Hailey stared unmoving at the machine. She half expected that it would do something to show some sign of intelligence, and at the same time expected that it would do nothing of the sort. She wondered silently what exactly it was the she was expecting, and realized with growing despair that she had no idea exactly what it was that she was supposed to do.
She looked slowly around at the other's and saw that each had their own varied thoughts and expectations. Standing nearest to her, her mother stood with a look of anticipation at seeing the doors of the old time ship opened again. Clearly she wanted it to be her daughter that first opened the door and she stood anxiously waiting for her to do so. Anna, who had until them stayed in the doorway of the barn, quite clearly hadn't had a very good idea at all of what was hidden inside, because she inched closer in curiosity now, but looked outright nervous at learning more about the thing. Rose's eyes were open wide in surprise and confusion, as she herself took in the whole scene in confused wonder. As far as Hailey could tell from watching the Doctor's reaction for a moment, he was only waiting in his own state of utter shock to see what exactly she would do.
The thought crossed her mind for a second of handing the key to him and entrusting him with the task of first dealing with the doors of the machine. He after all was the only one that had any true experience with such a thing, and she certainly trusted him more than herself. Her mother though obviously wanted her to do it, and anyway he was so distracted she didn't think she could get his attention easily to hand him the key.
Slowly Hailey reached forward, fully intending to fit the small metal key into the door lock in the way one would unlock a car door. She pulled her hand back startled as her fingers encountered a slightly tangible forcefield. The feeling of slight, almost electrical vibration made her nearly drop the key. The others all just looked at her with questioning expressions for a moment.
Abigail took a couple of steps forward and much to the dismay of the others, she spoke as though the machine could hear her. "Hello again, girl. James is long dead, but you must already know that. Hailey is grown up now. Everything is different, but at the same time, everything can in it's own way begin again."
Hailey tried again to reach for the door lock and this time her hand passed through to it with no trouble.
"Doctor?" Rose whispered. She tugged lightly on the sleave of his coat to get his attention. "Can it really understand her? Can a TARDIS understand so many spoken words like that?"
"I don't know," he answered slowly, still staring ahead in shocked surprise and confusion. "I've never tired such a thing with mine. It seems though... I think it was protecting itself."
The driver side door unlocked and Hailey pulled it open with little trouble but some personal hesitation. She had to admit to her self that among so many other things, she was curious about how the infinitely bigger on the inside than on the outside concept would work with an automobile. She was used to walking in and out of something that could basically be thought of as a slightly oversized phone-booth. But this was a completely different shape, and that confused her. She peeked slowly past the now open green door, and blinked at the disoriented feeling she experienced at first.
The front of the vehicle looked just like one might expect to find in an ordinary car, but behind the front seat there seemed an infinite space in which she could vaguely make out a curving stairway leading upward and a hallway moving far to the left.
As soon as she backed up again and stood upright staring again at the machine with an instinctive sense of confusion she could still not shake even after months of traveling in a multi-dimensional time machine, the TARDIS' exterior disguise shifted rapidly. The Doctor's was of course, always in the shape of an old blue police box, and so she'd never seen such a thing change forms before. She, along with the other four in the barn, gasped in surprise as the thing switched in a split second into a small white tool shed with a simple green door.
"Wh..." Anna gasped from behind the rest. "Why'd it do that? ... how did it do that?"
"It was in a good shape to blend in hidden in a barn but not very practical for walking in and out of," the Doctor explained. He seemed more himself now and clearly over the initial shock and typically anxious to explore. "All aboard then. I suppose we will all want to see what sort of state this one is in."
"Is... is it safe in there?" Anna questioned shakily.
"Of course it's safe," the Doctor answered. The five people filed on board the time ship, one at time with Hailey in front and Anna lagging behind with the greatest hesitation.
