Title: Circular Time
Author: TardisIsTheOnlyWaytoTravel
Summary:
Susan is a prisoner in the Time Agency. Time is in flux. And in the end, she finds herself at the beginning.
Setting: Before, during, and just after the Time War. References The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the last episode of Doctor Who in which Susan travels with the Doctor.
Author notes:
Yet another of those strange fics I write instead of sleeping. I'm rather proud of this one. Very timey-wimey, really.
CIRCULAR TIME
-
Susan Campbell stared at her feet, tapping her toes in a complicated rhythm as she sang.
"The Child of Time will rescue you
as the Storm blows across the stars
Alone of all the Otherworldly Ones
he picks out time in blue…"
David hadn't cared that she was an alien. He'd been surprised, of course, and it had made some things confusing, but they'd built something between them. She'd been a good wife, and a good mother, and David didn't care about her quirks. Someone else had, though, and one day people from the ramshackle re-built government had taken her away to 'ask some questions.' Her little Eloise had been six. Jack had been eight and Ian not quite twelve.
-
Susan wouldn't tell them anything about who she was. They'd been frightened when their instruments showed that there was so much more to her than any human. Next to her they were flat and shallow and five-pointed. So they built the Room, and shut her in it, and there she'd been ever since.
Susan glanced around at the reflections in reflections that surrounded her, thinking that it really had been very clever. They didn't really understand what they'd done, but they'd worked out enough to do it by studying the extra-planed puzzle-piece she represented. So here she was, fixed in place.
The years had passed by around her with excruciating slowness.
Sometimes they spoke to her, never visible within her prison, their voices echoing hollowly.
The told her once that her children understood what a threat she was, and that they'd tested as human, five dimensions and all the right pieces, and they simply viewed her as the alien abomination which had given birth to them, and that was all.
Susan had stared at the ceiling and hummed. She didn't answer, and they didn't know that she heard Eloise calling for her in the night, her mind so much brighter and stronger than a human child's.
They didn't know that Susan had told her to hide, and when she was old enough, to run.
-
After twenty years or so two new voices appeared among those that sometimes spoke to her. They had changed and were older, but Susan still recognised the voices of her sons.
They at least told her where she was, in stern distant tones that spoke of years of lies and disapproval.
It was called the Time Agency, and it had been set up not long after the end of the Dalek occupation, not long after she'd married David. It was through studying her than they'd realized how to control their past and future timelines. She was unique.
Susan didn't tell them that she wasn't that unique, but she did wonder why the Time Lords hadn't noticed a group of humans manipulating Time to their whims. Had it escaped their attention, or did allowing the agency to keep a half-trained Gallifreyan girl give the Time Lords some advantage she couldn't conceive of?
-
Susan reached full adulthood a couple of decades after that. If she'd stayed on Gallifrey she'd have been graduating by now, instead of being held captive by a bunch of precocious, intolerant humans, and with three children out there somewhere.
The Time Agency's timeline had mutated now. It's first office was a century ago, founded by one Eloise Foreman. No one seemed to have noticed. But then, they might not even know the name Susan had used before she was married. Susan had been arrested a century into the Time Agency's current history, anyway, so even if someone gave it some thought she wouldn't seem to have anything to so with it.
Susan wasn't entirely sure what her family's history was anymore.
The following centuries were an exercise in waiting. Susan learned patience, vast quantities of it, and wrapped it around herself as armour. She was an eleven-pointed star in a castle of glass, and every pane reflected back t her a slightly different Susan until she almost wasn't sure which was her anymore.
The place that held the Room became only one outpost among many scattering across Time, and no one but Susan remembered any differently. Time was being torn to pieces and reborn around her all the time, and she could hear the death-cries of her people, never-ending.
Susan wondered if the Time Agency had been a kind of fail-safe, as the Time Lords had felt the vague and twisting shape of Time to come.
-
And then, suddenly, there was one last cry, and then the wave of sweeping change. The voices of her people winked out around her, silenced more thoroughly than any human could ever dream.
The trap of mirrors was gone and in its place a simple cell with one single forlorn pane of glass.
The cell door opened as Susan watched it, but she made no move towards it.
A woman stood in the doorway, at first glance young, with a slim strong figure and long fair hair. At second glance her big dark eyes were deep and old, and matched Susan's in a way that couldn't be defined.
"I'm so sorry," the Time Agency's director said sadly. "It took me so long to get you free. Time kept changing, all the time."
"It does that," Susan told her daughter. She looked at Eloise.
"The differences must have been small."
'They were," Eloise confirmed. "They never noticed me, although Ian died at thirty-five. They found he had a second tiny, malformed heart that had never worked properly, and had messed up his system.."
"And you?" Susan asked.
"Only the one. Brain of a prodigy, though. Jack was human through and through."
There was silence for a while. Then Susan got to her feet.
"We need you rather badly," said the grown woman who had been her little girl once. "Time seems to have gone all wrong, horribly, and most people haven't even noticed it. I suspect I've only caught the edges."
"You have," Susan agreed. She didn't mention the war, or her people. The two stared at each other.
"When did the Time Agency first form?" Susan asked finally.
"The year 209AD?" Eloise answered soberly. "According to the records, it was started by two brilliant temporal physicists who travelled back in time, Ellie and Susan Campbell. I'm not sure how the rest works."
Susan sighed.
"Neither am I. But I suppose that's part of the deal, isn't it?"
-
And she leaves the cell with Eloise, and doesn't tell her how awfully like the Seal of Rassilon is the insignia on her Time Agency uniform.
Because Susan might never have graduated, or even made it halfway through the academy, but she can still see the shape of Time as well as anyone does and she rather suspected she'd end up here.
-
FIN