CHAPTER THREE – THE FAMILY WORRIES
Luke took the stairs up to the attic in Bannerman Road two at a time. Swinging open the door, he wasn't surprised to see both the Doctor and Sarah intensely hovering over some equipment on the light table. Mr Smith was out and obviously calculating. 'Any news?' he asked.
Sarah looked up and made her way over to him, enveloping him in a large hug. 'Oh Luke, you didn't need to rush home, but no, nothing.'
Luke and Sarah walked back over to the light table. 'Dad?'
Without looking up, the Doctor reached out and gave Luke's shoulder a squeeze. He then handed him a multi-page printout. 'Hopefully we're narrowing it down, Son.' He finally looked up at Luke. 'I'll be glad to have your input. You might find something your mother and I are missing.'
'Does Jack have any thoughts on what might have happened?'
'Your father sent him back to Cardiff to keep an eye on things there,' Sarah offered.
Luke could tell from Sarah's tone that Jack's presence had been more than just a tiny topic of conversation. He watched as his parents exchanged a look that bordered on a glare.
The Doctor frowned, 'Harkness has no clue about quantum physics and is best left out of the conversation. He's a jackass under the best of circumstances. What your sister sees in him, I have no idea.'
'Doctor,' Sarah said warningly. 'Jack is pleasant enough.'
'He's dating my daughter and insists on flirting with you at the same time.'
'The attention is a nice thing sometimes. He'd flirt with you too, except you keep glaring at him.' The Doctor responded by glaring at Sarah, but she only laughed. 'Yep, that glare right there. Besides, who Andy chooses to spend her time with is up to her, whether we agree with it or not.'
Before the conversation could degrade any further, Luke looked at the numbers on the printout, flipping pages and taking it all in. 'What was Andy working on before she disappeared?'
The Doctor glanced at Sarah, then turned back to Luke. 'She'd been using the rift to study out a theory about the quantum fields undergoing thermal fluctuations.'
Luke nodded. 'Using Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. She was telling me a little about that last week. It's a fascinating study given that renormalisation makes things a bit more complicated.'
'Indeed. Turns out your sister's experiment had nothing to do with her disappearance.'
'That's good at least.' Luke held up the printout. 'I'd like to make a few modifications and run these numbers through the TARDIS.' He returned his gaze to the Doctor. 'When was the last time you pulled energy from the rift?'
'End of last week.'
'So not due again for another week.' Luke headed for the TARDIS. 'I'll get going on these right away. The sooner we narrow things down, the less likely that the break between universes will get larger, or worse, seal up completely.'
'Is that a possibility?' Sarah asked. Luke and the Doctor exchanged a look that Sarah didn't miss. 'Forget I asked.'
Without another word, Luke took the printout and headed into the TARDIS. The Doctor turned to Sarah and reached out to run a hand along her upper arm. 'It's going to be fine, Sarah. Between us, I have no doubt we'll find Andy. We also have to assume she's working on the problem as well.'
Sarah couldn't stop the tears from welling up. 'Provided she's able to.'
The Doctor pulled Sarah close and kissed the top of her head. He knew words would only be platitudes at this point.
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Sarah stood at the window of Andy's bedroom and looked out over Bannerman Road. The moonlight glinted off of the raindrops that stubbornly stuck to the window, reflecting Sarah's mood. She kept her arms wrapped tightly around herself, except for occasionally reaching up and wiping away a stray tear as it fell. Silence fell across the room, when not ten minutes prior, all she could hear was the Doctor upstairs in the attic banging away on equipment and fussing loudly in Gallifreyan.
Without turning, Sarah could sense the Doctor standing behind her. His strong hands came to rest on her shoulders as he leaned forward and kissed the back of her head. 'Somehow I'm not surprised to find you in here.'
'Well?'
'I sent Luke to bed about thirty minutes ago. He was exhausted, and even now I'm making more mistakes than are prudent for me to continue tonight,' he said softly, his velvet voice comforting, even if the words weren't.
Sarah wiped away yet another tear. 'You need your rest. Nothing is going to change between tonight and tomorrow. At least I hope not.'
'You need rest as well.' The Doctor turned Sarah by the shoulders to face him. He reached up with his thumbs and wiped away the tear tracks that remained on her face. 'There's no point in thinking too much about it.' He pulled Sarah close in a tight embrace. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. 'I promise you, I will get Andrea back. No matter what.'
'She's in danger, isn't she?' Sarah mumbled into his chest.
Sarah could feel the Doctor stiffen. 'That's not something you need to worry about.'
She looked up at him. 'Her genetic structure is complicated, and we both know it. All those weeks we spent with her in hospital when she was a little girl. We almost lost her then and you had to do all those genetic grafts to stabilise her.'
He closed his eyes and whispered. 'I know.'
'You said it was environmentally specific. Well, she's in a different environment now.'
