AN: This took a year because I had to rewrite the whole thing many times to get it to work. I also have some retcons/changes: 1) Adam and Oswin are NOT actually married but they are still together; 2) Jenny still calls the Doctor "dad", rather than "mum", despite her gender, because I think that's fun; 3) the Doctor has a new nickname for Jenny which is "Blue".
Mother
1
She was surrounded by instruments. Conical flasks, test tubes, metal arms, makeshift burners, jars upon jars of different fluids. It was a cluttered workspace, but still organised by a meticulous – if extremely opaque to outsiders – system. She nursed a large crucible as a pale liquid was steadily distilled into it, desperate to find out if her calculations were correct or if her knowledge of chemistry had failed her. She didn't see how that could be possible, though. No, if she had failed again, there would be something else she hadn't yet discovered.
Clear liquid dropped into a flask ready for testing, and she drew out her sonic screwdriver.
"Blast," she muttered a moment later. Nineteen per cent salinity. Absolutely undrinkable. And it had already taken her so long to condense the necessary volume of liquid to even attempt to distil it. They had only a day's supply of water left, and she was unable to either generate more from the heaps of salt on Alatu, as she had taken to calling the planet in the fortnight they had been stuck there.
She sighed, "What do you think, K-9?"
"Additional liquid is required to meet desired salinity."
"Yes, but I've used your last estimate for the volume of liquid we need, and it's nowhere near enough. We'll all dehydrate before I can get anything remotely drinkable."
"The warp drive must be repaired."
"I know," she sighed, "They're working on it. It's Tharil technology, I'm not precisely familiar with the behaviour of quanta in E-Space, even after all this time." Five years she had been whiling away her time in E-Space, trying to help the Tharils where she could.
"The outlook does not look good, Mistress Romana."
"Certainly not if you have such a negative attitude," Romana told him off curtly, straightening up and switching off the burner she had been using in her attempt to purify some water for the crew to drink. They were all relying on her, the only scientist they'd seen necessary to bring in a routine voyage to check the CVEs for refugees.
The laboratory door slid open and in walked Leoz, the first mate.
"Did it work?"
"Not quite, I'm afraid," she confessed, "I may have to take the spectrometer to look for sulfur deposits, it's the only thing I can think of to make more iodine we could use. Or repairing the warp drive. Is there any news on the distress call?"
"That's what I came to talk to you about. We're receiving an incoming message in the bridge, but I can't make sense of it."
"How intriguing!"
"It's operating on a frequency our scanners deem incompatible."
"Incompatible? To creatures of the Gateway? I didn't think it was possible. Come along, K-9; we'd better have a look."
It certainly was a strange signal. It was operating at an extremely low frequency, a band nobody used for communications because it was usually so clogged up with the death rattles of starts billions of lightyears away. Except for some people, people who had lightspeed communication filtration arrays, the likes of which had been a standard part of TARDIS infrastructure since long before she was born.
It was a simple enough tweak with the sonic screwdriver to get the distorted message to come through the ship's comm speakers crystal-clear. Colro, the captain, picked up the receiver to respond.
"Testing, testing, one-two-three," said the incoming broadcast, "Can anybody hear me?"
"We're reading you," said Colro.
"Ah! Wonderful. I'm supposed to be going live on Ekho Moskvy any second now, can you point me in the right direction? I'm not sure what their frequency is, but I think if I twist these dials enough, I'll get through." It was a woman with an Earthling accent (Romana had never gotten very good at identifying Earth voices).
"I'm… I don't…" Colro was lost for words. "Live on what?"
"Moscow radio. I'm here to play my debut hit single, 'Liniya Khleba' – though, it's 1995 at the moment, so I think I'm a little outdated. Maybe I should break out my 'Lament for Yugoslavia' instead." Nobody replied, though Colro looked at Romana as if she should have an explanation. "I'm kidding! The truth is that I'm here because I'm looking for a girl.
"You see, I put a missed connection in the newspaper recently – Berliner Zeitung – and I think I might have found her. You know how it is when you're in one universe and she's in another. Anyway, I suppose she's blonde, short, looks oh-kay if you squint a little – I heard someone once say she had an 'imposing forehead' and long arms, but I certainly never noticed. Answers to the name 'Romanadvorartrelundar' – used to, at least. I believe she prefers to be called Fred? Do you know a girl like that?"