Hailey looked around the console room of the ship. It looked so different from that of the Doctor's TARDIS but still very recognizable as having the same origin. The center console was a bright silver color with various green buttons, dials, and switches everywhere on it's rounded and flat surface. The wall farthest from the door was lined with monitors and their corresponding controls. The room contained a few padded green chairs and the room was lit dimly from overhead. Despite it's having sat for eighteen years undisturbed, everything was clean and free of dust.
Anna, openly frightened by the size of the machine inside and the lack of understand of how such a thing was possible, hurried out the door and back into the familiar of her world, muttering about how she really had to get supper started right away. After reassurance that she was indeed alright and would meet up with them later back at the house, Hailey, her mother Rose and the Doctor went about the task of looking over parts of the old time ship.
Abigail had traveled years before with her husband on board that ship, and she recalled more and more of where things where and what they might do, as she wandered about. Rose was happy just to have a new kind of adventure and she walked about with the others silently comparing the ship to the Doctor's, and noticing more differences than she'd imagined might have existed between different ships of the same type.
It was while she was standing in a wide and curving hallway that Hailey burst into sudden tears and hid her face in her hands, trying futilely to hide her seemingly senseless crying. Abigail noticed it first and hurried over, crossing the hallway quickly.
"I remember being very young, not even two years old and wandering around in endless space within my father's little garden shed," Hailey explained slowly. "It should have seemed impossible but at that age I didn't even question it. I thought I was insane for years afterwards, when everyone started to say there were no such thing as 'magic boxes' that are bigger on the inside and can fly. By the time I was five I just stopped trying to tell anyone at all about it, and then finally I believed them when they said they thought I might be inventing such things in my own mind to protect myself from a reality a young mind couldn't accept."
The others listened quietly and with understanding as she continued speaking, now not quite as emotionally, and with more matter of fact acceptance. "Of course I knew since meeting the Doctor and Rose, that such a thing could well have actually been real and possible after all, but the memories from so early in life were so vague and nearly forgotten. Now though, I can see that my father's ship is exactly the way I remembered it for a few years until the world made me forget."
"Mum," Hailey said after they had all walked silently for a moment or two investigating a few of the hallways and then doubling back toward the console room. "That time in my life, the very early years of my childhood are so fuzzy and mixed up now. It's hard to recall being so young, even for me. I thought though I that could sort of remember living in a little townhouse on a quiet street near the top of a hill. Did we really live there or am I just all confused?"
"We lived in that house since a few months before you were born," Abigail explained. She laughed a little at a long forgotten and suddenly recalled memory of her own. "We moved into that place while I was pregnant.. We'd been in my flat until then, but it was so small and a baby would have just made it seem more cluttered in there. One day your father came home and found me and a friend painting the smaller of the bedrooms upstairs pastel yellow . He looked at us like we were crazy and then finally asked me after my friend left, why I would want to paint walls yellow. I explained that the walls were yellow because I didn't know whether pink or blue was in order, and yellow made a good choice as a gender neutral color. He looked at me like I was just as crazy even then and walked off questioning to himself why a baby should care what color the walls are. It was so easy at times to forget he wasn't human, but at such times the fact kind of smacked me in the head full force."
"Why did you live in a house at all?" Hailey questioned. "Why not just live on board the ship. It's quite possible to live on board."
"Very possible," Abigail replied. "He wanted to live a closer to typical human life though... most of the time anyway. He never came to Earth seeking adventures and excitement. He simply crashed here and by the time he got the ship fixed, he'd met me and we loved each other. Leaving was never an option anymore but settling here was."
"Nothing like the Doctor then," Hailey observed, with a laugh. "I wonder if he will ever stop running."
"Not as long as I can help it," the Doctor said in a tone of amusement. He was more seriously though as he put in, "Actually though, for him to want to stay somewhere safe and predictable would not have been so strange. Some of us never left home at all - never saw a thing beyond our home city, let alone went off world. There were always a few who due to their professions, had to leave and travel far away, but most of them hurried back as fast as they could. I think many were actually afraid of what might be out there."
