I hope you enjoy this. Happy Christmas!
A Real Weeping Angel.
The Ponds had known for a long time the TARDIS was telepathic and sentient. True, at first they'd thought the Time Lords were having them on. Not anymore, and ever since House they could never think of the time ship as anything more than a living, sentient being. The present atmosphere of the TARDIS was solemn, hurt, heartbroken and tired. It was an oppressive atmosphere that had made it difficult for anyone barring the Doctor and Angel to cope with. The Ponds weren't surprised by the aura of doom and gloom. They'd feel it too if their own daughter had been kidnapped by the Silence. But the reality was worse than that. Their daughter hadn't been kidnapped by anyone, but she was with the Silence. Rory and Amy were sitting in the kitchen in the TARDIS. It was late at night, and they were both hoping Angel and the Doctor were asleep after the mess in Berlin. After everything the pair had gone through recently the last thing they needed was more stress.
"I still can't believe the Silence and Kovarian grew a child from our DNA like that after they'd gone to all that trouble to kidnap Ayla," Amy murmured as she took a sip of her tea as she remembered the revelation when it had been shoved into her and her husband's faces. Rory had long since decided not to bother dwelling on it. In his mind River was not his daughter, and it would take more than genetics to prove to him she was his daughter. There was more to being a parent than genetics, you had to be there for the child, teach them values of morality. Rory had always wanted kids, he'd always wanted the responsibility to prove to the world he wasn't some scruffy nothing, and a woman, a self centered, manipulative, vain and heartless psychopath that shared his and Amy's DNA had not been what he'd had in mind when he'd thought of having kids. It made him bitter to think that Mels, the arrogant and self absorbed bitch that Amy had called her best friend when all she'd done was drag Amy into trouble, and blow up the Raggedy Doctor stories Amy had told them both out of all proportion. Rory just could not see Mels as he'd known her as his daughter or anything even remotely similar, and he frankly didn't care if Amy felt the same way or not.
It wouldn't surprise him if her own thoughts about Mels were more biased, but that was simply because she had gotten along better with Mels than she had with him. Now they knew why. Mels was actually Melody, their daughter, but she'd been born in a test tube like those designer babies he had heard and read about in science magazines, only the reality was even sicker. Rory had never imagined a child of his and Amy's would be made in such a manner, preferring the good old and traditional method. The only familial connection between River and Rory was in their DNA. That was it. He felt violated by the Silence, who had stolen his and Amy's DNA, grown a baby in a test tube, trained her to become a murderous psychopath with a delight in ruining a good woman's life. He felt no paternal love for River since she had never been raised by him, he had never held her as a baby, never taught her right from wrong, and he hoped Amy felt the same way. Unfortunately, his wife had a problem; she was unable to see how her views or her actions, or even how she perceived her friends might cause pain to others who loved her.
"I don't know," he mumbled unable to make his voice any louder since he was exhausted, "they did examine you when we were in America, and River did say the Silence had been looking for a child conceived by us. But they had to settle for Ayla when they realised they weren't going to get anywhere when they learnt you weren't pregnant. Angel saved a version of River, Melody, from that kind of life only for another to take her place. Ayla paid the price for Angel's action, but her escape brought about River anyway. It just keeps coming back to River Song, doesn't it?"Amy bit her lip as she thought about that. Angel had endured it all, the Doctor's amnesia and Ayla's kidnap, her kidnap and imprisonment whilst a ganger wearing her face ran about... She'd endured it all to try to keep a version of River bloody Song from being kidnapped the way a timeline said she would. It had all been for nothing; Ayla had been kidnapped instead, and River had been conceived anyway except instead of it being a natural, normal birth, this version of River had been conceived by technology. It sickened Amy to think that the one child she'd wanted had been ripped from her in a way that she couldn't describe. She'd always wanted to carry a baby girl that would be her Melody, named after her own future self that was sent back in time by a cult of psychotics, but now it had been ripped from her by Kovarian. Hatred for the evil, heartless woman surged through her before she bottled it up. Hatred for the woman wouldn't help bring Ayla back. It wouldn't close the gap between the Doctor and Angel. "Amy, how do you see River? I'm only asking because I don't see her as my child," Rory asked curiously.
Amy wasn't surprised to hear that. She herself couldn't really work out how she felt about River, once she'd been fascinated by the woman to the point of idolising her before she found out River was her daughter. Now, after seeing everything in River's past, Amy felt herself wishing she could warn her younger self not to put too much faith in River Song.
"I don't know," she replied honestly, with a sigh. "I mean, when we were kids and I thought her name was Mels, I just thought she was my best friend. Okay, she might have been insane, but she was my friend, now I know she isn't. She never was. She used us. When she admitted who she was, I wondered what the hell was happening, but now I feel betrayed, like the Silence had watched and waited behind the scenes for years from the moment the TARDIS first came into my life. I mean, the Silence and Kovarian had plotted and schemed to kidnap Angel for Ayla, even going to all the trouble of brainwashing the Doctor in forgetting who she was to him, and for what?
Ayla escaped and with our DNA the Silence just grew a baby like that. What I don't get is why they didn't bother with that kind of plan as a proper contingency in the first place. Instead of kidnapping either Angel or me when we were pregnant, they could have simply come to our home when we weren't travelling in the TARDIS and taken our DNA there. They didn't have to go to all the trouble of just kidnapping and brainwashing their own victims."
Rory was surprised by the outpouring just like he was surprised by Amy's insightfulness. He had to admit she had a point, and he homed in on a couple of points. "Yeah, you're right," he said, "it also makes me wonder who decided to wipe the Doctor's memory of Angel as his Mate in the first place. He did admit before we went to meet Jack, Mickey and the others Angel had been kidnapped before." Amy nodded as she pictured a Doctor who not only knew Angel was his Mate, but also aware she was pregnant, being kidnapped and replaced very quickly, and she voiced her viewpoint, "They could've just kidnapped her without needing to go through with that plan to stick a Silent inside the TARDIS during the regeneration, and they could simply have kidnapped Angel and used time travel to send the ganger back to the exact second she'd left, make it seem like nothing had happened. But I think they wanted the Doctor occupied whilst they kidnapped Angel, but why such an elaborate plan," she shook her head. "I've got a very good idea who set it all up, and I think you do too," Rory said grimly, and Amy nodded. She did have a good idea of who would want to make the Doctor forget Angel, someone who honestly didn't care who she hurt in the process. River. But they couldn't prove it, and frankly they didn't want to try. The chances were River would lie and maybe she wouldn't even deny it, and she was good at deception anyway, so what was the point? "What about River only coming to Demon's run after Ayla had been kidnapped?" Amy would never know what her husband was going to say. From the doorway to the kitchen doorway, the Doctor's voice said, "From a time travelling perspective River did the right thing in not coming until it was all over. It was the only way of preserving her timeline, and even River's not foolish or stupid enough to meddle with that since she loves herself so much." Deep down the Doctor wasn't secure in his explanation; River Song casually disregarded rules about time travel. What annoyed the Doctor the most about that about her was she seemed to not care about dropping in to meet him in reverse order. But she didn't seem to care, and that attitude irked the Time Lord no end, especially now he knew what the Silence had done to him. The Ponds watched the Time Lord make himself a cup of tea before sitting himself down. "How's Angel?" Amy asked, wondering why he wasn't with her. "Sleeping," the Doctor said shortly, not in the mood for long conversations. Unfortunately he wasn't going to get his wish for peace and quiet which was why he was even here. Rory echoed Amy's thought. "Why aren't you with her?" "She doesn't want me anywhere near her," the Doctor said sadly; naturally Angel had said she wanted to be alone, but the Doctor took it differently, "and I don't blame her." He took a massive sip from his mug, signifying the line of questioning was over. Amy and Rory glanced at each other, wondering what they could say to him without him losing his temper. The Doctor hadn't been in the best moods recently for good reason.
"What did you mean about River preserving her timeline?" Rory asked; ever since meeting the Doctor and Angel and learning about their alien origins, Rory had taken to studying the latest scientific theories, and time travel and what was seen as possible or impossible was at the top of his interests.
The Doctor sighed as he did his best to explain, "When Angel told you both not to have your wedding night in the TARDIS, she did so without knowing what would happen. She only had a feeling. When she did that, River's timeline was in flux. The Silence, with their time travel technology, saw that possibility, and when you were kidnapped, Amy they realised they would need a change of plan. But it was already on the cards; River was their assassin, but they had seen two potential means for her to exist; 1, she would've been conceived naturally in the TARDIS, absorbing the vortex energy, and gain some of the abilities Time Lords have; temporal senses, that kind of thing. Or 2, they would've had to grow River from your DNA, though they wouldn't have known why. So they travelled back in time, knowing they would need to kidnap Angel, knowing she was pregnant the whole time, and they got away with it. The only reason they kidnapped Ayla was because they believed it would take a Time Lord to deal with a Time Lord, and there's a lot of proof to back that up. "But when Ayla escaped, they already had your DNA. I think they gathered it as another contingency plan. River's earlier timeline is entwined with Ayla's. If Angel had left things alone, you would have been the one kidnapped and replaced with a ganger. But when she told you two not to have your wedding night, the timelines shifted anyway."
"How is Ayla's timeline entwined with Rivers?"
The Doctor sighed again in exasperation that was starting to dangerously border anger, wondering why humans never bothered to look at words to see the kind of puzzles there were. He'd noticed he'd become very short tempered with human stupidity recently, and if he were honest he didn't care if he hurt them anymore, particularly these two. In his mind, it was their fault for not leaving well enough alone or even telling him that something was wrong. "Because if Ayla hadn't been kidnapped, snatched from Angel's arms at Demon's run, River would never have been grown in a vat when she escaped," he grimaced and growled angrily at the memory of Angel sobbing whilst he'd gone off to sooth his curiosity though he'd done so because he'd wanted to know one thing. Why? Why the conspiracy to kidnap? Why go to so much trouble to kill him and Angel when there were so many easier and simpler ways of killing them? He'd had the right to know why, what for, what was the point, and what would happen later. But most of all he'd wanted to know why they had violated their lives in such a way. But most of all he'd wanted to know what else the Silence had done. Well, he'd certainly found out, and he hadn't liked the answer one little bit.
"Without Ayla's escape, River Song would never have been created, and her artificial conception and birth has only made her more psychotic since the Silence didn't bother hiding the fact Angel had stopped her original birth from happening," the Doctor sipped his tea. "It's not Angels' fault, she can't understand half of the visions she receives half the time, and they're almost always cryptic. She couldn't have known she and Ayla would've paid the price."
"Doctor," Rory began slowly, "I met Jenny, and I heard how she'd been conceived-"
"Don't you dare. Jenny is nothing like River, do you know why?" The Doctor interrupted at once in a harsh tone, annoyed by the implication his other, more older daughter, was being compared with River.
He pierced Rory's gaze with a deathly stare. His own fatigue and heartsbreak from his daughter's kidnap and his Mate's unease around him only made the stare more unnerving. "When we first met Jenny, she had the body of a young woman, and yet she had the mind of a child. Children have very impressionable and malleable minds. On that planet, Jenny and all the others were grown with the knowledge of how to use a gun, how to stab someone without feeling any remorse, and I wouldn't be surprised if River had the same knowledge grafted inside her mind. But despite all that knowledge, everyone who stepped out of those machines that created Jenny were children in mind. All they needed was some help from someone like Donna to realise there was more to life than guns. Jenny spent all that time around Donna and me before she met Angel, by then she'd come to learn there was more and better things in life than killing. River never had that kind of influence in her life, all she had was Kovarian and the poison she spouted in her ears everyday, and by the time her identity was revealed, she was too old to change her mindset. She would have given the opposite of what Jenny learnt from Angel and Donna." Amy was slightly disturbed that the Doctor would exclude himself from what had made Jenny grow out of her soldier persona into the person she was now. It was like he no longer saw himself as someone worthy to be respected and trusted, if he ever had. The Doctor took a sip of tea, and whatever he was thinking he kept to himself. Rory and Amy wondered what was going through the tired and annoyed Time Lord's mind. "I'm just glad Angel's safe," the Doctor said after a moment, taking another sip. Okay, enough was enough. Amy had spent the last few months wondering if she and Rory had done the right thing in keeping Angel's death at the lake a secret, especially if the Doctor now remembered Angel as his Mate, and had survived an attempt on her life.
"Doctor," she said haltingly, waiting nervously when her childhood friend turned his head curiously to look at her, "there's something you need to know." Rory stiffened and froze when he realised where his wife was going with this. He was about to open his mouth, to tell her not to say a word, but if he did then he would've been the biggest hypocrite of them all. He wanted Angel to live, and since River had told them not to say a word he couldn't help but ask himself if they should've disobeyed her from the word go. Besides, what with River out there, almost killing Angel, and with Ayla missing, the Doctor had every right to know his Mate was still in danger. Yes, Rory believed the Doctor deserved a bit of pain for what had happened, but he didn't want it to go too far. "What is it?" The Time Lord asked at once. Something in Amy's voice told him to listen. "We saw Angel being shot. At a lake, by someone wearing an astronaut suit like the one we saw the little girl wearing in America," Amy managed to get it out in one breath. She spoke so fast because she didn't really want to meet his eyes or see his expression, but when she'd got it out all her eyes could pick out was the Time Lord's body language and his expression. The scary thing about it was the Doctor wasn't angry as far as they could tell. He was looking between Rory and her with an expression they couldn't identify even after the three years they'd been travelling with him and Angel. Then his face contorted as the anger which had been surging since before and after Demons Run appeared. Visible rage appeared in his eyes, the set of his mouth. Amy trembled; she'd seen the Doctor furious before, but never like this.
"Why didn't you say anything?" The Doctor's voice was a whisper, but the two humans could hear the undertone of anger vibrating beneath the surface. Rory and Amy both knew the answer would send the Doctor over the edge, but they had no choice. Too bad they didn't get the chance to reply to his question. "Why didn't you say anything?" The Doctor repeated, seemingly unable to notice his companions about to reply, but he kept talking, his voice rising with growing rage as he felt the fatigue, anger, frustration and heartsbreak seep into his voice after begging for a proper outlet for days. "How long have you known about this-Wait, that little girl in the astronaut suit, the two of you and that bitch were acting strange, like someone had died, and it came from that diner. You've known since then, have you, that my MATE was going to be SHOT, and you didn't even TELL US?! IN FACT, WHEN THE HELL WHERE YOU PLANNING ON TELLING US, WHEN ANGEL WAS ABOUT TO DIE?! WHEN SHE WAS ABOUT TO WALK TO HER DEATH?! I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU TWO; YOU BOTH DIDN'T BOTHER TO REMIND ME ANGEL WAS NOT JUST MY MATE, BUT THAT SHE WAS PREGNANT! HOW MANY OTHER SECRETS ARE YOU KEEPING? YOU'D BETTER TELL ME NOW, OR I'LL MAKE SURE YOU REGRET IT!" The Doctor leapt to his feet, trembling with fury as he felt the dams holding his rage back crack under the stress of what he'd just heard. "Why? What is it with you humans?! Not only did the pair of you know about me and Angel when I'd forgotten about her, not only did the lot of you keep phoning us, making me and Angel more depressed, driving us mad with worry, now this?! You've been sitting on this for months on top of you, Rory," he pointed a shaking finger towards the startled human, "knowing about me and Angel years before! Why didn't you tell me, I had the right to know! Even if my memory was blocked, I would've listened."
The Doctor prowled around the kitchen, trying so hard to keep his anger contained otherwise he'd alert Angel, and in her current state that was the last thing she needed. "Who told you, who you made you make that stupid decision to keep Angel's death a secret from me after you saw the nightmare I was going through when I learnt Angel was my Mate?" he asked in a deathly whisper. He had a good idea, he just wanted to be sure. Amy shuddered, something in his voice implied a threat he would go through with if they didn't come to the point, "River." "Of course it was, why bother asking?" the Doctor replied darkly, running a hand through his hair in unhidden frustration, that same hand was then used to rub his eyes tiredly before his tone changed. He sounded more like a child wanting to know why when someone had stolen a toy, "Why didn't you ignore her and just say about what had happened?"
Rory considered the question. He'd wanted to tell Angel, warn her, but if he did that things might've been worse. He sighed and explained to the Doctor. He told him about the meeting with the future Angel, how distraught she'd been about the baby, Ayla, and how she'd been terrified at the lake before she'd been shot. The Doctor sat down heavily in his chair as he listened to Rory's story. Part of him wanted to kill the Ponds for not telling them this story when River wasn't gracing his TARDIS with her unwelcome presence, her "spoilers and sweeties." That part, a really big part of his mind if he was scarily honest with himself, was the part of him which was fed up with the Ponds. As far as he was concerned, Amy had made a big mistake by idolising him. Then again he himself had enjoyed the attention before returning to find she'd never gotten along with her life, all because of him. Now, a girl she'd thought was her friend was actually her deranged daughter, but to make it worse no-one, not even Rory, who'd witnessed what had happened at Demon's run; no one, not Jack, Donna, Martha, Gwen and the rest of the Torchwood team, had bothered to think if maybe the Doctor and Angel had wanted to be left alone whilst they looked for Ayla. Angel had been in a terrible state, barely eating, sleeping, let alone speaking. The Doctor had feared she had been driven too far; she'd only gotten him back, held their daughter for a measly two hours before Ayla had been kidnapped, and she'd almost returned to the happy, confident woman she'd been when she'd regenerated after that mess with Davros and the Crucible.
