Did you know that anxiety disorders can build up? I've recently been put on meds to treat my 20-odd year anxiety disorder. Don't expect too much, I've had this chapter written for a year.
The Temporal Schism that Donna has managed to locate is much larger than she had anticipated, if the sensor data is to be believed. Temporal Schisms are tricky things, and while the sensors describe a probable size that might fit a few earths inside it, it may simply be that they are picking up the complete energy output at once that the schism will ever produce. Tricky indeed.
Well, there is only one way to find out. The TARDIS' are hovering several thousand miles away, so it should be safe to open the doors to have a peek. Donna shrugs off the uneasy thought that it is more a Doctor thing to do even as she throws open the doors with a flourish.
Well, maybe not that tricky, Tinker thinks, her eyes full of the enormous naturally occurring tear in time and space. It is a familiar sight, even as she has never seen anything like it before, even as her mind tries to expand again as it did when she was a child, even as her mind filters out the unnecessary data trying to cram it's way in. It takes her a moment to bring herself under control again. It has been a long time since she's been in such a situation.
"Right, well," she mutters to herself, then turns around and heads towards her workshop. She has a harvester to send out and slim time to send it out in. It is Jenny's big day, after all, and her darling girl will need all the support they can offer is she is going to come through this unscathed.
BABY has helpfully collected almost all the components for a harvester for her, spread out over her favorite workspace in the shop, and while it has been some time since she's had to build something like this, she does in fact still have the nearly perfect memory of her youth. It only takes a few hours, and most of that is pure manual labor. No matter how smart she is, she still hasn't figured out a way to speed certain processes up without a time dilation feed, and even that is more a shunting of spent time to the side, rather than truly speeding anything up.
By the time the harvester stands ready to deploy, Donna has grown a bit worried over her strangely missing companions. She had expected at least one interruption over her work, maybe some questions or suggestions from either doctor, but they had left her completely to her work. It seems rather out of character, as far as Donna is concerned, so she seeks them out. Only to check on them, after all, those two do rather have a habit of getting into trouble, and they have more important things to do other than rescuing them from whatever madness they've cooked up.
Madness is perhaps the right word, she thinks to herself as she freezes in the doorway to the medbay. Her two missing doctors are clustered together beneath what she thinks is the remains of a chameleon arch that has been thoroughly cannibalized, Martha strapped into their new contraption and the Doctor holding what might have been a comically large red button in any other circumstances.
"Right, ready?" the Doctor asks, even as Donna is working through her stupefaction. Martha nods with surprising enthusiasm, and before Donna can say a word to stop whatever the heck they are doing, The Doctor presses the button.
A bizarrely mechanical whine issues from the bastardized contraption as Martha is engulfed in what can only be vortex energy drawn directly from the core of the TARDIS', similar in many ways to the glow of a regeneration.
Apparently it isn't as painful as Donna remembers a chameleon arch to be, because the sounds pulled from the darker woman are anything but pained, joined by what seems more like maniacal laughter from her dear husband in a crescendo of sound that continues even after the light starts to recede.
Martha seems to have lost consciousness, though seems otherwise unchanged and unharmed. For a moment Donna can't for the life of her see what that was suppose to accomplish, until suddenly her mind is slapped by the presence of what feels suspiciously like a newly loomed Gallifreyan mind, fluttering to wakefulness.
"Oh for fucks sakes, you numpty moron. What have you done?" she doesn't so much yell as breathe loudly, startling the unaware Doctor, who turns to her wide-eyed and guilty from reading whatever read-outs the contraption is showing.
"Um," he starts, looking between Donna and Martha, then following a connection on the machine that Donna hadn't even noticed until it reached the bed Jenny slept on, then back to Donna.
"I…" he continues, as Donna stares blankly at the machine, her mind trying to dissect it to be anything that might not just have placed her daughter in danger without her knowledge.
"Well, you see," The Doctor starts again, more confident now that several moments have passed without an explosion from either machine or Donna.
"Martha and I were discussing how we were going to get her through the whole Schism plan without her dying or becoming brain dead, which I would argue is pretty much the same thing, but now isn't really the time for that discussion, well, anyway Martha asked if we couldn't just turn her into a time lord with the chameleon arch, which of course we couldn't." The Doctor pauses with a demonstrative shrug of his shoulder,
"A laughable idea. Until!" he practically jumps into the air at his own brilliance, "of course, I had an idea. I mean, I still can't turn people into time lords willy nilly, but then I thought, I don't really have to." The Doctor is practically vibrating with excitement now.
"I just have to turn her into a garden variety Gallifreyan, and then she has a much higher chance of surviving the Schism than if she were human, aaaand we have a perfectly useful framework I could copy in the form of Jenny, who was already unconscious so it wouldn't hurt her at all, and et voila! Two young Gallifreyans!" He ends his spiel with a grandiose gesture, his tone of voice delighted and amazed at himself as could be.
Donna has no words. None at all.
The Doctor seems to realize that this is probably not a good thing and stuffs his hands back into his pockets, his bright smile slowly dimming and turning uncertain.
"Donna?"
Donna blinks, her mind still processing this idiocy, though she decides to just bite the bullet and ask a few of the questions she has running through her mind.