The group quiet reluctantly made their way back off the ship and out into the barn, which though no one voiced their opinion, everyone thought to be a vivid contrast from the bright lights and technology on board. All four of them stood looking at the strangely machine for a few short moments before Hailey voiced the question she knew someone had to ask eventually.
"So, Mum you say it's not safe to leave Dad's TARDIS out here for much longe, and I see your point on that. But what on Earth do we do with it now? Where are we supposed to hide something like this?"
"It won't necessarily need to be hidden anywhere - well not for another long term period like this anyway. She's a great old machine but needs to be useful for something other than just sitting in hiding forever on Earth. She needs a Time Lord to fly her again." Abigail stopped speaking for a second and looked around with bemusement on her face. "...Or in your case, would the correct term be Time lady?"
"Time Lady is very informal," the Doctor said, when Hailey looked at him questioningly. "You could say it that way in most casual situations if you wanted. Many do... or did." He stopping speaking suddenly and looked right at Abigail with a look of surprise on his face.
"No way" he said firmly. "Hailey would never be able to fly her father's ship."
"You could teach her to fly it," Abigail insisted stubbornly.
The Doctor, caught up in his own stubbornness, shook his head repeatedly and held one hand up in the air. "No, bad idea. Very bad idea."
"Doctor, before he left for the war, when we came out here to hide his TARDIS in a safe place, James told me one of his biggest regrets was that he would never be able to teach her himself. He thought she could do it one day, if only she could..."
"Well parents tend to have a certain way of becoming completely convinced their child is capable of anything," the Doctor said, with bitterness plainly apparent in his voice.
"Doctor?" Rose questioned, interrupting him and this line of thought out of concern. "What's the matter?"
"Nothing's the matter? why would anything be wrong?"
"I dunno, you just sound... just not very..."
"Rose, can we just drop it," the Doctor said with far more sudden and snappy anger than he'd intended express.
"Sorry," he said, forcing his mounting frustration out of mind and admitting to himself that he didn't even understand fully why he was frustrated or why he was taking it out on a companion who had done nothing at all. "I'll think all this over and decide what to do."
No one objected or questioned him, when he reached around the open door of the TARDIS and carefully removed a small panel that they would have otherwise never known was there at all. He pressed a little red button that was reviled underneath and then just as carefully he placed the panel back into it's place on the section of the wall, and let it click into place. Rose, Hailey and Abigail stood in stunned silence as the machine, with it's door still open appeared to shift itself into fully third dimensional form. In the time it took to blink their eyes, the impossibly vast interior structure, which seconds before had been partly visible through the open door, vanished. In it's place were four flat walls only a few meters wide by a few meters across and the hight of a typical small structure. The complex and impossible time ship had become for all intents and purposes, by all appearances, a typical garden shed.
The Doctor walked quickly toward the barn door and it was only as he was about to step outside, that Hailey dared to question him.
"Doctor, where are you going now? What are you planning to do?"
He looked back at her grinning. All signs of the frustration and completely uncalled for abruptness of moments before were gone.
"I'm going to bring my TARDIS over here, and materialize around this one. This one's been deactivated, so storing it in there is completely possible. We can put it in a big storage room downstairs and take it with us." With that quick and excitable explanation the Doctor ran out through the open barn door.
"I'm confused," Rose admitted, speaking quickly.
"Hailey can explain it," the Doctor called back as he stepped outside. "She understands all this science too."
~DW~DW~DW~DW~DW~
Hailey sat with her mother at a little cafe in what she'd come to refer to simply as 'the village.' The little place had become quite familiar to her, and she was glad that it had. She enjoyed the coziness of the little cafe.
"So what do you think?" Abigail asked from across the table, and over top of the cup of hot coffee she held in her hand.
"I don't want to insult anyone here, but so far I think George's daughter is positively dreadful. George said Melissa was excited to meet me, but still..."
"You think Melissa is dreadful?" Abigail set the cup down and looked at her daughter with surprise. "How so? I've always thought she was a decent girl in the time I've known her."
