up on the surface. The sensation of another presence had already disappeared, leaving her doubtful she had really felt it at all.

Imagination, she told herself firmly. Just my usual claustrophobia, that's all.

They were walking down a narrow stone passage by now, festooned with huge, ragged cobwebs. It wasn't difficult to guess that the Roman soldiers had also been down here recently, since the corridor was lit at intervals by flaming torches set into brackets in the walls. The musty, stale smell of the air made Tejana feel even more ill, if that was possible. On the whole, she found she much preferred the cold, whispering rain in the darkness outside – anything was better than this ancient, stifling, gloomy rat-hole.

A set of heavy double doors, wide open but far from welcoming, drew them out of the passage into a cavernous chamber with a dusty floor, patterned by a myriad of scuffled boot prints. In the centre of the room stood an imposing grey metal cube, each side engraved with an intricate circular pattern.

Tejana's jaw dropped in shock. Pulling away from the Doctor's support, she took a few trembling steps forward into the room. "Oh, stars! It's real. The Pandorica is really, really real! I don't believe it!"

He moved past her and ran his hand over one of the ornately-carved sides. "Oh yes, it's real, all right."

"B..but..." she stammered, walking around the box in a wary circle, all illness forgotten as she tried to absorb the impossible thing she was seeing. "What's in it?"

He shrugged, placing his ear against one of the walls, as if listening for any distinguishing noises inside. "No idea. Could be anything. You know the legend as well as I do."

"There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior," she recited in a soft, awed voice, recalling the words from her childhood. "A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it...one day, it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world...Oh gods, and you think, whatever this creature is, it's about to come out of this box?"

"Fascinating, isn't it?"

"But shouldn't you be doing something to stop it?"

"Like what, exactly? River says, according to her scanner, there are layers upon layers of security protocols in there and they're all being deactivated, one by one, as if it's being opened from the inside."

"River!" Tejana echoed. "As in, Professor River Song, that archaeologist we met in the Library? She's here somewhere too?"

The Doctor nodded. "She's gone to get the TARDIS for me. I parked it down near the Roman camp, but I've got a feeling I'm going to need it."

"She's doing what?" Tejana blinked at him in sheer astonishment, hardly believing the evidence of her own ears. First the Pandorica, then this - it seemed she wasn't the only one with a few mind-blowing surprises up her sleeve. "You're allowing a human to pilot your TARDIS now? That has to be some kind of joke, right?" She tried to imagine what the Master would have to say about that whole concept if he were here, but then she decided not to – the curse words were far too graphic.

"Actually, she's very good, as it happens," the Doctor retorted, a shade defensively. "Apparently, I taught her. My future, her past. Timey wimey and all that. And, now that you mention it, I'm not entirely sure she is human."

"You taught her?" Tejana couldn't remember the Doctor ever teaching any of his non-Gallifreyan companions to properly fly the TARDIS. Some of the more technically-minded of them, such as Adric and Turlough and Jack, had learned to operate some of the various systems, in case of emergency. But to actually single-handedly fly the TARDIS through the Time Vortex? Only a Time Lord should be able to do that. "So...you give her your own sonic screwdriver, you end up teaching her to fly the TARDIS, and she knows your true name? Is there something you haven't told me? Should I start calling her 'Mum'?"

His face was turned away from her, his eyes carefully fixed on the Pandorica. If she didn't know any better, she would have said he was blushing. "Don't be ridiculous. I told you, whatever happens between us is still in my future. She won't tell me any of it."

Tejana wasn't quite sure how she felt about her father making that sort of commitment to the brash, confident River Song. Her own mother had died centuries ago, when she was still a child, so Tejana had no issue with her being replaced in the Doctor's life by another woman, particularly since she had always known that her parents had only ever shared a marriage of convenience. However, aside from their hair-raising adventures in the Library, Tejana barely knew River. Not so long ago, it might have really bothered her, the inequality of her Time Lord father pairing up with a human, just as his inexplicable love for Rose had once bothered her. But now, having found her own happiness in what had to be one of the strangest relationships in the Universe, she had learned to be much more tolerant, much less black and white in her approach to life. In the end, the only thing that was important was whether or not River made her father happy.

