Author's Note
Welcome to Time Fracture! My plan is to update every other week, occasionally more frequently. If you have a moment, please leave a review. Thanks!
Chapter 1
What happened at the end of Kill the Moon…
DOCTOR: Well, I didn't do it for Courtney. I didn't know what was going to happen. Do you think I'm lying?
(Clara is crying with rage.)
CLARA: I don't know. I don't know. If you didn't do it for her, I mean. Do you know what? It was, it was cheap, it was pathetic. No, no, no. It was patronizing. That was you patting us on the back, saying, you're big enough to go to the shops by yourself now. Go on, toddle along.
DOCTOR: No, that was me allowing you to make a choice about your own future. That was me respecting you.
CLARA: Oh, my God, really? Was it? Yeah, well, respected is not how I feel.
DOCTOR: Right. Okay. Er.
CLARA: I nearly didn't press that button. I nearly got it wrong. That was you, my friend, making me scared. Making me feel like a bloody idiot.
DOCTOR: Language.
CLARA: Oh, don't you ever tell me to mind my language. Don't you ever tell me to take the stabilizers off my bike. And don't you dare lump me in with the rest of all the little humans that you think are so tiny and silly and predictable. You walk our Earth, Doctor, you breathe our air. You make us your friend, and that is your moon too. And you can damn well help us when we need it.
DOCTOR: I was helping.
CLARA: What, by clearing off?
DOCTOR: Yes.
CLARA: Yeah, well, clear off! Go on. You can clear off. Get back in your lonely, your lonely bloody Tardis and you don't come back.
DOCTOR: Clara. Clara.
CLARA: You go away. Okay? You go a long way away.
"Well, that went well, Doctor. Stupid, stupid Doctor!"
The Doctor scrubbed his face with both hands, trying to process the stew of emotions as the TARDIS drifted aimlessly in the time vortex. He'd stepped in it again, and fully in it, judging from his human companion's reaction.
"But I really was trying to help!" He shouted toward the ceiling. The TARDIS remained obstinately mute on the subject, though the air was heavy with her opinion on the matter.
"I am useless."
He did consider popping ahead in Clara's timeline. A few months might be enough for her to get over it and maybe even grow to miss him. But he worried that this really was it. This was a thing Clara would not get over. Would not forgive him for. Ultimately, he decided to respect her wish for no contact and just hope that she had a change of heart.
He paced in a circle around the console. Then, he went to the upper level and walked a few circuits, still stewing. Still agonizing. Still angry, and guilty and ashamed and sorry. Time passed. The emotions didn't. It was like he'd developed a fault. What to do? What to do?
In his Academy days, this is where he would have turned to Borusa, or another mentor or council elder for advice. But Borusa, the council and the entire planet of Gallifrey was hidden away in a pocket universe somewhere, ultimately safe, but forever out of his reach.
In his Earth-bound days with UNIT, he might have asked his good friend, the Brigadier, where he had gone wrong. While Alistair Lethenbridge-Stewart was a man of an entirely different stripe and human to boot, he was an excellent source of feedback when it came to the Doctor's ham-handed attempts at human relations.
But Stewart had died, as humans do.
I wish I had saluted him just once.
"Karn. I will go to Karn."
That decided, the Doctor zipped down the stairs to the console and charted the course, never mind that he had no real reason to go to Karn, other than that there were immortals there, who at least might understand his reasoning, if not condone what he'd done. He supposed he was looking for absolution.
And once he'd been on Karn for only a few moments he regretted going. Ohila, as always, had things to say about his life choices.
"Why did you come here this time, Doctor? What did you expect? You are the one who chooses humans as your companions. They grow to rely on you. How could they not? It was unfair for you to put them in that position. You have interfered too much in Earth's affairs. Now you have a responsibility. Which you ran from. Again."
How irksome. And regrettably true.
From Karn, he went to Victorian London and spent some time with Madam Vastra, Jenny and Strax, mucking in on a few cases. Vastra asked why he was there and why he was alone. He didn't answer. He stayed with them for a few Earth weeks, licking his wounds, until he grew restless.
