Notes: Sorry for the delay. Now that the kids are back in school and I'm done school, I should have more time on the computer to work on this story. I will be skipping a couple of episodes, but I really want to get to the Day of the Doctor stuff, I've been anxious for that part since I started all this. I changed this episode quite a bit, but I hope you like it.
The Doctor and Rose made a brief stop to visit their family on Earth, just in time for a party to celebrate Clara's ninth birthday. James had put off having her look into the time vortex, but the Doctor urged him to get it over with soon, as it would be easier for her to grow accustomed to her time senses when she was younger. They also asked to hear Jamie's story about meeting the Ice Warriors.
Apparently, he and River had landed on ancient Mars before Clara was born and they had made quite an impression on them. James was given an honorary title among the Warriors and the legend of how he helped them through a near catastrophe was started.
Little Clara was enthralled by the tale and the Doctor suggested that she could do a research project on the aliens and present it to them on their next visit.
When the Doctor and Rose returned to their TARDIS later that evening, they found a much older Clara reading in the library. She placed her bookmark and looked up at them as they joined her on the sofa.
"We brought some leftover cake. It's in the kitchen, though you've had some before. Your ninth birthday," Rose told her with a wink.
"Could you explain the wolf thing? You were terrified, gran," Clara asked her.
"I suppose. Your dad has heard the story a few times, from us and from Uncle Jack," Rose agreed, settling in her husband's arms to tell the story. "So, Uncle Jack, the Doctor and I were transmatted out of the TARDIS and onto this space station, orbiting the Earth. On it, were a bunch of reality game shows where, if you lost, you died. Thing is, you didn't die right away, instead you were sent to the Daleks, and used to help recreate their army. Of course, guess where I ended up? So, after the Doctor rescued me from the Dalek ship, we didn't really have a way to destroy them all."
"You didn't just run away though, right?" Clara questioned.
"Of course not," the Doctor assured her. "I had started building a Delta wave, but if I used it to destroy the Daleks, it also would have killed everyone on Earth. So, I sent Rose home in the TARDIS. She didn't know how to fly her and I thought she would be safe, even if we all died in the future."
"What did you do?" Clara wondered.
"I opened the heart of the TARDIS. I looked into her and she looked into me. I absorbed the entire time vortex and took the ship back to save everyone. See, the whole time that I had been with the Doctor until then, we kept seeing the words Bad Wolf everywhere we went. We didn't know what it meant, but when he sent me home, I realized that it was a message telling me that I could get back. Looking into the TARDIS transformed me temporarily into the Bad Wolf. I spread the message through time, made Uncle Jack immortal, destroyed all of the Daleks, and connected myself forever to our wonderful ship. That connection is what keeps me young, so I can stay with the Doctor for the rest of his life," Rose explained.
"The power has come back several times, when people we care about have been in danger. But Rose can't control it yet. She can't call on it consciously and doesn't remember what happened afterward. I have to believe that a power coming from Rose and the TARDIS can only be good, but the lack of control over it is terrifying to say the least," the Doctor added.
"I suppose it would be," Clara acknowledged quietly as she took in this new information about her family. "But the power of the heart of the TARDIS is enormous, you shouldn't have even survived it."
"She wouldn't have, if I hadn't taken the power out of her once the Daleks had been destroyed. I absorbed it all from her and sent it back into the ship. It killed me to do it of course, but at least I could regenerate," the Doctor told her.
"Gran, you risked your life to save him, not even knowing what you would do when you got there. Then you gave up one of your regenerations to save her, granddad. It's wonderful and tragic and completely mad all at once," she realized.
"The Stuff of Legend," the Doctor agreed and hugged his wife a little tighter.
"Now, I think we should all get some sleep before we go off on a new adventure tomorrow. We're going ghost hunting," Rose said as she got up from the sofa to head to bed.
A bit of research into interesting mysteries for them to explore had led them to Major Alec Palmer and Emma Grayling. In 1974, Professor Palmer had bought a house that was considered haunted, with the express intention of exploring the mystery of the ghost. There was extensive documentation about him and his 'assistant' Emma, who was an empathic psychic. The Doctor used the excuse of a government inspection to get them into the house and looking at their equipment.
It took some convincing, but eventually, the pair explained the details of their work. The time travelers also quickly discovered that the pair of them were in love with each other and denying it awkwardly.
"Would you care to have a look?" Palmer asked as he directed them to a bulletin board with photos pinned all over it. "Caliburn House is over four hundred years old, but she has been here much longer. The Caliburn Ghast. She's mentioned in local Saxon poetry and parish folk tales. The Wraith of the Lady, the Maiden in the Dark, the Witch of the Well."