Right now, however, it was a little difficult to tell whether the Doctor was happy about it all or not, since he was much too busy being utterly embarrassed. A small grin crept across her face. It was almost unheard of for her father to get this flustered and she couldn't resist teasing him a little. "Spoil-ers!" she sing-songed.

"Oh, shut up!" he growled. "You know what time travel gets like. It's complicated." He turned his head and fixed her with his gaze. "And speaking of complicated, when are you going to stop stalling and tell me what the very, very, absolutely important thing is that you came here to talk to me about?"

The grin slipped away from her face. "Stalling? I'm not stalling. What makes you think I'm stalling?"

"Because you've always done it, ever since you were tiny. Whenever it's something you think I won't want to hear, you always take ages to screw up your courage to tell me, but then - when it comes to the ultimate moment of confession - you start to talk about anything and everything else, trying to put it off for as long as you can," he said, a twinkle in his eyes at turning the tables on her. "So, what is it this time?"

Annoyed at being thrust so effectively on to the back foot, she drew herself up haughtily to her full height, which was probably a bit of a waste of effort, considering how small she was in this regeneration. "That's rubbish. Absolute rubbish. Stalling would be an extremely childish thing to do. I'm not five years old any more! And I don't have any need to stall, not in the slightest, thank you very much!"

"Uh-huh," the Doctor agreed solemnly, his eyes still dancing with mischief. "So why are you still doing it?"

She bit back the acid retort on the tip of her tongue and took a deep, steadying breath. Okay, fine, she told herself. No more stalling. This is it, crunch time, I have to tell him. Stay calm and just ease into it slowly. Everything will be okay, just as long as I explain it all carefully and use a bit of tact and diplomacy...

"I'm pregnant," she blurted out in a sudden rush of words. "The Master and I...we're going to have a son."

There was silence. Absolute, impenetrable, suffocating silence. As the old Earth saying went, you could have heard a pin drop. In the end, Tejana couldn't bear the agonising wait any longer. "Well?" she prompted. "Aren't you going to say anything?"

"What do you want me to say?" All the light and warmth had drained from his voice. It was flat, empty and impersonal, as if he was talking to a complete stranger. His gaze was cold and shuttered and there was no expression on his face whatsoever. Immediately, she felt both her hearts sinking like stones. She hadn't expected him to take the news well, but this was even worse than she had envisaged. Hot, painful tears welled in her eyes. Until now, she had never realised how desperately she had been hoping it would turn out differently, how badly she had wanted her father's blessing for her precious baby.

"Oh, I don't know. How about, 'Congratulations, Tejana, that's terrific news!' ? Or maybe even, 'Oh, wow, I'm going to be a grandfather, pass the cigars!' Either of those might be nice!"

"Nice!" he spat, his eyes suddenly blazing with incredible fury. "You think having a child with the Master is going to be nice? Do you have any idea what you've done? You can't seriously consider him fit to be a father, after all the harm he's caused throughout the centuries, all the mayhem and death and destruction. He's a twisted, psychopathic, murderous megalomaniac! And you're planning to inflict all that on a helpless child! I can just hear him now, 'Now watch carefully, son, while I teach you how to decimate a population!' And you expect me to be happy about that?"

Tejana went pale with anger. "Don't you dare start lecturing me about paternal role models, because believe me, you are on very thin ice!" she snarled, unable to hold back the bitter words, despite her resolve to keep a rein on her temper. "At least he'll be there when his child needs him, instead of dumping all his responsibilities to merrily jaunt off across the Universe."

The Doctor recoiled as if she had slapped him. He shook his head in sorrow and disbelief. "Don't you understand? You're my daughter! This isn't what I wanted for you, Tejana."

"No? Then tell me, Doctor, what did you want for me? A man who loves me? Who makes me happy? Who would do anything in his power to protect me and keep me safe? Who would do the same and more for our child? Don't you see that I already have all of that?"

