Christmas was always the best time for stories. Growing up, some of my best-loved memories were of Christmas nights, gathered with the rest of my family in a bundle of blankets on the floor as the adults traded stories. Not all of the stories were happy, but they were all true, so I loved to hear them. They had a happy enough ending, after all. They'd ended with us together, as Mum would always say.
"Once upon a time, there was a girl who worked in a shop. It was an ordinary shop on the ordinary planet Earth, back when things made sense and were horribly dull and boring…"
Those stories of men and monsters were the foundation of my early childhood, but they stayed with me even as I grew up because they weren't just stories. Those old tales were histories: the histories and exploits of my family, my father.
Mum would always say that the saddest story—the story of how the defenders of Earth were separated—was the story of how she'd died. But this is the story of how I lived.
Torchwood was a household name in a lot of ways. With Grandad's influence on, well, everything and Mum's rather expansive knowledge on non-terrestrial beings, the Tyler clan spent a lot of time in the sterile hallways of secret government facilities. Torchwood knew me before Mum entered the third trimester, which was probably for the best. It became evident early on that I could never go to a normal human hospital. I was, by New Earth terms, humanish. Mostly normal, but just different enough to get some odd benefits of a Gallifreyan lineage and the binary vascular system that comes with it.
Between curiosity for my physiology and an interest in impressing the bosses by offering free childcare, I became a bit of pet project for a select few of the Torchwood One team. Experts in alien technology and cultures became my first teachers, and—while my peers were busying themselves with eating paste and the like—I had a lot to learn.
Mum was a mess of pride and exasperation and worry when my love of the stories grew into something of a professional curiosity. She'd always insist I was far too young to be playing with the toys in Research and Development, but she never really put her foot down when I formally started working in the department, rising up in the ranks and always learning. And time passed. We lived that way for twenty Christmases. Two decades in Pete's World. All those years of me growing on the stories of adventures and heroism and shenanigans with an entire universe playing host to a daft man in a blue box. Years of study and experimentation with the brightest minds Torchwood could acquire as playmates and tutors.
I figured that would just be how it would go on until I was able to touch those stars myself. Technology would catch up to me eventually, and then I'd be able to take off into that sky myself. In the meantime, I took up the family business of defending the earth, even if Mum positively forbade me from the field. Pete Tyler had once managed to get dimension jumpers working, even if they'd splintered cracks into the threads of our universe. Call it arrogance or impertinence, but I was sure I could make it better. It might take a lifetime, but I was sure that I'd get the right books, the right minds, the right tools to all be in the same place, if only for one moment in the history of this universe.
But someone, without even the common decency to do it in person, beat me to it. One sunny Tuesday in April, I went to the lab that had been designated as mine in Torchwood One to find a prototype that certainly wasn't mine. Sitting on a piece of heavy cardstock on my desk, the device was perhaps the size of my palm and infuriated me to no end.
The card was a handwritten note in a hand I knew all too well: my own. The implications of it were stunning. I had half a dozen cautionary tales about going back into your own timeline among my bedtime stories. What could have possibly possessed me to flaunt that rule?
Staring at the note, that simply read Kandover is lovely this time of year, I could only wonder.
"Mum… do you have a minute?"
Director Rose Marion Tyler usually didn't have enough minutes in the day, a condition not helped by the fact that she refused to allow anyone to work on the vortex manipulator the institute had scavenged after the Charleroi incident years ago, but she still smiled when I knocked on her door.
"Yeah, course. Come on in."
"Does the word Kandover mean anything to you?"
"Kandover?" A strange light entered her eyes. "It's a tiny planet in the Indenari System. It was colonized to be a trading outpost for the Peggs-Ros. Why?"
"Anything else about it?" That was all well and good, but it didn't help explain why I would want myself to go there. Not that I exactly needed a reason to follow my own advice—if I risked crossing my own timestream, I must have had good reason, even if I didn't have it yet. "Did you ever go there?"
"I didn't, no…" Mum was silent for a long moment, her eyes searching me for some indication of what was happening, what was wrong. "Did someone tell you something about Kandover I should know about?"
"Someone did. Er, I did," I explained succinctly, holding the note out. "Or I will."
Mum studied the piece of paper, not daring to touch it. She knew better than most how fragile time could be. She stared it for a long time before straightening sharply in her chair. She twisted, reaching into a drawer for a pair of… 3D glasses? She slipped the glasses onto her face, turning her eyes to the paper again. The light in her eyes shifted, darkening, and her smile faded.
"Mum? What is it?"