Time Lords were possessive, rather selfish beings when it came to their Mates, and the children they had with them. The Doctor's search for leads on Ayla had been, in a word, brutal. He'd almost murdered the Papal Mainframe's Tasha Lem, the Mother Superious when he'd remembered what Manton had said about her giving permission to unhood the Headless Monks; oh, he had made that bunch of cowards regret ripping his daughter away. They knew what he was capable of, they'd been on good terms with him for centuries, and all that time they were prepared to steal his own child, an innocent girl to kill him, something Kovarian had forgotten to bother pandering about. If she had known what he'd done to the Daleks during their invasion back in his original incarnation, how he'd held the Key to Time in the palm of his hand, what he could have potentially done with that power, how he'd fought in the Time War, then maybe the worthless little monkey wouldn't have conceived of such a complicated and disgusting plan. Kovarian had a nasty surprise coming if he saw the stupid, worthless, disgusting little disease again. He had a nice long list of ways to make her pay for what she'd done, and he would not be satisfied until she was dead or begging him for nonexistent mercy, just like the rest of the Papal Mainframe and that stupid church!Angel hadn't said a word whilst he'd made them pay, nor did she even try to hold him back. Deep down, the Time Lady fury had told her they'd deserved to pay. Oh, with Lem it had been a different story. But his friends from Earth had driven them mad, those phone calls, whilst well meaning, had only depressed Angel and he too much though they knew their family had meant well. He'd decided to go to Leadworth to set the record straight, to tell Amy and Rory they were not helping by reminding them about Ayla, that in their idea of thinking they wanted to be spoken to, they were actually losing ground on where Ayla could be, but he'd never had the chance when that disaster of an adventure had been dropped onto them like a comet on a pane of glass.
Worse, it was because of her stories of him that Mels, River Song, even bothered to set her sights on Angel rather than him. Had it never occurred to the stupid child that Amy had been when he'd first met her to keep her gob shut? If she had then maybe, just maybe, she would never have needed to see psychiatrists, and keep biting them when they said he wasn't real. The Doctor didn't really care about himself at the moment; he had three years of hell to make up for Angel, and he wasn't going to fail. Not this time, he'd failed her far too many times to count already and that was before he'd lost his memory. He would find Ayla even if he had to rip the universe apart to do it. It shouldn't have reached that far, but to be honest the Doctor was fed up. He was tired of having to give, give, give only for the universe to rip his life apart even more. Was it so much to ask for a little bit of gratitude? At this point all he wanted was to be left alone, to find his daughter, and make it up to Angel.
That was it. Surely what he wanted was not difficult for the universe to give. He just wanted to be left alone! He'd wanted to be left alone to take care of Angel whilst searching for Ayla, and what had Amy and Rory done? They'd attracted the attention of their psychotic daughter, who'd hijacked them at gunpoint and forced them to Nazi Germany. Was it too much to ask to be left in peace? He'd fought - reluctantly though that had been before that mess with Cass near Karn - in the Last Great Time War. He'd prevented Rassilon from destroying the universe on some mad scheme that had a zilch chance of success. It cost him his race, barring himself and Angel, the one bright spot in his life. What did the universe give him apart from his Mate? A conspiracy to murder his Mate, and on top of that he'd been manipulated, brainwashed, forced to forget his Mate. His daughter had been kidnapped, and she was Omega knew where, and Rassilon help the stupid apes and telepathic freaks if they'd harmed or tortured her. The only good thing there was she'd managed to escape, the only good news the Doctor and Angel had had in a while since Demon's Run. It was the only thing keeping them going at the moment.
To make matters worse, his two friends had known about his mating for a long time, hell Rory had known for three years about he and Angel. Three years! Why hadn't the stupid nosed human said anything?! Why was Amy the only one to muster the courage to tell him the truth, but she wasn't innocent; no, she and her husband had been sitting on intelligence about a future Angel, who'd apparently had enough and got herself shot on the shore of some remote lake in America. If they had told them all this months ago, Demon's run may not have happened. The Doctor had had enough! What was the point in protecting a universe that allowed terrible things to happen like that?!
Amy was frightened. She had known for a long time keeping Angel's death secret from the Doctor was a bad idea. A mistake, and when he'd remembered her as his Mate, her fear of his reaction had grown. But there'd been so many things happening that any thought of revealing what had happened the shores of that lake had been shoved to the side. That was her only excuse. When people learnt a secret like that, anger and bitter tears were expected. If they were humans. Amy and Rory, and everyone who had travelled with the Doctor, had to be reminded, almost constantly he wasn't human. The Doctor's Time Lord nature was completely different. When the Doctor was angry, it began slow, quiet, under the surface like a submarine waiting to torpedo a ship. Then he began to plan a way to really get back at the fools who'd pissed him of. What frightened Amy the most was she and Rory were the fools who'd pissed him off, and the girl didn't think it was a wise move to consider the Doctor would let that 'Raggedy Doctor' thing get in the way.
The Doctor turned furious eyes towards Amy, his voice deceptively quiet and conversational. "Do you remember when I told you about not deciding what I need to know, Amy? It was during that adventure on Starship UK. Such a long time ago now. Why did you ignore that little rule? Did you think I was joking, that one time I would forgive and forget if it happened again? If you think that you might as well get ready to leave, because I won't accept that. You might think wandering off is cool and stuff, but let me tell you, that rule about not telling me things is something you shouldn't break."
He turned to face Rory, turning his head she he could face them both at the same time. "Give me a very good reason why I shouldn't take you back to your time, and leave you there. And whatever you do, don't say anything about Angel, 'cause I'm not in the mood for her to be used as a shield."
Rory sighed, "We wanted to tell you Doctor, but there were two problems with saying anything. If we'd told you and Angel, it might do something to Ayla. Angel, the future Angel, was at the Lake because something had happened to her. I thought, with everything," he looked a bit unsure, "that she'd lost the baby, and you still didn't know who she was to you. The second thing was we might bring the events about anyway."
"Then again, by telling me I might have remembered Angel being my Mate sooner, known she was pregnant and keep her nearby at all times so she wouldn't have been kidnapped and replaced by a ganger," the Doctor's whisper was harsh, "I might have managed to stop her from getting kidnapped. Did that occur to you?"
"Didn't think you cared." The moment the words were out of Rory's mouth he wanted to suck them back in. He'd seen first hand how broken, hurt and traumatised with guilt and worry the Doctor had been in the run up to the disaster at Demon's Run. In all the time he'd known him, Rory had believed the Doctor to be an egotistical fool who ran around getting people he was supposed to be taking of hurt, and chief among them was Angel.
"Rory!" Amy gasped in horror, but her husband ignored her. Rory had learnt the Doctor and Angel were the last of their species, and instead of caring about her, worrying about her whenever something happened to her, and if she was depending on him to help her, what did the Doctor do? Did he ever run of after her to make sure she was okay? No. Sometimes he'd flippantly say she would be okay, ignore her at best. When he'd learnt they were Mated and he'd forgotten her, Rory had taken it upon himself to care for her. Nobody else would; the Doctor was forever rushing around like a little kid hyped on sugar, and Amy, as much as he hated to admit it, hadn't really paid much thought or care to Angel, she'd become almost as bad as the Doctor was. At the time, Rory had just seen River Song as an annoying vain, egotistical know it all, and manipulator who hated the very air Angel breathed. One thing was for sure, whilst his wife had an almost childlike regard for the Doctor, Rory didn't. He still resented the Doctor for too many reasons. The Doctor's eyes had shot open at Rory's careless retort, but Rory wasn't going to apologise; no, he was going to make the Doctor see the consequences of what he did everyday. Rory knew that he'd already had to face it when River had given him the dressing down, but he wanted to shove his own case forward. "What did you say?" the Doctor whispered, horrified by what Rory had just said to him, Amy couldn't blame him.
Rory glared back at him, "You and Angel were the last of your race before Ayla was born, yet whenever she got hurt, whenever she went missing, did you lift a finger to care about what happened to her? No, you didn't. For someone who hated being the last of your kind, you sure enjoyed forgetting about her didn't you? You just flounced around, flirting with other women while she watched." The Doctor visibly wilted, he couldn't deny any of what Rory had just shoved into his face. Nor did he want to. He hated himself already for hurting Angel, for forgetting her, for disregarding her very presence and whatever she said to him. It had been a hearts breaking shock when he remembered Angel, but he had to admit it had answered so many questions, like why he seemed withdrawn whenever Angel was upset. And she had been upset frequently over the three years since his last regeneration.
He hadn't noticed anything at first, but as time passed from then to the moment he remembered her he had started noticing her moods, her appearance, her beauty in general... Only to forget her whenever River Song appeared. Now the Doctor had started to wonder if the Silent who'd gotten into his TARDIS had also hypnotised him into noticing River whenever she appeared, but the recording Kovarian had shown him hadn't hinted anything like that. It would explain things in his mind, and it made him kick himself even more. But if he was honest with himself, he had known something was missing in his life, and he'd replaced Angel with River, something that now made him furious, tired, and sick.
The Doctor was a Time Lord. He should've reinforced his mental barriers like he had before the Time War, but he'd been so complacent, so withdrawn it had never occurred to him to bother. Not even that mess on the Oodsphere with Donna in the last months of Angel's last incarnation had made him take his finger out, and do it. If he had then maybe this mess would never have happened. He could have locked the memories of Angel inside his mind, and if he had sensed something wrong with his memory, if someone had tampered with it, he could have checked his mind and found the memories. But the Doctor had to admit to himself that there were many things he could wish for and it wouldn't make a shred of difference. Rory was right; Angel and he were the last of their race (not counting Ayla, of course) before he found out about her pregnancy, a billion years of knowledge, of history and culture, and he'd almost carelessly disregarded her, and she could've died, all for the sake of him running around like an idiot on those stupid adventures, adventures he admittedly no longer wanted. What was the point if people were going to eventually try and kill him for a future conflict that involved so much death on a scale that could dwarf the Time War? He would've died with her thanks to their mating bond, and he wouldn't realise it until it was too late. He could picture it many times, and it made him want to vomit until he choked to death. If Rory thought he didn't hate himself enough already, the human had to buck up his ideas. A voice from the doorway interrupted them. "What's all this shouting about?" Everyone in the kitchen turned guiltily towards the doorway. Angel was standing there, wearing her long nightdress topped by a dressing gown. Her hair was tousled and the bags under her eyes showed just how exhausted she was. Amy and Rory felt guilty; if they had chosen a more decent moment to tell the Doctor what they'd known, Angel would still be asleep. Instead they'd just chosen the wrong moment, and they'd increased her stress. The Doctor sighed, and he stood up but he didn't approach out of fear of her shying away from him like she'd been doing for the last month. Angel noticeably stiffened when she noticed him stand up, and the Doctor's hearts clenched. How was he to hold himself together if Angel just rejected him? One thing was for sure, he had had enough of adventuring. What had it gotten him in the long run? His planet and people were gone, the woman he'd Mated to and sworn to protect had suffered to the point she stiffened whenever she noticed him, and their daughter, their own child, had been kidnapped because he'd forgotten he was Mated. Worse, his own legend had driven a bunch of people to hate him for something he hadn't even done yet, now they wanted to try to murder him and his Mate...With their own daughter! Why should he care about adventuring after all that hell? "Do you want to tell her, or should I do it?" he decided to take his frustration and anger out on the two humans who had known far more than he had, and he glowered down at the two Ponds. He knew he was treating them badly by making them scapegoats, but he didn't care. He was too tired, fed up, and generally annoyed by these pathetic humans who had just dragged him and Angel, unintentionally, into an adventure with someone who'd claimed to be their friend, when all he and Angel had wanted was to be left alone to concentrate on finding Ayla. Humans said payback was a bitch, but this time the Doctor was going to make sure the Ponds understood the depths of their mistakes. If this lesson didn't drum in the need to be straight, nothing would. When the pair of them froze, he took it as permission to explain, "These two apparently saw you die on the shores of a lake in America, that time when we met at that diner."
Angel's reaction was not what the Doctor or the Ponds expected. She suddenly wilted, but she didn't appear surprised. The Doctor gasped in disbelief, his mind struggling and refusing to believe what his eyes were telling him. "You knew?" he gasped. He couldn't believe it, he just could not believe it. How many other people knew? Did Jack know? Did Martha, Donna, Mickey, Sarah Jane? How many people knew about this conspiracy? Were they laughing at his expense? Amy gasped at the tone in his voice. She had never heard anything like it, she had no idea what kind of emotion was running through the Doctor's mind, but she knew it was not a flattering one. Angel bit her lip, and she nodded. Even Rory was surprised. "How long have you known?" The Doctor hissed in growing fury. It was rare, very rare, that he lost his temper or patience with Angel, but there had been instances where it had happened, and now he was starting to lose his patience with her. This time, though, this was the limit of all the wonderful time he'd known her. He couldn't believe it. He loved Angel and he regretted how he'd treated her since he'd regenerated, and he had sworn to make it up to her even if it meant he would have to for the rest of his life, and considering he was on his final life he knew it wouldn't be long. But he wasn't going to let his love for the Time Lady make him push aside the anger he was feeling at the moment, and he had a lot of it stored away inside him. He had three years of rage locked inside; River's flirting, the TARDIS blowing up, Amy's infatuation with him before that mess with the Dream Lord, the universe blowing up which almost took his mate from him, the Silurians in Wales when Angel had been sucked down into the ground, America with the girl in the astronaut suit, and the threat of the Silence, and River's kiss, the knowledge Time Lords and Ladies had been torn apart and stuck onto patchwork people by House.
But none of those moments were anything compared to the heartsbreak when he'd remembered Angel and learnt she was pregnant, only to be aware she was a ganger the whole time since America, only to lose her briefly before Demon's Run. The Doctor's hearts had been torn from him when Angel had withdrawn from him after Ayla's kidnapping. At the time he'd felt he'd deserved it for everything he'd done, and now his daughter was paying the price for everything he'd done over the centuries he'd been travelling. He was furious with Rory and Amy as well as their genetic daughter; Amy and Rory had known about him and Angel being Mates for a while now, and they must have known about the baby, and yet they hadn't done anything to tell him the truth.
Worse, their daughter was River Song! That bitch was enough to make him mad, and mixed with this new revelation the Doctor was amazed he hadn't exploded. Angel sensed the Doctor's rising temper, mingled with hurt and frustration, loss, but she knew she couldn't hide it now since he knew so much already. Throughout the night since the thing that had happened in Berlin - it was too ghastly to think of it as an adventure - she had started to think of a plan to deal with the Silence once and for all. Now it was for nothing. The Doctor knew now, he may not have the details, but it was enough.
"Since the download from the Teselecta. River's file included my death date," Angel admitted, "it's a fixed point. There's a still point in time at the lake-"
"Which makes it easy to create a fixed point," the Doctor groaned, "I still don't understand why you didn't tell me." Angel looked away. Realisation struck the Doctor like a bullet through the right heart. "You didn't trust me to keep you safe, did you?" The Doctor didn't know how much more he could take from all this. "Angel-" he sat heavily down and closed his eyes in exhaustion. "Who else knows about this? Be honest. I'm not leaving this room 'till you reveal what else you're hiding from me. River probably knows, these two know, you know. Who else?" he snapped. "No more GAMES! Tell me!"Angel sighed. There was no was point in hiding the truth from the Doctor. "Just us now," she replied, "and the crew of the Teselecta."
"So the whole damn universe knows!" The Doctor growled furiously, he had no idea what made him angrier. The fact his own Mate distrusted him to the extent of keeping a conspiracy to murder her a secret, or that the whole universe knew how she would die. He glared at Angel, "Okay, how do we deal with this problem? It's a fixed point, and these two," he gestured carelessly towards Amy and Rory, "have already seen it, so its in their past. How can we deal with something that's fixed?"Amy interrupted, "Can't you just...not go? Just...rewrite it, or something?" The Doctor sighed, knowing distantly that he'd already explained this to Amy at some point, but he was just too mentally fed up to care when, "Amy, a fixed point cannot be rewritten. Certain moments in time have to happen, and thanks to the Silence, Angel's death is fixed. There is nothing I can do about it. But why didn't you tell me?" he asked Angel, turning to her. "You think you're the only one who's suffered. How do you imagine I felt when I found out that River Song had manipulated me for 3 years, and I didn't even see it because I'd forgotten you? How do you imagine I felt when I kept looking at you and not knowing why, but knowing at the same time I was missing something, needed something important? Do you know how I felt when I discovered not only were you my Mate, but you were pregnant and no longer here? Do you know what that did to me? Do you even care about that? You're not the only one who's suffered Angel, think about that instead of keeping secrets from me." Kicking his chair away, the Doctor walked out of the room angrily. The TARDIS groaned in protest at how he was treating Angel, and the Doctor glared at the walls. He knew he shouldn't have said what he had to Angel, but he was too angry and hurt to care about that for the time being. Now he had the TARDIS breathing down his neck. After that advice she'd given him about River, the Doctor had hoped for a bit more. The TARDIS could've broken the rules; she'd broken so many of them over the centuries they'd been together, and he could've remembered sooner and he could've rescued Angel before the Silence kidnapped Ayla, and he snapped, "Oh shut up, you're not helping either."
