I would like to take this moment to say… Writer's block sucks.

Special thanks to all of you who have already followed, favorite, and reviewed this story.

On that note, here's Chapter One. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Nope, I do not make any money off of this. It's just for fun.

Chapter One: Everything Changes

"Oh, come on, Dad, please? I promise I'll be careful, you know I will. Mum says I'm already a better driver than you." Emma looked up at her father, giving him her best puppy eyes. She might not be as good at them as her little sister, but they still worked pretty well on her father most of the time.

However, they didn't seem to be working this time.

"No, Emma, you are not borrowing the TARDIS. I am not sending my frankly magnificent timeship off into Time and Space in the sole hands of my teenage daughter. And you are not a better driver than I am. I've been flying a TARDIS for centuries, and you are sixteen." The Doctor frowned at her, and she rolled her eyes.

"Yes, Dad, and you failed your driver's test, remember? Come on, I just want to go-"

"Emma, I said no," he interrupted her, and she pouted slightly.

"Fine. But when are you going to let me take the TARDIS by myself? How old do I have to be?"

She watched as her father's eyes closed and he looked up, as though asking for patience. "When you're 103."

"Daaaad," she groaned. "We don't even know if I'm going to live to be 103. Two hearts or not, I might just live a normal human life, in which case I need to live it to the fullest, and not put things off, right?" she asked, a sly smile creeping onto her face.

"Stop it, Emma," her dad said, fixing her with his familiar that's-the-end-of-it glare, and she gave up. "Now, would you do me a favor and look in on your brother? He's still having trouble with that sonic screwdriver he's trying to build, and your mother's worried he'll blow up the house."

Emma rolled her eyes again. "Mick'll be fine, I built my sonic pen when I was twelve, and I didn't blow anything up."

The Doctor grinned. "No, you didn't, but you aren't as inclined to get bored halfway through a project and wander off. If he'd just sit still and finish the thing, he'd be fine, but he keeps letting himself get distracted."

"Like you did with dinner the other night?" Emma asked, smirking.

"Oi! None of that. Go check on Mick. I'd do it myself, but I have to finish calibrating this," he said gesturing at the underside of the TARDIS console they were both staring up at, "and your mother seems to think he's been left alone with that too long already."

"Fine, I'll go," Emma sighed, and hauled herself out from under the TARDIS console.

"Thank you," her dad replied, and then stuck his sonic between his teeth, his attention turning back to the delicate calibration work that Emma had interrupted. On the last family trip, they had hit a small pocket of interstellar "stuff" that the TARDIS had not liked, and it had thrown off the ship's navigational sensors. It had taken three tries to get the TARDIS back to the correct time and place, even with Emma and the Doctor working together. She'd been helping her dad with the repairs to some extent, but this bit was something of a one person job.

Emma patted the console affectionately, then headed out the doors and upstairs to her brother's room. She knocked on the half-open door and stuck her head in.

"Hey, Mick, Dad wanted me to see how you're doing with your- Gah! What are you doing? Don't-"

Quickly realizing it was too late to warn her brother about the colossal mistake he was about to make in the construction of his sonic, Emma whipped out her own and zapped the crucial parts from across the room, robbing them of the charge that had been about to explode. While it probably wasn't enough to blow up the house, it certainly would have scorched the walls of her little brother's bedroom. And probably burned off his eyebrows.

"Hey, what did you do that for?" Mick asked, incensed. He spun his chair around to face her, glaring. "I was just about to-"

"Blow up your room?" Emma asked pointedly. "Look at your specs again, little ape. If you'd actually connected those circuits, it would have burned your eyebrows off at the very least."

"I'm not an ape!" he complained, apparently ignoring the rest of her comment.

"Then how did you manage to make such a stupid mistake?"

"I know what I'm doing!"

Emma rolled her eyes, and stalked across Mick's room to show him exactly what he'd been doing wrong. "See?" she said, pointing to the relevant bits. "That's where you went wrong."

Mick ducked his head, embarrassed. "Right," he mumbled, not meeting Emma's eyes. "Thanks, sis," he added, a bit grudgingly.

"No problem. Though, now I get why Mum wanted someone to check on you, and why Dad sent me up here rather than just checking in with you," Emma said, wiggling her fingers near her brother's temple in a gesture that meant "telepathy" to the entire family.