His hand shot out with the speed of a striking snake, catching her by her right arm. "This is what I didn't want for you!" Pushing back the sleeve of her jacket, he revealed a circlet of darkening bruises coiled around her slender wrist, unmistakably finger-marks.

Tejana stared at the livid prints in surprise. Until the Doctor had mentioned them, she hadn't even known they were there. She could remember the Master restraining her wrists while they were making love, it was something he often did. But she didn't remember any pain, just overwhelming pleasure. Oddly, now that she was aware of them, the bruises really did hurt. The marks seemed to be darkening even further as she watched, forming an ominous shackle of throbbing black smudges against her pale skin. And at the same time, she realised she could feel other aches emerging across her body, as if she was slowly becoming aware of other hidden injuries in the places he had touched her.

For a few moments, her head swam with confusion and a tendril of incipient fear curled up her spine. What the hell was going on? The Master had never hurt her before, not like this. And why hadn't she noticed it happening at the time? Why hadn't she stopped him? With a supreme effort, she pulled herself together, fighting to maintain her composure. Whatever this was, she was damned if she was going to admit to her father how thoroughly shaken she was.

"He's never done anything I didn't want him to!" she said, wrenching her wrist sharply from his grasp.

"Oh, and that's supposed to make me feel better about it, is it?" the Doctor retorted. "Because, hello, it doesn't! Does he even know you're here?"

"No," she said, her voice almost inaudible.

"Well, there's a surprise! Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that me being involved in my grandson's life doesn't exactly factor into his grand plan, now does it?"

Tejana didn't answer. There was nothing she could say. The Doctor was right. She knew quite well that the Master would be furious if he knew where she was and what she was doing.

Unexpectedly, the Doctor's hands moved to gently cup her face, searching her eyes with his. There was no anger there now, just a deep, abiding sadness. "Why did you really come here, Tejana? It wasn't just to tell me about the child, was it? There's something else you want from me."

Tears streaked down her face. "I wanted...I need to...please, Doctor, you're the last living President of Gallifrey..."

The light of comprehension dawned in his gaze at the incoherent words, realisation striking him like the crack of a whip. "You want me to marry the two of you? Is that what you're asking?" he said incredulously. "Why?"

"I've already given him my true name, we're going to have a child..."

"But why does a formal ceremony even matter to you? Gallifrey's gone forever, her marriage laws are redundant, her traditions totally irrelevant."

"It doesn't matter to me, it matters to him!" she sobbed. "It's the way he was brought up, he can't get past it. For our son to truly be his heir, we need to be married."

The Doctor turned away from her and leaned his head against the stone wall of the Pandorica. His shoulders were hunched like the old man he truly was, rather than the young man he appeared to be, as though the weight of the Universe was slowly crushing him. "No. You've got no right to ask this of me."

"But back at the Hub, you let me go with him! You told me to be happy!" she protested, dismayed at the rigid, uncompromising denial. "I thought that meant you were okay with us being together!"

"Well, you were wrong. After giving him your true name, you didn't leave me much option except to let you go! There wasn't anything else I could do!" her father said harshly. "But I won't condone your relationship or support it. You've taken away all my other choices in this, Tejana, but I won't formally hand you over to him, like some sort of gift-wrapped present. I'll never give him that satisfaction."

She took an angry step backwards, every line of her body tense with fury. "You're right, I should never have come," she said, her voice trembling with bitterness. "I thought for once you might listen, but I should have known better. When will you both learn that I'm not a possession for you to squabble over like a pair of children! But the two of you will always have a score to settle, and that will always come first, no matter what I do or say. If the miracle of my son doesn't change that, then I guess nothing ever will." She spun away and headed back towards the double doors. "Goodbye, Doctor."

His head shot up. "Where are you going?"

"Home," she responded, knowing that this description of the Master's TARDIS would upset her father more than anything else. She paused in the doorway and looked back at him over her shoulder. "You know, you're so sure that the Master is actively trying to destroy our relationship. But the truth is, he doesn't have to do a single thing to drive a wedge between us. All he ever had to do was to sit back and wait until we did it ourselves."