"She just seemed to me to have this hidden and underhanded way of insulting everyone. She managed in a single five minute period to tell me that her father was 'only' an accountant, while her mother and step father are both pediatricians in their own private practice together - and also that I should be sad because my own mother went crazy instead of raising me. She laughed like she was joking when she said that, but come on... She even complained about how the museum was not a 'proper' museum and that her community has a nicer one."
"She's still getting used to the idea of her father getting married. Hailey, she's only thirteen and still at the age she's be unsure of what to think of much of anything. Melissa's just acting out a bit to test all of our reactions."
Hailey stirred sugar and cream into her coffee and then looked at her mother with a spoon hanging loosely in her hand and a look of bewilderment on her face. Her pushed a strand of her hair - very recently dyed back to it's natural black and highlighted with bright purple - out of her eyes and blinked a time or two. "Mum, are you seriously not bothered by this? That was a nasty thing she said about you."
Abigail answered back distractedly. "Yes, I suppose it was a bit nasty. But in her mind she probably thought she was only being honest. I was in a mental hospital for eighteen years, and I was honest with her about that since we met."
"Yes but..."
"Sure it was a bit insensitive of her to be so blunt about that and the emotions related to it, but she's so young. I can't remember if at thirteen I had a sense of tactfulness either."
"I remember I certainly did," Hailey answered firmly, refusing to give in.
"Sorry," she said after another minute. "I should mind my own business and not judge so much. I'm just concerned about trouble starting up in the family after you and George get married."
"Even if you're right about possible trouble, it's not like she lives in the house. It's just me and George there most of the time. Things will be fine. A nice and simple, uncomplicated life; that's what we want and what are intent on having."
"And I'm happy you'll get to have that."
"Are you really though?" Abigail questioned in all seriousness. She looked at her daughter with a steady and almost unblinking gaze for a moment.
"I am," Hailey said seriously. She thought for a minute determined to find the right words, and then she went on speaking. In a way, or I suppose I should say in a few ways, I'm a bit resentful of the fact that you got out of the institution only after I was already all grown up. I would have loved to have gotten to be more like a proper daughter to you and have you as a real mother, before you went off and found this new life. I would have loved to have been the daughter that grew up in your house and now found myself calling George someone who was about to become family. I'd even have liked to think of Melissa as my soon to be step sister. But the truth is, and I'm sure you must already know this, I can still barely see you as actual family to me yet."
"Hailey, I'm trying hard," Abigail answered looking out the window next to their table, with sadness and a world of regrets evident in her eyes. "I am really am trying."
"I know you are." Hailey smiled and spoke lightly. "It'll just take time is all. I may be your daughter but we still hardly know each other at all."
"I'm so confused too so often as to what my role is supposed to be. You were not only already grown up when we met again, but the life you were already living was so different than the one I thought you'd have. I used to think about you so often in the hospital, but whenever I did I thought you'd be on the way to a typical human life in a typical human town somewhere - perhaps an advanced level student that started university early. I always knew you had the brains to be anything in life. You could have had any job you wanted, even at your young age. I never knew the type of terrible placed you went to live in. I'd assumed you must have been adopted at some point and had a loving family. I never dreamed you'd ever learn who or what you really were in any case. I thought that if you even looked for me one day I might tell you your father was from a far off planet, and you'd walk off then thinking you knew why I was in the nut house in the first place."
"Funny isn't it, how life turns out so unlike anything we'd even imagine?"
"Yeah."
"Your role though..." Hailey said, in reference tot he first line of her mother's long and scattered train of verbally expressed thoughts. "Well your in my life is to be my Mum of course."
"I'm not sure I have any idea at all how to be your mother. I've never been there for most of your childhood and now I'm not sure if I'm supposed to try to be parent to you or just a good friend."
"Mum, from what I know about people, most mothers tend to be a little of both when their daughter are out on their own. Besides, I'm not that old. Maybe I still need a parent sometimes."
