A/N: Another Doctor Who fic! It's been a fairly long time since I've written one, so it might be a bit rough. Also, my first actual attempt at a one-shot.
Please review!
Characters : Twelfth Doctor, OC (Angelica)
The first time the Doctor met Angelica was at the Nobel ceremony where he found himself sitting next to her. She was sixteen then. Her father was getting a Nobel prize for his work in theoretical physics and she was waiting the whole time for his name to be called. She kept whispering, hoping nobody would hear her. Unfortunately, a time lord's senses are a million times keener than a human's so he was able to hear every single word.
She seemed crazy enough for the time lord to introduce himself.
"Hello," he introduced himself, holding his hand out.
"Hi," she replied, not exceedingly enthusiastic about talking to a strange old man with white hair.
A long silence soon followed. The Doctor fumbled with his hands hoping she would continue the conversation.
God, socializing was so much harder without Clara around.
"What's your name?" he finally asked.
"What's yours?" she asked.
"The Doctor."
"Everyone here is a doctor."
"Are you a doctor?"
"No, my father is one. My question is, what's your name?"
"I just told you, I'm the Doctor."
"...are you deaf because you're old?"
"Excuse me?"
"I wanted to polite, so I didn't ask you, but it seems like you really are deaf. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?" a bit loudly. A person nearby shushed her.
"Okay," the Doctor adjusted his sitting posture. "Here's the thing. The last time someone said my name, the universe blew up and I had to reboot the universe."
The girl stared at him as though he was completely mad. "Are you-"
"I'm a madman, yes..." And with a dramatic pause, "...with a box."
The girl raised an eyebrow and slowly looked back at the stage and waited for them to announce her father's name.
The Doctor was still intrigued by this girl somehow. Like he had some reason to be intrigued. The last time he was this intrigued...no he was never this intrigued. Clara was one of a kind. He had an absolute necessity to have his life intertwined with her. Physics could be blamed for all of his adventures with her.
It's been almost eighteen months since the simulated Clara passed away. The Doctor got over it surprisingly quickly.
"Um," he started again. "What did your father do?"
The girl looked at him dead in the eye and replied, "Quantitative Causality Violation Analysis in Closed Loop Non Linear Quantum Mechanics."
The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "What year is this again?"
"2065."
The Doctor pulled a fobwatch from his inner pocket and looked at it. "Goddamn it, I overshot again."
He looked back at her, and asked, "And what does that mean?"
"My father said it was about time travel."
"Hmph," the Doctor smiled. He put the fobwatch back into his pocket. "Well that is the essence of it."
The girl smiled and buried herself inside the chair. She then whispered under her breath, "Of course it's the essence. You probably think I'm just a kid who's under the shadow of a Nobel winning physicist don't you? You pretentious idiot. I understood every single word of his paper, and not even my father knows about it. And unless they find a tachyon that can break through all the Feynman history of paths, there's no way they can form a stable closed quantum loop."
The Doctor looked at her in absolute shock. "What?" she looked at him innocently.
"...you just..."
"What?"
The Doctor looked at her in absolute bewilderment. He started noting a lot more details about her now.
He looked around for a second, trying to shake himself out of the haze that this girl seemed to have put him into. He pulled out his shades and put it on. He gave the girl a small bit of paper and made it to the exit. The girl looked at the piece of paper curiously. It looked like it was written by pencil, but the way it reflected was absolutely abnormal. It read (59.325896, 18.069931) She looked at the oscillating exit door. She smiled a small insignificant smile.
The Doctor immediately dashed to the basement of the complex. He had the TARDIS parked inside the janitor's closet. The sonic-ed the door open and walked inside the TARDIS.
New decors. No companion means there's a different mood that needs to be established in the main room. Somehow, he's wondered how come he's never thought how aesthetic looking black was.
The walls were all black, with it glowing a really dark shade of blue from time to time, highlighting the almost microscopic engravings of the names of all of his companions - from his first incarnation to his current one - in circular Gallifreyan. The central pedestal on which the tubular structure is present had an eerie cyan glow with a spiderweb of black patterns all over the floor. The console remained more or less the same, except the orange was replaced with - you guessed it, blue. The tubular structure was a lot darker now, almost hazy black, with the rods inside of it emanating a bright blue glow. Such a color scheme lit the entire TARDIS blue, as though you were in a nuclear power station. And to the Doctor, the TARDIS was as dangerous as a nuclear power station.