Romana grabbed the receiver right out of Colro's hands.
"Doctor!?"
"Oh, Romana. I'm looking for somebody called Fred, do you know them?"
"I'm on a planet made of salt. The ship I'm on with the Tharils sent out a distress call you should be able to trace us by."
"Salt? Sounds delicious. I'll be right there. Give me thirty seconds." The receiver clicked off and the incoming signal disappeared.
"That was the Doctor?" asked Leoz, "Your Doctor?"
"Not my Doctor. But the Doctor, yes."
"You're flirting with her already?" asked Jenny, arms crossed in judgement, leaning on the console and staying very deliberately in the way of a lever the Doctor had to keep pulling.
"I wasn't flirting," said the Doctor, absent, focusing on the ship.
"You keep telling yourself that."
"There's never been anything between Romana and me. Although, a supercomputer did once tell me we should get married, come to think of it."
"She sounded very happy to see you."
"People are always happy to see me, I'm the Doctor."
"I just find it suspicious for you to run out here on a whim to cross into your own timeline, in a pocket universe, to see this woman again, when Clara's upset at home."
"I'm not coming to E-Space and jeopardising my own timeline for Romana, it's for Clara. Everything I do is for Clara."
"Don't lie. This is for yourself. You're being indulgent."
"I'm indulging my desire to keep her safe. This entity pretending to be Marie Antoinette, she knew about Gallifrey, more than any non-Gallifreyan I've ever met. Not to mention those Gloves and an ability to survive decapitation. Romana's been in E-Space for years and she used to work at the Bureau of Ancient Records back home; she's the expert we need."
"And you're not an expert?"
"Me? Do you know what I was doing during my Academy lessons on Gallifreyan history?"
"I have no idea," she said flatly.
"Bunking off for band practice. I barely went to class – until I was betrayed, that is, by the Master. He only went and became a prefect, knew all my hang-out spots and kept writing me up for absenteeism."
"And now you teach history, how ironic."
"Earth history is a lot more colourful. All Time Lords do is talk about how great being a Time Lord is and how we're trusted by the innate fibres of the universal spacetime continuum to be more important than everybody else. Oh, there is something I have to tell you, though," bringing the TARDIS in to land, she was suddenly serious.
"What?"
"This Romana we're going to meet, she's about a century and a half away from the Time War. It's still in her future. We can't mention it; as far as she knows, Gallifrey is still there – and for her, it will be."
"You want me to lie about the Time War?" Jenny was horrified. "About Gallifrey? I can't pull off lying about Gallifrey, I've never been."
"No, no," the Doctor assured her, "I'll tell her the truth about you. That I chose to raise you away from it. Trust me."
"You didn't 'choose' anything."
"Even if Gallifrey was still there, I wouldn't have wanted you to be raised by those stuck-up time-snobs. The things they do to kids there – ghastly. I'm the Twelfth Doctor right now; I was the Fourth Doctor when I left her here, and when I'm the Seventh Doctor, I'll come back to E-Space and take her home. And… well, the less you know about her future the better."
"Just as long as you don't want me to lie about being your daughter."
"Jenny. I would never ask you to lie about that. Except, you know, when the age discrepancy doesn't make sense and you have to be my niece."
"Fine. But you're fielding any difficult questions."
"It'll be my honour. Now, would you please step away from the brakes? I need those."
"Those aren't the brakes," said Jenny.
"Of course they're the brakes, you're ridiculous." She pulled the lever and sure enough the TARDIS stopped, but not until throwing them about a fair bit first; Jenny didn't lose her balance until the Doctor fell right into her.
"I'm ridiculous?" she complained after putting her mother back on her feet. "I suppose we're not to tell her about Clara, either?"
"Of course not! That's an important part of my future, I can't have her letting things slip."
"As long as that's the reason."
"What other reason would there be?" She wasn't convincing, but Jenny dropped it; she may not believe the Doctor, but that didn't mean she was wrong. "Come on, let's see what's what." She hared off for the door before Jenny could ask her any more questions.
Outside was a white expanse that Jenny initially thought was snow when she followed the Doctor outside. But it couldn't be; it was much too warm and actually quite humid. The crunchy texture told her very quickly that they were standing on a huge, crystalline salt flat, rising and falling in gentle, alien dunes.