The Doctor sighed and looked down at Sarah. 'I won't lie to you, she is in danger. But I refuse to allow anything to happen to her now, any more than I did then. We will get her back and make sure she's safe. Even if that means I have to go to whatever universe she's in and get her myself.'
'Then what?' Sarah took a step back and began to pace around the room. 'You're not from this universe either. What if you get stuck? Or you go back to your original universe? I haven't forgotten how you got here.'
The Doctor leaned forward and put his hands on the window frame, not facing Sarah. 'Whatever it takes, Sarah, I will bring our daughter back to you.'
Sarah wrapped her arms around the Doctor from behind and rested her forehead against his back. 'And what if you can't? That's what I'm desperately afraid of. The thought of losing either of you tears at my heart. I can't lose you both. I just can't.' Sarah began to cry in earnest, feeling her family falling apart.
The Doctor turned around and held Sarah closely, kissing the top of her head as he reached up with one hand and began to stroke her hair. 'You're not going to lose either one of us, not if I have anything to say about it.'
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In the TARDIS, the Doctor ran a hand over his eyes and sighed before trying yet another calculation. After entering the data, he could do nothing except wait for the TARDIS to finish crunching the numbers. He looked at the readings returned and paused, double checking each number and sequence.
The Doctor slammed his fist against the TARDIS console, but this time, in victory. 'Sarah!' he bellowed, the rich timbre of his voice carrying out into the attic. Sarah quickly entered the white console room from the attic, an expectant look on her face. Luke was hot on her heels. The Doctor turned to them, his toothy smile filling his face. 'I've found her.'
Sarah rushed over and they embraced, the Doctor holding her close.
'I knew you'd do it,' she said softly.
With a grin, Luke walked over and began to look at the numbers for himself.
'Well, finding her is only part of it,' the Doctor pulled back to look into Sarah's eyes. 'We still have to find a way to get her home before she starts to have problems. That may be the harder part, but Andrea is resourceful enough, I'm sure she's recruited help by now.'
'And if I know our daughter, I think I know where she might've gone.'
The Doctor looked down at her, knowing what she was thinking. 'Do you really think so?'
Sarah nodded. 'It makes as much sense as anything else.'
The Doctor pulled away from her, his mind tumbling through the possibilities. 'While it might make sense, that's also a very dangerous thing for her to do.'
She frowned as she leaned against the TARDIS console and put a hand on her hip. 'Why?'
Before the Doctor could answer, Luke looked up, his expression grim. 'We need to find a way to get a message to her. That universe is not going to be kind. She needs to know what to watch out for, health wise.'
The Doctor agreed as he turned to Luke. 'True. However, we must preserve the walls between universes. The last thing we need is to break down one of those. Who knows what may be lurking in the void space in between.' He turned back to Sarah to answer her original question while anticipating her next. 'It's my original universe.' He put a hand on her shoulder. 'And while I know what you were like back then, we have no idea whether Andy approaching either one of us would be safe now.'
Sarah took a deep breath, thinking about all of the possibilities. 'That's not good.'
'Do you think we can somehow use the gap she slipped through? Without causing another temporal spike?' Luke asked.
'That's my hope, Luke.' The Doctor pulled up a series of equations on one of the monitors. 'Take a look at that and see what you think.'
Luke stared at the numbers, then pulled a small notepad and pen out of his pocket and started jotting something down. While he was doing that, the Doctor reached out and took Sarah's hand and led her towards the TARDIS interior door.
'Where are we going?' Sarah asked once they were out of earshot of the console room.
The Doctor said nothing until they walked into one of the living room areas. He guided her to sit next to him on one of the oversized sofas and kept both of her hands in his. 'I want you to know what we're up against, but I didn't want to say it in front of Luke.'
Sarah took a deep breath, steeling herself. 'I'm not going to like this, am I?'
The Doctor ran his thumbs along the back of Sarah's hands. 'Andrea's quantum signature carries a portion from that universe that she inherited from me. It's dormant, but still there. That may be what pulled her across.'
Sarah closed her eyes and bowed her head. 'When she was ill as a little girl, you had to alter and re-graft her DNA to set a level of rejection against that portion of her quantum signature to stabilise her here.'
'Yes,' the Doctor replied at a whisper as he slipped an arm around Sarah's shoulders.
Sarah's voice was matter of fact. 'Which means out of every universe she could've possibly landed in, that's the worst one.'
'Yes.'
'She'll start to destabilise almost immediately, won't she?'
'She'll be expecting the headache, that's pretty common given what happened, but then it will continue to get worse instead of better.'
She looked up into the Doctor's eyes. 'Is the damage reversible?' She could see the hesitancy in the Doctor's expression, so she prompted him. 'Tell me. Honestly.'
He sighed. 'It is, but only if we can get her home in time.'
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