Thought I had a major nightmare on my hands when I wrote half of this chapter and then lost the entire document (thanks for nothing, laptop)! But managed to remember a fair amount of it.

So, the Doctor and Elizabeth talk time travel, and a trip is suggested...

Enjoy and do please leave a review, I love feedback!

L_M_D

As the somewhat unlikely looking trio settled in Elizabeth's empty living room, with a sneaky glance outside from Elizabeth to assure herself that the fox had not followed her into her house (it hadn't, and it remained on the front porch, staring up at her), the Doctor looked at her quizzically.

"Why you?" he asked, scanning her with his sonic, looking as though he expected her to know what he was talking about? "Have you ever travelled in time?"

She looked at him, slightly gone out. Her gaze drifted to Jack, her eyes widening in alarm as he didn't immediately drag his friend away to Bedlam.

"Well…" she began, "no, because it's not physically possible…"

"Of course it is!" the Doctor flailed his arms in the air, kicking himself back into his chair, before launching into a very complicated and verbose explanation of the laws of time and space.

During this ramble, which lasted above twenty minutes, Elizabeth Dashwood stared at Jack, at the man who came into the tea shop every day and ordered a cappuccino, sometimes with a slice of homemade raspberry cake, and sat on the same sofa near the window. The man who called her Lizzie and winked at her and always, always asked if he could take her for a drink. Who'd smiled and made her day when it was raining. And now she saw him, as though they communicated the whole thing telepathically. That he wasn't the man who came into her coffee shop, but a stranger, a handsome stranger, who knew all about foxes with three tails, and precisely why she shouldn't touch it, and time travel, and who had possibly time travelled (although the idea was still somewhat alien to her), and… oh god what if he's an alien... The room span a little and Elizabeth clutched her mug of tea closer.

"So that's just the general idea anyway," the Doctor finished his spiel.

"Well, no, I've never… time travelled." Elizabeth wrenched herself into reality to reply to her unexpected guest.

"Strange, you've got traces…"

"There is the rift, Doctor… Could that have anything to do with it?" Jack turned to the Doctor, sending Elizabeth into further spinning worlds of confusion.

"Can someone please just tell me what's happening?" her small voice broke through the quiet conversation between the Doctor and Jack. Both men looked at her, sat in her own living room, contemplating how weird it was that everything about her reality, from the apparent love of her life to the very laws of science she had always uncomprehendingly believed in, had come falling down around her ears within a few short days. Jack's arm was immediately around her shoulders, his comforting voice assuring her that everything was fine. The Doctor's face creased in concern. The air in the room was thick with human fear. He glanced around, noting the creased and well-thumbed copy of Pride and Prejudice on the coffee table.

"1813." He stated bluntly, and although to him it was a perfectly logical statement to make based on his current thought process, both Jack and Elizabeth paused to look at him inquiringly.

He pointed to the book on the table.

"1813. When Pride and Prejudice was published. You should go there."

"What, in my time machine?" Elizabeth snapped sarcastically, the events of the evening having taken their toll.

"No, in my TARDIS. That's Time And Relative Dimension In Space." He grinned proudly. Elizabeth continued to glare. "Look, the Kitsune, this fox that's following you, for some reason it thinks you're special in some way," Elizabeth's glare deepened to a look Jack would later describe as more terrifying than hearing twenty Daleks, forty Cybermen and some Slitheen creep out from your wardrobe at four in the morning. "You should take a trip with me. To make them lose track of you. The Kitsune, they're determined, but not particularly adept at travelling in time, so a quick trip would probably be enough to deter them from trying to possess you."

"From trying to do what?"

"Possess you. In order to continue to wreak minor havoc and chaos on… Cardiff…"

"So, let me just clear up a few things… There is a fox, outside my flat, which wants to possess me in order to bring chaos to the world and in order to make the fox not want to possess me anymore, I should go to a few balls in 1813 in your, whatever you called it, and then… problem solved!"

"Well, it's not technically a fox, it's a mischievous spirit called a Kitsune… but yep, that just about covers it!" The Doctor smiled brightly.

"Oh, of course, sorry…" Elizabeth's head swam some more, the room went fuzzy, then dark, and our heroine, much to her later embarrassment, fainted.