He walked over to the monitor and pulled the keyboard that had Gallifreyan symbols printed on it instead of English letters. He tapped a couple of letters and the monitor sprung into action.
The paper he gave Angelica wasn't just a note. It was a long wave transmitter. The wave was so long it was practically impossible for any human (or alien) receiver to receive the signal emitted by the sheet of paper. And it wasn't a normal transmitter too.
The Doctor suspected that she was some kind of an alien. That was the only explanation. Either that, or it was one of the children whose systems weren't completely free off the Krillitane Oil. There was something messed up about her.
"Finally," the Doctor exclaimed. "Some excitement."
The monitor was then filled with symbols and displays that were filled with infinite fractals and standing waves that seemed like they were dancing to the samba. Then a loading bar popped under these seemingly scientific symbols, and proclaimed zero percent.
The Doctor pulled the chair with his leg and sat on it, while patiently observing the display. After a couple of minutes, it said one percent. He growled and stood up and pulled a level and pressed a couple of buttons. He then rang a bell thrice and the lights in the room immediately dimmed. He then descended to the lower level and pulled the hatch and looked inside. He dived inside it, his legs still dangling out. "Almost there!" he yelled. He then pulled out a small 20-pointed star shaped object and blew the dust off it. He sonic-ed it and the star started glowing again. He then reached inside the hatch again and groaned. He then heard a click and the lights in the TARDIS became bright again.
The monitor immediately rushed from two percent to one hundred percent in about the time it took the Doctor to get back upstairs.
"Phew!" he exclaimed. "Some day, I really do need to do a total maintenance check. What do you say you sexy beast?"
The TARDIS hummed in response.
"Yes very soon. But let's see what you found out about this girl."
Absolutely nothing. No alien oil. No alien DNA. Average human DNA. But extraordinary brain power. The Doctor smiled to himself. "I'm sorry to tell you Clara, but it looks like someone else is the impossible girl now."
He looked behind smiling and immediately, the smile dropped. "Oh," he sighed. "Old habits die hard, I guess."
He pulled out his fobwatch and checked the time. It should be done by now. And hopefully if she noticed the specialty of Gallifreyan graphite, then she'd want to leave this building the moment the award function was over. He released the lever and clicked a couple of buttons and immediately the TARDIS wheezed. He then pulled the lever again and ran out of the TARDIS. Ah, yes, the Nobel library.
And surprisingly enough, he found the girl across the road.
The girl wasn't searching for him. The moment she noticed the ghastly sound and the materialization of a blue box. She looked dead set on the center of the door. As soon as the Doctor emerged from the door, he could notice a tiny smile on her face. He crossed the road (with much difficulty) and reached the other side. He adjusted his hoodie and smirked at her.
"So," he said. "What do you think?"
"Questions, answers."
The Doctor's smile faded. "Sure," he pulled his hoodie off his head. "Some place to sit and talk?"
The girl turned around and looked at the library. "No," the Doctor said.
"Surely a man who is capable of fitting into a tiny blue box that can materialize and dematerialize in space is also capable of breaking into a library."
The Doctor smiled looking at the library. "Why do we have to break in?"
They climbed the stairs and both were stopped by the guard. "ID please."
The Doctor pulled out his psychic paper and showed it to him. "Mhm," the guard said looking at the paper, and then looked at the girl. "Who's she?"
"I'm a friend," she replied.
The guard raised an eyebrow and looked at her for a while. The girl stood, probably a bit shocked. The Doctor and she exchanged glances.
"You're the daughter of Doctor Jefferson Nolan, aren't you?"
The girl said, "Yeah. I just wanted to see the library. My father is a bit busy at the moment, so I got him to take me around."
"Yeah, sure no problem. It's not everyday you get to see the UNIT badge."
The Doctor frowned when he heard that. "Good to see you Doctor." the guard smiled and pressed a buzzer. The gate opened and the two of them made it through.
They found a small place isolated in the mountains of shelves that contained every single doctorate that got their authors a Nobel. They both sat on the carpeted floor.
"Questions, answers," the girl said.
"So you already know for sure that my name is the Doctor, in a way I never imagined you would find out, but okay. What's your name?"
