Chapter 10

"Have I told you that my great-grandmother took part in the 1948 Summer Olympics?"

The Doctor's head popped up from the other side of the console, where he had been tinkering with a part of the TARDIS. He had neglected his maintenance on the old girl for a few days now. Not that that was a bad thing - the TARDIS had really appreciated not having parts of her dismantled and then put back together for those few days that her Doctor had been distracted.

"She didn't win anything, though," Clara continued from her place against the railing.

"Ah, yes. The Games of the fourteenth Olympiad, first Summer Olympics after the war… And in good old London! Did you know," the Doctor came around the console, already in full rambling mode, "that those were the last games that included an arts competition? Gave one of the artists the idea for the winning statue. Might have also helped him with the more difficult parts." He mimed chiseling a statue with his hands, grinning at Clara, then clapped his hands together abruptly. "Anyway, more participants than ever at any Olympic Games before. First Olympics to be broadcast on television! Been planning to go there for a long time now, actually…" He trailed off, now standing directly in front of Clara, but looking somewhere far away with a frown on his face.

"Could we go?" Clara asked, making the Doctor jump a little before he looked back at her. "I really want to see my great-gran, and you just said you want to go too, so…" She gave him a hopeful smile.

The Doctor just stared at her for a moment then abruptly turned, commencing his dance around the console. "Off we go, then. 1948."

He was feigning his usual enthusiasm, and he could see that Clara was debating asking him what was wrong, but then she shook it off and started to smile in anticipation.

It wasn't really that he didn't want to go - he hadn't been lying when he said he'd wanted to go there for a very long time - it was just something he had wanted to do with… with Rose. Not with anyone else. But Clara wanted to go, and he had (unfortunately) already blurted out he wanted that too, so he couldn't very well tell her he changed his mind now and wouldn't take her there.

She still deserved so much for saving his life a thousand times. He couldn't ever pay her back. So this one little trip, one that she specifically asked for, was something he gladly gave her.

"Soooo, Clara, where exactly shall I land us? What do you want to see?" Clara was now standing beside him at the console, staring up at him as he looked down at her, smiling, but he was missing the excited glimmer in his eyes that he usually possessed when preparing for their next adventure.

"You said something about an art competition? Did they really do that back then?" Clara looked every bit as if she didn't believe him, making the Doctor frown at her.

"Well, yes. And it was a very important competition as well, I'll have you know," he said, his chin in the air.

Clara couldn't help but tease him. "And you're not just saying that because you practically won in that very important competition?"

She laughed at the Doctor's offended expression.

"Right, how about I show you the exhibition, then, first?" The Doctor made his way around the console to type in the coordinates and send the ship into the vortex.

The TARDIS actually shook a lot less than usually, Clara noted as she gripped the railing. She was just about to loosen her grip when the ship made an abrupt turn and she flew off the ground for a few seconds before all movement stopped and she heard the familiar thump of arrival.

She quickly righted her jersey dress and pushed her hair out of the face before following the Doctor to the door.

"Here you go, Clara: the 1948 Summer Olympics!" he called, pushing the door open.

Clara was surprised to see that at least the time was right, judging by the clothes the people were wearing. She could also see several paintings at the wall.

The Doctor was rambling again, walking out of the TARDIS, and Clara hurried to follow him.

"… only art that features sport, so you see, it really is relevant after all," Clara heard him say, but that made her pause.

The paintings she had seen so far had been pretty normal. Some of them she even recognised from previous trips to the museum. But she hadn't really seen any art depicting sport so far.

"Doctor," Clara interrupted him, well, tried to, because the alien just kept babbling on and on about when he'd met that particular sculptor and how he'd helped him quite a lot, yes, and that he'd even go so far as to say that he had won the gold medal and -, "Doctor, are you sure we're in the right place? There hasn't been a single painting about sports yet."

