Author's Note:

Thanks everyone for your reviews on the previous chapter. I can't tell you how lovely it was to get the e-mail notifications. Sadly, FFN doesn't seem quite as happy to have me back, as none of them are currently showing on the story and it won't let me reply to any of them. Not sure what's going on there, but hopefully it's just a New Year's glitch and will fix itself in due course. In the meantime, I would like to thank the following people here instead, as the site won't let me do it personally: Andy, tardislover1, Guest, PushtoShove, readthishit, the Doctor's Mistress, AnnieAnonym, Energetic red, aBlue Gillespian, Need My Mad Lover, Catelly and MountainLord-92. You are all awesome, and hopefully I'll be able to review reply to you all soon, if the site sorts itself out.

In the meantime, while I am on holiday and on a roll, have another chapter :)

(PS. To MountainLord-92: Thanks for reminding me about the quotes I used to put at the front of the chapters, it's been so long that I forgot about that. I've now amended Chapter 33 accordingly!)

- Chapter 34 -

"Time can say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you, I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time can say nothing but I told you so."

- W.H. Auden

The time rotor yawed back and forth, shrieking like a creature in pain. For a few, soul-shattering moments, it appeared that the Master's hastily-conceived plan would bring them all to ruin. The interior dimensions of the TARDIS began to warp and bleed into each other; twisting insanely, as though the Time Vortex was attempting to wring them out like a wet towel. Theta opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out, the sound snatched away and lost before it was ever born. Silence invaded his ears, too immense to fit inside his brain. He could barely see Koschei. He tried to focus his eyes, but the images he was receiving were bizarrely fractured. One moment his friend seemed incredibly tall, the next, smaller than a mouse, his face distorted on a thousand different planes. The sensation was like nothing Theta had ever experienced before; and was nothing he ever wanted to experience again.

Then, all at once, it was over. As if they had broken through some kind of barrier, everything began to subside and go back to normal. The striving engines eased and the oscillation of the central column slowed and settled, emanating a soft, humming sound. Gradually, the walls stopped pulsating and regained their usual solidity.

Theta fell to his knees, his cramped fingers losing their grip on the edge of the console. Behind him, Koschei was stretched out on the floor on his back, gasping for breath like a stranded fish. Shaking, Theta brought his hands up to his face, exploring his features with his fingers, making sure everything was still in the right place.

"I don't believe it," he murmured. "We're alive. We're actually alive!"

"Congratulate yourselves later," the Master said curtly. The black-clad hologram was circling the console, checking the instruments, still looking eerily like a ghost. "We still have a lot to do."

"It's all right for you," Theta retorted. "You're just an avatar. We're flesh and blood!"

"There are some advantages to being temporarily incorporeal, I admit. But there are some big disadvantages too," the Master growled. "Like needing to make use of a primitive device such as the TARDIS voice interface to communicate. And most of all, requiring the assistance of two immature numbskulls such as yourselves."

Pulling himself together, Koschei sat up, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Where are we, anyway?"

"We're hovering in Gallifrey's atmosphere, just inside what's left of the transduction barrier, directly above the Panopticon."

"The Panopticon!" The dark-haired boy thrust his disorientation aside and leapt to his feet, snatching at the navigation screen and whirling it around to face him. "We need to get to the Academy! Kat's in danger!"

"She's not there any more," the Master said, his tone flat. "Her hiding place in Borusa's study was discovered by Lord Marnal Oakdown, over an hour ago."

"Father." Koschei's face lost every scrap of colour it had ever possessed. Fear and loathing stirred in his eyes, a naked flash of pain that sent a vicarious shiver down Theta's spine. His shocked protest emerged as a jagged whisper. "No."

"Yes. Our father." For a fleeting moment, there was almost a flash of sympathy in the Master's own eyes as he looked at his younger self, dark memories flickering deep inside his hazel gaze. For just those few seconds, Theta saw the man stand once more in the boy's shoes, giving all he had, but never measuring up, never being good enough. "He's taken her to the Panopticon to have her publicly executed."

Warily, Theta rose and stood beside his stricken friend. "How do you know?"

"Because I was the one who brought her here, through the crack in time. We're inextricably linked. Wherever she is, part of me goes with her."

"You pulled her through the crack?" Theta's hackles rose at this information, his still mysterious protective instinct over Kat immediately roused. His best friend's future wife, that explained a lot, especially Koschei's strong, visceral attraction to her. But it didn't explain everything. "You caused her to break the Fourth Law of Time? What for?"

"To keep her safe. Her and the child."

"Well, you haven't done a very good job so far, have you?"

The Master glared at him furiously. "I don't need to justify myself to you, Doc... Theta."