"When I said questions, answers, I meant I'm the one asking the questions."
"Oof," he mockingly stabbed his chest.
"It's Angelica."
"Angelica."
"Anyway. Clearly, there's something about you. The paper you gave the guard was clearly empty. And he called you an agent of UNIT? I've never heard of it before. So that's the first question, I guess."
"What is?" the Doctor asked, confused.
"What's UNIT?"
"Ah," the Doctor said. "UNIT is an acronym for an organization formed by the United Nations. It stands for UNified Intelligence Taskforce. It's the wing of the UNO that protects the Earth from alien threats."
"Okay. Second question. If you could fit inside a blue box like that, and the suit you're clearly hiding under your sweatshirt isn't crumpled. So you had ample room to move inside the box. So I guess your box is bigger on the inside."
"Transcendental dimensional engineering, yes."
"And no human has ever done such a thing till now, and we don't have enough papers that can bring multi-dimensional physics to engineering. So, you're a human time traveller from the future - which would explain when you said back in the room 'I must have overshot' ; or you're an alien which would explain your access to advanced technology and your extraordinary hearing abilities."
"Close enough. I'm an alien time traveller."
"Brilliant," she said without batting an eye.
"Excuse me?"
"We do have aliens. Humanoid aliens, no less."
"Next question."
She pulled the piece of paper from the pocket on her sweater. "What did you write this with?"
The Doctor plucked the paper from her hands and said, "Gallifreyan graphite. It reverse polarizes the light that falls on it, so it..." and he looked around almost searching for a simple explanation. "...reflects in a weird way."
"That's what you are? Gallifreyan?"
"I'm from Gallifrey, yes. I'm a time lord."
"Okay, next question. Is your time travelling abilities biological or is the box a time machine."
The Doctor smiled. "Would you like to take a look at it?"
The TARDIS hummed as soon as she placed one foot inside. She looked around in fascination. The TARDIS hummed a bit angrily. "Now, now," the Doctor laughed. "She's a guest. We'd want to be nice to her now, don't we?"
"It's...disappointing."
"What?" the Doctor turned around, aghast. "What?"
"I don't know. If I was given the powers of transcendental dimensional engineering, I'd make an infinitely huge room. Not just make a medium sized room stuck inside a small box."
"Truth is, it is infinitely sized. That door there?" he pointed to the sub level door. "Going through there will allow you to explore the remainder of the TARDIS."
"TARDIS?"
"Time And Relative Dimensions In Space."
"So this is the time travelling machine, and relative dimensions because you travel through time like you travel through space."
"Well that is the essence." he said. He then whispered to himself, "A very accurate essence."
"So," she threw herself on the couch that was attached to the railing. "Are you going to show me how it works?"
The Doctor leaned on the console and smiled smugly. "Wouldn't you love to."
Angelica smiled back. The Doctor pulled down a lever and the lights in the TARDIS started dancing. He then pulled a stop and immediately the TARDIS shuddered. "Hold on to the railing." he said and started prancing around the console. "So all of time and space. Where would you like to go?"
"Anywhere?"
"Any-when too."
"Okay," she said and looked away quietly. "How about the day of my birth?"
The Doctor's face grew serious. "Why?"
"Whoa, hold on," she chuckled. "You don't have to do it if it breaks some kind of Gallifreyan code of conduct. I'm not going to go back in time to kill myself and see what will happen."
"You won't mind if I don't trust you on that?"
"Oh, well."
The Doctor disappeared behind the large tubular structure and said, "What's your date of birth?"
She folded her legs onto the couch and said, "20th of August, 2048."
The Doctor pulled the monitor towards him and pulled the Gallifreyan keyboard towards him too. He started typing into it. The TARDIS started quaking now. The lights danced to the bohemian rhapsody. And then the TARDIS wheezed into life, and the TARDIS shuddered one more time.
About a second later, the shaking stopped. Angelica held on to the railing like it was her dear life. The Doctor appeared from behind the tubular stem and asked, "You're seventeen?"
"It took you a whole minute to calculate that?" she said, standing up.
The Doctor shrugged. "Wasn't on my mind till now."
"Oh, well." she replied. "Are we here?"