In the kitchen Angel was sitting rigidly, her mind traitorously replaying what the Doctor had said before he'd left the kitchen, and she had to admit to herself he was right. It didn't help her the Doctor's anger and hurt was still churning away inside him, and she could feel that same rage as though he were shouting in her face. Not that she could blame him. Amy and Rory had told her how driven the Doctor had been when he'd tried to find her, how worse he'd become. She remembered the bliss when they'd held Ayla between them, only to lose her. In a way she blamed him for leaving her to appease his curiosity which only led to the Silence snatching Ayla away like they'd intended, though she could understand his reasonings. She shared the curiosity as well, about why the Silence had come after them the way they had, conspired with various races to build the Pandorica, the destruction of the TARDIS, and this whole Ayla-River business. Then River had turned up, scolding the Doctor in a manner reminiscent to her own way, but where Angel would use kindness to show the Doctor where he'd gone wrong, River had just been blunt and every word that had come out of her mouth had cut like glass shards through skin. The Doctor had seen, from Angel's point of view, just what life had been like for whenever River had shown up before his memories had returned. He'd been disgusted with himself and River, but she'd clung to him. But inside the TARDIS when they'd both gone to find Ayla... She'd pushed him away, but she'd forgotten something; Ayla was his daughter too, and he'd only known about her and the pregnancy for a short span. After three years of nothing with him, she'd become accustomed to it, of pushing him away.
Now this.
The Doctor knew about her impending death in America, knew about how she'd tried to keep it secret, but the plan she'd been working on would've taken years to fine tune to get things moving. Now there was no chance. Angel had no intention of dying. For a start it would mean giving up on Ayla, and though she wanted more than anything to properly forgive the Doctor she couldn't forget the pain he'd put her through. But she was guilty of forgetting something important too; she'd forgotten that the Doctor himself had suffered, and he was still suffering just as much as she was. He was suffering now. She could feel his pain and anger through their bond. Angel had forgotten that, and she'd sensed the rage burning in his soul when he'd left. He was angry that everyone seemed to know she was going to die, and it made him feel helpless. Angel knew how much effort he'd put into looking for Ayla, knew how much he'd hated being distracted by Jack and the others, and ordinarily she would've loved to chat with them, catch up.
But they'd kept calling at bad times. Worse, sometimes the Torchwood team would get into fights. How they imagined those fights would help the Time Lords find Ayla, Angel did not know. All she knew was she'd agreed with the Doctor's decision to head to Leadworth, and tell Rory and Amy that although they'd appreciated the calls, they were not actually helping with the search for their missing daughter. Angel knew that the Doctor had thought, more than once, during that time that if their family wanted to help, then THEY should help look for Ayla instead of constantly ringing and asking the same boring questions. Even Angel had found her patience exhausted.
But the Doctor was right. She had been unfair, but she'd spent the last three years of her life suffering in silence whenever the Doctor flirted with other women besides River, so the selfishness had been ingrained, and she'd heard enough of the Doctor shouting to realise she could have taken the law into her own hands, and shown him proof of their Mating, or their impending parenthood, anything so long as he'd remembered, but she hadn't done that.
He had suffered as well, as much as she had; the Silent's hypnotic command in the TARDIS during his regeneration, knowing she was important somehow but not knowing why, remembering how she'd almost died more than once in incidents he could've prevented without expending any effort, learning he was her Mate and that she'd been kidnapped because a bunch of fanatics wanted to raise a weapon out of the innocent child she'd been carrying. HER child. Angel had become so used to her own pain for three years it had never occurred to her to see things from her Mate's point of view, and that had been a mistake. HE had been the one the Silence wanted to get rid of, and knowing how she'd suffered made him regret every little thing he'd done in his life. HE had been forced to watch her memories as River berated him, seeing his past self either ignore or not notice her pain, and HE had been the one to forget her. HE had to watch as River poisoned her whilst she'd been disguised as Mels, and he'd almost panicked himself to death trying to find a way to save her life.
Angel remembered how the Doctor had wanted to die, rejecting in horror the Dampening bracelet she'd tried to force on him. It had hurt her to see the horror in his eyes at the sight of the bracelet, and she'd heard the question "Where the HELL did she get THAT!?" reverberate through his brain."Angel?" The Time Lady looked into Rory's eyes, grateful he'd pulled her out of the abyss for a time. "What is it Rory?" Rory nodded his head in the direction the Doctor had gone, and Angel realised Amy was no longer here. Her hearts sank, the Doctor was not going to be an easy person to speak to. Not in that mood. Angel knew the Doctor; he might have been childish at times, but when he was angry he preferred being left alone to his own devices so he could think things through before making a plan. But she wasn't sure if he could get them out of this mess as much as she wanted him to. No one could break a fixed point in time.
Not even a Time Lord.
Despite her exhaustion, Amy was fired up ready for a fight as she headed for the control room. As she'd expected the Doctor was sitting by the console, tired, weary, annoyed...and broken judging by his posture. His head was between his knees. Whether he'd heard her come into the room, she didn't know. She studied him closely; he hadn't stiffened as she'd noisily come into the room, so he either hadn't heard she was there or he had but decided it didn't matter. Amy hesitated, then she decided to speak. She had come this far after all. "Doctor?" A response. His back stiffened. Not a good sign. Nor was his verbal response. "Go away, Amy. Leave me alone, please." The whisper was barely audible but Amy caught it, she also had to hold down the sudden urge to run at the tone of his voice, but Amy swayed on her feet, the hairs on the back of her neck rising as the shiver of fear of his tone washed over her. She had never been afraid of the Doctor until now. In her eyes, the Doctor was a childhood hero, someone to love and lookup too. Now he was so broken by what had happened and what he'd learnt and he hadn't had the time or the chance to prepare himself for the inevitable pain and misery.
Amy remembered how River had appeared, scolded him as though she were Angel, but where the Time Lady would be gentle her daughter had tactlessly and brutally shoved every one of the Doctor's mistakes into his face and down his throat. He hadn't wanted that, in fact his posture had spoken had wanted to murder River, and now Amy wasn't sure if that wouldn't have been a bad thing. Back in the present. The Doctor looked up, saw her and groaned, "Why is it you humans never do as you're told? I tell you to not wander off, what do you do? You wander off. I tell you to go away, to leave me alone, you don't go away, but the worst thing is you don't bother to use your common sense, and when you should have kept your mouth shut!"
Amy was staggered by the anger, particularly since the last bit had nothing to do with her habit of not doing as she was told, but more of knowing when to be discreet. She'd been a child, for God's sake! "What do you mean about the last part, me not keeping my mouth shut?" she asked, though she had a good idea where he was going with this. The Doctor closed his eyes to try and keep a grip on the last shreds of sanity he had left inside him but it was hard considering what he'd just learnt. It was bad enough his Mate didn't trust him enough to tell her she was about to die, but it really annoyed him she didn't realise he'd also suffered some harsh lessons, and now this pathetic little ape was getting on his last nerves with her constant questions. The Doctor was frightened because he had no idea what would happen if he lost his temper, really and utterly if Amy didn't get the hint and leave him alone. Honestly, how hard was it for her to understand the phrase "leave me alone?"
The Doctor genuinely cared for Amy, he really did, but she didn't know when to keep her questions restricted to a time or a place. One such moment was during that mess in Berlin after River had poisoned Angel, and Amy had been more interested in getting the facts straight whilst he had been preoccupied with saving his Mate's life. She couldn't be that stupid, could she? Though he did sometimes ask himself if Amy had fewer brain cells than other humans? The Doctor usually looked for curiosity in his companions, the need to question everything and notice subtle differences in the surroundings, but there was a time for that. He shook his head to get his mind back on track. "When I jumped forwards in time after meeting you, 12 years had passed, right? In that time, everyone knew about me, everyone in bloody Leadworth - Jeff, his grandma...everyone. Did it ever occur to you to keep your mouth shut? It's no wonder your aunt took you to see FOUR psychiatrists, surely that had drilled something into your mind, to keep quiet."
Amy blinked in hurt that he'd bring up the psychiatrists and the embarrassment she'd felt, but before she could reply, the Doctor was started off on a rant. Now he had an outlet for his inner frustrations, he was unstoppable. He regretted it though, regretted the fact he'd done it again; he'd screwed someone else's life, and worse it had been a child instead of an adult. If he hadn't crash landed in Amy's garden then perhaps she could've grown up, gotten a different job from a kissogram or whatever she was now if she hadn't spent all those years fixating on River would never have changed her focus to Angel. "Did any of you - Jack, Mickey, Martha, Sarah Jane - did any of you ACTUALLY bother to look for Ayla your end or not?"
"Of course we-"
"Then why did you waste all that time and energy phoning us in the TARDIS constantly?" the Doctor interrupted harshly. "They can't pretend they didn't have the means. Why didn't Sarah or Jack and Grey tell us news from their contacts? I gave Sarah Jane the means to contact various races and a K9 model to help her on her cases, and Jack and Grey both come from the 51st century, and they both have contacts of their own. Why do I get the impression none of you actually bothered to think about that?"
The Doctor felt bad for his accusation. But at that point he didn't care. Amy didn't speak, she was surprised by the amount of emotional pain coming from the Doctor.
Letting him rant may have been a mistake. "Why do you imagine I dropped the search to head to Leadworth? It was to give everyone a message, to stop calling us constantly since the calls were not doing a single bit of good for me or Angel, and to concentrate on looking for Ayla. All you had to do was use your common sense and think what would be more helpful; looking for Ayla, or phoning us with worthless and repetitive phone calls."
Looking back, Amy could understand the Doctor's point, but she and the others had been worried for him and Angel, she also had to admit that he had a point about Jack and Sarah Jane.
"We didn't think-" she tried to say to placate him, but all it did was make him jump up and pace around the console angrily. "No, that's exactly the problem, especially with you Amy. You don't think at all. It only takes a bit of common sense. Do you remember Prisoner Zero, Amy? Do you remember when you handcuffed me to the radiator, losing the keys on top of that, and I told him you'd called for backup when you were dressed in that fake police woman's uniform? I was trying to bluff him to play for time, but what did you do? Did you play along? No, you didn't, you went," The Doctor then did a cruel but accurate impression of Amy, even copying her own voice, bringing tears to the redhead's eyes, '"I didn't send for backup."'
Inwardly the Doctor was ashamed for pointing out all of Amy's flaws, but to be honest he was too tired, fed up, hurt, and angry to care about the humans feelings, not after the night of bombshells that had dropped on his head in the space of half an hour and he hadn't even had proper time to assimilate it all. "Have you never heard of bluffing? Then, in America, you turned your back to reach for a gun as the spacesuit figure lifted the visor to reveal a little girl, and you shot at her! And we still don't know who that little girl-"
Suddenly his mind clicked, and the Doctor's eyes widened. "That little girl in the spacesuit," he whispered, "oh please," and he leapt towards the console and started pressing buttons. "Amy, get Rory and Angel. NOW!" he shouted in a tone that told her it wouldn't be a good idea to sulk or refuse.
Amy ran, delighted to get away from him. The Doctor didn't even notice the tears running down her face.
"What's all this about?" Angel asked him as she entered the console room. Amy had come rushing into the kitchen a few minutes ago, saying something about the little girl in the spacesuit and the Doctor had told her to go and get them, but Angel and Rory were not blind; they'd seen the redness of her eyes like she'd been about to cry. Angel had spent the search for Ayla mostly holed up in her room, crying, or listening to her family ringing them up. It had driven them both mad, and it didn't take a genius for Angel to know what the Doctor had done.
The Doctor looked up, "The girl in the spacesuit. We should've gone after her instead of messing around." "Why, what is it?" Rory asked, his curiosity putting his anger towards the Doctor for nearly making Amy cry out of his mind. "Who do you think she is?" the Doctor sidestepped the question with a question. "Look, we met the girl at the time where you Amy and you Rory left behind traces of your DNA the Silence would then use to create an embryo, so who was the girl? Think about it; ignore the Silence's time travel tech, what're you left with? The girl we think River was is more dedicated to the Silence, this one was scared, so-" The same thought occurred to Amy, Angel and Rory at the same time. "Ayla," Angel whispered, paraylsed with shock. "Could be," the Doctor replied as he started working on the TARDIS controls. It was the only hope they had. They had assumed the girl in the spacesuit had just been River, someone for the Silence to lure Amy and Rory in to steal DNA, creating a paradox, but that didn't make sense. If they had just wanted to do that, surely they wouldn't have needed to kidnap Ayla.
Amy gasped, "I shot at her." Angel bowed her head, remembering that moment, that primal fear that had exploded in her soul. Now she knew why she hadn't bothered to use the vortex to deflect or melt the bullet, because she'd known, deep down, the girl in the astronaut suit was her daughter. Her Ayla. The Doctor didn't comment on that, he'd already made his opinion on THAT matter clear. Besides he had better things to concentrate on than some lowly human's feelings. "Yeah, Ayla," he ground out, unable to hide the pain and anger, towards himself for not bothering to properly investigate the little girl who had clearly been a major part of the Silence's plans, anger towards River who'd manipulated him into focusing on the Silence.
River. The Doctor clenched his hands just at the thought of the arrogant archaeologist, he couldn't help but wonder if she had known the whole time who the girl was. She probably did. She was a member of the Silence, just a creation born in a test tube. Case closed. He didn't care where her DNA was from originally, to him that didn't change the fact she was a psychopath. Angel bit her lip, following the Doctor's thoughts about River through their bond. She wanted to reach out, to sooth his anger, but she didn't. She knew he was in agony that she hadn't told him about her impending death.
"It gives us a lead, and besides there's something else there I want to see," he said, inputting commands into the console, setting the TARDIS for America. He'd set the controls to around the same time period they'd first encountered the Silence in, and with the search parameters narrowed down to a single point the TARDIS was able to pinpoint Ayla. The Doctor and Angel set the TARDIS to land silently, and when they ran out of the TARDIS they saw why the ship had landed them in this particular place. There was a little girl in the alleyway, and she was regenerating. Angel and the Doctor stopped dead in their tracks, their hearts breaking at the sight of their daughter who couldn't have been any older than 5 or 6 years old already regenerating. The Doctor's hearts and soul bled from the guilt his daughter was regenerating because of him, his arrogance, his need to flaunt his unwanted protection of the universe. If the Time Lord had ever needed some kind of proof of the harm his meddling had done, it was this. All the other signs in the past that he'd seen was pale in comparison, all the criticism from the other Time Lords paled in comparison as well. This was his daughter and she had suffered god knew what because of him. And why? Because he had gotten such a big head.
They didn't notice Amy and Rory come up behind them either. For the Ponds the sight of an actual regeneration was something to behold, they'd heard of regeneration before, seen it happen before it had been stopped when the astronaut on the shore of Lake Silencio blasted Angel to the ground. So they were surprised when a totally different girl appeared when the energy and light died down.
Amy remembered Ayla as tiny brown haired girl, so she was surprised when a small, strawberry blonde haired girl appeared. She looked totally different now, her skin seemed lighter, glowing healthily despite her dirty and worn clothes.
The girl panted and peered at herself using a puddle as a mirror. Amy looked at the Doctor and Angel, wondering why they hadn't moved towards their daughter when Ayla noticed them. The little girl's eyes widened when she clearly recognised them, the Doctor was just thinking about how much hatred the girl had for them, how couldn't she hate them? It was all his fault she'd been kidnapped, he'd been so arrogant, so cocky, believing in his own reputation until his Mate and daughter had paid the price. The Doctor was expecting the little girl to run, to scream, to vanish into the alley just to escape them, and his legs... he didn't know if he could even make them run if she did that. He was prepared for her to scream, to run off, and he was prepared for his knees to make contact with the cold, wet concrete as his legs gave away when she made the connection and felt she couldn't stand to be near them, so he was surprised when Ayla suddenly came running towards them, arms out and ready for an embrace. "Mummy! Daddy! Aunt Amy! Uncle Rory!" she cried. The Doctor and Angel bent down to meet their running daughter, and hugged the girl as she slammed into them, squeezing her. The Doctor was numb, he'd been so sure that Ayla would've run away from them both for who they were, but instead she'd run to them, but he wasn't going to let this slip away from him. The Doctor kissed the top of her head, his nose catching a whiff from the dirty and bedraggled clothes Ayla was wearing, and his hearts clenched again. His daughter had just regenerated after going through Gallifrey knew what, all because of him.
Angel heard his thoughts, but she didn't comfort him because she herself wasn't far behind in recriminating herself. The Doctor might hate himself for forgetting her as his Mate, for letting River get close to him and manipulate him into becoming someone he wasn't, but she hated herself for giving in so easily. The Doctor was right; she could and should have told him she was pregnant. Instead she'd wallowed in her own issues, and she'd been replaced by a ganger when it could all have been avoided. "I'm so sorry," Angel whispered to Ayla, knowing her apology covered many issues.
"Really sorry," the Doctor said. Ayla than did the one thing they didn't expect. She pulled back and smiled at them, "I knew you'd come back for me. I knew you would lose me, but you would figure it out when you saw me in that suit."
The Doctor closed his eyes, mentally punching himself for not bothering to follow up on the little girl in the spacesuit when they'd had the chance. What had he been thinking? Oh yeah, he hadn't. He reminded himself of what his earlier selves would've done, his Ninth self, they would've looked harder and longer. Not him. He had to run off, didn't he? "I think she's inherited some of my psychic abilities," Angel admitted.
The Doctor blinked in surprise, Angel and he had never really imagined that her abilities were hereditary, now he wasn't so sure. Now he was convinced she'd inherited a lot from the pair of them. But one thing bothered him. "Ayla, how did you get out of that suit?" he whispered, he needed to know after remembering the damage caused to the empty suit when they'd found the thing, "How did you escape from them?"