He swatted her hand away. "Yeah, fine, we've established that I'm incompetent," he grumbled. "Want to help me, then?"

Emma glared at her brother. "You're not incompetent, Mick," she said firmly.

"Then why can't I get this thing right?" he growled, glaring at the pile of tech on his desk as though it had personally offended him. "You built yours in one afternoon, and I've been working on this for days and I still can't get it."

"That's because you keep letting yourself get distracted. If you'd just focus, and use that big Timelord brain of yours, you'd be done," she replied, flopping down onto Mick's bed.

"You sound like Mum," Mick grumbled as he turned back to his project.

Emma smirked, and was opening her mouth to retort when they both heard the front door open and close. "Mum and Sarah must be back," Mick observed.

"Yeah, and we better get downstairs. She said she was going to swing by Tesco's on the way back from Sarah's gymnastics class, which means she's probably about to call us down to help carry things." Emma bounced off Mick's bed and headed for the door, then stopped and turned back. "On second thought, I'll do it, you get that thing stabilized so it doesn't blow up before you get back to it."

Mick stuck his tongue out at her, but bent over his desk again, and Emma chuckled as she left his room and headed downstairs. True to her predictions, she'd no sooner reached the ground floor when she felt her mother touch her mind.

"Right here, Mum," she said, walking into the kitchen.

Her mother smiled in greeting as she lifted her head out of the fridge, where she'd been putting the milk away.

"Emma, love, could you run out to the car and get the rest of the groceries? I need to start dinner," Rose requested.

"Sure. Where's the squirt?"

"Oh, she ran downstairs to the TARDIS. She wanted to show your Dad what she learned in gymnastics class today."

"Well, I hope he can take a minute and watch, when I was down there a minute ago he was engrossed in some pretty delicate repair work."

Emma winced internally as her mother gave her a knowing look. "And you chose that moment to ask him about borrowing the TARDIS, didn't you?" Rose asked, fixing her with a stern look. "You were hoping to catch him off-guard and distracted, so that he'd agree out of habit. Isn't that right, Emma?"

This time, Emma's wince was not internal. "Well, can't blame a girl for trying. And it's not like I want to cross Timelines or anything like that, I just want to be able to go somewhere on my own every once in a while. Can't you-"

"No," Rose interrupted her. "No, if your father doesn't think you're ready to take the TARDIS out by yourself, then I defer to his judgment on the matter. He knows a lot more about that than I do, obviously, and I'd have to be mental to argue with him. Now, would you please go get the rest of the groceries out of the car?"

Emma sighed. "Worth a try," she muttered under her breath. "Will do," she said in a louder voice, and turned on her heel to head for the door. She hadn't really expected that to work, since her parents tended to be a united front on just about everything, but she'd figured it was worth a shot. Now, she'd been effectively denied by both parents, and so she was stuck.

It wasn't like she disliked Earth, quite the contrary. It was just that she never seemed to fit in here, no matter what she did. At school, she didn't fit in with the athletes she met through figure skating because she was so much smarter than they were (and that wasn't conceit, that was fact), but she couldn't make friends with the more academic types either, partly because of her status as an athlete, and partly because she was cleverer than all of them, too. Occupational hazard of being part Timelord, and having the intelligence that went along with it. Having the last name "Tyler" didn't help either. Her parents were figures of national importance (not that you could tell that by hanging around their house), and that made her a target for every gossip rag in the country. Add to that the fact that she had to lie about her very species to everyone she met who wasn't family, and it made it very difficult to get close to anyone. Though, for some reason, Mick and Sarah didn't seem to have that much trouble with it.

It all added up to making her extremely frustrated with planet Earth sometimes. It gave her an incredible urge to run, as fast and as far from the planet of her birth as the TARDIS could carry her, which was pretty extremely far. The only times she's ever had a reasonable conversation with someone who wasn't related to her was when she'd met people in the future, people who at least understood some of the basics of quantum physics and temporal mechanics. Then, she didn't have to lie about her species, because that far in the future, nobody cared if you weren't fully human. Plus, nobody had any idea who she was, so no one was taking embarrassing pictures of her for the gossip rags.

Emma shook herself, realizing that she'd been staring at the car door, lost in thought, for almost a minute without moving. She snorted softly, and opened the door to bring in the groceries. Fuming about the situation didn't help anything. The only thing that helped was hitting the ice, so she'd just have to head down to the rink in the TARDIS after dinner. She needed to work on her routine for the next competition anyway.

