HELLO! Just an authors note to say that I'm happy you're reading and would love your reviews since this is the first fic I've uploaded on here.
ALSO; I don't own Doctor Who and I never will *tear*.
This was all my fault. I didn't even ask for it, but it was all my fault. I was born and raised in the royal palace on the planet Veristala. It was such a beautiful planet. I remember it so well... and I remember that day like it was just yesterday.
"Tea!?" I heard my father call as the ground shook.
"I'm here, I'm here!" I ran down the hallway, ducking as chandeliers became unhooked from the ceiling as I ran. I could hear him heading towards me, despite the danger. He really should be running out of here, though to what avail I don't know.
Everyone was evacuating. The civil war... the civil war was my fault. If I had not been proclaimed by my mother as the next in line for the throne, this wouldn't have happened.
Our society is matriarchal. Most of the planets in our system are, and as a high nobel, I hadn't been permitted to do any distant space travel. So my mother, as the Empress, ruled the entire planet. Oh Veristala. Such amazing purple skies, the silver oceans, turquoise grass blowing in the wind... oh and the way the suns would light up the sky on those brilliant summer days. That's how a planet properly looks like, at least to me. That's the best most normal way for a planet to be.
Ah, but my mother. As Empress, she was able to have many husbands. I have all sorts of half siblings. Had. I had all sorts of half siblings. But my father was the one that she was in love with. The problem with that was that he wasn't Veristalian. He was part human, part... something else. He had escaped wherever he was from when he arrived on Veristala. He never spoke a word to me about his past. It wasn't proper for me to ask. He tried to tell me, though, at the end.
He rushed to me, pulling me out of the way just in time as another chandelier fell down, shattering into millions of pieces.
"Are you alright?!" The concern in his thoughts was heartbreaking.
Oh yes, that's another thing that is worth mentioning. We are a telepathic people, the Veristalians... at this point in time I hadn't the slightest clue what my voice sounded like, I'd never had to use it. I suppose that narrows it down, the non-human part of my father. I suppose it's something worth bringing up. He was always able to use telepathy, just as well as any Veristalian. I miss his thoughts, and the thoughts of my mother.
"I'm fine, I'm not injured. We need to get out, father!"
We need to get out, but we have nowhere to go. Everyone was evacuating yes, but we were not permitted. Only the pure Veristalians were allowed to leave to safety. I thought that if we escaped somehow, maybe we would find a way off of the planet... before the ignited core blew up and destroyed everything and everyone. That was supposed to happen days from now... so I thought that this must be some build up. Oh but they were just so wrong.
The renegade militia responsible for this horror... the end of everything I knew and loved... they had given false information in their testimonials. They didn't assume that they would be immediately and properly executed. They had wanted an element of surprise. Well... surprise! We didn't know it, but we only had hours. None of the ships would be ready in time.
My father and I ran. I had never done so much physical activity before. It wasn't expected of me... not as an Empress to be.
Purity was something oddly important to the majority of the Veristalian citizens. I was to rule them, I was not pure. Fury turned into dissent, dissent to riots, riots that eventually led to a civil war. All my fault. My fault.
We reached what I thought to be a random alley and turned. At the end of it was a small grey teleport pod, as if it was built to just teleport small children. Well... maybe it was. I never needed to teleport to nursery school or anything as a young child. All of my time was spent in the palace back then.
"What are we doing?" Question laced my thoughts, and was amplified to what I imagine must have been the equivalent of shouting.
"Tea... Teagan, I'm going to need you to get into the teleport when I tell you to."
I didn't understand. How would I fit? How would he fit? What good would a teleport even do us? What my father would have received in his head was a giant panicky question mark of a thought.
"Calm down, sweetheart, if that's possible. I need to explain some things to you... this is going to be really hard..." I could feel it in his thoughts and see it on his face, the sorrow. "When I've finished explaining things... or if anything... if anything happens, I need you to get into the teleport and it will start automatically when the door shuts. Oh Teagan!" He hugged me close, tears starting to leak out of his eyes. I was trembling. I was trembling, crying, and thinking of how everything must really be over.