"I dunno. I felt it hurting me, I had to get out, then the light appeared and burnt the suit, and I got out," Ayla said. "They kept me in the white suit, only I didn't like it, and I just wanted really badly to get out of it, then there was this light, a yellow light. It cut through the suit and I just slipped out. I...kept running so they wouldn't find me, the pirate lady and those aliens." The adults saw Ayla visibly flinch at the memory, the Doctor rightly guessing Ayla would be suffering from nightmares for the rest of her life. The Doctor and Angel didn't need to work out what that meant. "It seems she's inherited your connection with the vortex," the Doctor said to Angel, and he prayed Ayla never lost two lives like Angel had in order to properly harness the vortex. It had almost killed him when it happened to Angel, watching her regenerate out of two bodies like that despite her claims she was glad of the change since her last self had been scared of the vortex. HE was scared of the vortex, what it could do to her.
Angel reached out and pulled Ayla back into her arms. This was like a dream for her, she'd been tortured with notions she would never again see her daughter again, let alone hold her. "I'm just glad she's here," she whispered back, "she's just like you. Running away and very strong."
"She's just like both of us, remember she saw we'd come back for her," the Doctor replied, hiding the thought from Angel that their daughter NEVER became like him. "That's 'cos it didn't work," Ayla said, pulling back, her face in a frown as tears filled her eyes, "The pirate lady wanted me to hate you! I couldn't," she said quickly like she was reassuring them that even though she'd been torn out of her mothers arms she didn't hate her, "I just couldn't, I remembered you." Ayla reached into her dress and pulled out a string where a small pink bowtie was dangling. The Doctor's eyes closed as he didn't want Ayla to see him crying; how long had it been since he'd seen that little bowtie? Ayla sensed her father's sadness, and she quietly hugged him tightly. Angel smiled, then she looked around the alleyway in case Kovarian or Silents were lurking nearby, "We'd better be going," she said.
The Doctor's eyes snapped open, they were as hard as granite, "We've got somewhere to go first."
Angel had really bad memories of the Silent timeship where they'd saved Amy from, but as she looked through the monitor where the Doctor and Rory were kneeling down by the console of the timeship. Though she understood the Doctor's reasoning for coming back here to download the ship's datacore to learn more about the Silence, Angel didn't have to like it. Memories of the Doctor and River flirting as she shot down the Silents dominating her mind. She glanced over at Amy who was playing with Ayla. Now the little girl was safely inside the TARDIS, she had had a bath, and gotten a change of clothes she looked far healthier than she had when they'd appeared by the alley, but the girl was not stupid. She was sending looks towards the monitor and the TARDIS doors. She knew why they were there.
Rory had been reluctant to come out with the Doctor when he'd explained where they were going and why, because like Angel he had bad memories of worrying about Amy, or the fighting and the death. But there was more to it than that. When Angel had told Amy the truth about her relationship with the Doctor, his wife had managed to persuade Angel to talk to the Doctor...Only to see him kiss River bloody Song. Rory had been frightened that would be the last straw for Angel, but she'd stayed, something Rory was delighted about.
Now he was back here. Rory had expected to see the dead remains of the Silents, but there was nothing here. Whether he was actually seeing the dead bodies and forgetting about them when he looked elsewhere, Rory didn't know. He knelt next to the Doctor as the Time Lord removed a panel from the side of the timeship's console. "Is this what we need?" he asked. "More or less, I need to get to the datacore," the Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver and got to work. Rory, knowing he didn't know what this technology did, looked away, "How long will it take?"
"Not long," the Doctor replied, then he cursed, "No!"
"What's wrong?" Rory asked in concern. "The datacore's protected, it'll take a few minutes longer for the sonic to break through it!" The Doctor smacked the metal struts of the console angrily, but he sat down and Rory followed suit, and they waited for the sonic to break down the protections around the core.
"Doctor, why are we even here?" Rory asked. The Doctor shot him a look that spoke volumes about how stupid that question was. "I'm tired of nearly everyone we meet knowing who and what the Silence is, Rory," the Doctor said, "I'm tired of their attempts on Angel's life. I think I have the right to know why they kidnapped Ayla to make her into a weapon to kill us, I want to know why they made me forget Angel, but more than that I want to know why they think we should die. What would you do if someone tried to kill you and Amy, kidnapping your first child to brainwash her, implying you will do something in your future that has to be prevented to go that far? Wouldn't you want to know why?" Rory looked away, he didn't need to think about the answer. He already knew it, what every responsible and loving husband and father would do would try and protect his family, so yes Rory would want to know why. He understood why the Doctor was so driven to protect Angel and Ayla, and he also understood the Time Lord was feeling useless after spending three years ignoring Angel and not noticing she was pregnant with his child. "What do you hope to get from the core?" he asked to try and take his mind off what Angel had gone through. "I dunno, but if we find out more about the Silence from the core, we might find ways to avoid them in the future," the Doctor replied. Inwardly he wasn't certain; he was sure since time travel was involved the Silence had seen him do something, or something he and Angel were a part of that was so terrible they wanted to change history by having them killed. But what could they have done that would result in such atrocities?
It was the only thing that really made sense, then again Kovarian had hinted something like that at Demon's run, but if the Silence were deliberately trying to change history they would not give up. Finally the protections over the core broke down, and Rory squinted inside the panel. "Is that it?" he datacore was a small silver sphere nestled in a space stuffed with futuristic technology, but Rory couldn't see any way to remove it. The Doctor nodded, "Yeah, that's it.""Are you going to take it out?" The Doctor smiled at him, then silently pointed his sonic at the sphere, flicking it open when he was finished before taking it out. Rory closed his eyes, of course, he'd downloaded the whole thing into his screwdriver. "See, told you it wouldn't take long. Come on, lets get back."
The moment the two men were back inside the TARDIS, getting a wonderful hug from Ayla as he walked in, Angel dematerialised as the Doctor went up to the console. Flicking his sonic at the monitor, the Doctor uploaded the datacore download into the TARDIS, making sure it went through the firewalls in case the Silence were as paranoid as they were arrogant and desperate to leave a virus behind. It looked like lady luck was smiling at him for a change. It appeared the Silence had never believed anybody could access their technology, though whether it was because of the Silence's stick to the shadows approach he didn't know and he frankly didn't care. He was the last person whom they wanted to be found breaking into their mainframe.
The beautiful thing about the TARDIS was that her computer systems were radically more sophisticated than anything humans could manufacture, and the Silence time machine was basically human in design, it didn't take long for the TARDIS to break through any defences in the computer. Then the Doctor really set to work. As a renegade, a Time Lord who'd left Gallifrey, the Doctor had learnt many hackers tricks over the centuries combined with his already existing knowledge of computer technology. Breaking the meagre encryption was far from tricky, but it did take a short while for him to get his bearings in the Silence's mainframe. He started to grin. Really, the Silence's computers were easy to crack and if they wanted to be such a good criminal organisation despite their religious background they would need to improve their computer security, and from the look of it he'd struck gold. Patiently he mapped out their systems, learnt that their communications systems were relayed throughout time and space using stations found on moons and asteroids, bases built using a combination of robot drones, nanotech constructors and prefabricated dwellings to assemble them in a hurry, and now he had the time ship's access codes he was able to hack into them and make a permanent tap.
The Doctor set up an inbox to collect the communiques so he could read them later, and he programmed the computer to filter out anything relating to him, Angel, Ayla, River, the Ponds, Demon's run, and anything related to them. He also set up a filter for Kovarian. Exploring the Silence's network wasn't difficult; it was arranged like a spider's web, so navigation was fairly easy.
His eyes caught files and sub-files labelled 'MISSION REPORTS,' 'SUBJECT TRAINING STATISTICS,' that one he would look over with Angel when they developed the stomach to actually read the first word that related to their daughter, as he was sure that particular file related to both Ayla and River before one file caught his eyes. 'HISTORY.'For a moment the Doctor was tempted to simply ignore the file and move onto the next one in the network, but he didn't because the History file might be exactly what he wanted, an idea of what the Silence were doing in his timeline and why. There were so many things he did not know about the Silence's motives; why they wanted to kill him was the tip of the iceberg, but really, if they had wanted to kill him why hadn't they simply gone back in time to one of his more ignorant incarnations, but discounted that quickly; in this earlier time streams the Time Lords were still present, and any interference in his timeline from them would have instantly been detected and destroyed before the Time Lords of those earlier times simply reversed the damage. Hmm, that was a thought - what if the Silence were aware of his people and more than aware of what they could do? Truth was everyone who'd mastered time travel in some shape would've heard of the Time Lords. The War Lords had when the War Chief had met them, but the War Lord's arrogance on Gallifrey had been a true mistake he had had no time to regret since he'd found himself dematerialised. But the file was tempting, and the Doctor opened it curiously. As he read through the file, his eyes widened, growing more surprised as he read each word and sentence on the monitor. "Angel, you'd better take a look at this," he said. Angel, who'd been playing with Ayla with Amy and Rory, looked up curiously at his tone. "What is it?" she asked. "It's best if you look at it for yourself," The Doctor stood to the side to let her come to the screen to read it while he leaned on the console, trying to hide his desperation, fear and uncertainty from the others, but Ayla and Angel felt it, and when she read the file she felt the same surprise he did. "No...it can't be, its not possible," she whispered.
Sometime later the Doctor and Angel were lying in bed, though because the tension between the pair of them in the room was astronomic since Demon's Run, Angel had spent most of her own time when she wasn't in the console room in the same bedroom she'd been sleeping in when the Doctor had forgotten her. She was only in the same bedroom as he was because now they'd found Ayla, and they had more or less reconciled.
But things were still tense between them; the Doctor was still put out that Angel had lied to him and kept her death date a secret from all of them, well him, and she was uncomfortable with him still because she had spent 3 years being ignored by him. It was only the reunion with Ayla that the pair of them were even in the same bed, so they had that to be grateful for but they had a long way to go before their relationship even resembled what they'd treasured before. Then again there was what they'd learnt from the Silent time machine that had them both wanting each other's company.
"I don't know what I was expecting when I was reading that file, but it definitely wasn't that," the Doctor commented, staring up at the ceiling as he tried to keep the delight that Angel was back where she belonged out of his voice and thoughts. One of the benefits Time Lords possessed was the fact they needed less sleep than humans, but sleep was still beneficial. He felt Angel nod beside him. Like him she was staring up at the ceiling, absorbed in her own thoughts. "I know," she whispered.
It seemed like the Silence had a good reason to hate and fear both of them after all, though River had probably a good point about how just the sound of his name was enough to scare armies. When the Doctor had found out what the Silence were doing, how they wanted to kill him by using the child he'd conceived with Angel as a weapon, he'd wondered why. At first he'd taken what River had said to heart, how he was so feared out there that it was inevitable a group would band together to put an end to his "threat."
But it was worse than that. The Silence were afraid of another Time War erupting because the Time Lords were not dead, but were still alive in a pocket universe. Amy and Rory had been right to be surprised when they saw the file afterwards. Like the Doctor and the Ponds, Angel hadn't believed it, but there was something there like deep down she'd always known their people still lived though even the Doctor found that hard to believe, but she was Angel. But that wasn't the worst of it; the Silence had no idea how the Doctor or Angel had discovered Gallifrey still existed, they didn't even know how the Time Lords had managed to survive. What they did know was everything would come to a head on a planet called Trenzalore, and it was on that planet that centuries of fighting where countless lives would be lost, caused by races like the Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans and many others though the Daleks would prove to be the biggest threat of them all. And the Doctor along with Angel were in the centre of it, because apparently the Time Lords would be asking "Doctor Who?" a question only Angel could answer, something only those with a great knowledge of Time Lord custom would know about, a question which would let the Time Lords know it was safe to leave the pocket universe. He couldn't believe how stupid the other Time Lords were to flout such a sacred tradition...On second thought, he could after a moment's private musings. How many traditions and taboos had Rassilon created centuries before the war only to tear down during the war in the name of victory? Too many to count. No-one would balk at another, but a Mating... It didn't seem conceivable such a sacred tradition, one more so than others would be flouted so readily, and yet according to the datacore it happened, it would happen. Time travel was so complicated. But now... The Silence, for all their arrogance and power, were simply no match for the Daleks, especially now. They never were. The Daleks, according to the time ship's memory core, had been hunting them down for some time after learning that in a now defunct timeline the Silence had taken possession of the TARDIS and exploded it. The Daleks more than any race in the universe were more than aware of the dangers of destroying a TARDIS and the theoretical consequences, which was the reason they hadn't resorted to the method the Silence had used during the war. Now the Daleks were busily wiping out the Silence's bases, turning members into puppets in order to spy and assassinate those in authority. He could understand why, the Silence could try such a trick again and the Doctor might not be able to put it right a second time. It had been a close call during that mess with the Pandorica. The Doctor had to focus on what was more important, though he found it ironic their most dangerous and oldest enemy was currently wiping out the Silence. The Time Lords had found a crack, exactly like the cracks that had been the aftershocks of the TARDIS's explosion not so long ago, and they'd sent a message "Doctor Who?" Defending the planet with a forcefield, the Papal Mainframe's own Tasha Lem had declared a reordering of their church, turning them into the Silence.
It had become too much for one group, the Kovarian chapter, who'd become disgusted by the siege, and in their arrogance they'd gone back in time with their basic understanding of time and time travel, and tried to kill an earlier version of the Doctor and Angel. Their desperation was telling, but they hadn't taken into account that it was an established event. In Kovarian's tiny little mind it would've been simple to attack a version of the Doctor and Angel before the siege to avert the siege, unfortunately it wasn't as straightforward as she'd hoped or expected. She hadn't taken into account the dangers of blowing up a TARDIS - oh yes, the Doctor and Angel knew about that now - nor had she imagined what the possible consequences would be for her little bunch of followers.
The Daleks, experts in time travel technology, had no doubt discovered what the Silence had done, and had taken action against the Silence. Truthfully there had to be residual scar tissue left over from when the universe was blown up, and the Daleks would have studied it. They studied everything they encountered even as they cut a path of murder and destruction through the universe, and they would have detected the timestreams as they had been when the Pandorica had flown into the exploding TARDIS. Also, the Path web that linked them together seemed to exist outside time. That explained why the Daleks were aware of his 9th incarnation even if Dalek Sec had never met that one, so the Daleks knew about the Pandorica and their mistake in thinking he would destroy the universe. Then Kovarian had gone down events that, for the versions of the Time Lords at Trenzalore had already happened; she kidnapped Angel, tried to turn Ayla into a super assassin, only for that to fail as well. They had been lucky that Ayla's Time Lady mind had managed to resist mental conditioning, and there was no record of Time children out there.
It was a blatant attempt at stupidity. Kovarian, so taken by the idea of killing the Doctor and Angel, and her followers had simply pointed the Doctor and Angel down the path to Trenzalore, creating a Destiny trap. It made the Doctor want to laugh though there was nothing funny about it when he considered that the war that had begun, for him, at the beginning of his recent regeneration; the Silence weren't exactly responsible for the Time Lord's survival, but they weren't entirely innocent either. They'd forced the TARDIS to explode leaving the cracks including the one the Time Lords were going to use to try to use to get him to let them out, brainwashed him into forgetting his own Mate, kidnapped his daughter to turn her into a weapon, committing all kinds of atrocities along the way, some he still had no idea about. They were part of history now, and there was nothing they could do about it. And for what? What had Kovarian's scheming gotten her so far? They held most of the cards now, but the Doctor wasn't going to commit to that. His cockiness had cost him dearly. There was no way the history file was make believe. There were too many things that slotted neatly into the puzzle and made sense for him to discount, besides it did make a lot of sense in his mind, as he didn't really remember much about the final hours of the war from his perspective. From a certain point of view, the Doctor could rightly understand the idealism of the Silence, he could see their points of view. They were right; another Time War would erupt if the Time Lords escaped their pocket universe, and since the Daleks were the monsters the Time Lords had been fighting it was logical the Papal Mainframe had been frightened about the scale of the conflict which would come if the Time Lords came back, and the Doctor and Angel couldn't blame should be scared, all of them; the Daleks and the Time Lords war had nearly destroyed the universe, both sides were almighty civilisations, both armed with the technology and knowledge to travel through time and space on a level beyond that of the Silence, but it never occurred to the Papal Mainframe, or rather the group who had decided to take the law into their own hands that they really should not meddle in affairs beyond their understanding. The Kovarian chapter were already being hunted by the Daleks' time travel attack forces as punishment for blowing up the TARDIS, something even they had never dared to do during the Time War since they knew all too well the consequences after their raids on the Matrix on Gallifrey. No-one amongst the lesser races knew the real causes and the reasons behind the war, and the Doctor doubted they would ever find out for themselves. But he did know that if the war reignited now, then the universe would be in a lot of trouble. The Daleks were strong again because he had let them escape the 1940s, when his two previous incarnations after the war had managed to destroy the Dalek survivors he'd encountered since the war's end. That was no longer the case anymore. The Doctor still wished he'd found another way during that encounter with the New Daleks and Bracewell, if only he hadn't been so impatient to wipe out his oldest enemies once and for all. He also cursed the fact he'd never properly studied Oblivion continuums, if he had then maybe he could've disconnected the one powering Bracewell, and used that to destroy the Dalek ship before it had escaped through that time corridor. It was done now, and there was nothing he could do about it. The Daleks had successfully rebuilt their empire, learning from their mistakes, and they would probably never make them again. The Doctor wasn't sure if they planned to recreate the Reality bomb and make their dream of universal and ultimate supremacy possible, but he hoped they didn't. It was unlikely, but not impossible; the Daleks always learnt from their mistakes, if they saw a path to their goals was unachievable, they ignored it and carried on before a new plan came along. Contrary to the Silence's beliefs, the Doctor wasn't going to use his powers and knowledge as a Time Lord to change history. It wouldn't help even if he tried. Besides that was what Kovarian had tried to do, and he would sooner slit his wrists than become like that stunted little ape. And even if he tried to change the tangled mess Kovarian's bunch had gotten themselves into, he would still end up on this Trenzalore anyway, so what was the point? But he was still torn, and it wasn't a nice decision. The Doctor didn't need to be a psychic like his Mate to know the death toll would be gargantuan if the Time Lords escaped, but the Papal Mainframe's clumsy attempts to change history had only ensured those same events they were trying to prevent took place anyway, so nothing the breakaway group of the main Silence sect did made any difference. The Doctor closed his eyes in dread, hating to think of the possible alternatives that had sprung from the Silence's meddling. He almost laughed. He was a meddler, and he was calling what the Silence had done meddling. He was such a hypocrite. Like the Doctor, Angel was deep in thought. Only Angel wasn't thinking about the events leading up to the siege on Trenzalore. She was thinking instead of the Time Lords. Angel had always, deep down, felt that the Time Lords were actually still around like phantoms in the background. Her practical mind had refuted that, put it down to want since she'd spent the majority of her time and life on Gallifrey, immersed in the telepathic presences of every living person before the war, before she met the Doctor, so she'd never said a word. Understandable; the Time Lords had once been noticeable in her mind, but until the Doctor had rescued her there was only static. When she'd been rescued, head freed of a mental dampener, shot by a Dalek, regenerated, she'd known at once something was wrong. It didn't take her long to guess what had happened, but she was alright about it in a sense, something she had never been able to explain to herself at the time until now. But when the Doctor had thrown herself on her mercy, she had known somehow the ending of the war hadn't come the way he'd thought it had. It wasn't a vision, it was more of a gut feeling. Angel hadn't said anything because she wasn't sure how to explain it, and besides she knew nothing about the circumstances. She had forgiven the Doctor because she had known he had only done what he had believed was the right thing to do, and besides that if he had been truly evil he wouldn't have even thrown herself at her feet, pleading for forgiveness, telling her he would understand if she wanted to leave him and the TARDIS. Angel knew others wouldn't have been so forgiving. The Master was a prime example, though in her opinion he'd used their races absence to his own advantage, and he'd faked anger at the "destruction" of their race as an excuse to hurt them during the Year.