She made it as far as the passageway before the last of her strength gave out and she fell to her hands and knees in the dust, her fierce pride no longer enough to keep her upright. The narrow, torch-lit tunnel seemed to blur in front of her and she found herself struggling to breathe. Something was very wrong. This was much more than just being pregnant, much more than the residual effects of the vortex manipulator. She felt almost as if she was dying. Her eyes fell to her right wrist. To her shock, she saw that the bruises from the Master's fingers had worsened still further, taking on the appearance of deep, crusted weals. Her entire body ached viciously, as if she had been kicked all over.

Oh gods, she thought fearfully. What's happening to me?

Suddenly, the air seemed to thicken and, with a chill, she knew she was no longer alone. The invisible presence she had sensed earlier had returned in force. It was all around her, like a tangled net, closing her in. She tried to struggle free, fighting to gather enough breath into her lungs to scream. Across from her, a glowing line began to trace slowly across the stone wall, shaping itself into a ragged curve, resembling a huge, malevolent grin. There was a terrible grinding noise and the line grew wider and wider and wider, transforming into a gaping fissure, greedily spilling tendrils of pure white Time-fire into the darkness of the tunnel. Galvanised by absolute terror, Tejana tried to scrabble away, frantic to reach the safety of the room containing the Pandorica. But the hovering, unseen presence merely tightened its grip on her and she found herself being forcibly dragged backwards towards the shimmering crack. She could almost feel the invisible hands wrapped around her ankles, pulling and pulling and pulling. Frantically, she clawed her fingernails into the dirt floor, trying to slow her progress, while kicking her legs in a vain attempt to free herself. It was all to no avail. The ghostly grip on her ankles was as inflexible as iron and she didn't have enough strength left to resist. She was much too close to the crack now. The strange heat emanating from the Time-fire scorched along her back, burning cold, freezing and searing at the same time as it reached hungry fingers towards her, absorbing her piece by piece into its endless, unchartered depths.

At the last moment, just as she was about to give up all hope, the Doctor appeared like a rocket out of nowhere. He hurled himself forward across the ground until he was flat on his stomach and seized her by the left arm, wedging his feet against the doors behind him, anchoring her firmly in place. Tejana howled in agony as both his hands closed like a vice on the wide leather band of Hart's vortex manipulator, crushing it around her injured wrist. Neverthless, he didn't loosen his grip, hanging on like grim death instead.

"It's all right!" he yelled. "I've got you!"

"Something's got me by the ankles!" she gasped, still kicking feebly. "It's pulling me in! I can't break free!"

She looked wildly back over her shoulder. Already her legs had been completely swallowed by the ravenous crack as far as her waist, her slender form crawling with serpentine white fire. Every muscle was shrieking in pain as her body stretched taut between the Doctor and her phantom assailant, like the rope in a savage tug-of-war. Her left shoulder was almost pulled out of its socket from the tremendous strain.

And despite her father's best efforts, she was still slipping away from him.

"Doctor!" she cried. "Please!"

He gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on her wrist still further. His eyes glittered like steel and his jaw jutted in terrible determination. "Keep fighting, Tejana! I won't let you go, I promise you...I'll never let you go!"

Inch by inch, refusing to be defeated, he struggled against the supernatural power of the crack, striving to wrest her back towards him. For a few heady seconds, she actually felt herself sliding in his direction and she thought he had won after all. The iron grasp on her ankles seemed to slacken, leaving her ensnared only by the unnatural, almost magnetic pull of the Time-fire itself. The Doctor gave another heave, dragging her even further towards safety. But then, to her utter horror, she saw the small fasteners on the strap of the vortex manipulator starting to separate, as though nimble, invisible fingers were unbuckling them, one by one.

"No!" the Doctor yelled, making a desperate grab for her as he felt her arm slipping through the loosened wrist-strap. "NO!"

Tejana lunged for his hand, only to feel the eldritch coils of Time-fire twining around her, snatching her violently away from him and dragging her fully inside the glowing fissure.

"Father!" she screamed.

She heard him shout her name, caught one last look at his agonised face, and then the crack snapped shut and she began to fall.