"Huh," the Doctor put her hands on her hips, "She really wasn't kidding about the salt. Don't eat it."
"Why would I eat it?"
"If you're hungry. You're always hungry."
"And you've seen me eat handfuls of pure salt a lot, have you? Look, where's this ship? I don't see it anywhere."
"I'm not sure, but I expect it'll stick out like a sore thumb when we-"
"Doctor!"
The Doctor turned and saw Romana appearing from just beyond the lip of one of the salty hillocks, just tall enough to obscure a shallow valley containing a spaceship – and conveniently in a place where the TARDIS had partially blocked it from view.
"Romana!" the Doctor greeted her with just as much enthusiasm as Romana bounded over to hug her. She laughed and almost lifted Romana off her feet. Jenny felt extremely awkward; she didn't think she'd been in the unfortunate position before of stumbling across one of the Doctor's former companions while playing the role of 'current companion'.
"You've regenerated," Romana let her go.
"Have I? Are you sure?" she feigned ignorance and looked herself over like she was trying to check her jeans were the right fit. Romana hit her lightly on the arm.
"You always have this same sense of humour, no matter the face."
"It's a great sense of humour, that's why."
"How many times?" Before the Doctor could answer – presumably to say something cryptic – Romana interrupted again, "Go on, let me guess. You know I have a knack for this sort of thing."
"Well, alright, then. Go ahead."
"Hm," she stepped back, hand on her chin thoughtfully, looking the Doctor up and down and frowning. "That can't be right. More than half a dozen?"
"Eight, I think."
"Eight!? But that means – your regenerations are almost up!"
"Oh, don't worry about all that," the Doctor brushed her off easily, "You know me, I have my ways. I'm special." Romana was obviously not convinced, but something else took precedence.
"You've left me here in E-Space for eight regeneration cycles?"
"First of all, you wanted to stay; you told me very clearly that you didn't want to go back to Gallifrey. And second of all, no; I'm breaking the rules a little here, crossing my own timeline. I'll only really leave you here for three cycles. Keep an eye out for a softly-spoken Scotsman with a real thing for question marks, he's your guy."
"And how long, precisely, do I have left until you take me back there?"
"If I knew, I wouldn't tell you. But don't mention any of this to him when he gets here – I don't know a thing about this part of my future, I came here on a whim. Jenny can attest to that."
"Mm," Jenny agreed. Romana noticed her standing there for the first time, clearly taken by surprise; her eyes hadn't left the Doctor all the while.
"I think I know how to preserve your timeline by now," said Romana, "But I see you've replaced me, regardless. Another Time Lord?" She squinted a little at Jenny like she was trying to read her mind. But Jenny didn't mind because she'd just been identified on sight as a Time Lord, something that had never happened to her before.
"Yes," said the Doctor, putting a fatherly arm around Jenny's shoulders and pulling her over while she tried to stay still as a statue, "This is my daughter, Jenny. And she's a chip off the old block. By which I mean, very stubborn." The Doctor squeezed her, and she made a face, then shrugged herself free. "See what I mean? Stubborn."
"It's nice to meet you," Jenny held out her hand for Romana to shake, which she did, smiling warmly.
"I'm charmed. It must have been a long time if you've been at the looms again. I thought you swore off them?"
"Well, it's complicated. Ask me again in a few centuries."
"I'm sure she's a credit to Lungbarrow." Jenny didn't know what that meant.
"Oh, she's an off-worlder," said the Doctor, true to her word for once, "I wanted to spare her all Gallifrey's nonsense. You know how they are."
"Gosh. A child of the Doctor raised off-world? Sounds like trouble – in the best way."
"Maybe," said Jenny, noncommittal.
"Anyway!" the Doctor clapped, "I hear you have quite the water situation. Tell me about that, let's see if I can help."
"We crashed here ten days ago," Romana began, walking off towards the ship, "Our water supply is almost completely exhausted. I've been trying to distil drinkable water from the air out here, but I haven't yet been able to achieve an acceptable level of salinity. And K-9 has been absolutely no help, the old hound. It's either I work out how to produce drinking water or somebody fixes our warp drive. Or, of course, somebody could rescue us."
"I doubt anybody will find you in time all the way out here," said the Doctor, "Nope, you're doomed, as I see it."
"You're a cad – you always were. Terrible."
"Gimme a look at your drive. See if I can't rustle up a hotfix."