"Is she real? As in, actually real?" Clara questioned excitedly.
"Oh, she's real," Palmer insisted. "In the seventeenth century, a local clergyman saw her. He wrote that her presence was accompanied by a dreadful knocking, as if the Devil himself demanded entry. During the war, American airmen stationed here left offerings of tinned Spam. The tins were found in 1965, bricked up in the servants' pantry, along with a number of handwritten notes. Appeals to the Ghast. 'For the love of God, stop screaming.'"
Looking at the pictures, Rose asked him, "How come she's always in the exact same position? In all these pictures, it's like she's frozen or something, yeah?"
"You're right, gran. She never changes. The angle's different, the framing, but she's always in exactly the same position. Why is that?" Clara agreed, examining them more closely.
"Sorry, did you call her gran?" Emma interrupted.
"We don't know," Palmer replied, ignoring the question of their relationships to each other. "She's an objective phenomenon, but objective recording equipment can't detect her."
"Without the presence of a powerful psychic," the Doctor added.
"Absolutely. Very well done," he agreed.
"She knows I'm here. I can feel her calling out to me," Emma told them, staring into the distance.
"What's she saying?" Clara wondered.
"Help me."
Leaving the couple that wasn't yet a couple to their work, the time travellers explored the house in search of the ghost. The Doctor kept a firm hold on his wife's hand as he carried a large candelabra with them to light the way through the dark corridors. They could each feel the other's excitement over the mystery, despite a bit of fear in the face of meeting ghosts. The last times they'd faced ghosts they had either been non-corporeal beings using natural gas to inhabit dead bodies, or camouflaged Cybermen invading the planet.
As they explored, they all had the feeling that they were being watched by something. Nothing showed itself or attacked them, but there was a definite feeling of a presence following them through the various rooms. The Doctor found a circular spot in the exact centre of the house that was colder than the air around it. They weren't sure what it meant, but he marked the area on the floor with a piece of chalk from his pocket.
There was a loud banging noise echoing through the house as the temperature in the entire house began to drop. The candles the Doctor was carrying were blown out as the trio tried to figure out where the sound was coming from.
"Okay, what is that?" Clara demanded nervously.
"It's a very loud noise. It's a very loud, very angry noise," the Doctor told her.
"What's making it?" she asked her grandfather.
"I don't know. Are you making it?" he responded.
"Not getting any better with reassuring the children, love," Rose told him.
"Granddad?" Clara prompted.
"Yes?"
"I may be a teeny, tiny bit terrified," she admitted.
"Yes?"
"But I'm still a grown-up," she protested.
"Mainly, yes, and?" he asked, not sure what she was getting at.
"There's no need to actually hold my hand," she insisted.
The Doctor looked at the hand he had clasped with his wife and the other that was still clutching the useless candelabra before answering, "Clara."
"Yeah?"
"I'm not holding your hand," he whispered.
"Oh my god!" Rose gasped and they all screamed as they ran back down the stairs to join the others.
As they all gathered together, looking around fearfully for the source of the noise or a drop in temperature, a black, oval disturbance, hovered in the air above them. They couldn't tell what it was exactly, but there was no doubt that it was related to what was going on.
"Has this happened before?" the Doctor asked him.
"Never," Palmer answered fearfully.
"Camera. Camera!" the Doctor demanded and began taking pictures of the phenomenon.
In all of the activity going on, Emma seemed to sense an intense psychic message and by the time the disturbance was gone, she was unconscious in Alec Palmer's arms. Rose looked at the wall by the staircase and grabbed the camera from her husband's hands to take a picture of the words 'Help me' written in frost on the wallpaper.
Rose and Clara stayed with Emma while she recovered from the events, while the Doctor went with Alec to develop the photographs. The ladies tried to convince Emma that she should stop wasting time and admit her feelings to Professor Palmer, but she wasn't convinced that he felt the same, despite their assurances.
Ultimately, the Doctor came back, urging Rose and Clara back to the TARDIS to do some more investigating about this ghost. They assured the others that they'd be back.
"So, where are we going?" Clara asked as the Doctor began typing coordinates into the console.
"Nowhere. We're staying right here. Right here, on this exact spot, if I can work out how to do it," he replied.
"You're not going to break the professor's camera are you?" Rose asked, noticing that he had borrowed it.
"Of course not," he assured her.
"So, when are we going?" Clara revised her question.
"Oh, that is good. That is top-notch."
"And the answer is?" Clara prompted.
"We're going always," the Doctor told her.
"Haven't heard that one before," Rose commented.
"We're going always?" Clara questioned, not quite following how that worked.
