Chapter One
Haven
Had anyone been watching, the odd people frolicking on the beach would have raised eyebrows. But to one person in particular, the scene was perfection.
Haven Amelia Pond had long light brown hair and her grandmother's chocolate coloured eyes. She had enjoyed her family's annual trip to Darlig Ulv-Stranden – it was a welcome change after having spent the previous week fighting off an invasion of Cybermen on Adipose III.
She stood knee deep in the water with her friend, Luke. To be honest, he wasn't just her friend. She didn't know exactly what he was, come to think of it. They'd always had an understanding that they are what they are, though even that had never been explicitly spoken. Regardless, she supposed, their relationship could be classified as 'complicated.'
Though this was true of her relationship, her parents undoubtedly had the most complicated relationship of all. The Doctor and his wife, Professor River Song, were quietly walking along the beach hand-in-hand, deeply immersed in their whispered conversation.
They were time travellers, both of them; Married and in love, but never meeting in the right order. It had always appeared to Haven that her father would travel forward along his timeline, but her mother would pop in and out of his life. Sometimes she'd jump forward, and other times she'd go backward.
It had made for some very awkward conversations over the dinner table:
"Have you spoken to the Face to Boe recently?"
"Spoilers!"
Or:
"Sweetie, you really need to repair the chameleon circuit before we do Athens."
"I – River!"
Then again, Jenny and Vastra were often the cause of awkward conversations over the dinner table. Jenny, a human from Victorian England, had married Vastra, a Silurian who was born on Earth long before humans evolved. No one had ever doubted that they were madly in love, but sometimes their cultural differences caused a few issues – like Vastra's habit of referring to humans as 'apes'. As one might expect, that description never went down well.
As she surveyed the beach, it occurred to Haven that there was someone missing. The potato-looking man in a space suit that was Strax, a Sontaran from the planet Sontar. The fact that he was missing didn't sit well with Haven. They'd had an incident a few weeks prior, in which the soldier in question accidentally flew away in the TARDIS. Needless to say, he wasn't allowed inside by himself anymore.
"Where's Strax?" she asked Luke, who shrugged.
"No idea," he replied. "I haven't seen him since we landed."
She frowned. "I'll be back in a minute, yeah?"
She waded out of the water and made her way up the beach, to where her father had parked his time machine - with as much noise as he possibly could, as was his way.
"Strax?" she called through the open door. "Strax, where are – oh!"
The door unexpectedly shut behind her. The next thing she knew, she'd been thrown to the floor as the TARDIS began to shake uncontrollably.
"Madam!" she vaguely heard Strax yelling. "Madam!"
As suddenly as it had started, the shaking stopped. It took Haven a moment to pull herself off the floor and stop the room from spinning. Finally, she looked around and gained her bearings.
"Oh, my h – what?"
Staring straight at her was none other than Clara Oswald.
"What?!"