"What's this accent? You sound bizarre."
"They tell me I'm American now," she sighed, "It's just one of those things. I'd rather be Scottish again, to tell you the truth."
"It's you and your daughter on the TARDIS now, then? Just the two of you?" she asked.
"Not exactly," said Jenny, "I do my own thing. She usually has Clara."
"Who's that?"
"Oh, you know. Just someone I met," said the Doctor casually. Just someone she met. Jenny made a note to tell Clara she'd been relegated to 'just someone the Doctor met' when they got back to Brighton.
"Well, where is she? I'd like to meet her, if she's the one you're 'usually' with."
"She's sleeping. Humans! Always sleeping," she tutted. "She had a busy day, which is actually the reason I'm here – I need your help. But that can wait. Which way to the drive room?" She turned about in a circle in the corridor, looking for a signpost that didn't exist.
"Straight down there, a left, then a right – you can't miss it. I'll only be a moment telling Colro you're here, unless you want to meet him?"
"Who's that?" asked the Doctor.
"The captain."
She made a face, "No, thanks. You know me and authority figures."
"That's what I thought. I'll be back in a jiffy." She went off in a different direction, leaving Jenny and the Doctor briefly alone.
"'A jiffy'," Jenny repeated, "She's very English, for an alien."
"The quasi-aristocrats on Gallifrey get along well with the Brits; who could've guessed?" she remarked. "C'mon, let's see about this drive. Not that I'm too sure why she couldn't fix it herself – maybe she doesn't have the experience. She's very young."
"How young is 'very young'?"
The Doctor thought for a moment, "I suppose she must be nearing a hundred-and-thirty."
Jenny was startled, "A hundred-and-? But that's half my age."
"Well, you're getting on in years now, aren't you?" said the Doctor. Jenny could hardly believe it; she'd expected Romana to be some world-weary Time Lord who'd been watching the stars tumble and turn for millennia. "River was only three-hundred, in the end – although, she did give me all of her regenerations, which probably had something to do with it. Completely unnecessary."
"And now you won't give her the time of day."
"Here we go, this looks like the right room," she dipped into a room that was in roughly the right spot Romana had described. There were two engineers in there who looked like a cross between a cat and a human. They were just as surprised to see the Doctor and Jenny as Jenny was to meet the Cowardly Lion's two siblings hidden away down there.
"You're friends of Romana," the nearest one said right away.
"Indeed we are!" the Doctor announced, "And a friend of the Tharils, too. Do you know Biroc? I helped him out of a bind. I'm the Doctor." Evidently, when she said that they knew who she was and couldn't stop singing her praises. Jenny wasn't interested in listening to people go on and on about how her mother had saved their whole species, though; she approached the warp drive, a big spherical structure suspended in the middle of the room, a ladder leaning against it.
"Be careful up there," one of the lion-men, a Tharil, told her.
"Don't mind me," she said, climbing all the way to the very top of the ladder. The Doctor glided over to brace it if it toppled. "Drive's empty," she said.
"We had to empty it. It's overheating, that's the issue," said one of the engineers. Romana came back into the room.
"Colro would very much like to meet you, Doctor," she said.
"Have his people call my people, we can set up a lunch at Dorsia," said the Doctor, keeping an eye on Jenny.
"It's routine maintenance," said the Tharil, "Coolant system. But we don't have the equipment here."
"What equipment do you need?" asked Jenny.
"A taller ladder, to get all the way to the top."
"Hm…" she looked up and finally saw the fault they were indicating; one of the dozen or so coolant tubes feeding into the warp drive sphere had a nasty rupture in it, probably from a shock pressure release in the system – maybe the pressure equaliser was the source of the issue – but he had a point, it was quite high up.
"Don't show off," the Doctor warned her.
"Who's showing off? I'm not showing off," said Jenny, standing very precariously on top of the ladder.
"At least let me get you a rope, or – you're just going to jump, I see."
"Relax," said Jenny after steadying herself on one of the suspension beams. There was a dozen of them, made of metal but fitted with hydraulics so that they rocked and wobbled. But that was no trouble; she only had to get used to the wobble so that she could meticulously predict it. Though it was a steep and relatively narrow tube, she carefully stood up straight, arms out for balance, and started the ascent.
