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Chapter Three
"I don't exactly have time to go shopping now, you know," the Doctor pointed out as Donna perused the clothing racks.
"Well that ship of yours isn't going anywhere anytime soon, according to you, is it now? Besides, you can't go running around Paris like that, can you?"
"Paris..." he mused. "So we're in Paris..."
Donna quirked an eyebrow at him. "Course we're in Paris. How could you not know that?"
"Why would the TARDIS bring me here? What's so special about Paris, France?" He seemed to be musing to himself, but Donna decided to answer anyway.
"It's Paris, for crying out loud! City of lights, of love...Never meant to come here myself, mind you, but...well, it's a pretty beautiful place anyway. What size are you? Fourteen?"
"Will you stop it with the clothes?" he huffed irately. "We should be spending our time trying to figure out what caused those snails to mutate the way they did and how to keep it from happening again. More to the point, I should be doing that. You should be getting home-"
"Don't start with that again," Donna snapped, shoving a shirt and trousers into his hands and pushing him toward the dressing room. "You're not getting rid of me that easy. Besides, I can't get another plane for God knows how long, and I can't exactly take the bus back, can I?" She closed the dressing room door before he could argue and waited nearby for him to change. After a moment, she heard an annoyed sigh and the sounds of him getting out of his old, singed, ripped clothes.
"How do you know me? I've never met you before."
"You ruined my wedding day, you did," Donna said. "Still...ended up being for the better anyway. So maybe I should thank you?"
"But it's all wrong. You can't have met me yet. The Doctor you saw...what was he like?"
"You want me to tell you about yourself? That's a bit egotistical, don't you think?" He opened the door to glare at her in annoyance.
"Just describe him."
"Fine..." Donna sighed as he disappeared back inside. "Tall...skinny...rock-star hair. Annoyingly chipper, if you ask me. And..." She trailed off, remembering all of a sudden the darkness she'd seen in that man's eyes, the fury that had burned there as he'd destroyed the offspring of that horrid alien they'd faced beneath the city. She remembered the fire, the heat, the fear, and she thought of those vibrant blue eyes of the man in the dressing room beside her.
Suddenly, it wasn't so hard to believe that it really was the same man in there.
"Doesn't sound familiar," he said, snapping her out of her state of deep thought. "Must have been a future version. But when you met him, did he...I...know you?"
"Don't think so," Donna said.
"That's bad..."
"How so?" He opened the door again, staring at her intently.
"Because if you met a future version of me that didn't remember you, us meeting here now means I've caused a paradox. and that's dangerous. It's the last thing I need to deal with right now." He thrust the shirt she'd handed him before back into her hands harshly. "It's too small."
"How do you not know your own size?" she asked irately as she went to find something else.
"It's this new body. I don't know it yet."
"Fine," she said, handing him another shirt. "Try this." He rolled his eyes and disappeared into the dressing room again.
"So...a paradox...what would happen if we did cause one?"
"Could be anything," he said. "That's what's so dangerous. Could rip up the planet, or the whole galaxy if it was bad enough. Time is complicated like that."
"How complicated?"
"Very complicated." Donna crossed her arms and leaned against the wall when something caught her eye. She reached over and grabbed the leather jacket, opening the door to the dressing room and thrusting it into his arms.
"This should suit you," she said. "Dark and mysterious. Perfect for you."
The Doctor stepped out a minute later, and Donna grinned.
"I told you the jacket would be a nice touch," she said proudly. "Much better than that old period costume you had before, eh?"
"Now that you're satisfied," he said, his jaw set. "Can we get back to more important matters?"
"Probably a good idea..." Donna agreed. "It's getting late anyway." The Doctor paused a moment, and then his eyes widened as if he'd just noticed something incredibly significant that he'd missed before.
"How late?" he asked urgently.
"What? You got a date or something?"
"What time is it?"
"Uh..." She looked around for a clock, finding one on the opposite wall. "Going on nine o'clock. Blimey, is it really that late? Jet lag will be the death of me..."
"Nine o'clock?" the Doctor mused. "But how can it be..."
"What are you talking about? What's so important about the time anyway?"
"Look outside," he said. "Just look!" She did.
"Yeah? What's so important about what's happening out there? Just an ordinary day...besides the giant snails anyway."
"Exactly...day!" He rushed toward the window of the boutique, pointing outside. "It's light outside. Bright as day, but it should be dark."
"What..." Donna strode over to the window as well. How could she not have noticed? He was right; it was as bright as midday out there. "Maybe the clock is wrong or something?"
"No...it's not. Can't be. Look." He pointed to another clock out in the square outside. It read exactly the same: nine o'clock.
Before Donna could say another word, he was out the door. Without paying, she realized, when she heard the angry shouts of the shop owner behind her. She quickly ran after him, following him around the corner.
"Not making any friends, are you?" she asked when she caught up with him. He walked at a brisk pace, but she could hear the shop owner not far behind, and he seemed to have gathered a few comrades to help him chase them down. "Maybe we should keep moving, yeah?"
He took her hand. "Come on."
They cut through a back alley, and he sonicked the lock on the chain link fence that blocked their path, replacing it when they were through and rushing around the corner, leaving the fuming shop owner and his friends behind.
"The source of that light has got to be somewhere..." he mused as they weaved their way between buildings, coming out into the street.
"Don't you think that if there was some giant celestial body up in the sky that wasn't supposed to be there, someone would notice it at some point?" Donna asked.
"Doubt it," the Doctor said. "Apes tend to be horribly bad at noticing things when it's not convenient to them."