The two woman sat in the quiet and nearly empty cafe and finished their coffee in happy and peaceful silence. Neither had much to say at that moment, but neither felt much need to speak to the other. Abigail reached over the table to pull a few strands of her Hailey's hair between her fingers gently. She shook her head and laughed light heartedly at the fact that fact that her daughter had gone from one outrageously unnatural hair color to another that was just as shocking. Abigail finally spoke again, questioning to herself out loud as her where Hailey's passion for bright and outrageously colorful fashion had come from. As far as she knew she could think of no one in her family that liked anything but simple and well coordinated colors in their clothing and neutral off whites and beiges in their home decor. She was pretty sure as well that the sense of color had not come from her father's side and she said so.
"It was your father's great grandmother that loved color," Hailey said with a calm matter of factness, that shocked her mother. Abigail sat for a second blinking at her in confusion.
"Your great- great grandmother would have died long before I was born. Your grandfather barely remembered her at all. I think she died when he was thirteen."
"So," Hailey laughed. "She still loved bright colors when she was alive."
"Yes that might be true. I actually have no idea. But how did you..."
"I was able to look through past actually timeliness, with the idea of finding such a person, in mind. For the past, there are what we might refer to as actual time-lines. The future, relative to oneself, is a little more difficult. There is no actually time line yet because there is no set reality. From the future perspective though we would see the many possible outcomes of any event in the present time. I'm still not very good at this though... I'm still learning to scan the time-lines, but I'm happy for the chance to practice."
"You seem just so typical sometimes, just like anyone else's daughter. At times though I'm reminded that you were never supposed to be completely typical."
"Mum?" Hailey asked after the two had make their way out of the cafe. They walked slowly up the street toward the car that George had recently given to Abigail. "In the time years ago that you traveled a bit with Dad did you even make it all the way to his home world?"
The two of them stood next to the red red car as Abigail slowly unlocked the doors. "We wanted to. We always planned to one day. He so wanted me to visit, but he had so many doubts that his family would ever really understand what he was doing bringing his human wife back there with him. It wasn't against the law you see, but it was certainly not encouraged by any means. He was ready one day to say darn it all and we should do it anyway, but around that same time I got pregnant and we stayed home from then on. I wish I'd been able to see his home planet. most of the time I just can hardly believe it's really gone."
Abigail stood next to her car looking over the roof at her daughter and she went on with speaking her thoughts. "How can a whole planet... an entire advanced race, just be gone."
Hailey got into the passenger seat and said, "I feel so sad lately that I'll never see my other home world. I can read about it and see pictures and everything, but that's the closest I'll ever get. Everyone wants to see their homeland. It's in our nature normally to wish to do so. I suppose for me that's just a piece of my own life that I'll never have."
"What exactly happened to Gallifrey anyway?" Abigail questioned. Her eyes were watching the road as she drove through the village and out onto the country road on the way to her home. She watched carefully for places where there might be slippery sections of pavement caused by the light snowfall of the afternoon, but her mind was busy and distracted by other things. "I never did find an opportunity to learn the whole story on that."
Hailey stared out the window into the darkening winter evening. "I only know that the Time war had gone on and on for so long and dragged so many races and worlds into it that it had endangered the entire universe and very reality itself. It's hard to really imagine it, even for myself, but this war wasn't fought with guns and bombs and maybe the odd nuclear attack on a city. This was a war fought in several dimensions at once, in the past and the future and several versions of their present time. Inter-dimensional gateways were opened and controlled and many things that were let through were set loose on whole solar systems. I don't know much about it, but that's what little I could find in the books. Anyway, you can imagine why it had to be stopped before it got so much worse. Both sides though were so angry and full of hate for the other. I suppose many of the Time Lords were changed by war, or at least that's what the Doctor told me once. Common sense, compassion and certainly the whole idea of non-interfearance went right out the window. They would have done anything to destroy some enemy that they say started it. "
"Did they start it?"