"Sorry about this," said the Doctor, to Romana, "She thinks she's all that." Jenny got all the way up very quickly and was able to carefully sit down, straddling the cylinder – which was about ten inches wide and not completely uncomfortable in the short term – and keeping her legs around it tightly enough that she didn't slip. She was about eye level with the broken coolant tube.
"Have you got any sealant? Or tape?" she called down. One of the Tharils went to a toolbox and fetched a big piping gun full of industrial glue. "Just throw it up, I'll catch it."
"If you slip, I'll have hell to pay," the Doctor told her sternly. She did not want to have to tell Ravenwood that Jenny had died on her watch.
"When have you ever seen me slip?" The Tharil threw the piping gun up to her and she caught it easily in one hand.
"You know, I could do that, too," said the Doctor to Romana, "I just don't want to."
"Yes, I'm sure," Romana did not believe her for an instant. "Where did she learn to climb like this?"
"I was an acrobat, in a space circus," said Jenny.
"I could've been an acrobat," said the Doctor, "But I didn't want to."
"I tried to do yoga with you two months ago and you fell over about fifteen times," said Jenny.
"That – you were picking a lot of unfair postures! How am I supposed to do a crow? Anatomically, I'm nothing like a crow. It's unrealistic. And when have you ever seen a crow balance on two limbs like that?"
"Other than literally every crow that exists?"
"I am not having this argument with you again!"
"Argument about what? How many legs crows have?"
"I've seen a fair few crows with only the one leg," Romana intervened.
"I can do a one-armed crow," said Jenny from her perch.
"That's completely unnecessary," said the Doctor. "How did you crash, anyway? Because of the coolant?"
"Yes, it was an emergency landing," said Romana, "With the rupture. But our distress call hasn't been answered, we're too far out in the boondocks. To be entirely honest, I'm not sure where we would be if you hadn't arrived."
"Somebody probably would've climbed up there themselves," said the Doctor, "Doesn't look too difficult."
"It's a lot like decorating a cake," said Jenny, hearing this, "Doing the pipework."
"Do you decorate a lot of cakes?" asked Romana intrigued.
"She used to work in a bakery," said the Doctor.
"Work? Doing a real job? Your daughter?"
"Well, she – she's very versatile, has a lot of skills," said the Doctor, "An excellent cook. Just today she brought me some homemade sorbet."
"Remarkable, truly. I'm not sure I've seen you cook a day in all the time I've known you." Jenny laughed high above them.
"Joke's on you, I cook every day," she grumbled.
"Really? What do you cook, pray tell?"
"I made a whole roast dinner this weekend. I do it most weekends. And I made those, um – whatever it was. What was that, Jenny? You were there."
"Do you mean the macarons?" said Jenny.
"Yes! Macarons."
"You forgot the word for 'macarons'?" asked Romana. The Doctor felt her face grow hot.
"I just usually call them a different name." She was lying; she had forgotten. Maybe crashing through a CVE had jumbled her up a bit.
"Catch!" Jenny shouted. The Doctor was startled but just about managed to catch the big pipe full of industrial sealant.
"You can't just throw things at people!" she complained. Rather than walk down the cylinder, Jenny decided to simply slide down it back to the warp core in the middle, at which point she swung her legs over to one side and dropped lightly to the ground.
"It should be good to go once you refuel it with exotic matter," said Jenny, wiping her gluey hands on her jeans; the sealant flaked off and tumbled away. "I better not have gotten anything on this cardigan," she complained; the cardigan was light grey with a few traces of blue and had been knitted, like many of her possessions, by Ravenwood. She liked it very much.
"Is it not washable?"
"You know what she's like with knitwear. It's an all-day project."
"She who?" asked Romana.
"Uh, my partner," said Jenny.
"I know, it's tragic," said the Doctor, "Jenny's not an eligible, young bachelor anymore."
"Women can't be bachelors," said Jenny.
"Did you want me to call you a spinster, Blue? Former spinster?" Jenny glared at her. "That's what I thought. Anyway – is there anything else you need help with? Or can we do my thing now?"
"You still didn't tell me why you're here," Romana reminded her.
"Right! Well, to cut a long story short, Marie Antoinette is an alien trying to kill me and we think she comes from E-Space."
"I think I'd rather hear that long story, well, long. Marie Antoinette?"
"Yes. She's spent the entire day trying to assassinate Clara just to rile me up."