"Who are you calling an ape, spaceman?" Donna snapped.
"Well you are. Just a fact of your evolution. Homo sapiens...you're primates after all. No changing that."
"You're a charmer, aren't you?" He turned to look at her, and he seemed to want to say something, but something else caught his eye just then, and he paused. "What?"
"That," he said, pointing up at the sky. She saw nothing but a rather unnaturally bright sky.
"What?" He sighed in exasperation.
"Oh, look, won't you? Really look." She strained her sight, trying to see what he was trying to point out to her, but she just couldn't make it out. He rolled his eyes.
"Alright, fine...fine. Hold on a moment." He surprised her then, facing her square on and placing his hands on either side of her face.
"Oi! What are you-"
"Just relax, alright? I need to concentrate."
"But what are you-"
"Letting you see what I see. Close your eyes."
"I'm not-"
"Just close your eyes, will you?" he barked.
"Fine," she huffed, and she did as she was told, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, letting herself relax.
She felt the unnatural and unfamiliar sensation of someone prodding around in her mind, taking over her thoughts. She resisted at first, but his presence in her mind was no unpleasant or painful, so she was able to relax a bit after a moment, letting him take over. Suddenly, she could see, but her eyes were not her own; she was seeing what he was seeing: her own face, her eyes closed, his hands on either side of her head.
Everything was so vibrant, so colorful, so saturated that it was as if she'd been seeing in shades of gray for her whole life and was just now seeing color for the first time. When he focused on the sky above them, she couldn't help but gasp.
It was a crack. A tear in the sky itself, stretching across her field of vision, flooding everything with bright light.
He took his hands from her, and she staggered a bit as his presence receded from her mind. "What was that?" she asked, holding herself up against a lamp post.
"A wound in the skin of the universe," the Doctor said darkly.
"From what?"
He was silent; he worked his jaw back and forth uneasily.
"Doctor?"
"From a war," he finally said with a sigh.
"What kind of war?"
"A horrible war." He waited a beat, not waiting for her to speak, but seeming to gather his own will to keep talking himself.
"Aren't they all?" Donna asked during the lull.
"Not like this..." he replied. She could hear the pain in his voice; it was as if she was having a conversation with a man who was stoically resisting unimaginable torture even as he spoke. "My people...all of them...they were locked away in the midst of the war. Unable to ever escape through time or space. All of them...dead."
He looked away as he spoke, and she wanted to reach out to him, but he exuded an air of solitude that seemed to push away anything or anyone that came close, like magnets repelling each other. So she merely stood beside him.
"That's where I came from," he finally said. "From the front lines of that war. It must have been so violent that it wounded time and space itself. That must have been what caused those creatures to mutate the way they did; that crack is overflowing with all kinds of temporal energy" He paused a moment and thought to himself. "It must have been what drew the TARDIS here too. It needs to repair itself after escaping the Time War. Would have come to the first place it found with the energy it needed to recover."
"Is there any way to close it up?"
"A crack that big...it would take a massive amount of power to close it correctly. And doing it incorrectly would be very bad for the universe. Like setting a bone wrong...You'd have to re-break it before you could do anything else, except re-opening that crack would be nearly impossible, and even if it could be done, the results would likely rip the universe apart at the seams."
"So...what?" Donna asked. "Things like this are just going to keep happening?"
"Possibly...eventually the crack should close itself, but there's no telling when that could be. Could take hours. Could take a millennium. There's just no way to know..."
"And you can't do anything about it? You're just going to let it keep pouring out temporal energy or whatever the hell you mentioned for as long as it takes to close?"
"What else do you want me to do?" he asked, turning away from her.
"I can tell you what I don't what you to do," she snapped. "I don't want you to turn your back on this planet. You never have before. How could you do that now?"
"How do you know that?"
"How do you think? I've been looking for you for months. I researched you. You've always been there, all throughout history, like some great defender of the earth..."
"And what about my planet?" he snapped, whirrling around to face her again, his eyes blazing bright blue with anger and pain. "Who was there to defend Gallifrey while my people burned? Why should I save such a little insignificant planet when I couldn't even save my own? When I destroyed my own-"
He stopped mid-sentence, his shoulders slumping as something within him seemed to break and bring him back to his senses.
They stood in silence.
"I can't do anything about this...not now...Not without a TARDIS at the very least, though even then..."
"How long will it take?" Donna asked somewhat awkwardly after a few moments' pause. "For your TARDIS to fix itself, I mean?"
"Depends...a few more hours, maybe."
"And it'll be okay? Back in that alley?"
He surprised her, letting out a chuckle. "Nothing can get through those doors. Trust me." He looked over at her, and he noticed her slightly confused expression as she looked at something over his shoulder. "What is it?"
"Oh, it's nothing," she replied off-handedly.
"Donna," said the Doctor, looking her straight in the eye. "Nothing is unimportant right now. Especially when there's a giant crack in time and space above your head, you can't afford to overlook details. What is it?"
"It's just that...that statue over there..." She gestured over to a cathedral across the street. There were three angel statues to the left of the large wooden doors, and two on the right. The third spot where it seemed a statue was meant to be placed, was occupied by an empty pedestal.
"What about it? Which one?"
"On the right...I couldn't sworn there was another statue there, but it's not..."
"Odd," he mused.
She turned around, heading back down the alley to get a better look at the cathedral from a different angle, and she let out a scream of surprise when she rounded the corner and an angel statue was staring her right in the face, teeth bared, ready to pounce.