"Have you lost your mind?" is the first thing out, followed by; "Was Jenny safe during your little experiment?" Donna hisses, gesturing angrily to her sleeping daughter, then back to Martha, still unconscious in her chair, "was that safe at all for either of them?"
The Doctor seems to realize how worried she is, as he walks towards her, hand held out to her calmingly and an apologetic expression on his goofy face.
"Oh, Donna, Jenny was never in any danger, I promise, and Martha knew the risks associated with the procedure." He comforts her, or at least that's what he intends, Donna knows.
"Anyway, there's no need to worry," the doctor said, his tone once more bright and optimistic as it always is when he thinks he's found the answer to the universe and wants a pat of the back.
"Martha will be fine, once we finish with the schism, all we need to do is hard reset the Chameleon Arch, and she will be right back to being the lovable human doctor that she's always been." He gestures brightly to the spread out guts of the machine as he talks, one of the dials or possibly one of the switches probably rewired to function as a hard reset.
Donna isn't impressed with the posturing, and she isn't all that calmed down, given that there is a very real Gallifreyan mind reaching out in blind instinct that will need to be tethered if Martha is to make it through the trauma of the Schism in tact, which in turn means that she will have to suffer the breaking of yet another bond once the woman is back to her human self.
The Doctor should of course have been aware of that, but he is his usual thoughtless self, or perhaps he's just not that concerned about it. Maybe he thinks that he will carry that burden all alone, for All Donna knows, and isn't aware that even as they stand there, the juvenile mind is latching on to them both. It amazes her that he can't feel it the way she can, or if he can, he pretends that he can't, which makes no sense.
"All right, space boy. As long as you know what you've done, fine. We're already at the Schism, and as far as my calculations tell me, we're at an appropriate distance to induce temporal trauma, so wake up the girls and help me lug them to the doors. Rassilion only knows whats going to happen, but I'll trust your judgement for once, I guess." she mutters and walks over to stand by her daughter.
Jenny is still the most precious little girl in the universe, as far as Donna is concerned, even if she is about to take the last step into the life of an adult Time Lord. Hopefully the bonds between herself and her daughter, as well as her doofus of a husband, will be enough to ensure that Jenny makes it through the experience whole and sane.
"Al right," the doctor says, then brings out what looks like a hypo and injects something into the junior doctor, following up with a few steps and injecting Jenny as well, "That should have them up and about by the time we reach the doors." he says.
He pauses momentarily as Donna feels his own reaction to Martha's mental grabbing, feels the nascent bond snap into place along side that of Jenny, but he shows no other outward signs that he might not have realized what would happen. Donna leaves it along and helps her slowly waking daughter to her feet. The walk to the doors is slow and tedious, as if the TARDIS' are deliberately lengthening the corridors to allow the two young women to wake up and prove the Doctor right.
The doors opened at their arrival in the control room.
Empty space was the first thing anyone would think when faced with the great expanse visible through the blue doors. It would have unnerved Donna, who had been frightened of empty spaces, both real and imagined.
Tinker saw so much more than that.
There was a certain clarity of thought that only came with this kind of emptiness. She stood with Jenny leaning heavily against her shoulder and revelled in the feeling of her mind floating on a wave of boundless possibility. She needed this, almost as much as Jenny did. Tinker needed this perspective, this illustration of possibilities of boundless space.
Part of her mind bloomed out wards towards the great black that filled her field of vision, a tense pressure, like a muscle fully extending after having been still for too long. It was painful in a way, but the rush of euphoria more than made up for it, filling her with a sense of immortality.
She carried the waking form of her daughter towards the very edge of the TARDIS doors, idly smiling as the TARDIS expanded the door enough that both adult Time Lords could stand side by side with their precious cargo without being cramped.
Rightly enough, the girls were both standing on their own by the time they all stood comfortably in the door. Though Donna hardly had time or presence of mind to note it, her euphoria was not unnoticed. The Doctor kept glancing her way, a thoughtful frown pulling at the sides of his expressive mouth.
The Schism would erupt directly in front of the door, if Donna had managed to get the positioning right, far enough away that they would be unaffected by the shock wave that followed, but close enough that the radiation would trigger Temporal Shock in unprepared minds. It had been some time since she had been close to a Schism, but it had been a rather common occurrence when she had worked to rescue damaged TARDISes. It took barely a moment to shore up her mental defences.
Perhaps foolishly she didn't bother to ask The Doctor if he was familiar with the procedure, or even if he needed a refresher. It slipped her mind that he might not be trained to handle it, as he handled practically everything else with such aplomb.
In an instant the black was filled as far as the eye could see, though filled with what would take a single person more than their own lifetime to describe. Even shored up, Tinkers defences shuddered against the backlash of the unrestrained of a Wild Schism.
Even against such forces, she had not shielded the bonds in her mind, intent on keeping a close eye on Jenny's reaction, and somewhat reluctantly Martha's as well. She had never done this for anyone else, but remembered well the feeling of her own matriarch supporting her during her ceremony. If the unfeeling Bluegrove Matriarch could do it, then The Tinker would do the same for her children, who even then were starting to bloom beautifully.
The Doctor was not handling it as well.