"Yes." he said and directed her to the door. She ran towards the door excitedly and touched the door gingerly. She looked back at him and asked, "I can go out and interact with the objects out there physically, right?"
"Of course," he said, walking towards the door himself.
"No butterfly effect thingamajigs?"
"Boy, you sure do have a lot of questions, don't you?"
"I just don't want to be the reason to rip a hole in space time."
"Cautious?"
"That's the word."
"It's quite alright, really. Time heals itself. That's the nature of time. You can go out. We're right below the waiting room."
The girl raised and eyebrow and she walked into the waiting room.
And he was right. She was in the waiting room. But she decided to be sure. She checked the holographic calendar nearby. 2048. He was right after all. She walked north and she was able to see the glass door with a label that said Natal Care Waiting Room. And there she saw her father, much younger, hunched over a laptop sitting in the chair, waiting to hear an announcement. The digital clock nearby struck one am. She knew that she was born an hour later.
She found the Doctor standing next to her. "So, how much can I interact with the objects here?" she asked. "You want to talk to your father." he replied.
"If it's illegal or if it's going to rip the universe in half, then it's alright. I think I can just watch."
"It's okay, you can talk to him."
She hesitated twice before walking towards the glass door. "The day I was born was a day of mourning for him. His PhD project was outright rejected. He tried to find everything wrong with his paper and he was correcting it the whole time he was here. Once he lost the mood for that, apparently he started working out some random physics problems just to pass the time. It calms him. I've seen it calm him. I just want to let him know that his failure of a PhD back then was what gave the foundation for his next paper which got him the Nobel."
The Doctor looked at her sympathetically. "You can talk to him about anything. Just don't tell him about the Nobel prize."
"If he could function most of the nights at home less depressed, I'd do anything about it, you know."
"It's a fixed point in time. Whatever happens, he will get the Nobel prize."
Angelica looked at the Doctor to which he responded with a happy nod. "So nothing will happen if I made him more optimistic, right?" she asked.
"If you make him more optimistic, there'll be one huge drawback."
"And that is...?"
"His relationship with you."
Angelica looked at the Doctor with a plain face. She looked back at her father. "Well what the ancients say is true then. You can't have the cake and eat it too."
"They said it for a reason," he smiled. "I was probably it." Angelica smiled at the remark.
"Go ahead, talk to him," the Doctor nudged him. "Just not anything about the Nobel. Maybe about his current paper. Not the one that won the Nobel."
Angelica nodded, and walked close to the door. "Oh, and one more thing," the Doctor added. "Don't even touch the baby, when it arrives." Angelica smiled and walked in.
Angelica walked back into the TARDIS and laughed with tears in her eyes. The Doctor followed her and hugged her by the shoulder. "It's okay," he said.
"I looked so puny!"
"Nothing has changed much then," he jested and walked back to the TARDIS. "Back to Stockholm?"
Angelica positioned herself on the console, a bit hazy. "Sure, why not?"
As the TARDIS swam through the time vortex, Angelica asked, "So how does it work?"
"It's not a machine, so it doesn't work."
"You know I didn't mean that."
The Doctor knew that. He smiled. "It's kind of hard to explain."
"Really?" she raised an eyebrow. "You're serious?"
"No, it's like, I know how it works, but I don't know how to put it into words."
"Even in the most scientific sense?"
"Especially the most scientific sense. It's like asking a human how he gets angry."
"Well that's easy. There's a series of chemicals that is released by the brain in recognition of a specific pattern of neuron triggers."
"Yes, but_" the Doctor gave up. She was right. "Okay, it's something like trying to explain how language works. My point is," he said, before allowing her to answer his example, "It's something that happens so naturally that you don't really question how it works. I mean, you know it works, you know how to work it, you know how to fix it if there's a problem, but you don't exactly know how it works."
"Okay, if it's an organism," she replied almost instantaneously. "then it needs to feed off something. What's the power source?"
"A black hole in stasis near Gallifrey. It's called the eye of harmony."
"Stasis? Like frozen in time?"
"Exactly. The forefathers of time lords found an exploding black hole and froze that particular moment in time. Doing so, we basically get infinite energy."
"Wait, but how do you gain access to that energy?"
"Once it's frozen, it can be manipulated through dimensions, and as you can see," he gestured to the interior of the TARDIS, "we are masters at manipulating dimensions."