"Father... what-" he didn't let me finish the thought, as he poured his own into me.
"Teagan I love you so very much. Your mother did too, and I want you to know that and hold that with you for the rest of your life. Y-your mother is... is dead. She was killed by a faction of the enemy militia as she tried to assure the evacuation of all the continents. The only thing I can do now is make sure that you're safe. Teagan you are now the Empress of Veristala and you will live on. I've set the coordinates to Earth, where the humans are from. It's so far away from here, and I don't know in what time you'll land. I never really learned how to fly one of these things. I... I know I never really told you much about me, where I'm from. It's not Earth. My planet... you can't go there, no one can. For all intents and purposes... it... it no longer exists. I was able to escape destruction when my people were destroyed, but I can't escape this. I will know, though, that everything was worth it if you can live on. You are the best thing that I could have ever done with my life. I want you to know how important you are. There are some things you need to know. Earthlings are not telepathic, you're going to have to speak, use your mouth to make words that you can hear. I don't know where or when you're going to land, and so I'm not sure what you'll need to know. You know you don't look like a Veristalian, right?"
I did. I knew that very well. My people were tall, usually adult females were 7 feet tall. They had magenta skin, and the woman always had such beautiful floor-length hair and eyelashes that were at least two inches long. Oh how I wish I looked like a proper Veristalian. Instead I had yellow-y pink-y skin and was short, only 5'6''. My hair only went down to the middle of my back, and instead of being white or blue or even gold, it was this pinky red type colour. Redder and more orange than proper skin colour but still rather close. My eyelashes only went up to my eyebrows. It was horrible. My father received all of these thoughts in a whirlwind.
"Y-yes, well you look more similar to... to my people, and so also to humans. I'm very sorry about that, I... I know how that must have been for you. Tea, my people, they were not far from here. These same suns lit my world, my people they-"
He never finished the thought. A sonic propeller spear hit him, straight through his chest.
"T... Teagan..." he spoke these words. My eyes widened both in shock and horror at his wounded figure collapsing toward me, and in surprise. I had never seen someone speak with their mouth before. So this is how humans communicate. I didn't know how to begin.
I ran to my father, tears streaming down my face. I held him close, kneeling on the ground with his head in my lap. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
"G-go..." he managed, before his skin started glowing yellow.
I leapt up in surprise, not knowing what to make out of it as his body just seemed to erupt. Maybe this was how his species died. I didn't have time to ponder, I just ran to the teleport... it was a good thing I was similar in height to child. My father was only 6'3'', so I guess he might have been able to squish in here if he had bent down.
I got in, and my jaw dropped. I made the first vocal noise that I ever made in my life - I yelped. Then the door shut, the machine lurched, and I fell down. After that I must have lost consciousness. When I awoke I was on a small boat in the middle of what looked like an ocean, only it was dark blue and covered by a blue sky. Only one sun was up. It was terribly hot. I surveyed the boat. It had a latch. I opened it and saw that the ship's insides were somehow inside the boat. I shut it quickly. In front of me by some steering mechanism was a computer monitoring my planet. I watched for hours as my home was destroyed. It began trying to tally casualties. The number was going up and up and up. I switched it to survivors.
I never want to see that number again. 1.
For days, I sat in silence, in the middle of the strange blue waters. It was not a normal silence. There was none of the comforting buzz of the noise from those connected closely to my mind, or even those who were just nearby, as there would have been if my people had survived. It was the most horrible thing. My mind felt empty. And then I opened my mouth. I screamed and screamed and in my mind I screamed out to the universe.
"HELP ME!" I shouted with both my voice, my voice!, and my mind. I'm not even sure how I did it. I don't think I could do it a second time. Voices, eesh. I shouted even as I was sure that no one could hear me, and that no help would come, and that no one would hear me.
Just like my people had been wrong about oh so many things, I was wrong about that. For once, though, being wrong was a good thing.