0-0-0-0-0

An hour later, the five of them were seated around the dinner table, finishing up the evening meal and laughing at something little Sarah had just said. Rose got up from the table a minute later to go bring in dessert, and Emma was suddenly struck with an unusual wave of contentment. Just at this exact moment, her struggles at school and everywhere else seemed so far away, and all that mattered was her family. It was all so comfortingly normal, teasing her little brother, laughing at her baby sister's antics, bantering happily with her parents, and she felt some of the tension draining away from her. She decided that maybe hitting the ice wasn't the only thing that made her feel better.

The relaxed family evening shattered a moment later when her Dad's mobile began to chime the silly, annoying ringtone that meant Torchwood was calling. Instantly, the atmosphere sobered as the Doctor got to his feet and pulled the phone out of his pocket to answer it.

"Doctor Tyler," he stated into the phone as he walked away from the table. Emma watched him go with a sigh, and was startled a few seconds later as her mother's mobile went off as well.

Oh, that's never a good sign, Emma thought. If Torchwood was calling both of her parents on a Saturday evening, it could only mean that something was up.

"Agent Tyler," Rose answered as she followed her husband into the sitting room, and the three kids sat awkwardly around the dinner table, waiting for them to come back. Emma toyed with the remains of her dessert, no longer having even the slightest appetite for it. They stared at each other for a long moment, then Mick broke the silence.

"What d'you think's wrong?" he asked, his voice far more subdued than usual.

Emma sighed. "Don't know, Mick, but it's got to be big for Torchwood to call them both like this."

"Is Earth gonna be invaded again?" Sarah asked in a small voice, sounding like the little girl she was for the first time that evening.

"I doubt it, there's usually some kind of warning before an invasion starts, they don't just show up out of nowhere," Mick replied, his tone of voice belying the confidence of his words.

"Maybe this is the warning," Emma suggested quietly. "Maybe they detected something coming towards us, and so now they're calling in the experts before-" She broke off, noticing the scared look on her sister's face. She got up from the table and walked around, wrapping her arms around Sarah's shoulders. Sarah turned and clung to her, and Emma did her best to soothe her sister.

"Hey, it's gonna be alright. We don't know anything right now, it could all be a wild goose chase or something. And even if it is an alien invasion, Mum and Dad will sort it, you know they will. They always do, don't they?" she asked, pulling away and meeting her sister's eyes.

Sarah glanced down. "Yes," she said softly.

"Well then, nothing to worry about, right?" Emma smiled at her sister, firmly pushing aside her own fears. No matter what the situation happened to be, panicking was not going to help anyone.

As she got to her feet again, both of her parents reentered the room, wearing uncharacteristically serious expressions. Emma felt her hearts jump into her throat.

"What is it?" she heard Mick asking, and felt a brief surge of gratitude towards her brother for asking the question she couldn't voice just then.

Their parents looked at each other, then the Doctor sighed. "Torchwood just detected an enormous and very heavily armed spaceship in synchronous orbit above Ireland. No one's seen anything like it, and even I don't recognize the description they gave me just now. It also seems to have appeared out of nowhere. Whoever's on that ship sent a message to Torchwood that even my new translation software can't make head nor tails of, so your mother and I are going in. Hopefully the TARDIS translation matrix can crack this, so that we can figure out what they want from us, and hopefully avoid a fight."

"Right then, you three, you know how this works. You stay in the house and stay out of trouble. Emma, you're in charge." It was a mark of how serious the situation seemed to be that Mick didn't even offer a token protest at their mother's words. "Lock yourselves in the TARDIS right away if we tell you to, if you see something fishy yourselves, or if you don't hear from us by your bedtime. And if you see something yourselves, you let us know right away. Got it?" Rose fixed the three of them with a look that allowed no argument, and they nodded.

"Yes, Mum," they chorused seriously. There was a split second's pause, and then the five of them were locked tightly in a group hug, without Emma having any memory of conscious movement. They all reached for each other's minds at the same moment, and clung tightly to each other both physically and psychically, taking comfort from the telepathic link.

When they finally broke apart, it was with great reluctance, and little Sarah promptly attached herself to Emma's waist. Emma in turn wrapped an arm around her sister's shoulders, and met her Dad's eyes, her expression serious.

"Be careful, please," she said softly. "Both of you."

