oOo

It took Noni almost a full hour to return to the Console Room, feet dragging, but she saw the Time Rotor raising and lowering itself and knew they were on their way. The question was, as always, where? She voiced it aloud. "Where are we off to now, Doctor?"

Before he could answer, a light began flashing near the edge of the console. "What's that?"

"That, my dear, is what you might call a very good sign," the Doctor beamed. "That light tells me we're on the right track. Some of the coordinates my first self reminded me of could be very useful. Very useful indeed."

"Coordinates for where?" There was cautious hope in Noni's voice, and he could tell she was struggling to keep herself under control. Very impressive; he saw so much of her mother in her that he was always surprised when she managed to control both her temper and her impulses.

"Some of the places the Master used to hide out not long after we were in school together, places I hadn't thought of in, well, quite a long time. But my past self and the Master were school-mates much more recently than he and I were, and if I'm reading this correctly, then his TARDIS has been at one of the locations, and not too long ago." He grinned jubilantly. "If I'd just thought of this sooner, I'd have found him when Kyris and I were first hunting him down!" The grin faded. "It's a shame what regenerative trauma can do to one; try to avoid it, my dear."

"That'll be easy, since I'll never be a Time Lord," Noni said, matter-of-factly.

That pulled the Doctor up short. "No, I suppose you won't," he agreed. Noni's mixed heritage all but guaranteed she'd never be accepted into the Academy, although that hadn't stopped others in the distant past. Nor was attendance there mandatory; Kyris had been taught by Romana, but his talent as a Healer had made it inevitable that he would follow in his parents' footsteps. At least he was fully Gallifreyan. Even so, Noni's genetics shouldn't stop her from becoming a Time Lady if she so desired, but he hadn't really thought about it before, and he should have, shouldn't he? After all, his own granddaughter was half-human, too.

Of course, Susan had never expressed a desire to learn how to regenerate, to earn the title Time Lady, although she was half-way there just by traveling with him all her life. At least, he didn't think she had; his memory was still too damned spotty for him to be sure of anything pertaining to her early life. Certainly by the time she left him she'd made it crystal clear that settling down and finding happiness were more important to her than flitting about the known universe in search of adventure like her more restless grandfather. Oh, it had been fine whilst growing up, but love, ever elusive, had finally found her and he had been fortunate enough to recognize it and send her off to the life she deserved to live.

Noni brought him back to the present with a practical question. "I thought you still had to see Susan when she was a young girl, isn't that where we should go first?" All her instincts were screaming at her to follow the Master's trail before it went cold, but the practical side of her remembered that putting things off, even while in a TARDIS, could have disastrous effects.

"You're absolutely right," the Doctor agreed. "Susan first, then the Master's TARDIS and our missing family members."

Noni started to turn away, then looked back at him, pausing in mid-step. "Have you checked on them lately, seen how they're doing?"

It was the question he'd been hoping to avoid, the one he wanted least to answer. But answer it he did, unflinchingly. "I'm afraid that's impossible."

Suspicion grew on Noni's face, quickly flowering into shocked disbelief. "Doctor, has something happened to Romana's tracking device?"

"It wasn't just a tracking device," the Doctor mumbled, answering and not-answering her. In the past tense.

"Oh Doctor!" Noni cried, real despair in her voice. "How will we know if they're still alive?"

"Because they are," the Doctor snapped. He turned away from her. "If the Master just wanted to kill them, he'd have done so instead of simply sending them off in his TARDIS. He said they were alive when he had you and Susan captive, remember? And if they were alive then, they're alive now."

"But what happened to it?" There were tears in Noni's eyes, tears that reminded him how young she was. There was a great deal of Leela in her, but she'd grown up in a far kinder environment than her mother, and tears that Leela would never have shed came more easily to her daughter.

"I was attempting to modify it." He turned around again, reluctantly, reaching into a pocket and extracting a small handful of metal shards. "Apparently Romana had it booby-trapped. Probably after the Master tried to steal it the first time."

Noni stood, unmoving, doing her best to process this piece of information while the Doctor remained, equally still, next to the Console. "So all we have to go on now is this hint your first self gave you? To check out the Master's old hiding places?" He nodded, and she strode over to his side and shook him, literally grabbed the lapels of his coat in both hands and shook him. "That's not good enough. You have to go back, back to before my mother killed him. You have to make him tell us where they are!"

The Doctor gently pulled her hands away and held them down at her sides. There were more tears glittering in her eyes, tears as much of frustration as anger, tears he knew she would never allow to spill. "Noni." His voice was quiet. "In spite of what you've seen me doing lately, crossing my own time stream and such, I cannot and will not cross the Master's. I cannot go back and try to change what's already happened. It's too dangerous."

"Dangerous for who? For us?" She yanked her wrists from his grasp; she seemed to be doing that a lot, lately. "I don't care!"

"But I do." The Doctor's tone was implacable, and his gaze had gone steely. "It's not just dangerous for us, Noni. It's dangerous for everyone. There are things that you don't know about traveling through time, about interfering with the proper order, things I can't begin to explain to you. You'll just have to accept that I can't do what you're asking."

"Then you don't really want to find them at all." Her voice was as cold as his, but he refused to allow the devastation he felt to show on his face. She'd lost faith in him, and he wasn't sure there was anything he could do to restore it.

He watched as she walked away from him, shoulders slumped in defeat, and sternly repressed a twinge of guilt. He wanted desperately to do exactly what she wanted, but it was more complicated than that. "I'll let you know when we've arrived," was all he said.

She didn't turn, didn't acknowledge his words in any way, simply opened the interior door and disappeared from view.