"Void stuff," she explained. A strained laugh escaped her. "I should have known, I suppose. I nearly destroyed a world trying to hold onto my dad, and you are my daughter."
"So it worked? It really works? If it has Void stuff on it, this came in! But I wasn't there anymore, and there wasn't any usual activity on any of the security systems. I—I must have hopped back. But I knew how much damage the rift caused here the first go round with the dimension jumpers… I must have fixed it somehow… But for me to come back and give it to me now—"
"You've created a paradox. And there's only one good reason I can think of for you to have done that." Mum reached out for my hand, tightening her grip on my hand as she held my gaze. "You're leaving."
"Mum—" There were tears in her eyes, but she was smiling. Another laugh fell from her lips, raw and aching.
"You brought it back, because you already will bring it back here. You have to go… You did the one thing that could have forced my hand to let you go. You absolute brat. I would have given you up years ago if I'd known you would have done this to your poor mum."
"You could still fix the vortex manipulator and change your mind?" I offered, smiling weakly.
"I think one paradox in the family is enough, don't you?"
"I—I can say goodbye, yeah?"
"I think you can… It looks like I've got one last story to tell you, so we might as well get the family."
Kandover was the last place he went before coming back to me… So much time had past for him, all while Mickey and I were just standing in that street. All those pictures I'd seen when looking for him that first go round were all the places he went in between.
I was breaking all the rules now. If I went to Kandover—if I met my dad before all but one of his adventures with my mum—I was in unspeakably dangerous territory. But there was that little bit of me—maybe the human bit, maybe just the idiot bit—that leaned towards the danger, ready to sprint headlong into it.
He tried to help people on his own, but traveling alone doesn't suit him. Losing people is harder when you're alone at the end of it all. After Krakatoa, he needed a change of scenery. Kandover was a good fit: a tiny little world crammed full of people.
There were just a few things to test on the device before I was officially off. I didn't dare deconstruct it, not willing to risk breaking it and shattering the loop of the paradox, but there was little harm in scanning the damn thing. It wasn't like anything I'd ever seen before, but that wasn't exactly surprising.
It's a trading colony, like I said—six million people all together and all yelling and hawking wares. It was alive…
The tech Torchwood used in the Battle of Canary Wharf was a hydraulic jack, widening and stressing the pre-existing cracks between the worlds until they were big enough for someone to jump across. This new device had some sort of honing beacon, but none of the technology we could muster could reach that far across the universe to see where it was tethered.
He never said exactly what else happened there. Just that something reminded him made him wonder if he was running away or running forward.
Preparations for my departure went by quickly. The institute had access to the world's greatest minds, so a replacement for my position and all its funding and toys wasn't too difficult to negotiate. There was hardly a trace of residual void radiation in my lab when Mum brought the glasses over. No signs that the universe had experienced any sort of shift, no new rift or breach. There wasn't any indication from the device if there was a way to set a specific destination, which was somewhat worrying, so we did our best to plan around it. If I'd reappear more or less in the same position in that world as I'd disappear in this one, I could control my landing zone. Our world was about three years ahead according to Mum, so the timing was going to be tricky. If the device was solely purposed to travel across dimensions and not space-time, as I believed, I would be stranded in whatever place I landed in. My destination had to be chosen carefully.
Less than a week after finding the device, I found myself in Cardiff. It wasn't the first time I'd been to the city—I'd visited Torchwood Three on several occasions, though the most recent was to oversee the delivery of scavenged tech from one of our affiliates—but I was looking at it through different eyes in some ways. Mum came with me, refusing the let me out of her sight as she took me round town, pointing out the differences between the Cardiff she'd known in the Doctor's world versus the one I'd grown up with. Always have one foot planted before taking another step was a phrase that often came from Grandad's mouth, and Mum seemed to be taking it seriously now.
We were in Cardiff for the worst-case scenario. If the device worked as I believed it would, I would be unable to move through time and space through it: its sole purpose is a dimensional shift and nothing else. If that was true, Cardiff would provide me with potential access to Torchwood Three, assuming they and/or their files concerning Canary Wharf survived. Failing that, it would enable me to take up the last resort option of camping over the rift and settling for a wait. According to Mum, I was bound to run into a potential ride eventually. That was the part of the contingency that I liked the least. If I needed the Doctor to ferry me back to his own past—or worse, his future—the hazard inherent in such a thing was more than staggering. When he figured out what happened, Dad was going to be livid.
But there was no way around it. I had the device—which I quietly named a dimension needle—which meant that I'd traveled both across time, space, and dimensions for that little errand. Only thing left to do was leap into the paradox and hope to close the circle soon.
Posted 10:15, 4.19.20