Part One

My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue
An everlasting vision of the ever changing view
A wondrous woven magic in bits of blue and gold
A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold

Fairy Tales

A short time before (in Joshua's personal timeline), in the Alternate Universe...

Several months had passed since SesTok had returned the former hostages from SenSaru'a, and the long process of negotiating and mounting a colony to Pacifica begun. Joshua and his parents had returned on SesTok's ship along with Donna and the hostages, rather than taking the fast way in his TARDIS, Baby; the advantages to the proposed colony of their former captor ferrying them all safely home and therefore being present to make a public apology was immediately obvious. Thoughtfully, he'd even gone so far as to return the Mexican girls to their own Universidad, rather than stranding them in Cambridge with the original group. His handling of the assaults on four of the girls (which had occurred while he was a prisoner on his own ship), finding the miscreants and turning them over for punishment, also did much to repair his Earthly reputation, and he was able to begin the return journey to SenSaru'a after a few weeks with a positive, albeit extremely tentative, initial report.

Joshua, Corin, and especially Rose had been incredibly busy since their return, working unbelievably long hours to convince various world leaders of the veracity of the situation, and the incredible opportunity that was staring Earth in the face: the chance to begin an off-world colony, far outside the solar system, on a kind, friendly, Earth-type planet, with the major hurdle of transportation already solved. Joshua had made several trips to Pacifica and SenSaru'a with various dignitaries on board Baby – the hard part was then convincing them that Baby was NOT going to provide the means of transportation to the colonists; the SenSaru were. Then Tony Tyler (Rose's half-brother) jumped in, with all the resources of Pete Tyler Industries (still the world's biggest telecom company) to work with, and magically things began to happen all over the globe.

At last the project was slowly gaining traction and momentum, and it looked as if the family could at least take an evening off (minus Tony, who was busy cajoling mulish American conservative leadership). In a piece of perfect timing, Donna was home again from Cambridge, having finished the courses and passed her final exams – uni officials had given each hostage the choice between taking delayed exams that summer or repeating the final semester, and Donna had been one of several eager and able to forge ahead. She had only a week off, now, before beginning her delayed residency, and was determined to make the most of it, decompressing and lounging around the mansion in pajamas all day.

She was sitting in the large, comfortable living room with Corin and Joshua, listening to the latter tell stories of his life in the other universe with the Doctor and Mama Rose, Mum's twin, while they waited for Mum herself to come home. He'd just gotten himself and Mama Rose out of the disintegrating Time Lock and back to the Doctor's TARDIS when Rose walked through the door, her eyes dancing with suppressed, amused astonishment.

"You are not going to believe this!" she announced to the trio. "I can't believe it myself. Wait, is Tyler here? I asked him to come over for this." Tyler had moved out into a flat two years before.

"No, he's not here yet," answered Corin. "You're not going to make us wait, are you?" he went on, a wide, curious grin daring her to spill the beans.

She snorted. "I should, but I can't. This is too incredible." She flopped dramatically down on the couch next to Joshua. "I got a call today. You'll never guess who from. The Office of the Private Secretary to the Sovereign. Can you guess what they had to say?" She looked around, but each of them shook their head no, and her grin continued even wider. "I'm going to receive an official letter very soon – an invitation to a royal audience with Her Majesty. Can you guess the purpose of this audience?" More head shakes. Rose took a deep breath, and said very carefully, "You are looking at the future Baroness Gallifrey."

For a moment, they could have heard a pin drop. In the kitchen. Then, all three exploded at once: "Baroness?" "You're joking!" "Are you kidding?"

She let them go on for a moment, then looked at Corin. "Remember John? Our descendent? He never did tell us exactly what his title was, or how it came into the family, just that he was 'the eleventh Lord Gallifrey'. Well, now we know. It's a Barony, because of the SenSaru invasion and the Pacifica colony."

"It's to be an inherited title, then? Not just yours for your lifetime?" he asked.

"Yup. To go to the eldest natural-born child, regardless of gender. I insisted on that part. – One of the reasons for the call was to pin down my preference there."

"Well, that was nice of Her Majesty."

"Wasn't it, though?" Suddenly unable to continue making sense, Rose simply threw her head back and laughed and laughed until tears were streaming down her face – and the others weren't far behind her.

"What in the world is going on?" came a new voice from the doorway, and they swung around to see a tall, good-looking young man in his late twenties, Corin's genes evident in his large brown eyes and unruly hair.

"Tyler!" cried Joshua, springing up from the couch. "Where you been, man? I haven't even seen you once since I got back!"

Tyler stared at the stranger, apparently older than he was, without recognition. "Who are you?"

The question stopped everyone cold. "Tyler!" their father called sharply. "I know you've had your head buried in your lab and your engagement since the SenSaru invasion, but surely you've heard something about it. That's your brother!"

Tyler's jaw dropped – but at Corin, not Joshua. "My brother's a kid, Dad. Or he would be. We don't even know if he's still alive." He turned back to the 'stranger'. "I don't know who you are, or what the hell you're playing at, or how you managed to fool them, but it won't work with me."

"Tyler!" It was Rose's turn, though she tried to keep it light in spite of her son's outrageous behavior. "What have you been smoking? We know where he's been – he went back to the parallel universe with the Doctor!"

"Oh, please, Mum, not those old fairy tales. This is real life, not those silly stories you made up for us when we were kids. There's no such thing as parallel worlds, the Doctor's as real as Santa Claus, and we all know it." He turned back to the 'stranger' yet again, and his tone turned even sharper. "Who are you?"

His parents began to splutter their outrage, but Joshua calmly waved them down. "I'll tell you," he told Tyler, "If you'll shake my hand." Rose and Corin caught on immediately, and glanced at each other, smothering grins.

"Shake your hand?" Tyler repeated skeptically. He rolled his eyes, then held out his hand with a wary air of humoring a possibly dangerous mental patient. Josh took the last step between them and grasped the proffered hand firmly, giving it a couple of emphatic pumps – while, with his other hand, he pulled a small blue ball from his pocket, dropped it onto the floor, and then swiftly drew the same free hand dramatically up towards the ceiling and then out towards the walls. To the other three, the two of them seemed to shrink to almost nothing as swiftly as his hand movements and disappeared into the ball still on the floor, then a few moments later, the ball faded out of view. Listening very closely, Rose barely heard the faintest tiny whoosh whoosh of a TARDIS dematerializing.

She let her grin lose then, turning back to Corin. "Think he'll take him to the end of the Earth?" her husband asked drily, reminding her of her own first trip via TARDIS. She laughed, then shook her head, bewildered at her eldest son's very odd behavior.

"He thought we've just been telling fairy tales all these years?"