"Totally," he insisted.
"That's not actually a sentence," Clara argued as he dashed down the stairs to the room below the main console.
"For once, I'm not following either, sweetheart," Rose agreed.
"Well, it's got a verb in it," he called to them before coming back into view. He held up the orange space suit that he had worn on Krop Tor, though Rose hoped he had a new helmet. That one had been broken when he jumped to the bottom of the pit. "What do you think?"
"Colour's a bit boisterous," Clara replied.
"I think it brings out my eyes," he replied. "What's wrong, love?"
"Why exactly do you need that if we're staying on Earth?" Rose asked, feeling uneasy about the trouble they had faced the last time he wore that suit.
"I told you, we're going always. If we go back far enough in Earth's history, the environment isn't always friendly to most life forms. And you know what it's like in a few billion years, after all, we were there. It'll just be for a minute or two. Promise," he assured her.
He took the TARDIS as far back and forward as physically possible. At various points, he went out and took photographs of the exact same spot, trying to catch images of the ghost throughout time. The whole thing only took a few minutes and they were back to where they started at Caliburn House.
The Doctor made the photos from the camera into slides and projected them up onto the wall to explain what was really going on with the ghost.
"Right, done. That's it. Gather round, gather round. Roll up, roll up. The Ghost of Caliburn House. Never changing, trapped in a moment of fear and torment. But, what if she's not? What if she's just trapped somewhere time runs more slowly than it does here? What if a second to her was a hundred thousand years to us? And what if somebody has a magic box. A blue box, probably. What if said somebody could take a snapshot of her, say, every few million years?" he told them as he showed the pictures and they saw a young woman, running and glancing over her shoulder.
"She's not a ghost. But she's definitely a lost soul. Her name is Hila Tacorian. She's a pioneer, a time traveller, or at least she will be in a few hundred years," he told them, having recognized the young woman, who was, after all, one of the people his people watched out for.
"Time travel's not possible. The paradoxes-" Professor Palmer argued.
"Resolve themselves, by and large," the Doctor countered curtly.
"How long has she been alone?" Emma wondered.
"Well, time travel's a funny old thing. I mean, from her perspective, she crash landed three minutes ago," he replied.
"Crash landed? Where?" Emma asked.
"She's in a pocket universe. A distorted echo of our own. They happen sometimes but never last for long," he explained. He tried to show them by blowing up a couple of balloons from his pockets. "Our universe. Hila Tacorian's here, in a pocket universe. You're a lantern, shining across the dimensions, guiding her home, back to the land of the living."
"But what's she running from?" Clara asked.
"Well, that's the best bit. We don't know yet. Shall we see?" the Doctor said as he flipped to the next slide. In the photo, there was a creature coming out from behind a tree.
"What is that?" Clara questioned, not recognizing the alien from her studies.
"I don't know. Still, not to worry," the Doctor assured them.
"Wait a minute, Doctor. Just want to go over all the facts for a moment because something isn't adding up to me. The cold spots and the portal thing are this pocket universe attaching to ours, yeah?" Rose asked.
"Yes. A way through from here to there," he agreed.
"And something is chasing her there, got that part. But what I don't get is the feeling we had of being watched here, something taking Clara's hand, and the banging noise. How do those fit in with this?" she continued.
"Ah… Good points. All of them. Not quite sure yet, but working on them," the Doctor acknowledged and gave his wife a quick kiss on the forehead for being more observant than he was, as usual.
"So, what do we do?" Emma asked, still wanting to help the girl whose loneliness and terror she had felt.
"Not we, you. You save Hila Tacorian because you are Emma Grayling. You are the lantern. The rest of us are just along for the ride, I'm afraid. We need some sturdy rope and a blue crystal from Metebelis Three. Plus some Kendal Mint Cake," the Doctor told her before tugging Rose and Clara back to the TARDIS with him to get their needed supplies.
"Can't you just, you know?" Clara asked as he piled rope and a couple of harnesses into her arms.
"What?" he asked distractedly.
"Fly the TARDIS into the parallel universe?" she clarified.
"Ah, it's not a parallel universe. It's a pocket universe. Plus, it is collapsing. I mean, the Tardis could get in there all right, but entropy would bleed her power sources, you see? Trap her there until the entire universe decayed back into the quantum foam. Which would take about three minutes, give or take, you know," he explained.
"Not enough time to find her and get out of there," Rose agreed.