"Oh. Well. Yes, now that you mention it," he turned around on the spot, eyeing the room suspiciously, "this does look like a pretty normal museum. Hm. Don't see anything dangerous around here, though. Why don't you go take a look around while I go have a word with the TARDIS about why she decided to do this again when Clara clearly deserves at least one decent trip without you mucking things up!" By now he was shouting in the general direction of the space ship, making Clara chuckle.

"Alright, you go clear things up with your ship, I'll go look around here," she said with an amused smile on her lips.

The Doctor was already on his way, saying, "Meet me back at the TARDIS when you're done exploring."

"Got it." With that, Clara went in the direction of the next room, spotting some stone statues through the doorway. There were two rows of them, one on each side of the room, some of them had missing arms or other parts of the body. It looked to be white stone statues from the ancient Roman Empire.

She decided she'd have to ask the Doctor to take her there - or ancient Greece, it didn't matter. She just wanted to wear one of those togas like some of the statues were wearing.

Browsing through the rows of statues, she read the small golden signs first before looking at the statue it belonged to. As Clara had expected, there were many Gods and Goddesses, but also some philosophers or warriors.

She first walked along the right side of the room, then, when she arrived at the end, turned around to look at the other side.

She made it to almost the middle of the left row of statues before she read another golden sign, looked up at the statue - and made a double take.

She looked back at the name on the plaque. "Goddess Fortuna, 200 AD. But… I know her. I think." She scrunched up her face in concentration. It must have been in the Doctor's time stream then where she had seen that face before, if she could barely remember the person it belonged to. She looked back up at the statue - and then she saw flashes of brown pinstripes and pink hoodies - and she suddenly remembered.

"Doctor," she whispered, then turned and ran back to the TARDIS.

Not long after that she dashed through the TARDIS door.

"Oh," the Doctor exclaimed, a grin on his face, "Clara, there you are. Now, we are actually not that far off. Just the wrong museum. The TARDIS and I sorted it out, and I believe she will behave herself enough to get us to the right one now," he finished with a stern voice.

"Doctor, you have to come with me, right now." Clara was still standing in the entrance of the space ship, one foot outside in the museum.

"But you wanted to see my sculpture for the arts competition!" The Doctor looked a lot like a little child finding out his parents weren't going to come to his Christmas school performance.

"I might have found out why the TARDIS has landed us here! Come on!"

Clara was out of the door and on her way back to the statue already, so the Doctor cancelled the dematerialisation sequence he had already put in and made to follow her.

She kept yelling encouragements at the Doctor, like "Come on, it's not far from here anymore!" and "You won't believe it, it looks exactly like her!" and then "Just around the corner, come on!".

And there she went, just around the corner, never getting slower so that she had to hold onto the doorway to not run right past the room they were headed.

She could hear the Doctor's footsteps behind her, and see several faces looking at her, but she could also see the statue still standing there, on the left side, surrounded by other statues and some other visitors of the museum, but she didn't dare look anywhere but the statue's face, afraid it would disappear or turn out to be some entirely different face now that the Doctor was with her.

"See, there it is. I told you, it looks exactly like-", she started, but was soon interrupted by the Doctor's strangled voice.

"Rose."

"Yeah, how come there is a statue looking just like her standing in the British Museum?", Clara asked.

The Doctor just walked right past her, making her lift her gaze from the stone face to look over to him where he made his way to the statue.

"Doctor?"

That wasn't her voice, Clara realised, and shifted her gaze further to the small group she had ignored earlier surrounding the statue. Right now, she could only see a woman and a man (though she knew she'd seen another person out of the corner of her eye before, but the Doctor blocked her view), and they too seemed awfully familiar. The redhead was Scottish, and the man with the big nose was called… Nina? No. Rory! Yes. And the woman was Amy, but she hadn't been the one to say the Doctor's name. They'd been the Doctor's companions! They had a look on their faces that told Clara they hadn't expected to see him here. Not travelling with him anymore then, so how had they ended up in 1948?

Amy's attention was on the woman Clara couldn't see. "You know the Doctor?"