"Okay, so let me get this straight. The outside is in our current dimension, the one where we exist. But somehow, once we enter it, we're in another dimension where the interior lies, and the interior is further connected to the black hole?"
"A part of it, yes."
"A part of what?"
"The black hole, it's connected to a part of the black hole."
"Oh, okay, so every single time lord and his TARDIS is linked to a portion of the black hole."
"...yes."
"So you literally have infinite energy."
"Sort of. But from time to time I need to recharge the TARDIS by placing it above a rift of some sort."
"Oooh, that sounds fascinating. Take me to one of them."
The TARDIS stopped humming. "We just reached Stockholm." he looked at her, exasperated.
"We're travelling in time like walking by the road. Surely we can get back here once my father gets out, right?"
The Doctor smiled uncomfortably. "There's something I should tell you about this TARDIS."
"And that is...?"
"This is slightly... defective. She doesn't always listen to me."
"A problem child, huh."
"You could say so."
"Never mind." she said, walking towards the door. "But I could take you to the rift, if you want. It's in Cardiff."
"Cardiff? What?!"
"Long story. Want to go?"
She shrugged. "Sure."
The Doctor and Angelica sat in front of the memorial next to which the TARDIS was parked. Both of them had a cup of coffee in their hands. Neither of them had taken a sip from it yet.
"...weird." Angelica responded to the whole story. "Nuclear power station here, huh. Kinda makes sense."
"To split open the universe again?"
"For a hostile suicidal alien, yeah."
The Doctor smiled and put the cup to his lips. She followed suit.
"When are we?" Angelica asked.
He looked around for a bit. The sun was at its zenith, so clearly they didn't travel in just space, they might have also traveled in time. Stockholm and Cardiff might have some time zone difference but not this apparent.
He pulled his fobwatch from the suit and checked it.
"Huh."
She raised an eyebrow. "What does Huh mean?"
"We've traveled back in time. To about a couple of days before..." The Doctor's eyes widened in shock.
He grabbed Angelica's hand, and ran to the TARDIS. He pulled the monitor and started typing hastily into the computer. The computer spat out an answer for his query. "NO!" he wailed and pushed the monitor away. He ran back outside and checked Cardiff again. Nothing happened. He ran back inside and released the handbrake. He then set the TARDIS into motion - it didn't matter where or when they were going. They simply had to go.
"Doctor, what's going on?"
The TARDIS quaked and shot itself into space.
"Doctor?!"
"Angelica, there's something you need to understand about time."
"It's non linear, collapsible and paradoxes can happen. But it would be healed as time flows by."
"Close enough," The Doctor stopped the TARDIS and opened the door. They were somewhere near the Oort cloud. "Far enough," he whispered to himself.
"Time heals itself, but if the wound is too large for it to naturally subside, you have paradoxic creatures that absorb the disturbances in time to avoid the paradox." The Doctor yelled.
"Okay, what's the issue now, why are we outside the Solar System?" Angelica retorted.
"Remember," he shuddered. "Remember how I told you that the TARDIS is a wee bit unstable?"
"...what happened?" Angelica asked, genuinely scared.
"We landed in the exact time and date when I previously landed to prevent the Slitheen minister to blow this planet to kingdom come."
"Wait, but that's a fixed point in time."
"Yes, it's a fixed point in time, and that means that if there are two of me at the same point of time near the same position, I risk blowing up the entire planet for violating the-"
"Pauli Exclusion Principle?"
"Not quite, but yes. If I don't make the planet blow up, then there would be these creatures - time reapers - that would destroy the cause of the paradox. It would kill the TARDIS. Remember how I told you about Rose?"
She nodded.
"We went back in time to see her father before he died. She saved him. She caused a paradox. The entire town was affected by time reapers. Loads of crazy stuff happened. I'm not sure if I am prepared for another one."
"Why not?"
"Because in order to prevent the Universe from getting destroyed I had to reboot the entire universe from a crack in space and time."
Angelica stood there for a while and blinked at him.
"How old are you, exactly?" she finally asked.
A couple of months later, life for Angelica went back to normal. She continued going back to school, and the science teachers insisted on asking her father whether or not he could give a speech at their school. She didn't find it annoying or upsetting. She just found it boring.
One evening, her father said, "Angelica, I'm off to the University. Do you want me to get something for you on the way back?"