After creating several timey-whimey type gadgets and a headpiece holding the crystal from Metebelis Three, they were ready. Rose and the Doctor refused to be separated, despite assurances that they would definitely make it back. So, both of them were attached to the rope with harnesses and as soon as the portal into the pocket universe appeared, they jumped through. They found themselves in a misty forest and agreed that Rose would stay attached to the rope while the Doctor went in search of Hila. It wouldn't do them any good to lose their path back when they had so little time to find her.
He came back fairly quickly and hooked Hila to his harness.
"Grab the rope. Give it three tugs, quick as you like," he instructed.
"What about you two?" Hila asked worriedly.
"We'll follow you with the other rope. Best not risk all of us going at once," the Doctor told her.
Hila tugged on the rope and was pulled back into their universe. Rose watched as her husband looked around the forest, searching presumably for the creature.
"We could have gone with her, couldn't we?" Rose guessed.
"Course we could. But something about what you said before isn't quite sitting right with me. What is this creature? What was the knocking? What took Clara's hand?" he rambled.
"The rope is pulling, love. Grab onto me, please," she urged.
"Yes. Time differential. Will give me a little longer to figure this out," he agreed, though not sure how he would get back if need be.
The couple fell onto the floor as they were pulled through the portal, their minds still racing about the pieces that didn't fit. Emma was breathing heavily from the ordeal, nearly passing out. Hila was staring at all of them in awe of what just happened.
"Hang on, love. We are missing the obvious here, and for us to miss this, of all people, is ridiculous. There's two of them. One there. One here. This is their Canary Wharf!" Rose realized.
"What? Of course! It only makes sense. That's why the other one is staying right here. Looking for that crack to get him back here! You are brilliant! And we need the TARDIS this time," he shouted, jumping up from the floor and taking her hand to run back to their time ship.
"Granddad! Are you coming back?" Clara shouted after them, but decided that she could always call her parents to pick her up if they weren't back soon.
"Did you say granddad? But you look the same age?" Professor Palmer asked her.
It was only a few minutes later, that the TARDIS returned from its dangerous trip into the collapsing pocket universe, but the creature that had been trapped there with Hila, was now back with its partner in the house.
The Doctor and Rose exited the TARDIS to join the others outside. Emma was hugging Hila goodbye, Clara watching happily.
"Where will you go?" Emma asked her.
"He can't take me home. History says I went missing," Hila told her.
"But he can change history," Emma argued.
"No, no, no, I can't, actually. There are fixed points in time, you see-" he began but Rose put her hand over his mouth when she saw the others' eyes glaze over slightly at the beginning of his babble.
"I knew you were there. I could feel you," Hila told Emma.
"I know."
"Have we?" Hila wondered, looking at the other woman confusedly.
"We can't have. You haven't even been born yet," Emma reasoned.
"No, you can't have met but she can be your great, great, great, great, great granddaughter. Yours too, of course," the Doctor interrupted and gestured between Emma and Alec. Both of their eyes widened at the statement. "But you guessed that already, didn't you? Oh. Apparently not," he realized.
"The paradoxes-" Professor Palmer began, but was again interrupted.
"Resolve themselves, by and large. That's why the psychic link was so powerful. Blood calling to blood, out of time. Not everything ends. Not love. Not always," the Doctor insisted.
"Doctor, what about, what about us? Emma and me?" he asked.
"What about you?" the Doctor wondered.
"Well, what's supposed to happen? I mean, what do we do now?"
"Hold hands," the Doctor insisted, taking his wife's hand and squeezing it tightly. "That's what you're meant to do. Keep doing that and don't let go. That's the secret."
"Granddad? What did you two mean about Canary Wharf?" Clara asked.
"A long time ago, before your dad was even born, I was trapped in a parallel universe," Rose told her. "A battle with Daleks and Cybermen, involving a rift between the two universes, ended with me trapped on the wrong side. It was nearly three years for the Doctor, but about ten months for your dad and me. I never gave up finding a way back, and we made it."
"And we have a similar story here. It's the oldest story in the universe, this one or any other. Boy and girl fall in love, get separated by events. War, politics, accidents in time. She's thrown out of the hex, or he's thrown into it. Since then they've been yearning for each other across time and space, across dimensions. This wasn't a ghost story, it's a love story!" the Doctor continued.
"But the monsters?" Clara asked.
"How do sharks make babies?"
"Carefully?" Clara guessed.
"No, no, no. Happily!" he corrected her.
"Sharks don't actually smile. They're just, well, they've got lots and lots of teeth. They're quite eaty," she argued.
"But Clara, they don't hurt each other," Rose insisted.
"Exactly. But birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Every lonely monster needs a companion," he concluded, hugging his wife from behind.
"You're not a monster, my love. Let's find another adventure," Rose responded, taking Clara's hand to lead her back to the TARDIS.