If she was being entirely honest with herself she had mixed feelings about the other Time Lords returning to the universe. Like the Doctor she preferred remembering the image of their people; wise, not entirely benevolent but not viciously evil and cruel either, respected, and essentially good natured. At least that had been their general image. It was better that way than thinking of the reality. It was equally better than forcing her to pull back the skin to expose the rotten flesh beneath, and that was what the Time Lords really were, deep down, and it did hurt to think of her own race like that, but it was the truth. Angel, like all of their people, had known the Time Lords were corrupt, especially the High Council. It was an open secret back home about how corrupt the higher echelons of their society were, and on Gallifrey you learnt to believe the rumors if you had common sense, whereas many others wished to maintain the status quo and live in a society that had gone stagnant centuries before half the worlds in the universe had even spawned life.
Angel, thanks to her psychic ability, had sensed more to the Council than most, but she hadn't been with the Doctor to make sense of them. Most of her knowledge of their corruption came from her Mating with the Doctor. If there was one Time Lord who knew how corrupt their people could be, it was the Doctor; he'd shown her some of the most bitterest memories he had of their people, from his exile to Earth and forced regeneration, to Ravalox and the Valeyard before plopping the rotted cherry on the cake, the Final Sanction. A plan to destroy the universe by tearing apart the vortex.
During those final days of the war where the Doctor was mostly focused on fighting on the frontline, Angel and her sister had become terrified of the High Council, and many of their policies which seemed to benefit only them.
Well, mostly Rassilon. Every Time Lord and Lady had always placed him up on a pedestal because of his achievements. He was the one who had led the Time Lords, established the cornerstones of Gallifreyan society, developed the Eye of Harmony after Omega had detonated that sun.
He had been seen as benevolent godlike being, though early Time Lord history and legends spoke of him as a ruthless tyrant, a dictator who crushed anyone who stood in his way. But he was only a man, a man capable of making mistakes, and during the war dozens had been made that had caused nothing but death and misery on galactic scales that echoed through time and reverberated like an avalanche. Angel had always stopped herself from making a definitive guess about Rassilon, she was the type of person who could see the kind of soul if she met somebody face to face. That was how she had judged the Ninth Doctor when they'd met in Van Statten's bunker as a good, kind man trapped in an incarnation battered by so much pain and grief, and she hadn't met Rassilon personally when the Time Lords had brought him back, and her meeting with him before the Doctor regenerated had given her enough taste of how mad he was, how selfish he could be, not to mention how arrogant he was. He was brilliant as a scientist, a warrior, and a leader there was no question of that, and the Time Lords were testament of his achievements since he had created them and all their traditions, but his ideas were archaic, they were outdated and didn't really benefit anybody.
What had really disgusted her about the council were the rumors which were later confirmed by the Doctor, who'd seen them with his own eyes, of Time Lords who'd been experimented on by Rassilon himself as part of his desire to force the Time Lords to ascend, becoming 'creatures of consciousness alone.' It was one thing to try and end a war that was destroying everything it touched, but it was another for their people to willingly destroy the universe for a plan that had no guarantee it would work. Just because Rassilon had said it would work didn't mean it would, and even if one day the Doctor would claim it could work they wouldn't believe it, then again why, why would their people even go along with it? Were their people so drawn in by Rassilon's legend they were willing to destroy everything that made them who they were? The answer was probably yes for many, but they had probably gone along with Rassilon out of fear rather than loyalty.
Then there was what they'd done to the Master. Angel had been raised by a loving mother, and so she had a very sheltered but practical knowledge of mothers, and as a result she had her own expectations of how mothers should behave. Angel believed that mothers, and inherently everybody else, should virtually worship children. Look at Francine Jones and Jackie Tyler. Both loved their children very much, the very concept of anyone harming a child the way the High Council had done would terrify them. Angel bit her lip. She missed Jackie Tyler; the woman had been like a surrogate mother to her, and whilst Francine herself was nice and had been kind in the end, she had been taken in by the Master, but Angel could understand why. The Master had played on her fears for Martha's safety, and had used it as a weapon. The Doctor, especially in this incarnation despite whatever shortcomings about him forgetting her and basically ignoring her presence, LOVED children, but it seemed that the High Council only saw them as tools. Angel remembered children as young as nine or even six picking up weapons ranging from guns, knives, and even stones whenever the Daleks committed their raids against Gallifrey. The image had sickened her; those children were supposed to be innocent, they should've been concerned only with their childhoods. The Time War had cut that short.
Another example was the Master himself. Everything the Master had done; murders, genocides, wars on planetary and interplanetary and intergalactic scales, the Time Lords were responsible for it. The Doctor himself could remember a time when the Master had just stolen someone else's body, the father of one of his own companions, a good and kind man...and he died because the Master had been driven to survive. Animals hunted and preyed on weaker animals to survive, but there was a difference between hunting and killing to outright stealing a body.
Then again Martha had done her best to keep her mother from learning the truth about the people she was travelling with, and even if she had seen the TARDIS, seen the wonders for herself, Francine had witnessed the dangers. She knew Martha had been at the hospital at the same time the Judoon had teleported it to the moon, and then Lazarus. She would've been terrified much the same way Jackie had been for Rose when the Doctor had taken them back to Earth. For Rose, only a day and bit had passed, for Jackie a whole year. The woman had been besides herself with terror for her daughter, she had accused Mickey of kidnapping and maybe even killing her, and she'd put up posters and everything. It had been hard to let her go with a time travelling alien.
Anyway, back to the things the Time Lords had done. The Master had then gone on to meddle in a universal process he had no understanding of, and he'd become responsible of destroying a section of the universe, something even the Daleks had never managed to do.
It was all the Time Lord's fault. No, actually it was the council's fault. If there was ever a trial on a universal scale into the Master's crimes, Angel had no doubt of the guilt of the High Council. It would be one of many, but the Time Lords would consider their own affairs more important than that of the rest of the universe. Her silence attracted the Doctor's attention, "Hey, you okay?"Angel nodded before deciding to be honest with him, "Yeah, I'm just thinking... I just have mixed feelings about them ever coming back. I mean, we like to remember our people from the way they were before the Time War started, but we both know how corrupt they were. If the Time Lords really survived the war, then Rassilon is almost certainly still alive even if the Master had succeeded in hurting him; what if when we release them he tries to start the Final sanction again?" There was real fear in her eyes.
The Doctor closed his eyes, and he gently pulled Angel close to her chest. Angel had a point, but what could they do? Rassilon was one of the first Time Lords, he was the equivalent of a god in their society. Had the other Time Lords seen the danger of Rassilon, and finally put him back in his tomb? Or had they simply looked the other way, again, than get their hands dirty? It wouldn't be the first time, he reflected bitterly. Other things came to his mind. Many of Rassilon's policies, outdated because of the time the man had actually been born in, had disgusted him before and after his regeneration into the... Other incarnation, and were one of the many reasons why he'd refused to even pick up a weapon to fight.
But the real reason his Mate was terrified was because they had NO idea what the Final Sanction would do to her if it actually happened. Another was Angel had seen some beautiful and yet terrible things in her time with him. Rassilon did not have the right to decide if it should be destroyed any more than Davros did. Time Lord or not, Lord President of Gallifrey or not, brilliant scientist and engineer or not, he did not have the right to decide if ONE race should survive over the universe. He frowned as a thought came into his mind, "Angel, do you remember when Rassilon saw you? He knew you by name, but we don't know what else he knew about you. Do you remember when you told me about how at the Academy, you used to get nearly every answer on a test right, but you never studied for them? Maybe he knew about the potential you had to be a Visionary."
Angel frowned, she didn't remember her academy years very fondly. Over her different incarnations she'd had a different point of view about those centuries spent studying to be a Time Lady; some lives would be indifferent, others sad she hadn't done well, or almost angry at how she'd been treated. She'd been a below average student but she hadn't really cared, yet the Doctor had just raised a very good point. "But the Visionaries are mad," she pointed out to him, "I'm not. Not yet," she added quietly but the Doctor heard her.
"Don't you dare say that," he said, "ever. I think you have a buffer, the TARDIS. She let you see the Vortex remember, and she loves you. She'll never let you go mad like the Visionaries."Angel lifted a brow. The Visionaries were Time Lords and Ladies who had the ability to see into the future. Normal Time Lords and Ladies like the Doctor and the Master could tell when time was out of synch, they had they ability to see fixed or flux points, but they couldn't really see into the future despite having the gift to tell them whenever time was wrong, and yet they could see the turn of the universe to a limited extent. Visionaries were rare on Gallifrey, they only appeared once every few hundred years or so. There was nothing mystical about them as far as scientists knew; they were just Time Lords with greater sensitivities to the Vortex when they gazed into the Untempered Schism. Those sensitivities gave way to painful visions which showed different possibilities and potential probabilities. Rassilon had created something simpler with his Possibility engine, which helped guided his actions during the Time War. He couldn't have used a visionary. Their minds were too badly warped, and they spoke in riddles and sing songs, and their prophecies just raised more questions. Rassilon wouldn't have wanted that, he would've wanted someone to give him answers that would've guided his actions. It had taken him a while, but the benefits of having someone who could look into the future without the insanity would've attracted Rassilon.
Ever since he'd had freed her from Van Statten, the Doctor had been amazed by how similar Angel was to a Visionary; many of her predictions, though they'd never really made sense to him at the time since they were vague comments or riddles, had come to pass one way or another, and her exposure to the Vortex had only made her gifts more heightened. Unlike many Time Lords of his generation, the Doctor had actually met Visionaries rather than know their reputation, and they were unbelievably insane so they deserved their reputations. They had the ability to see into the future sure, but they had lost their minds, and as the Doctor had noted Rassilon had known about her. He loved his Mate; he didn't care if she had been a TARDIS farmer or not, but it was clear she was of interest to the High Council. How else could she have been recognised?
The Doctor wouldn't have been the least bit surprised if he ever learnt, and he made a mental note to find out, the High Council had watched Angel from afar as she grew older, convinced she would've become the most powerful Visionary in their history, one who had never lost their mind.
THAT had never happened before, and if he knew the High Council they would've been disappointed and disillusioned. Angel had always maintained despite his best efforts that she wasn't smart like other Time Ladies like her own sister, who had been a 'refined, smart and proper Time Lady,' and if the Doctor's growing hunch was right the High Council had been disappointed she hadn't fitted the mould like nearly every other child who walked through the academy. One of the biggest problems with the Time Lords and the High Council were their standards. Every single child had to be the same, they had to be uncaring about everything around them, apathetic to what existed outside Gallifrey's borders, and they all had to receive the same results for every lesson like every generation that had come before them and after.
If they'd been fascinated by Angel as he thought they'd been then it meant they'd taken note of her academic records, and knowing the High Council like he had then they'd been disappointed in her. Considering his own personal feelings of them the Doctor honestly didn't care about what they thought or suspected about Angel. He loved her the way she was compared to the refined little dolls that came out of the academy.
Angel had never been like that, and that was one of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place. The Doctor had always wanted to have a Mate, but he hadn't felt anything for any of the Time Ladies he'd known over the centuries. Not even Romana, oh he may have been attracted to her for her beauty and her inherent abilities when she'd travelled with him, but she was so much like the Time Lords he'd chosen to break away from despite her cheeky tendencies.
Not Mate material at all. Angel... Angel was exactly the kind of Time Lady he'd wanted; she was kind, fun to be with since she had a unique perspective on everything, and yet she was more insightful and wise than she let others think. But best of all, in his mind, she wasn't like the other Time Ladies which made her seem more real than the perfect china dolls other Time Ladies were. The Doctor had been around Time Ladies like that throughout his early life, and whilst he'd married a woman, he had not Mated with her, and she'd been so disdainful of his ideals anyway so she hadn't been offended to the marriage instead of ... Now she was perfection incarnate, when they'd met something had clicked for him. Slightly embarrassed by the Doctor's thoughts about her, Angel changed the subject, "How could they have survived in a pocket universe anyway? Surely the calculations would've needed centuries to work out.""They would," the Doctor commented, the types of pocket universes running through his mind as he tried to think of one that could've been used quickly without hassle or extensive power cost, but he failed. "If you were expanding the size of your pockets, it wouldn't be a problem. But to wrap a planet into a pocket universe, it wouldn't take a second or two to work out the math, but centuries to work out the right calculations. You've got to work out gravity, mass that doesn't just include the population but everything else, how much energy the universe needs to stay stable and for how long... You can't do that quickly, and its not a plan our people would come up with for all their knowledge and power in the blink of an eye. Out of the box thinking wasn't their forte, was it? Besides they wouldn't consider it. It's too different."
Angel frowned before she shook her aching head as she tried to imagine how it had worked, and she suggested "Maybe we should worry about the how later. Right now we need to work out what we're going to do about the Silence." The Doctor agreed with her suggestion at once. His own head was aching as he tried to figure out the means the Time Lords had used to survive the war. He decided Angel had a point, they could worry about it later. "Yeah, you're right. Working out how the pocket works won't get us anywhere, we'll eventually learn how it happened in time. But how do we do it? The only leverage we have over the Silence at the moment is the fact we've got Ayla back, so we know she's safe if they're looking for her. What else do we have?"Angel bit her lip, "My death date. Think about it. As far as the Silence are concerned we're still looking for Ayla, and somewhere along the way they know I'm going to go to Lake Silencio... and be shot." She choked on the final three words. The Doctor choked as well, especially since there was nothing he could do about it... Wait a moment. "What if you were there and yet you weren't?" he asked, sitting up and looking at her with a smile. "What?" Angel blinked in confusion, surprised by his sudden mood swing. What had he come up with now?
"What if someone or something looked like you, and took your place?" the Doctor asked in growing excitement; now the idea had entered his head, he refused to believe he could not save his Mate from death. "No, no I won't let anyone else die for me," Angel interrupted, waving her hands to show the subject was closed, but the Doctor's hands shot out to squeeze them lightly, drawing her attention back to him.
"I wasn't thinking about a someone, but a something. The Teselecta. Think about it Angel; its a shape shifting android. We can materialise the TARDIS inside, have it change its form to match yours, and then we let it take the shots with us protected inside it. All we need to do is simply tell the crew what we have in mind and hope they'll listen to us. Time says you have to be there, but what if WE played a trick on time. There's a picture of you, standing on the lakeside. But it doesn't have to be a living being. There was AN Angel on the shore, but it doesn't have to be you. The Silence created a conspiracy to kill us both, why don't we create a conspiracy to deal with them? Besides, we can't directly confront them; they'll just come after us again."
Angel closed her eyes to think through the plan. It had merit, but one of the things that had gotten her down was how her 11th self's personality had taken a battering when the Doctor had regenerated. In her mind regeneration was something that always helped her gain something, her last regeneration had given her a confidence in herself that she'd lacked for centuries, but when the Doctor had forgotten her she'd found herself yearning for a regeneration to take away the pain. Now she no longer felt confident or good about herself and her abilities, but with Ayla back and the Doctor remembering her as his Mate again, her self confidence was improving again. The Doctor saw her hesitation, "Angel, I've let you down," he swallowed hard, "so many times since I regenerated, but please let me redeem myself, please, I'm begging you. If I could go in your place, I would in a heartsbeat, but its you that's in that picture and what Rory and Amy remember, but let me do this for you. Please, you and Ayla, you are all I've got left. I can't lose you, please let me make it up to the pair of you for being such a failure, for being a neglectful, uncaring, swaggering ingrate. Please."