"We will, Emma, don't worry. We'll be back before you know it. Well, that's a bit erroneous, you'll know it of course, so we'll be back… pronto. Oh, no, I hate that. ASAP. In a flash. Ooh, I like that one. In a flash! We'll be back in a flash, you three, so behave," the Doctor rambled, coaxing a few giggles out of his children, which, judging by the look on his face, had been his intent.

"Oh, and Emma?"

"Yes, Mum?"

"Call Tony and check on him, if you would? Just tell him what we told you, and ask him to stay indoors."

"Will do," Emma assured her mother, and with that, and a last mental caress, her parents left the house to head for Torchwood.

0-0-0-0-0

It was nearly two hours later when Emma began to sense that something was not right. Her time senses weren't nearly as strong as a full Timelord's would have been, nor was she particularly skilled in using them yet, but it didn't take much control to be able to tell that something was happening nearby, something not good. She walked quickly to the front room and peered out the window at the street, then up at the sky, and what she saw made her hearts skip a beat, and she felt herself going pale.

The sky was covered in alien aircraft, each about twenty feet long, and shaped, oddly enough, rather like butterflies, though clearly far more deadly. She could see the enormous weapon mounts from here, even though the nearest ones seemed to be a couple of streets over. Worst of all, however, was that each one of them had a stream of armed aliens pouring out of them, and sliding down lead ropes to the ground. There were too far away for her to even begin to guess what species they were, especially in the dark, but it was quite clear that they were not friendly. Closer movement caught her eye, and she noticed little Kristi Bennett, the youngest daughter of one of the families down the street, wandering up the road. She must have slipped outside while her parents weren't watching, and now she was clearly in danger.

Emma swore, loudly and creatively in every language she knew, finishing off in Gallifreyan. She whirled around to find Sarah and Mick staring at her, eyes wide.

"Ooh, I'm gonna tell Mum that you were swearing," Sarah said happily, then her eyes grew wide as she took in Emma's frightened face. "What?"

"Get down to the TARDIS. Now," Emma snapped, and was instantly gratified when Mick promptly seized Sarah's hand and began pulling her toward the basement stairs. She herself wrenched open the front door and raced into the street after little Kristi, intent on getting the little girl back to her parents. It only took a second for Mick to realize that she wasn't behind him, and she felt him reaching out for her mind.

"What are you doing? You've got to get down here too," he called.

"I'm right behind you, don't worry about me. Tell Mum and Dad there are aliens in the streets," she replied, trying to sound as calm as she could. She raced up to Kristi and scooped the little girl up in her arms and took off down the street to number 17, where her parents lived, knowing they must be frantic with worry for her. Meanwhile, Kristi wailed and complained, kicking and screaming loud enough to wake the dead, forcing Emma to waste precious moments trying to calm her down. When it became clear that the kid was not going to be quiet, Emma reached up and placed a hand on her temple, shutting her down into a light sleep. It wouldn't last long, and it wouldn't hurt her in the slightest, but it would give Emma a chance to get her back to her family and then down to the TARDIS with Mick and Sarah.

She raced up the Bennett's drive and rang their doorbell, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other and clutching Kristi tightly. She didn't have long to wait though, and was soon able to push the sleeping girl at her frantic and grateful parents. Emma didn't stay long enough to listen to their gratitude, though, just took off back down the street, running as fast as her long legs would carry her, her entire mind focused on getting back to the safety of the TARDIS.

She wasn't quite fast enough. As she neared the house, a squadron of strange, insect-like aliens marched around the corner, firing nasty-looking particle weapons at even the smallest shadows. They spotted Emma quickly, and three of them fired at her before she even had time to blink.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the energy beams from the alien weapons flew down the street towards her, and she felt as though every beat of her frantically pounding hearts was taking an eternity. Panic swelled up within her, and she felt a strange sensation in her head, a kind of pressure, and then suddenly something snapped.

A flash of pure gold lit the street without warning, and filled her vision. She felt as though she were pulling, hard, at something unseen, and a sense of pure, undiluted power rushed over her, filling her with a tingling from head to toe. Emma then felt an odd sense of tug-of-war, though what her mind was fighting, she had no idea. Whatever it was, it gave quickly, and the golden light faded once it had. She caught a brief glimpse of some sort of copper metal, and got an impression of startled faces, and then everything went black.

Thanks for reading, and please review!