"It was to erase you from existence, not 'rile you up'," said Jenny.
"That's the reason I didn't bring Clara out here with me, she's still at h- she's still on the TARDIS," she very clumsily corrected herself.
"But you brought the TARDIS here, I'd like to meet her," said Romana.
"Well, no, not that TARDIS – when I said 'TARDIS', what I meant was, she's just, you know. Hanging around."
"She's staying in London with her sister," Jenny lied casually.
"…Well, I'd better say my goodbyes to Colro, then; I can meet you on the ship?"
"Absolutely!" the Doctor clapped, "Great idea. I need a few minutes alone with Jenny to confer about sweaters. Maybe socks."
"Don't speak to me about socks," said Jenny, following the Doctor and Romana out of the engine room.
"You're so precious about your damn socks-"
"Because you keep stealing them and filling them with holes! You're always taking my clothes. Those are my jeans you're wearing."
"They are not," said the Doctor, who was sure she'd stolen the jeans from Clara – not that Clara had a whole lot of jeans.
"I wish you were still a man and none of my clothes would fit you."
"I'll leave you alone to, uh, resolve this," said Romana, obviously not wanting to be stuck in the middle of their bickering. They'd reached a junction in the corridor where they would need to split up.
"Sure. We'll meet you on the TARDIS in ten."
"Quite right."
"Okay," said the Doctor as soon as Romana was out of earshot on her way to the bridge, "We need to get our story straight."
"You know, I remember you used to be a lot better at lying," said Jenny, "Used to lie non-stop, in fact."
"I'm a great liar when Clara's here to keep me straight."
"Is Clara particularly good at 'keeping you straight'?"
"Very funny. I need to work out what to tell Romana."
"Just tell her what I told her, about London."
"That's too simple."
"The simpler the better. Just don't tell anyone anything about yourself or your personal life, ever. And if they ask again, look offended, like, 'how dare you.' That's what I do."
"And how does that work out for you?" Jenny stopped walking in the corridor and stared at her. "Alright, jeez, I'm sorry I asked."
"See."
"Why don't you do the talking with Romana?"
"No."
"Urgh. You're very frustrating."
"I still think you should tell her the truth about being married. You told her the truth about who I am."
"I can't do that, it would cause chaos."
"Right. Because she fancies you and you don't want to upset her."
"That's not what's happening here."
"Of course not."
"And we're putting my console room back. I'm not having her thinking I have no taste in TARDIS interiors – the interior of your TARDIS says a lot about you on Gallifrey."
"We can't do that, your interior is full of pictures of you and Clara."
"What? And yours isn't?"
"My wife doesn't show up in pictures, so, no."
"What did you have to go marrying a vampire for?"
"Do not tell Romana anything about vampires, please."
They argued about the console room all the way back across the salt dunes and into the ship, with the sky turning a very compelling shade of pink (which the Doctor paused to make Jenny take a picture of that she could show to Clara later).
"This is what I mean. You just bring her up constantly. You're going to get found out."
"I do not do that," she snapped as Jenny put her phone away, going back into the ship. Jenny's interior was pink, too, but not a shade the Doctor found compelling. She liked her indigo lights and industrial grey steel.
"You do, you can't help yourself. You're too used to her just being there all the time that you can't handle it when she's not."
"You know, Jenny," she began pointedly, "I can't actually remember the last time I saw you and Ravenwood in the same room together."
"Because she doesn't like being around you, how many times?" said Jenny, "I like seeing you, you're my dad – but to her, it's like hanging around a ghost. I visit you when she's asleep or doing vampire stuff."
"Hmph," was all the Doctor said.
"Look," Jenny began sincerely after a moment, "Are you really worried about us? Or are you being snarky? Because – if it's the former – we're all good. I'd tell you if something had happened, you'd be the second person I'd tell."
"Who's the first?"
"Oswin."
Before the Doctor could argue with her anymore, Romana made her grand return to the TARDIS.
"Well!" she took in the room, "I must say, I rather like it in here. It's nice to see it's still so bright; I was worried it might be gloomier."
"It would be if she had her way," Jenny said.
"It's not gloomy, it's atmospheric," the Doctor insisted, then added to Romana, "This is Jenny's design. I let her have at it for her self-esteem, y'know how it is with kids."