Could she live in this body and with this personality for another few hundred years? One look into the Doctor's pleading eyes gave her the answer. Yes, she would. She couldn't resist that pleading look on his face to give this plan a chance. "Okay," she said at last, "but what do we do about Amy and Rory? If we go through with this plan, we will want to make it look as though we're still looking for Ayla, and we can't have one of them just stay inside the TARDIS."The Doctor's face fell slightly, then it hardened a bit, worrying Angel. She knew how impatient he'd recently become with humans, but with Amy and Rory it was different. They had lied and kept secrets from the pair of them, and Angel could understand the Doctor's annoyance, but he would forgive them for it though he wouldn't forget it. While she was forgiving, the Doctor was not.
"We could bring them both in on the plan," he said after a while, "or we could wipe their memories, but that's what the Silence did to me. I don't want to be anything like them."
"I know you don't," Angel replied knowing he'd seen the flash of fear when he'd suggested wiping memories, "but what about the others like Martha and Jack?"It took all of the his self control for the Doctor to maintain his composure. He still wasn't happy with his former companions for not bothering to use their common sense, and in the cases of Sarah Jane, Mickey and Martha and Jack their contacts to help them find Ayla. He knew, deep inside, they had, but it didn't feel like they had thanks to those useless phone calls.
"We don't tell them anything, not until Lake Silencio is finished," he said decisively. Angel looked at bit hurt by the prospect of keeping everything secret from her family, but she asked "Why?"
The Doctor gave one name for his answer, "Jack. I found out he'd been recruited into Torchwood because he'd gotten drunk in a number of pubs in Cardiff, and Torchwood operatives overheard him talking about us. With someone with a loose mouth like that would you want him knowing a plan as delicate as this one?"
As much as Angel wanted to say that Jack was trustworthy, she had to admit to herself her brother was sometimes incredibly careless. The story of his relationship with Angelo when she'd gone to help with that mess with the Miracle was a prime example of how blatantly stupid Jack could be if he was given the chance; for someone born in a century far more advanced than the 20th, Jack really lacked common sense at times. How could he have been so stupid as to get involved with someone who'd killed him by accident, saw him come to life again, kill him again, let him come back to life in front of an audience, and then killed him again? Better still, why did he even get into that situation in the first place, and let so much blood be collected by those Families?
"You're right," Angel replied reluctantly, "so we keep this from the rest of the family until it boils over, then what?"
The Doctor smiled at the good and correct use of the human expression, Angel had definitely come a long way, but she had a point. "We start deleting records of ourselves throughout the universe so no-one gets it into their minds to hunt us again. We've gotten too big, I've gotten too big, and the result is you've suffered, and so has Ayla," his face was grave, "its time for us to slip into the shadows."
Angel blinked, wondering privately to herself if the Doctor was putting too much expectation into this plan. She didn't think the Doctor could retreat into the shadows after the kind of life he'd been leading all these years.
"You want to do what?!" Rory asked the next morning as they tucked into breakfast. Angel sighed and said to her Mate, "I knew they would react like this."The Doctor and Angel had explained their plan to Rory and Amy, with Ayla piping up every once in a while, though the Doctor had occasionally seen the little girl look away when she'd finished, and he'd told Angel whilst closing their connection off from their daughter. It was clear Ayla had never been allowed to give an opinion during her years in the orphanage, and he felt renewed anger towards himself for getting Ayla in that position in the first place.
It's not your fault, Angel said to him, repeatedly. It's Kovarian and the Papal Mainframe who're to blame for this mess. If they'd bothered to study time travel properly, this wouldn't have happened.
Not true. Time can be altered to an extent, rewritten, but if you and I tried to change history there wouldn't be a mistake because we use simple techniques we know will work, but that does not excuse what Kovarian and River did.
"We want to take the Tesselecta, have it change into Angel, and take her to Lake Silencio. There River can shoot her, and the Silence will think they've succeeded," the Doctor repeated calmly, showing no sign to the telepathic talk.
Rory looked at Angel, "You okay with this?"
Angel sighed. She still wasn't sure if this was the best idea or plan the Doctor had ever thought up, but it was better than waiting for two or more centuries to pass looking for Ayla whilst secretly looking for information on the Silence, like she had planned to do before the Doctor had found out about Lake Silencio.
"I wasn't at first," she said, "and I still have worries about how it will go, but I'm all for it, especially after reading that file."
Amy and Rory had read the history file as well. It was one thing hearing how the Doctor, Angel and Ayla were the last Time Lords, but to find out the rest of the species were alive, and the Silence wanted to make sure they never back was something really different. It put a whole new angle of the war they seemed determined to wage against the Doctor and Angel, using Ayla as an assassin and willing to create a new baby to take her place because the little Time Child wasn't interested in harming her parents.
"When will this all happen, this battle or siege the Silence are trying to prevent?" Amy asked.
The Doctor flinched visibly at the notion of himself dying on some backwater planet with the Daleks and other races fighting amongst each other and him to keep his real name silent, and Angel had to hide her own shudder. "We don't know," she replied, thankful that she didn't know.
"All that matters to me is protecting my Mate and stopping the Silence from trying to murder her," the Doctor interrupted, glaring at the Ponds, daring them to contradict him, "and I also want to protect Ayla. If there is a chance of getting Gallifrey back and help the Time Lords return, well that's good."
The Ponds noticed he'd added Gallifrey and the Time Lords last, and it made them happy he was finally doing the right thing and making an effort to keep Angel and Ayla safe.
"When are we going to do this?" Amy asked to shift the subject. She wasn't sure what disturbed her the most; the fact the Doctor had put the Time Lords beneath his list of priorities, or the fact he was willing to go down whatever road he needed to for Angel and Ayla's safety.
"Not right now. We're going to try to pick up a bit more intelligence about the Silence from other races," the Doctor replied, "I want to know more about them from different perspectives."
"We're thinking of doing this in a couple of months," Angel said.
After a few months, the Time Lords had decided to pull off their plan but they needed to find the Teselecta. It hadn't been easy until the Doctor had found a dying Dalek, stole its eyestalk and downloaded its datacore. After that finding the Teselecta was simple. For a security organisation, the department of the Time Agency that controlled the fleet of androids similar to the Teselecta were not very bright, impersonating a Silence member who'd died months before. Even Angel, who didn't see herself generally as bright after centuries of being mocked by other Time Lords, would never have made that mistake.
Persuading the Teselecta crew for help hadn't been as difficult as the Doctor and Angel had expected, then again it might have been because they had started investigating the Silence as well. Apparently, ever since that encounter in Berlin, the Teselecta crew had taken with them information and records about Melody Pond. The crew's superiors had decided the Silence needed to be dealt with, one way or another, but so little information existed on them. Their order was very powerful, but it was so secretive. They never stayed in one timezone for long, and they maintained bases throughout the Milky Way. Gaining membership was next to impossible, and besides even their best spies couldn't find any way in.
It had been nasty hiding inside the Teselecta, even if the crew of the time travelling justice android death machine had agreed to help. Even if the Doctor was grateful for the way the humans had agreed to help he couldn't forget or forgive the way they abused time travel, but they were helping him protect Angel. For that he was thankful, so he could turn a blind eye unless they killed someone dangerous ahead of schedule.
The hardest part for the Time Lords and the Ponds was when 'Angel' had to go to the shore for the final phase of the plan to work.
It had been just as hard for Amy and Rory, seeing their younger selves and knowing what was in store for them and knowing there was nothing they could actually do about any of it.
When they saw River lift that visor, smirking at 'Angel' it had taken all self control from the Doctor not to hurt her even though they'd been miniaturised. The real Angel had laid a gentle hand on his forearm to remind him she was there even as she guided the Teselecta through its paces, adding her mannerisms to make the performance real, that she wasn't going to die, but even Angel was sickened when River spoke about Ayla without a touch of compassion or empathy, unaware that 'Angel' was the Teselecta, and that Ayla was standing inbetween her parents, squeezing their hands in fear at the sight of River. The Doctor had glanced down at his daughter, surprised by how terrified Ayla was at the sight of River, though what had truly startled him had been the look of recognition in her eyes. Had River and Ayla met before? He bent down, and hugged his daughter to his chest, whispering that she wasn't going to know they were actually inside a walking machine.
There was no sorrow in River's eyes when she raised the gloved hand with the blaster built in before she'd fired the shots to 'Angel's' hearts. The Doctor's own but very real hearts had gone cold when 'Angel's' hands started to glow with fake regeneration energy before River fired the last shots then everything turned black.
Over the audio scanners, Amy and Rory listened to themselves, sobbing, begging for 'Angel' to still be alive over River's cold and rational calm, and Rory couldn't help but wonder if River was only being calm and seemingly rational because she knew she'd failed to properly kill Angel and was disappointed.
Amy, meanwhile, shivered at the cold tone of her daughter. Seeing that cold expression which had replaced the psychotically delighted look at the imminent demise of 'Angel,' it had frightened Amy. It showed her what kind of person River truly was. It was strange for all of them, particularly the Time Lords when the scanners relayed enough data to show the funeral procession to the boat the Time Lords had prepared with the elderly Canton helping.
Rory found it weird watching his younger self gently splash gasoline respectfully around 'Angel's' body before they pushed the boat off after setting fire to it. Rory and Amy had no idea how long they had spent when it had been them standing on the shore of the lake, but in the Teselecta they learnt it had been two hours before they'd left. The Captain of the Teselecta looked up from his instruments, "Thank god the outer hull is flame and heatproof." "How long can we stay here?" Rory asked. "A long time." Very helpful, the Doctor thought to himself sarcastically, though he didn't say anything about the one word answer.
The Doctor looked around the control room. Whilst his Time Lord mind would probably make short work of fully comprehending the technology around him, he decided it wasn't the time to show off. "Captain, do you have a way of tracking down the aliens who work for the Silence?"
One of the crewmembers replied instead, "Yes, we do. Do you want me to scan now?"
Angel nodded, "Yes, please." If they knew the Silents were nearby then they'd know there had been witnesses to her death. It was actually quite eerie thinking about her death and being casual about it. It was nothing like regeneration, that was natural for Time Lords. And truthfully regeneration was no different, if you looked at it rightly, to skin dying and renewing. But death…..even Time Lords feared it. She could very well imagine her own death, though she preferred not to think about it. The crew member nodded and ran the scan. "They're here alright," the female crewmember reported grimly. "Quite a few of them. They're heading for Melody Pond." Amy shuddered at the reminder she was related genetically to someone who was a psychopath. Rory wrapped a gentle arm around her shoulder when he noticed her expression. The Doctor walked to the Captain's chair. "What do you know about the aliens in the Silence?" he asked, not really bothered about what the Silents could potentially do to River, and not really caring. The Doctor had already worked out using that little information River wasn't meant to escape from this unscathed. Why else was she imprisoned in a maximum and minimum security prison like Stormcage anyway? Kovarian saw her as cannon fodder to be fired and then discarded without a care, and frankly the Doctor did not care about her. As for the question to the Captain... Though the Doctor and Angel had learnt the Silents were in fact genetically engineered telepaths, confessional priests, he wanted to know what the Time Agency knew about them.
"Not much. We know they're intelligent, capable of manipulating electricity, able to erase memories in the long or short term," the Captain replied grimly, "but there are ways to track them, detect them and still retain the memory. Did you know, a month ago, for us, a report came in saying the Daleks had wiped out a cell of the Silence after seven separate attacks? They couldn't have done that without being able to see them and retain the memory."
"That doesn't surprise me, many idiots have made the mistake of believing the Daleks to be harmless and they usually end up being exterminated," the Doctor said grimly, but only Ayla and Angel knew from their mental bonds to him that the Doctor was almost jumping for joy that his oldest enemies had destroyed one of his newest, "do you know why?"
The Captain turned in his seat and stared at the new time travellers onboard his command. "No," he replied with a sigh, "even after all this time, we still don't understand Dalek technology enough to decipher their communications."
The Doctor nodded and he rooted around in his pockets for a notepad and a pen, "I sympathise with your problem. I'm going to give you a bit of advice on how to break through the Dalek communications network. Hopefully you can find something there to save a galaxy, hopefully. Just be careful. The Daleks are paranoid like you would not believe, and don't underestimate them either. They are very good at tracing hackers. Here."
The Captain took the pieces of paper the Doctor handed to him, he held them as though they were gold dust. "That's my way of saying thank you, don't abuse it," the Time Lord delivered a final piece of advice.
"That was a good thing you did," Angel whispered as she and the Doctor settled in bed. "What?" he blinked in confusion as Angel got comfortable. He couldn't work out what she meant because he hadn't done anything good recently. Angel smiled at his cluenesses, "You giving the Teselecta captain that advice on how to break Dalek communications, that was a good thing."
"Yeah, I only hope it works. I gave it to them as a kind of thanks for letting us live. I hope they use it wisely, like finding out where the Daleks are going to attack next." Angel furrowed her brow, the Doctor sounded like he was expecting the crew of the Teselecta to do the opposite and use that information to do something monumentally stupid. Angel wasn't surprised; the Doctor had spent a long period of his life as a pragmatist, and the last three years had not helped for his state of mind. The restoration of his memories and the fact he'd been manipulated, abused and mentally tortured whilst she had gone through hell herself had not helped.
Angel felt bad for her own contribution for the fragility of her Mate's mindset; she'd hidden things from him, and he was right, she could have told him she was pregnant when she'd had the chance. He might have remembered her before it had been too late for him to do anything to help her. If she had been a bit more brave then maybe she would not have felt her hearts shatter into shards at the sight of him flirting and later kissing River Song.
Unfortunately for her the Doctor overheard her recriminations. "Hey, don't," he mumbled, "don't even think of that manipulative bitch. I'm already beating myself up as it is, and I'm just happy we probably won't have to worry about her for a long time."
"You know we can't," Angel pointed out. "We've got to maintain the timeline."
The Doctor groaned. "Great, we have to put up with her. I was hoping to leave her in that cell in Stormcage."
There was a silver lining though. Darillium. The last time he would ever - hopefully - meet River Song. That night he dreamt of the Singing towers, and he had to work hard on maintaining his mental barriers to keep Angel out of his sweet dream of seeing River for the last time.
There were many forms of time travel, and the Doctor and Angel knew all of them like the backs of their hands. They knew time travel had always been possible in dreams, and inducing one was not difficult. After a month of visiting numerous times and places where both Time Lords had done a check to see how well known both of them were in the universe, and they were not happy. Part of the plan they'd both come up with had been to hide in the shadows, but they could not do that if they were well known. After evaluating the scale of the problem for a while, Angel and the Doctor had decided it was time to see the rest of the family. Unfortunately they had a problem. They didn't want to visit the rest of the family separately and tell the whole story to them, it was better for the pair of them to give the story once. Besides that they had a lot to do if they wanted to prevent a repeat of Lake Silencio from ever happening again, and to do that was to get everyone together at the same time.
Angel had wanted to contact everyone by just visiting them, but the Doctor had argued with her that the Silence could be monitoring them, and though she hated it Angel had to admit he could be right. Thanks to the Teselecta the Doctor and Angel had managed to find ways to detect the Silents, but they didn't want to put anything to chance. It was Angel who'd decided to use this method of time travel to bring everyone together. It was straightforward to simply use the TARDIS telepathic circuits rather than a soporific to induce a temporal sleep, easier too. The problem with soporifics for Time Lords were it was because they were such a primitive method, but by using telepathic circuits to reach out for the people who'd come to Demon's Run who were members of Angel's family.
It was simple for the Doctor to induce a telepathic sleep inside the TARDIS, and to extend the circuits to Angel's family. Rory and Amy had gone to bed, expecting to have a nice night of good dreams...Only to be awake in a room with four massive couches and stuffed armchairs, and they were not alone. "Jack?" Amy asked at the sight of the handsome Time Agent.
"Amy, Rory?" Jack asked as he stood with the rest of the Torchwood team when suddenly Sarah Jane, Donna, Martha, Mickey and Jenny appeared. Each one of them looked around curiously before spotting everyone else. Then the Doctor and Angel sat down just as Vastra, Strax and Jenny from Victorian times appeared.
"Doctor, Angel?" Sarah Jane asked in surprise.
"It's okay Sarah, sorry we had to bring everybody here like this," Angel replied, "but we had to bring all of you together somehow without the Silence finding out.""But why?" Rory asked. "Didn't we deal with the Silence after Lake Silencio?" Amy added. The Doctor took a deep breath, hoping his one sided shouting match directed at her had been enough for Amy to learn to keep her mouth shut. He was hoping to explain what had happened to delay the Silence threat gradually. "Yeah, but we didn't want to take any chances," the Time Lord replied.
Jack frowned, "You still having problems with the Silence?" The Doctor and Angel blew out a breath, but before he could reply Amy broke in without thinking, "Yeah, we stopped River from killing Angel by conning them."
Even Rory was annoyed Amy had opened her mouth, "Amy!" The redhead seemed to realise what she'd done wrong, and she turned slowly to see the look on the Doctor's face. "I'd thought we'd been over this Amy, please tell me you have a good memory of that. Stop opening your mouth, start using your brain, please!"
Angel closed her eyes, ignoring how hypocritical her Mate was. She couldn't count the number of problems he had gotten them into with his mouth, but she could see his point this time. She also knew even the Doctor could pick his words carefully at times. The Doctor had wanted to tell them the story slowly, to give them time to listen without jumping in and shouting all the time. "What happened?" Jack jumped in, proving the point. "Were you just going to let Angel die, again?!" Sending another glare at the visibly wilting Amy, the Doctor held his ground, though his fists visibly clenched angrily at the notion he'd let his Mate almost die, again. "No, we used a Teselecta to hide in whilst River tried to kill Angel. The Silence had come up with a plan to induce a fixed point in time by killing Angel next to a Still point in time. Amy and Rory had seen a version of Angel get killed at the Lake, so for them it was the past. It had happened, Jack. You know fixed points cannot be altered or avoided. We decided to con the Silence into thinking they'd succeeded, they already knew Ayla was lost, but they had no idea we'd found her-"
"Wait, you've found Ayla?!" Mickey interrupted. "When can we see her? Why isn't she here?"The questions just kept coming, but then Jack shoved his fingers into his mouth and he gave a loud shrilly whistle. "Hold on, give 'em a chance to explain."