Clara decided to find out who had made the Doctor speechless, and took a few more steps towards the group. There was the statue, and right next to it, she could see a woman with brown hair… who turned out to be the statue's model herself.

"Hang on a minute," Rory's confused voice rang out in the room, "You called her Rose. That's not her name… or, is it?"

"How are you here?" The Doctor was talking quietly, and Clara was glad she had moved closer.

"Bad Wolf," Rose said, "She pulled me right through one of the cracks."

"The cracks?" came Amy's voice from behind them, overlapping with Clara's "Bad Wolf? That's what younger you said on Gallifrey, too. Who is that?"

"But that means… you don't exist in Pete's World. That's what happens when you go through the cracks… What about other me?"

A sad smile spread across Rose's face. "He died. A long time ago. As did our children."

"You had children? What happened?"

"Yeah, two girls and a boy. And our grandchildren… Wait, I don't exist anymore, at least not in the other universe - what will happen to them now?" Fear was written all over her face, and Clara was too confused to wonder about the fact that it was impossible for this young woman to have grandchildren. And judging by the expressions on Amy and Rory's faces, she wasn't the only one feeling that way.

"The universe will create a different story for them, don't worry, they won't cease to exist," the Doctor consoled her, pulling her into a hug.

When they parted, Rose reached up to fix his bowtie. "You look good." She was smiling again, tongue in teeth.

"Oh, right! I regenerated! How did you know it was me?"

"You should've seen the look on your face. Only you look at me like that. And only you say my name like that."

"Which brings us back to my question," Rory said, finally having found his voice again. "I thought your name was Mary?"

Rose turned to look at him. "I didn't want any younger version of the Doctor to accidentally find me. We used to have this little game where he showed me some of his previous incarnations, and in turn he looked up my name on the TARDIS so we could look at other Rose Tylers in history. At some point we would have stumbled across me, and that would have been hard to explain. So I changed my name. Mary is for Marion, my middle name. And Young… well, I'm not exactly young anymore, but I do look young, so I thought it fit." She chuckled.

"How old are you?" the Doctor asked in a soft voice.

"Let's not talk about that right now," Rose said, avoiding his gaze. "We can do that later, on the TARDIS… She's here, isn't she?" A fond look crossed her face.

The Doctor took her hand and started to pull her with him towards his ship, saying, "I parked her just around the corner - well, actually -"

"Oi!" Amy's voice cut him off, making him stop abruptly and turn around, with Rose having a hard time following his movements, "You're not gonna just leave us here! Have you even noticed us? You haven't even said hello!"

"Oh," the Doctor said, sounding genuinely surprised to see her there. "Amy! And Rory! When did you get here?"

"Are you serious?" Clara asked, and the Doctor's head whipped around to her as if he'd forgotten about her, too.

Then he turned back to Amy and Rory, grinned broadly and, without letting go of Rose's hand, pulled each of them into a big hug. "Amelia and Rory Pond. This time I really thought I'd lost you…"

"Yeah, he spent some hundred years sulking alone up on a cloud," Clara chimed in.

The Doctor let go of the Ponds and turned to her looking positively offended. "I did not sulk. I merely took some time off to catch up on my reading."

"Uh huh," Clara added knowingly.

After one last unconvincing glare in her direction, the Doctor turned back to Amy and Rory. "Anyway. Rose, Ponds, Clara. Back to the TARDIS, we've got lot's of catching up to do."

!-!-!-!-!-!-!-!-!-!-!

A/N: I really shouldn't promise things I can't keep. But, this chapter actually was nearly done when I posted the last. Then a day later I found out my uni had re-scheduled important exams so that they were now a month earlier than originally planned… So for the past few weeks all I did was study. And I passed! And now I actually have time to write again! Yay! But I won't promise anything (learned my lesson haha). Tell me if you like this chapter, or if you don't tell me what I can do to make it better!

Series 9 has started! I'm so excited, it looks amazing already :)

All mistakes are mine.

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who.