"Nah," she replied, doing her homework on the floor. "Something to eat maybe?"
"I'll get a cake."
"Sure," she resumed doing homework.
Once she heard the door slam shut she ran towards her father's study. She opened the entire book that her father wrote on closed quantum loops and started reading it all over again. She knew her father would be back in less than an hour, and that she couldn't find what she wanted to search for in that period of time. She scanned the pages of the book using her phone and and placed the book back where she found it. She dashed back to her own room and locked the door.
She then printed each and every page out from the phone and bound it temporarily with yarn. She checked her watch. Half an hour more.
As her eyes flew across the words and equations, she analysed each sentence and hypothesis with extreme care and skepticism. And then she found it.
The leap.
The illogical leap that her father had to take in order to make an assumption about time. A assumption that makes sense, but the leap that he took isn't something very scientific.
Submerged in hundreds of thousands of words worth of text and equations, people wouldn't often notice it.
But now that she knows that the supernatural exist - that there are beings that are far more superior than her - she knew one thing for sure.
Her father had also met someone who could travel in time.
She immediately wished she would meet the Doctor again, however unlikely it was. Because as it so turns out, if her father did meet someone who is not of this Earth, the Doctor would be a great starting ground.
Her eyes sparkled when she heard the wheezing of the TARDIS outside.
The Doctor ran in front of the door and knocked hastily.
"I thought you didn't want to see me anymore." Angelica quipped.
"There's a serious problem," the Doctor gasped for breath. Angelica raised an eyebrow. "And you need me because...?"
The Doctor grabbed her hand and brought his owl eyes inches away from hers and whispered, "Because you are the problem!"
"Hu-" she said before the doors of the TARDIS shut and wheezed away.
"Questions, answers," the Doctor said. Angelica nodded nervously.
"What's your father's name?"
"Doctor Jefferson Nolan"
"Full name!"
"Doctor Jefferson Mildew Nolan Jr. Why are you angry?"
"QUESTIONS, Answers!."
"Okaaay,"
"What about your grandfather, or his father?"
"Granddad was the senior, and his father was Geoffrey Parkson Nolan,"
The Doctor jostled her, grabbing her shoulder and shaking her, as though that would get him some answers, "Is there anyone in your family tree who has the name Gregory Mallison Nolan?"
"That's my unborn nephew."
"...huh?"
"My paternal aunt's grandson. Who isn't born yet. Well he will be. In two weeks, I guess."
The Doctor scrambled across the console, and checked his calender. She was right. The dimension shattered on the 3rd of November, 2065.
"Angelica," the Doctor said, breathing deeply, "Your nephew will be the first human time traveller."
"Wait, what?" Angelica startled. "You've taken companions before, haven't you? Human companions. You said your first companion was in the year 1963, which is like more than a century ago."
"Time, isn't necessarily linear, remember?"
"Yeah, but that doesn't apply unless-"
"Believe Angelica, right now, every argument you put forward, everything you say after the unless clause holds true."
"What are you talking about?"
"The global frame of the time-brane is more screwed up than I thought it was. It isn't just a sphere with wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, it's a sphere with a single origin point. It's like a..."
"...a water balloon?"
"More or less. The worst part is, I thought that point existed in a different dimension hidden away from all of us. Even those with time machines that can penetrate such dimensional barriers. This TARDIS has seen the void between the two dimensions, but somehow, I thought that this point of origin was just in that void or was in the third dimension."
"But if it was in a hypothetical third dimension, doesn't that mean the time brane would be a...donut?"
"Torus, that's what I thought too. Until I got into a small problem with the bank of Yzitrane - long story - and realized that it wasn't in another dimension. It was here for all the time lords and everyone who could manipulate time to see."
"Are we going there now?"
"Unfortunately not. The TARDIS is old and would burn under the tremendous energy that the origin point holds. But that's not the important part. The important part is your father's work."
"Speaking of my father's work, I went through it again today. At one point he made a rather unscientific leap of faith to get to a point. It's somewhat hidden, but its obvious once you find out."
The Doctor sighed and leaned on the console as the humming of the TARDIS stopped. "You've gotten close to the truth then."
"Eh?"
"Your father created the framework on which your yet to be born nephew went back in time and created the universe from."