Angel sighed in relief, "Thanks Jack. Yeah, we found Ayla, once we'd worked out where and when she was."
The Doctor closed her eyes, hoping even Amy didn't say anything about seeing Ayla months ago, and doing nothing to work out who she was. He was still kicking himself for it.
Fortunately no-one seemed interested in knowing where the little Time Child had been found, they were just happy she had been found. "Where is she?" Jenny, his daughter asked, looking excitedly around as though Ayla would appear.
"She's asleep. We'll bring her to each of you to see soon," Angel replied, "we didn't bring her now because we would take her to see you soon, so what's the point?"
Everyone seemed to accept that. "So, what's happening?" Martha asked.
The Doctor closed his eyes as he tried to think of where he should begin. Thanks to Amy's big mouth he'd lost his train of thought. Fortunately Angel was the one to speak.
"Well, no matter how it was done we've stopped the Silence from trying to kill us. But we've learnt so much about why they wanted to kill us," she said.
"I temporarily stopped the search for Ayla to drop in on Amy and Rory to tell them to tell all of you to stop calling us at all hours of the day and night, reminding us we'd lost our daughter," the Doctor said, his voice darkening. "Did it honestly never occur to you that your resources would've been better spent actually using your contacts, especially you Jack and Sarah, to find leads. Instead you didn't."
Angel found it hard to agree with the Doctor there, though she was more forgiving. "It would've been helpful if, once or twice, one of you rang to let us know if you'd heard anything."
The rest of the family looked at each other aghast. They'd thought they were helping Angel and the Doctor by asking them how they were coping, it had never occurred to any of them that they were doing more harm than good. But they HAD looked for Ayla, hadn't they? The Doctor didn't bother to hide his disappointment when he saw the looks, and he wasn't afraid to hide it.
"It really didn't occur to you, did it? Especially you, Jack, who knows that the TARDIS does not exist in the normal universe. You must've known that whenever someone sends a message to the TARDIS, or if dozens of people send messages at the same time the TARDIS receives them all at once! And answer one simple question, Team Torchwood, how is fighting and arguing with each other like a pack of rabid dogs going to help us find a little girl? Go on, tell me. I've lived for almost a thousand years, another minute of waiting for an explanation won't kill me."
Angel quietly placed her hand over the Doctor's to stop him from launching into a tirade. While she was grateful for everyone's love and concern, she had to see from his perspective they could have done so much more and not leave all the work of finding Ayla to them.
"Now's not the time, Doctor," she said, looking over the collective faces of everyone there. She didn't let them off, though. "While it was nice and wonderful for all of you to ring us, it would've been better if you'd tried to help us find Ayla and let us know. But the good news is we've found Ayla and dealt with the Silence."
"How, and where are we? How are we here, wherever we are?" Jack asked.
The Doctor snorted, wincing when Angel gently elbowed him in the side. "Time travel has always been possible in dreaming," he replied, "there are simply different methods of inducing it."
"We used the TARDIS's telepathic circuits to induce this one, its easier and more safer for us than simply delivering some kind of soporific, which is another common method, but with the TARDIS its safer not to mention easier," Angel added.
"What do you mean its safer with the TARDIS?" Martha asked.
The Doctor wondered how long it would take for them to move on and get this over with, but he answered Martha's question, "Because there's a lot of business we have to get on with, but we'll tell you what we mean later. We brought you here for a reason. We wanted to tell you that, touch wood, we're safe from the Silence, Ayla is with us and safe. Most of all we'd wanted to tell you how we'd done it."
"We met River again," Angel said with nothing in her facial expressions or her tone of voice saying anything about how she felt about that, though judging from the sudden anger on the Doctor's face everyone didn't need to be psychic to know how he felt about that. "It was a younger version of her, a version who hadn't yet picked the name River Song. She made us go to Berlin when the Nazis were in power."
"At gunpoint," the Doctor ground out, "she was wearing a shimmer linked to a perception filter, I didn't even know who she was. Not until Hitler shot her. The bullet caused the damn thing, which was as skintight as possible to maintain the illusion, to revert her back to her proper appearance."
"Ow!" Jack and Gray grimaced, both men from the 51st century knowing the benefits and dangers to using such a technique, and knowing what would happen if the field was even remotely damaged, "That would be painful. The illusion if it was damaged would be like being wrapped in red hot barbed wire being pulled up and down with her inside it."
Everyone grimaced at the thought of that kind of pain, then they realised it was just River who suffered.
"Why did she make you take her to Nazi Germany?" Mickey asked, trying to get the image of red hot barbed wire out of his mind.
"She wanted to kill Hitler," the Doctor said simply. "Trust me, in my less stellar and thinking moments, I've thought of doing the same. But if I did that I run the risk of allowing a more competent and more dangerous Nazi to take his place. I'd be responsible for thousands of deaths, more than Hitler was ever capable of. Some historians might argue Hitler didn't know about what was going on, but a more competent leader would definitely know, and endorse it. Yet River didn't understand the dangers of changing history."
It took the Doctor, Angel, and the Ponds an hour to tell them the story of what the young River Song had done. They didn't gloss over anything, and though Jack and Mickey were furious that Angel had come close to dying of poison they were pleased the Doctor hadn't left her to die, they were pleased he'd concentrated solely on Angel, of finding a cure.
The fact he had been prepared and even welcomed death if it meant being with her spoke volumes, though it was troubling. None of the audience knew what to make of the Dampening bracelet. Jenny, the Doctor and Angel's daughter, put her hand to her mouth in horror at the idea of her own mother being willing to dampen the bond between them.
But when the audience learnt what Rory and Amy had seen at Lake Silencio they were up in arms.
"You didn't tell them Angel had died at some lake, 'cause of River bloody Song?!" Donna shouted.
"What were you thinking, how would like it if someone had seen your wife die and didn't say a word?" Mickey snapped at Rory.
The Doctor had to hold back his smile of satisfaction as Rory and Amy cowered in their couch, revenge was a dish best served cold. What made the Doctor even happier was the question Mickey had asked Rory, maybe it would make him a bit more wiser in the future.
Angel, however, was not as viciously minded as her Mate, and she instantly rose to Rory's defence. "It's not his fault-" she tried to say, but even Donna was not in the mood to forgive and forget. "No, Angel," she said, her eyes gleaming angrily at Amy and Rory, "they shouldn't have kept it secret."
"We'd wanted to tell them," Amy tried, but Martha snapped back, "Oh, did you plan on telling them when Angel was marching off to her death, like a lamb to the slaughter?"
Rory saw the look on the Doctor's face, "You're enjoying this, aren't you?"
The Doctor nodded, smiling unrepentantly. "Wouldn't you if someone who didn't just know you'd forgotten you were Mated, and said Mate was pregnant with your child, that you have endangered them both for three years, put them through hell whilst you swanned about, and you knew there was more to their relationship than there appears to be on the surface? Tell me Rory, if you hadn't told me about Angel, were you just going to let me think we were just friends until one of us came close to death? Yeah, I am enjoying this, though there's no way you can experience the pain and misery you put me through when I learnt about Lake Silencio? Did you honestly think I would forgive and forget?
"If you believe that, then you don't know me. Most people tend to think I'm an all round nice guy, and thanks to Angel I am, but don't ever think I'm not capable of making your life a living nightmare. Some of you think I don't keep up with any of you, know anything about you, who you are and what your secrets are. Let me tell you, I'm not as ignorant as you might think. I knew Martha was engaged to Tom Milligan, and I also knew about their breakup. That's how I knew where to find her and Mickey when they were fighting against a Sontaran. I also knew Jack was on Earth for a century, and I knew that Sarah Jane Smith was an investigative reporter. I'm going to warn you now, all of you, don't ever do anything to endanger Angel and Ayla. If you do I will use every last secret you have to shatter your lives at the source until you can't show your faces in the light of day again, and I will get away with it, because I know how," the Doctor glanced at a stunned Martha, "Martha will remember what happened to the Family of Blood, how I gave them immortality only giving them a living death. I hope it was worth it, because I don't care if they're enjoying being locked in a mirror, frozen in time, pushed into a collapsing galaxy, wrapped in Dwarf star alloy chains or not."
Angel shuddered at the vengeance in the Doctor's mind. Even she was astonished he would go so far, all in the excuse of protecting her and Ayla, she understood why of course, but she didn't have to like how he would do it. That was nothing compared to how everyone else felt. They could see that the Doctor was serious, dangerously serious. They could see it. The danger that made the Master's madness pale in comparison. Even a Cyberman was cuddlier compared to the Time Lord at the moment. Sarah Jane who had a more in depth knowledge of the Time Lord could guess why he was delivering that threat. It was easy when you saw everything from his point of view. He had had a wonderful relationship with Angel, worshipped her, loved her, only for some religious cult snatch that away from Angel, who had believed the Doctor no longer loved her when all that had happened was he'd forgotten her. He'd been manipulated by some psychopath who'd been willing to murder Angel just to get her claws into him, and that psychopath had been grown from DNA taken from Amy and Rory.
He'd only just found his daughter who'd been kidnapped by the Silence when she'd been a baby, stopped a murder attempt on his Mate's life, and he'd just had to cope with a conspiracy to murder Angel and Rory and Amy, his own companions, had known about it and had been told by River not to say a word. Was it any wonder he was furious still? The Doctor was acting like a wounded animal, desperate to survive and to protect his Mate and daughter from any further attacks, and he was willing to make his own friends lives a misery if they betrayed him on a higher level than Amy and Rory did, but it was understandable.
The Doctor turned his gaze over the shocked faces, inwardly pleased he'd delivered the warning, but he had to deliver another one. "That includes going to bars, getting drunk, and talking loudly. Right Jack?" Jack jumped, his eyes wide open pathetically. Martha thought he looked like a deer in the headlights of a nasty great white hunter about to add an extra head to his wall of trophies. "What? Now, Doc, you know I wouldn't -"
"Oh right, so that little incident in Cardiff where you were arrested by two Torchwood operatives who killed you when you blabbed about me and Angel wasn't an example?" The Doctor shook his head in undisguised disdain at the immortal ex Time Agent who was presently sitting stunned at how angry the Time Lord was. "Did it never occur to you to show some kind of restraint? Of course not, why ask. Despite being immortal, you are still a stunted little ape. You didn't think at all, a characteristic you share with many of your annoying planet. You could've gotten drunk in a locked room or something where no one would've heard you, but no. You had to get drunk and reveal you knew us to Torchwood in public, at the time a major threat to Angel! I haven't forgotten how interested in Angel Yvonne Hartman was, and don't you dare think I will. I told you Jack, I do keep tabs on you. I knew you were on Earth the whole time, but I wasn't expecting to see you at Cardiff before we jumped to the end of the universe. I found out about how you were recruited after that mess with the Master, and I can tell you straight on I'm not impressed. Is it so surprising that we didn't say what we were doing to save Angel's life? You'd have blabbed at the first opportunity. You can't tell me that was not careless, and don't get me started on Angelo Colasanto. If you hadn't gotten careless, none of that would have happened. I mean it, I won't stand for it. Get drunk, blab, and if the Silence come after us again, including Ayla, I will make your life a living nightmare, and you thought immortality was bad."
The Doctor knew that was a low blow, but he really did need to make his case. Angel, seeing how tense everyone was getting, interrupted, "We learnt why the Silence wanted us to die."
That announcement made everyone feel less tense after the Doctor had threatened them, for the first time many of them wondered if the Doctor they were used to knowing was actually someone ruthless and callous if anybody crossed a line with him. Judging by how protectively he had wrapped Angel in his embrace, they guessed he would carry out his threat to ruin everyone if they betrayed him and Angel.
"Go on," Donna asked, holding back her shudders at how threatening the Doctor was. "What did you find out?"
The Doctor shared a look with Angel, and she shrugged her shoulders. "You all know, from your time travelling with us, that we've told you we're the last of our race. Well, that's not true." Silence. Everyone barring the Ponds looked at the Time Lords in surprise since they'd all thought that Gallifrey had been destroyed in the Time War, but they had never spoken about it to the Doctor or Angel since it upset them to remember their race was gone. It was harder for Sarah Jane. She'd travelled with the Doctor long before he'd met Angel and fought in the war, and she had witnessed the missions the Time Lords had sent him on, remembered the frustration he'd felt.
She remembered the way the Third Doctor had described the Time Lords, as intergalactic ticket inspectors keen to stamp out unlicensed time travel. It had been incredibly hard for her to grasp when she'd met the Tenth Doctor that his people and Gallifrey was gone.
For the others it was just as incomprehensible since apart from the Doctor, Angel, and those who remembered the Master when he'd returned, they had little knowledge of the Time Lords and what Gallifrey was generally like. Jenny's eyes were wide, but she quickly started smiling at the prospect of meeting other Time Lords. Her delight wasn't unnoticed by her parents, but they didn't say what the bad points about knowing the Time Lords were, well not yet. Meanwhile Jack was considering how the Time Lords had survived the war, but he couldn't since there were many ways they could have escaped the Daleks."How can the Time Lords still be alive?" Martha asked the question after the long and shocked silence. "Apparently the Time Lords are trapped inside a pocket universe," the Doctor said. Jack closed his eyes, nodding as he worked it out for himself, "Yeah, a pocket universe makes sense. Do you know what kind?"
"Strangely no, and that's not the worst of it," the Doctor replied, "the Silence say we protect Gallifrey, in this siege," out of the corner of his eye he saw his older daughter look interested, "and apparently the Time Lords send a message from the universe into this one, a question only Angel can answer. Doctor Who?"All the people in the dreamworld were aware that the Doctor had only told his name to Angel, but they knew nothing about Time Lord customs to see how serious this was. Angel sighed, "When we were at Demon's run, some of you asked what Ayla's name was, but we couldn't tell you. We know her name because she is our daughter, but no-one will know what her real name is. The Doctor and I are the same, no-one on Gallifrey, not even members of our families besides our parents know our names." The Doctor smiled at Martha. "Remember when we met the Carrionites, and that name thing? Well, the Time Lords were afraid of that power being used against them. It was a very dark time, then. But when the early Gallifreyans, see this was a time when the Time Lords hadn't yet started to evolve, came up with the idea, we used our telepathic abilities to create a box in our minds where our real names were hidden. It provides us with a strength and shield around our real names."
"That and having titles in place of our real names made us appear pompous," Angel remarked.
The Doctor chuckled, "True."
Sarah Jane smiled to herself when she saw the Doctor hesitantly hold an arm open, but she grinned quietly to herself when Angel smiled and let him pull her into his embrace. It was like the cloud had lifted and the Doctor and Angel were happy once again. But the happy mood didn't last long. "Doctor, my granddad told me 'bout how Gallifrey came back, how you and Angel were scared, how the Time Lords were going to rip the Time Vortex apart," Donna said."They were going to do WHAT?!" Jack and Gray shouted. Angel cringed. The Doctor tightened his grip on her, reassuring her. "They had this weird scheme in mind. Look, our leader had been experimenting on other Time Lords, adjusting us. I sometimes felt as though he was planning on mutating us, and dumping into metal war machines." Sarah Jane gasped at the thought of the Time Lords willingly becoming the Daleks just to fight the Daleks, and the others were no better, but unlike the others she had a unique perspective. Sarah Jane had actually met Davros originally when the megalomaniac had gotten started, she had seen the destruction he'd wrought on the Thals and his own people. But the thought that the Time Lords would willingly allow something like that... It stunned Sarah Jane, and she was glad when she looked around she wasn't the only one to be surprised. As a Sontaran, Strax knew about the Time War, but he knew only so much about it. The Sontarans and the Rutan Host had been fighting for 50,000 years, 50,000 years of glorious battle and blood, but neither side would contemplate becoming like the other, even to affect a swift victory. The idea of becoming like a Rutan, a disgusting abomination which didn't have the Sontaran mobility and strength, and had to resort to electrocution and slithering like some worm...it disgusted Strax. The very notion of the Time Lords experimenting on themselves disturbed him as well, though not as much as the others because in war you sometimes needed to augment yourself to gain victory; he knew the major powers of the universe routinely experimented on themselves, the Cybermen were a prime example of that. They were once affected by gravity, gold and radiation, but now after hundreds of years of experimentation they were practically invincible. The Doctor and Angel were hugging each other tightly. Angel had heard all about Rassilon's experiments, but she'd never seen any of them for which she was incredibly grateful. The Doctor wasn't so lucky. Then she tensed when she felt something like resignation in his mind, a need to be truthful for once. The Doctor sighed, looking at everyone sadly. "It's time I was truthful with you. I'm the eleventh Doctor in name only, in truth I'm in my last life." Angel looked around the faces, and she wasn't surprised to see the looks of surprise on their faces. As his Mate Angel had known all along why the Doctor had lied about his last few lives, understood the reasons, but she knew the ultimate reason was because he had been broken by the knowledge he had thought he'd wiped out billions of innocent Gallifreyans and Time Lords, including their children, and their world. "What?" Sarah Jane whispered. "How can you be the last Doctor?" Martha asked. The Doctor closed his eyes wearily, he'd really wanted to avoid this ever coming out. "Donna, Jack, do you remember when I almost regenerated when we dealt with Davros?" Not waiting for a reply, he carried on, "Well, it might have looked like I'd channeled the energy into that spare hand of mine, but in truth it burnt up that regeneration. "You see, Time Lords have packets of regeneration energy inside their bodies, and they break apart when a change is needed. That time, the process began normally, then I redirected it into something that contained my DNA. My spare hand, and whilst I was healed from that Dalek shot I had wasted a regeneration." Jack shook his head, "You never said, why didn't you just regenerate then?"