He left without saying goodbye and set the TARDIS controls to random, hoping the sentient time machine would take him somewhere with a good distraction to keep those still seething emotions at bay. It was then that he received the looping video from Kate Lethenbridge-Stewart from 1 January 2026, London, England.
Yes, he wanted a distraction, but this?
15 December, 2014
"What's bothering you, dear? You're not yourself."
Clara smiled. No matter how much she tried, she could never fool her gran.
"It's nothing, Gran."
"Well, clearly it is something. Or someone."
It was like clairvoyance.
"Is that Danny Pink giving you trouble?"
"No, Gran, Danny's good. Really. Everything's fine. I'm just a bit,"
[bored]
"distracted," Clara finished.
Gran squeezed her shoulder.
"I'm always here for you, you know. You should come round more often. Your father would like that, and so would I."
Clara kissed Gran's cheek.
"I know, Gran, and I will. The school break is coming up and then I will have more time. We should plan an outing."
And all was well with Danny Pink. On Friday they celebrated the three-month anniversary of that cataclysmic first date with a trip back to the same restaurant. They went out at least once a week or stayed in for romantic dinners or less romantic grading marathons as they neared end of term. It was all very nice and normal. And predictable. And boring.
I miss the Doctor. I'm still angry with him, and I was right when I told him off, but I do miss him. And Danny was right, I don't hate him.
To fill the void left by the removal of the Doctor from her life, Clara threw herself into extracurriculars. She resurrected the school literary anthology and consigned a half dozen of her year 11 students as an editorial staff. She partnered up with Tobias, another English teacher, to put on a one-act play of Cyrano de Bergerac. In retrospect, the production was over-complicated, fraught with an angsty hormonal student cast with the typical drama and discord, and came off badly on the final night, but it kept Clara busy. She made sure rehearsals were on Wednesday afternoons, so she didn't have time to think about how she used to spend her Wednesdays going on adventures with the Doctor.
With such a full life, Clara still found herself feeling oddly lonely. Lying in bed at night, she often replayed her last argument with the Doctor. I was right to do it. I was.
So why did she feel so guilty?
The Doctor ran into difficulty when he tried to land at the origin of Kate's message. The TARDIS's interior lighting switched to amber and the Doctor heard an alarm he'd only experienced once before. Pulling one of the monitors over, the Doctor saw only static on the screen until it was replaced by an error message that said TEMPORAL DISTURBANCE and then TIMELINE INSTABILITY and then TIMELINE CORRUPTION.
None of those sounded like good things.
He replayed the video message from Kate. He studied the data log and then did calculations to arrive three minutes before the message was sent. He got the same error messages.
Next, he backed it up to five minutes before the transmission. Still no change.
The Doctor proceeded to back up his arrival by five-minute intervals until he was finally able to land. The instruments showed he had arrived two weeks before Kate sent the message.
"Finally! Thanks, Sexy." He patted the TARDIS console lovingly.
Before exiting the TARDIS, he checked the monitor and saw the same interference that showed before the message displayed. He entered a few commands on the keypad to access environmental data for the area immediately surrounding the TARDIS.
Apparently, he'd landed in a broom cupboard on the third floor of the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. It was 18 December 2025, 6:00 PM local time. Oxygen levels were at 19%, just below what was considered safe for human life in the 21st century. The Doctor saw little to no evidence of local electrical activity, very odd for a hospital. And then the kicker: Gamma radiation levels were well outside of normal background radiation for 21st century Earth.
"But I'm in hospital, so perhaps it's from their imaging equipment."
He knew the readings were too high to come from 21st century Earth imaging equipment. The readings were still barely within safe levels for himself, but any humans exposed to those levels for more than a few minutes would certainly sustain damage.
"So apparently, something went nuclear. Now, where are you, Kate Stewart?"
The Doctor pulled up her biodata extract and initiated a London-wide search. Since it was two weeks before her message, she could be anywhere, even outside of London or even out of the country.
Fortunately, the search pinpointed her location to the basement level of the hospital. The Doctor pulled up a building schematic and began plotting his route.