"I have no idea who started it. I don't think anyone really knows. You know how it is with conflict. Two sides will blame the other until they are breathless and still no one will claim responsibility. The truth of who started it was lost to many long years of fighting, but finally someone decided they had to end it for the sake of everything that would ever exist. A Time Lord out an end to it by destroying Gallifrey somehow. He managed to time lock the whole war and the planet after that so it would never somehow restart in some insanely complicated way that I can't even begin to understand, once the linear time-line of the past caught up to it."
"Hailey, are you sure that's all true? I mean, the idea of a Time Lord destroying Gallifrey is rather unbelievable. You know how stories go. Over time they just get bigger and bigger and more and more far fetched."
"I'm sure. It does seem a bit crazy, but I'm convinced it's the truth. We have to remember here that they were dealing with circumstances that are beyond any true comprehension for us both."
"And you're pretty sure the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords... well aside from you of course?"
"Yes. As far as we know."
The car followed the smooth paved road as it wound around a hill to the left and down a small slope into a little valley. Hailey watched the country scenery go by. It was the first time she'd traveled that road after sundown and had to admit it was pretty out there at night.
"The one that ended the war stayed outside though," she mused out loud, still watching the view through the car window. "He'd have to. A time lock cannot be set up from inside. Almost like locking a prison call. You can't lock it from the inside of the cell, only from the outside. I suppose the one that did that would have to be out there somewhere too. I've often wondered how the Doctor escaped. It's nice to think that others might have too, in any case. "
Hailey sat in the car thinking intently and for the first time ever, really trying to work out exactly how the final events had unfolded. Exactly who, she wondered, to the point of nearing a momentary feeling of desperation, was this person outside the war who had finally succeeded in ending it. Whoever did it, she knew, would have likely survived and could well have escaped anywhere. Just the fact that this person, who's potential danger was without question, was out there in the universe and probably in possession of advanced time travel technology and scientific equipment scared her for the first time. She had, she realized with a start, been so caught up in the whole adventure of self discovery and exploration, that she missed the matter of a dangerous member of her father's society on the loose in time and space.
For the first time, she thought she understood completely the things the Doctor had explained to her months before, about the balance between the good and bad sides of Time Lord society. For the first time she really understood her her father's people really were capable of the most drastic and terribly frightful acts right along side the good. Their nature was so much like that of humans, yet existed within a far more advanced race of beings. Knowing humans as well as she did, that thought suddenly horrified her.
She reminded herself that she would feel better again once the growing sense of panic and loss of logic passed. She made a mental note to ask the Doctor about a possible survivor when she got back to the ship. Even as she did that however, a horrible sense of realization was forming in her mind before she could even try block it out. The words of the alien creature on the train a long time before spring to mind and its words repeated though her mind relentlessly. She remembered that the thing had accused the Doctor of destroying Gallifrey and she remembered how she'd brushed the whole thing off after a moment of reasoning it out. Her heartbeats increased as the truth hit her full force like a hard blow to the face. There was on other surviver, she knew then. The Doctor had been the one to end the war himself.
She fought back her tears and sat still and determined to hide her sudden reaction from her mother. Though she was suddenly so terrified and furious in equal parts, at the same time, she wanted to deal with the situation herself instead of finding her mother involved. As soon as the car pulled up along the road side, near the house and right next to the place where the TARDIS was parked and waiting, she said a quick and falsely cheerful goodbye and hurried out the passenger side door.
The Doctor and Rose were sitting in the console room laughing and chatting with each other about nothing or much importance when Hailey walked onto the ship. She let the door slam shut behind her and walked quickly up the ramp with such a look of despair, horror and rage on her face, that both stopped in mid-motion and got to their feet full of great concern, and both clueless as to what could possibly have happened.
"Doctor," Hailey said in a whimpering and shaky voice, that she had intended to be one of furious rage instead. "You can't really have been the destroyer of Gallifrey... could you?"
Finally away from her mother and her perceived need to hide her newest understanding she gave in to the flood of unrelenting tears that she'd fought back in the car.