"The child..." Koschei spoke up, interrupting the mounting tension. "If Kat's your... my... wife... then the child...?"

"Is mine, yes. My son. The Heir of Oakdown."

A look almost of awe crossed Koschei's face at this unheralded glimpse into what his life was destined to hold. "My son..." Then his jaw tightened. "Kat said the baby's father was a man called Harold Saxon."

The Master shrugged, sending a ripple through the hologram of his body. "Harold Saxon is an alias of mine. My past, your future. She didn't want to compromise the causal nexus by telling you the truth. She tends to worry about things like that."

The implication being, Theta supposed, that Koschei's future self didn't tend to worry about it, as proven by his disregard for the Laws of Time. Deep in his hearts, Theta wished he was more surprised about that.

"If you're going to save her, we have to hurry." The Master broke the conversation off, resuming his pacing around the console. "You'll need to reconfigure the localised teleport function to lift her out of there."

"You can't be serious!" Koschei protested. "To safely teleport her out of there from this distance... there's no way I can reconfigure the system that specifically! Especially when we don't even know exactly where she is."

"Oh, we know where she is. I can guarantee, she'll be standing in the dispersal chamber, directly over the access point to the Eye of Harmony." The Master's tone was like iron. "And I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to him."

With a nod of his head, he indicated Theta.

The blonde-haired boy's eyes widened. "Me? If Koschei can't do it, what makes you think I can?"

"Because I know your strengths as well as my own," the Master said. "That's the thing about you and teleports, you've always had a really good aim. Pinpoint accurate, in fact."

Theta swallowed hard. "If I get this wrong..."

"You won't. Because if you do, she dies."

The bleak finality of the hologram's words made Theta break out in a cold sweat. He shot an anguished look over at Koschei. He'd never held someone else's life in his hands before like this... and when that someone was as precious as Kat... He could feel panic clawing its way up his throat.

"It's time for you to decide," the Master said harshly. "Both of you, right here and right now. Whether you'll sink back into the pit of mediocrity with the other Time Lords. Or whether this will be the day you reach for the stars."

Reach for the stars... He could hear Kat's voice in his head still, as clearly as if she was standing right next to him. Oh, Theta! The stars are anything but a myth. Before this all happened, they were our birthright – yours, mine, Koschei's – the song that called all three of us out into the Universe. Through crimson stars and silent stars and tumbling nebulas like oceans set on fire. Through torrents of light that scorched the skies and danced across a million horizons. Throughout all of time and space; everywhere and anywhere and beyond, limitless and free. It's all you've ever wanted. You have to remember that!

"He's right, Theta." Koschei put a hand on his friend's arm, a gesture of desperate encouragement. "You're the only one who has a chance of pulling this off. You can do it, I know you can."

Numbly, Theta nodded. Then he stepped up to the console and began to enter the commands to call up the localised teleport protocols, his hands trembling as they raced over the keyboard.

The hologram of the Master glowed brightly for a moment and then, slowly, began to vanish.

"Wait!" Koschei cried in alarm. "Where are you going?"

"I'll be back," came his older self's voice, from the swirl of ever-diminishing light. "For now... I have an execution to oversee."

River had no choice but to leave John lying where he fell. It seemed wrong just to abandon him. But somewhere deep in the museum, the Doctor needed her. Reaching out, she closed the ex-Time Agent's staring eyes and brushed a last kiss on his already-cooling forehead.

"I'm sorry, Tobias. I'm so sorry."

Then she turned and ran for the trapdoor leading to the lower parts of the building, leaving him sprawled in a pool of his own blood on the cement rooftop behind her. Holstering her laser weapon, she climbed down the ladder as quickly as she could and dropped lightly to the ground in the lower corridor.

At the other end of the passageway, masked in the gloom, she detected a faint movement.

"Doctor?"

Slowly, a dark mass began to separate itself from the shadows, rolling ponderously towards her. To her surprise, she realised it was a Dalek, its casing ancient and decayed, grey with dust. Having been trapped inside the TARDIS for most of the Doctor's most recent escapades, she had no idea how it had come to be here. But having just been attacked by a crowd of mummies restored by the light of the Pandorica, she could guess.

"Ex-term-in-ate! Sys-tems re-stor-ing!" the Dalek rasped painfully, waving its blaster at her in a weak gesture. "You... will be... ex-ter-min-ated!"

River's mouth curled upwards in a cold smile. The suppressed rage inside her at John's death was screaming for release, and she could think of no better way of expressing it than giving the universe one less Dalek to worry about.

"Not yet," she replied, her voice calm as she unhurriedly drew her own weapon. "Your systems are still restoring, which means that your shield density is compromised."