"Then I'm charmed," she said politely to Jenny, "And look who else I brought!" She'd been holding the door open and in rolled K-9, struggling a little to get over the wooden threshold.
It was as if the Doctor had been reunited with a long-lost lover when she saw that hunk of metal – entirely in spite of the fact Oswin had painstakingly rebuilt K-9 for her once already as a Christmas gift. She fawned over the dog like it was a newborn infant.
"She loves that thing more than me," said Jenny.
"I once threw him into the sea. It was an awful accident," said Romana. "But why are you here? What's this about Marie Antoinette?"
"About three months ago we went to Paris; we were aiming for the twenty-first century, but somebody got the dates muddled up," said Jenny loudly, though the Doctor wasn't listening, scratching behind K-9's plastic ears, "And we arrived in seventeen-ninety-three on the day the Queen was executed. Then we found out she's some sort of alien and there was a scheme to use these devices, Gloves, to bring her back to life, a plan she made herself. They reanimated her head and sewed it back onto her body."
"Good heavens!"
"She seemed fine, was the weird part. Anyway, Clara – her 'main companion' – was the one who used the Glove-"
"It's an empathic connection," the Doctor added; so she was listening, or maybe she'd just tuned back in upon hearing Clara's name, "The person who uses the Glove trades their life for the life of somebody else. Unless the Glove is destroyed and the connection is severed, or both Gloves are used, and the resurrection can conclude with no side effects. They forced Clara to do it at knifepoint and we got roped into the whole thing."
"She had the other Glove stashed in a hidden compartment of the Tuileries, we had to break in and almost got arrested by the Convention for our trouble," said Jenny, "The Queen had a vortex manipulator and disappeared."
"Fast-forward to today, and Clara gets kidnapped! By this," the Doctor stood up and went over to the console room's chair, picking up the large, clockwork device Clara had recovered, "It's a remote time scoop. Marie Antoinette pulled her right out of what she was doing and took her to Leeds in two-thousand-and-six. Send a bunch of robots to kill her in the past."
"For what reason?" asked Romana.
"To stop a certain event in which Clara will save my life from ever happening," she explained cryptically, "Thereby, kind of, erasing me from existence. I can't tell you more than that. The important thing is that when she kidnapped Clara she told her she was from somewhere 'a few clicks south of Alzarius'. Naturally, I came rushing over into E-Space to talk to you."
"Alzarius? Strange. I suppose they do have a remarkable capacity for evolution there, but machines that can bring back a severed head?"
"It was talking, too, when it was off," said Jenny, "Creepy."
"But she knew who I was, and that Jenny was my daughter, as soon as she woke up," said the Doctor, "And about Gallifrey. She seemed like she had a bone to pick with it."
"Hm. Alzarius. It does occupy the exact, inverse coordinates of Gallifrey's spatial-temporal coordinates in N-Space," Romana mused.
"South of Alzarius, she said," said the Doctor.
"There's no such thing as 'south' in space, Doctor; I shouldn't have to tell you that. But… this is ringing a very odd sort of bell. You see, I've heard the Tharils talk about a region of spacetime here they avoid at all costs."
"The Tharils can traverse the Gateway without a ship, and they're scared of an anomaly? Tell me everything about it."
"Well, I'm afraid I know very little. They call it 'the Bleed', and it's forbidden."
"Is it close? Do you know the coordinates?" the Doctor got ready to input whatever information she could gather into the TARDIS.
"No. But they must call it 'the Bleed' for a reason; it must be leaking something."
"Everything in space is leaking, I need a little more than that."
"Mistress, if I may interrupt," said K-9, "I have a large amount of the Tharil historical databases in my system."
"Of course!" said Romana, "I forgot I downloaded that!"
"The Bleed produces a large energy signature of a type of radiation I am not familiar with."
"God!" the Doctor threw up her arms, "It's stet all over again!"
"Sorry?" asked Jenny.
"Nothing. If Martha were here, she'd get it. Hey, maybe we should've brought her?"
"Maybe we should have… brought Martha?" asked Jenny very carefully, looking imploringly at her mother, "Are you sure about that?" The Doctor paused, confused, then realised; she scrunched up her face in frustration.
"Never mind. I'm fine. I'm fine. The Bleed. Gimme the coordinates, K-9; I'll chart us a course. It won't be bleeding for much longer if I have anything to do with it."