"I had vanity issues," the Doctor replied, turning to smile at Angel lovingly, and even though it was a dream he still idly stroked her hair gently, though he inwardly cursed his previous incarnation for his stupidity, "I didn't want to leave Angel, especially in the pain she was in," he added grimly making everyone bar Amy and Rory mutter in agreement.
Amy though was confused, "What do you mean, in pain?"
The Doctor glared at her, "It's a long story, anyway I didn't want to go. I mean, I love Angel, and I didn't want to leave her. But in terms of regenerations left, I only had the one packet left."
"But why?" Donna asked in exasperation. "You all know I fought in the Time War, right?" The Doctor asked after a moment's peace as he worked to figure out the right words to properly describe the events of a dark period in not just his life, but Angel's. "Well, I didn't fight in the war, not completely at least. The war started in my eighth life, but just because I didn't fight doesn't mean I didn't get involved - I saw Davros' command ship be destroyed by the jaws of the Nightmare Child, at the Gates of Elysium, and I went about doing this and that. "But I refused to get involved, and I wasn't the only one either. The traditions of the Time Lords meant many of us grew bored and decided to leave to pursue our own ideals, renegades we were called. The Master himself was another. But the Time Lords found ways of conscripting us. I was part of an endangered breed, and by the time I entered the war there were only one or two left out of the fighting, but even they couldn't escape," the Doctor said darkly. "I finally got involved in the war when I tracked a damaged spaceship to a planet. It's crew had abandoned ship, except for one crew member. Her name was Cass-"
"Was?" Martha jumped in with the past tense, but the Doctor only ignored her interruption. "I tried to rescue her, but when she saw the TARDIS and worked out I was a Time Lord, she decided to die with her ship," the Doctor suddenly let out a bitter laugh, "and I didn't blame her. By that point in the war, I wouldn't have been surprised if every race hated the Time Lords. Our people were leveling civilisations, doing more killing than the Daleks. It was like that analogy where you find yourself diseased or infected flesh, and you have to cut out them out to give the healthy flesh a chance to survive. Anyway the ship crashed, and I was still on it." Sarah Jane had never heard a story as bizarre as this, "What happened then?"
"I died, but I was brought back to life. I didn't regenerate then."
Donna was glad she wasn't the only one confused, "Oi! Don't go all spaceman and Martian on us, get to the point.""He's coming to it, Donna," Angel said softly. "The planet was Karn." Sarah Jane gasped, "Karn? Not the planet we encountered Morbius? That Karn?"
"Where else?" The Doctor asked rhetorically. Jack also recognised the name of the planet, "The Sisterhood?"
"Who are the Sisterhood, and who is Morbius?" Martha asked, and soon everybody jumped in asking practically the same question, and then Jack shouted, "SHUT UP! Let him finish.""Karn is the home of the Sisterhood of the Eternal Flame. They're basically a cult to those who haven't heard of them, they worship a flame that creates a liquid that grants them a temporary immortality. At first the only people to know about it were the Sisterhood themselves, and the High Council of the Time Lords, and in exchange for Time Lord protection since the universe is crawling with marauders looking for something new to exploit, and something that gives a simple form of immortality was to die for, the Sisters would routinely give us a supply of the elixir," the Doctor explained. "But why? I mean Time Lords regenerate, why should you need that?" Mickey asked in confusion.
"Not for immortality," Angel answered with a smile, "it makes a good medicine for regeneration whenever one goes wrong, and they often did. Right, Doctor?"The Doctor smiled, lovingly stroking Angel's chin even if they were in a dream brought on by TARDIS telepathic circuits, he loved her. "Morbius, a Time Lord himself, was power mad, and to cut a long story short he brought an army together, promising all kinds of things, and immortality was one of them. The final battle was waged on Karn, devastating the planet, and turning the Sisterhood fearful of whoever came to the planet. Ask Sarah for the full story, it doesn't matter. What does matter is what the Sisterhood did for me in the war.
"I said I was dead, but the Sisterhood had brought me back to life for only four minutes. The High Priestess offered to give me an elixir to trigger my regeneration, pleading for me to enter the war. She didn't tell me anything I didn't already know; I knew the Daleks and the Time Lords were threatening all of time and space, but I was determined to stay out of it."
"But why?"
The Doctor clenched his fists angrily, "Okay. The Time War started in my eighth incarnation, but a couple of lives before the war started I encountered a side of my people I was more than aware of, but never expected them to go that far. Sarah Jane will know thanks to when she met me that the Time Lords had already tried and exiled me to Earth. They force regenerated me, locked the TARDIS so I couldn't leave, and believe me I have never forgotten or forgiven my people for that."
Jenny blinked in surprise at the bitterness in her father's voice, "Why did they exile you?"
The Doctor looked down as he remembered the mess he'd gotten into, "I was a fugitive. The Time Lords have a hard policy towards people who go out into the universe without permission, and they punish them harshly. It has to be harsh otherwise they can't maintain order. Like I told Sarah Jane during our first adventure, the Time Lords could be likened to intergalactic ticket inspectors. They can't be that way whilst turning a blind eye to their own lawbreakers, besides our people weren't tolerant to Time Lords who wanted to break the typical mold of Time Lord; haughty, aloof to the universe they were observing, dull, arrogant, stagnant. Anyway, I landed the TARDIS on a planet where a group of aliens had kidnapped human soldiers and forced them to fight to form a dangerous army to conquer the galaxy. I turned up, realised the task of returning them home was too big for me since time travel was involved, and the humans had been brainwashed. It was just too big for me, and I had to call my people for help.
"After I tried to escape, I ended up on Gallifrey for the first time in centuries. I was put on trial, and the Time Lords decided to exile me. I was bitter, but my punishment, I later saw when I was in my Sixth life when they put me on trial again, was fairly lenient."
"Why did they put you on trial again?" Donna asked.
The Doctor closed his eyes, "The Time Lords have a computer system, we called it the matrix. Technically its supposed to be hacker proof, but a group of aliens from Andromeda had found a way in proving it was anything but, and they operated on Earth. They used that base to download all kinds of information; new technologies, stuff like that. The Time Lords eventually found out, and they came up with a really nasty way of ending it. They moved the Earth through space, similar to the way the Daleks did when Davros tried to destroy reality, and it caused a fireball that nearly destroyed the planet. Earth was renamed Ravalox and forgotten, and the Time Lord's plan might've succeeded, if I hadn't gone there for myself. All I did was go there out of curiosity, and unless there were many places called Marble Arch in the universe, I didn't know if I was on Earth or not."
"Anyway the Time Lords put me on trial, seemingly for no reason. I didn't understand why they bothered as their punishments towards me were light, and besides I'd done a great deal in the past since my exile to make up for my crimes, but as the trial went on and I was hounded the chief prosecutor, a Time Lord known as the Valeyard who had it out for me than was professional, so many things happened. I was accused of interference, but when that didn't hold out, they came out with something even better. Genocide. I destroyed plant based parasites who would've destroyed Earth, and the Time Lords considered it genocide.
The Doctor took a sip of his dream water in the shocked silence, and carried on, "There was only one punishment for that crime. Death. No appeal. But help came from an unexpected form. The Master revealed he had hacked the Matrix himself despite what the Time Lords responsible for it believed, and he revealed why Ravalox was so important. I couldn't believe what my own people had done, I even ranted about it; then again that incarnation would've shouted to have the last word when the end of the universe came to end.
"I spoke how I'd battled against power mad conspirators, and how I should've stayed on Gallifrey instead. I was so angry I compared the Time Lords to the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Sontarans. But the worst was to come; the Master said that the High Council had made a deal with the Valeyard, or as he'd always known him as the Doctor to adjust the evidence. In return the Valeyard would be free to take all of my remaining lives."
"Hold on, did you just call this Valeyard the Doctor?" Jack couldn't believe it; before he'd even met Angel and the Doctor, the legends of the Time Lords had made them sound like temporal police agents who would frown on any kind of temporal disruption. What he was hearing contradicted everything he'd thought he'd known, but then again the Master had tried to rewrite history, this was something worse.
His surprise was also shared by Sarah Jane, who had actually travelled with a Doctor in a time the Time Lords still ruled. She had witnessed first hand the kind of things they had made him do, and though he'd disliked his TARDIS being sent on wild goose chases they hadn't really done anything that altered history.
The Doctor didn't answer straight. "Jekyll and Hyde. Everyone has evil in them, and I know I'm not an exception. I've done a lot of terrible things in my time, I'm not cowardly enough not to admit that to anybody. The Valeyard, according to the Master, is an amalgamation of the darker sides of my nature, somewhere between my twelth and final incarnation, and as I'm in my final incarnation now, he hasn't appeared. Not physically. I've been frightened of becoming the Valeyard for a long time though I didn't know how he'd appear. I didn't ask him during the trial in case my question would merely bring the transformation closer. Over the years I formed theories about him. Now I just think he's a version of the Dream Lord; the dark side of my nature made real rather than a physical version of me who comes out of a regeneration. When I first met the Valeyard, the Master told me he'd been bargained with by the High Council; he would prosecute me and in return he would receive my remaining regenerations."
Angel silently placed her smaller hand ontop of his larger one, squeezing it. The Doctor smiled at her gratefully, but he shook his head, "I couldn't believe it at the time. It was one thing knowing my own people would order a planet to be dragged across space and nearly killing every living thing in the process and not give a damn, but to break every time law...It was too much, and they accused me of flouting them. I may have meddled, I may have done things the others frowned upon, but I never broke the laws of time unless I could help it, but I would never have dreamt of breaking them on that scale.
"When I was in the academy, the other students in my class saw me as odd, but though I didn't agree with some of our laws I did believe in preserving history. When the trial was over, I may have sounded forgiving towards the court inquisitor, but I wasn't. I acted mature because it was the easiest and quietest way of leaving Gallifrey and the Time Lords behind. The act seemed to work, and not even my companion, Mel, saw through it. After that I had minimal contact with the others. It would've taken more than a simple apology to make me forget what the Time Lords had done, which is what she was aiming for. I left, and I had a minimal amount of contact with the Time Lords, even more stringent than before."
"Is that why you didn't fight in the war, because of that trial and this Valeyard? I find it hard to believe," Martha said.
"There was more to it than that," the Doctor answered, "but yeah, the trial and the memory of how far a corrupt council was willing to go colored my perception, but even then I wasn't likely to ignore people asking for help. Its not my style, but it was when the Time Lords started destroying planets and species in the name of ending the war that I refused to help."
Donna shook her head in disgust, "Why would they even do that?"
Angel said it, summed it up in one word, "Rassilon."
"Rassilon?" Sarah Jane blinked as she recognised the name, "I remember visiting his tomb on Gallifrey once, but that usually means someone's dead."
"Simple, he was never really dead," the Doctor smiled at her, ignoring the surprise looks on the other's face, he understood their confusion about how a supposedly dead man had come back to life to lead a planet in war, "he'd achieved immortality, he was just sleeping in a kind of suspended animation. He was still alive, and the Time Lords made him the President of the council once again. Rassilon made decisions during the war, decisions no-one really wanted to make, it was just too bad some of those decisions had nothing to do with fighting the Daleks. It was no wonder Cass preferred dying on her ship to being rescued by me."
Angel rubbed her eyes, "I was conscripted by the council, forced into the same platoon as my sister. Some of Rassilon's decisions in the war made no sense, but no-one really spoke out against him because they usually disappeared and he was considered the closest thing to a god the Time Lords had. It wasn't until later that he reclaimed his reputation of being a tyrant." The Doctor answered the question that had popped into the minds of the others, "Though he was considered to be the first and greatest Time Lord ever, there were rumors that described him either as a benevolent ruler who governed with a kind but strict hand, but there were other rumors that called him a tyrant. In the war, we had our answer." "Alright, Doctor," Jack said, "what happened when you met the Sisterhood?"
"I refused to join in the war, but when they brought in Cass's body, I decided I couldn't stay on the sidelines anymore. I drank the elixir, regenerated, disowned my own name, and I started fighting in the war." The Doctor closed his eyes then opened them again in surprise when he remembered something. "Hold on, wait. I'd forgotten about that. When I met the Sisterhood, they told me my Mate needed me, but this was before I met Angel, and yet they described her so well. That was the turning point in my decision, but later on as I fought in the war, looking for her, it crossed my mind they'd lied to me."Angel blinked in surprise, she...had never known that, but she supposed it made sense that she didn't know every one of the Doctor's moments.
"When I regenerated into my War incarnation I did it because I knew my Mate needed protection, but as the years passed I met hundreds of Time Ladies who were fighting. Well, the war had corrupted them. By the end of the war," he shook his head with a sigh, "I'd decided the Sisterhood had lied to me, led me on. It wasn't until later I realised my Mate would be outside the war instead of inside. That version of me decided the Time Lords weren't worth it, that enough was enough. I was just angry I hadn't found the wonderful woman the Sisterhood had hinted at." Angel smiled at him. The rest of the family smiled at the romance on display, then another point was raised. "One thing I don't get is why the Silence kidnapped Ayla, going through all that trouble when they could simply have kidnapped another kid, or raised one themselves," Martha said as everyone thought hard about what the Doctor had just revealed, it was hard to believe that he had a secret incarnation no-one knew about, but now they understood, more or less, why he'd never told anyone.
"That's easy, Martha," Angel said quietly, "they wanted a baby who had the same qualities as a Time Lord."
"When the Time Lords first discovered time travel, we learnt that exposure to temporal energy affected unborn children, and when they were born they had higher sensitivity to time and its effects. It took centuries, but put it this way every single new generation who was exposed, and had children with others of their generation who'd gone through the same thing developed stronger abilities that eventually became stronger and stronger until they manifested with people like Angel, Ayla, the Master and myself," the Doctor said. "As our people's knowledge of the vortex grew, we started exposing temporal energy for new couples, that way their children would become Time Lords," Angel was almost reluctant to give this information, mostly because her own parents had done the same thing, occupational hazard when you had TARDISes and needed to test them, and her parents had decided to go through with their plans for children, and the conception of her own daughter, "when the Doctor and I...finished our Mating," she said awkwardly since everyone in the know knew precisely how the Mating process finished, "and we had Ayla, well I would've been surprised if she wasn't a Time Lady herself."
"Ayla was conceived inside the TARDIS when we were travelling in the vortex, and since Angel and me are both Time Lords, and have been exposed to the vortex over a long period of time, Ayla couldn't have been anything but a Time Lady. That's one of the reasons why the Silence were desperate, they wanted a child who had the same abilities as me and Angel."
Donna frowned, "What do you mean?" The Doctor gave a humorless smile, in fact it looked like a death's head grin. "I found out at Demon's run that I was seen as a warrior, a weapon. The Silence probably thought it was the sickest joke imaginable to snatch our daughter, and make me pay for everything I've done by making her into an unthinking assassin," he choked, and he squeezed Angel's hand, "but they had to take Ayla instead when they realised Amy wasn't pregnant, and yet they had to grow River when our daughter escaped. The Silence wanted an assassin I wouldn't be able to do anything against, but I hate her. "I know that makes me sound like a hypocrite after everything that's happened, but now I wish I'd never met her. All I know is that River is now in Stormcage. She was expendable according to the Silence." Amy frowned at that. She didn't like the reminder that her own daughter, well biological rather than actual daughter, was a psychopath who was willing to murder someone, only to be discarded when she wasn't useful to them anymore.
Angel noticed her frown. "I'm sorry Amy," she said. Amy looked up in surprise, "Sorry for what? Angel, River chose to be who she is. It just disgusts me that the Silence would even need to steal mine and Rory's DNA to create her. She had a choice to be who she wanted to be, when she heard my stories about the Doctor after I first met him, and she decided to kill you instead." Rory nodded, "You've got nothing to be sorry for. River may be genetically my daughter, but I just don't accept her as one."The Doctor saw the pain on Angel's face and he knew what she was thinking. Angel had never liked the thought of pain being inflicted on anybody, not even the Daleks, the things which had fought their own people during the war, and he knew that though she hated and feared the Cybermen after what they'd done to her beloved mother, Angel genuinely pitied the unfortunates who ended up becoming Cybermen. Angel, the Doctor now knew, blamed herself for what she saw was River's plight, though if River was asked by anybody how she felt about her upbringing then she would almost say it was the best childhood ever, though even he had his doubts about that, but she hadn't said or done anything to disprove his belief she was the enemy. She could have escaped the Silence if she'd wanted too, instead she seemed to have thrived on her training to kill him and Angel, and it was more than likely now he thought about it the Silence would have sent her to try to find Ayla and kill her, or they would have simply dropped her into Stormcage to suffer the consequences, taking her out when the situations demanded it. That would explain her presence on Alfava Metraxis.
All in all the little reunion had gone more or less the way Angel and the Doctor had expected, and they'd promised to bring Ayla to them soon, and give them the technology to find the Silents in case they ever came back. Ayla was sleeping blissfully between her parents as they spoke in the dark of their room. Their daughter had come in because of her fear of the dark, and her parents had jumped to the need to shelter her at once.
As they fell asleep, the Doctor held both his daughter and Mate to him, hoping and praying nothing ever came between them again.