Chapter Four

A/N: Thank you to WhovianTenthStories, TheDoctor'sAmazingCompanion and randomnameisme for reviewing the last chapter.

The Doctor cradled his face in his hands, unable to believe that he had been so blind. All of the clues had been there, but he had been so slow, his mind addled by all that had happened since the collapse of the prison; he had never even noticed.

"Oh, of course." he sighed, his voice muffled by his palms. "Oh, that's good. That's very, very clever."

"What is?" Wilfred asked, clearly confused by the situation. "Doctor? Who is she?"

"They hid the information on her, encrypted it and replaced it with something more normal than the real thing. Oh, she's not human, that's for sure." he began, trying to determine how best to phrase this to a man that could not possibly understand the enormity of the situation. "Not completely, at least. If I'm right, and this data is accurate, then she's part Time Lord. Clarelia; it's a Gallifreyan name."

Immediately, the eyes of the white haired man widened dramatically. 'I guess that he does understand the enormity, then.' he thought, as he noted the nature of his reaction. 'Well, to some extent, at least.'

"She's one of you lot?" he asked, with all of the subtlety that the Doctor recalled his granddaughter having had. Sadly, he smiled. There were many times when he talked to Wilf when he was reminded heavily of Donna, and the pain prickled at his heart each time the man spoke a phrase that his former companion used to speak.

"She's not completely Gallifreyan. She's a hybrid." he tried to explain, though he sensed that the majority of what he was going to say would go right over Wilfred's head. "But the Time Lords adjusted their biology, years ago, so that it wouldn't be compatible with the lower species. It was part of their ideology of non-interference, the idea being that there could never be a situation where a child connected a Time Lord with another being. So, if that alteration was made... then this girl shouldn't exist."

"But she's here, Doctor. You saw her, so did I, stood outside the gates of this place." the veteran pointed out, trying to assist the Time Lord in decoding the mystery of the child, although both of them were aware that he was not really helping at all. "If she couldn't exist, how can she be here?"

"There's a difference between something that couldn't exist and something that shouldn't." he told the man, gritting his teeth against his mounting frustration. He simply could not understand how the girl could exist; she was a near impossibility of biology. "Not much of a difference, but enough."

"So, if she's... what you say she is, then how can she be here?" Wilfred pressed, and the Doctor sighed a little. He was trying not to become annoyed with the man, because he knew that he was only trying to make a useful contribution, but all he was doing at this moment in time was trying to discover how a hybrid like this could exist.

"Part Time Lord, part human." he thought aloud, ignoring Wilf's comments. The man seemed to take the hint, and went to look around the various paper based files behind the desk, leaving the Time Lord to his own thoughts. "She has to be Time Lord and human, otherwise she would have been locked up and experimented on by now. But how can she be? There's only me left, and she certainly isn't mine. So, if she isn't mine, then..."

Suddenly, the Doctor fell silent, his features softened into an expression of shock. The answer had been staring him in the face, and yet he had not seen it. He had been so occupied with trying to find a complicated and clever solution to the problem that he had overlooked the blindingly obvious.

"She's the Master's daughter." he breathed. "Part Time Lord, part human; she has to be. She's the daughter of the Master and Lucy Saxon."

The Doctor was dimly aware of Wilf approaching him again, interesting in helping now that he had come to his decision, but he was too absorbed in this revelation to notice anything else. Now he knew why he had felt a connection with the child; he had a connection with the Master, and she was his.

"But how?" he wondered aloud, not expecting an answer from his companion, who did not attempt to give one on this occasion, as he was utterly clueless as to how this could have come about, and about the changes this made to the Doctor, the Time Lords, even the Universe itself.

"Well, there was a year; the Year that Never Was. That was the year when the Master opened a void between modern day and the end of the Universe, and allowed the Toclafane to descend on Earth. They decimated the population within an hour, and within a week, the whole planet was under his control. He used the remaining people as slave labour to convert the entirety of the planet's coasts into shipyards, preparing for a war across the galaxies. When the Master was finally defeated, time reversed, so that the year never happened, after from for those at the eye of the storm, on the deck of the Valiant. If Lucy Saxon was pregnant then..."

"Then the baby would have been born later?" Wilfred asked, uncertain. The Time Lord guessed that

"Pretty much." the Doctor responded. "But Lucy, she could only have been in prison for two years, tops. Time Lords grow very quickly in their first regeneration, far quicker than humans. Even if she's only two in human years, she could already look eleven or twelve. In another year, she could be an adult already."

"But won't someone have noticed, if she's growing quicker than all the others?" the Londoner questioned, feeling a little foolish that he was asking so many questions. He wondered briefly if Donna had been this way with the Doctor, but decided quickly that he should not think of such things. It only resulted in heartache.

"Of course they noticed, that's why they hid the records." he explained. "But I need to know how much of a Time Lord she is. The Master must have experimented somehow, otherwise Lucy wouldn't have been able to carry her full term. That means he'll know her strengths and weaknesses better than we do."

"So, what are we going to do, then?" Wilfred asked the Time Lord.

"We have to find her, before the Master." he told the man, his voice heavy with purpose. "For her sake as well as ours."

A/N: Please review!