Without taking her eyes from the oncoming Dalek, her slender fingers began to adjust the settings on her gun. "One Alpha Mezon burst through your eyestalk would kill you stone dead."

The Dalek hesitated briefly, unable to deny the truth of her words. The corridor was long and empty. It was too late to run and there was no place for it to hide.

"Rec-ords in-di-cate that you will show mer-cy. You are an as-soc-i-ate of the Doc-tor's."

The cold smile widened. "I'm River Song." Her arm extended, the weapon balanced with the perfect aim of the trained killer. "Check your records again."

The Dalek's plunger twitched imploringly, in a way that in any other creature would have been almost pathetic. "Me-rcy."

She raised one cool eyebrow, the angle of her gun not wavering one iota. "Say it again!"

"MER-CY!"

River thought of all the countless people across the universe who had begged the Daleks in vain for this very same thing. The harsh scream of the vile creature's plea had barely died away before she pulled the trigger. The blast struck the eyestalk with deadly accuracy, the dome exploding in a spctacular, searing flash of light. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left of the Dalek's travel machine but a shattered, blackened shell, and the stench of burnt flesh wafting through the air.

Her face impassive, River lowered her gun and then kept on walking.

John, she thought, would have approved.

Lord Marnal Oakdown was enjoying himself. There were few things he liked better than playing to an appreciative audience. It helped to feed his monumental ego. He knew he cut an impressive figure, standing here at the heart of the Panopticon, garbed in his rich red robes, his handsome head thrown back, his arms flung wide as if to embrace the crowd. He had wealth, he had power, he had physical presence. He, like Gallifrey, would continue on forever, regeneration after regeneration, the rest of the universe be damned. And now, there was nothing and nobody left who could stand in his way, because he was the only one that knew the truth.

His eyes glittered with triumph as he gazed over at the tiny, slender figure trapped inside the transparent cylinder. Just one minor obstacle to be removed, and it would all be his, for all eternity.

Solemnly, he returned his attention to the breathlessly waiting crowd of Time Lords. "Let it be known that this execution has been carried out with all due process required by the Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey. So perish all traitors."

With that, he inclined his head to Rannex, who was poised by the bank of controls that operated the dispersal chamber. "Castellan, do your duty."

Obediently, Rannex pulled down the red lever, and there was an audible intake of breath across the Panopticon as the cylinder containing Tejana began to hum.

Gloatingly, Lord Oakdown turned to watch. He had to admit, she was a brave little thing, standing like a princess with her head held defiantly high, despite the hopelessness of her situation. It would have given him a lot more pleasure to hear her beg for her life. However, he still fully intended to enjoy watching her die. His only regret was that his cur of a son wasn't present, so that he could force him to witness it as well.

Pinkish-red rings of light were beginning to form in the cylinder above Tejana's head. Once they dropped, once they enveloped her body, the dispersal process would commence.

Without warning, a blue-white shimmer seemed to flow over her slender body like water, and she disappeared, leaving the dispersal chamber completely empty. In a gutwrenching flash, it dawned on Lord Oakdown that the impossible had happened – somehow, she'd just been teleported to safety, right in front of his eyes.

He stepped forward, opening his mouth to give an involuntary scream of rage. However, the cry never had the chance to be uttered. Deep in the inner pockets of his robe, the laser screwdriver he had stolen from Tejana began to vibrate with a resonance known only to the Master. A second blue-white shimmer burst from the triple diode tip, a radiance crawling over his body and shrouding him from head to toe. Before he could draw breath, he found himself standing inside the glittering cylinder, where only moments before, Tejana had been trapped. The shackles that had bound her wrists were now fastened on his, pinning him to the silver disc beneath his feet, as the lethal spirals of light coiled overhead.

"NO!" he bellowed. "Stop the execution! For Rassilon's sake, STOP THE EXECUTION!"

But it was far too late for that. The process had already been set in motion. There was no calling it back. In the last, terrified split-second of life he had remaining to him, Lord Oakdown thought he saw an odd reflection on the inside of the glassy surface of the cylinder. A man with tousled white-blonde hair and bitter whiskey-brown eyes, dressed all in black, his arms folded implacably.

The last thing he ever saw, as the rings dropped around him, was a beautiful white smile of satisfaction and vindication; and the last word he ever said, as the knowledge of who was destroying him sank inexorably into his brain, was his son's name, whispered in disbelief.

After that, there was no time for anything else, as every atom in his body was shredded in excruciating agony and scattered across what was left of the universe.

Another Author's Note: And yes, I still love my canon references. If anyone can tell me the Nu-Who episode where the Doctor's pinpoint accuracy with teleports is mentioned, I'll give you a virtual cookie 3