AN: Well hello - fancy seeing you here!

Welcome to my newest tale - where old friends are reunited, new friendships bloom, and the universe has to get used to TWO whole Time Lords being around on a regular basis. As if one wasn't enough trouble!

Let's play a game - how quickly can you guess who I've brought back? There's plenty of clues in this chapter... leave me a review, let me know how quickly you worked it out.

This chapter is entirely original, and shorter than the rest of the chapters are planned to be. So don't be disheartened by the brief opener! It's just a little taste of all the good that's to come.

Now, for the slightly less entertaining (but no less important) bit.

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who. It would be lovely if I did, but I'm a 20 year old broke medical student who spends far too much time creating imaginary scenarios with celebrities. Also, any similarities between my work and the work of others is entirely coincidental. I adore other fanfiction writers, and I would never use their work as my own.

And now, on with our story... I hope you're sitting comfortably.

Chapter 1: Crossfade

Autumns on the planet Isenfel weren't really autumns, not in the Earth sense of the word. For one, there was no significant change in the weather, just a slight change in the colour of the sky. Two, they only happened once every sixty years. This was the third one she had seen.

She remembered autumn; the soft breezes and myriad leaves that danced on another world. The cool mornings that faded into cooler days speckled with rain, slivers of blue-grey peering through the gaps in clouds, the faint smell of damp dirt under the feet. Nothing like that happened here. The colour tone of the sky shifted from a soft green to a softer yellow, and the temperature rose a degree or two overall. Nothing special. Not like an Earth autumn. Not like the autumn she'd felt in Paris, so very long ago - or was it far in the future? For all she knew, time ran very differently here.

As she weaved her way through the town at the edge of the wood, a few of the residents waved and said hello.

"Afternoon, Wanderer!"

"How's the day?"

"There's more bread going out soon, if you want any!"

She responded to them all in turn, maintaining a lightly carefree expression and trying to ignore the desperate fluttering of her hearts beneath her ribcage. None of these people knew what she had been planning; none of them knew what she hoped to achieve today.

Coming past the last little homes, she turned and looked out at the place she'd been inhabiting for the last thirty years. It was little more than a sprawl of lopsided one-story houses, open sided bakeries and smith's workshops, and well cultivated crops. Simple, but peaceful. Her own little residence was on the other side of the patch of scrub and woodland, but she had spent many days here. Telling children stories, helping with small repairs. The same way of life had taken her through nine of these little settlements now, wandering across the small world with whatever she had managed to create in the meantime.

Using the little pathway through the woods that her footsteps had created over the decades, she let the trees eclipse the village from view. It would hopefully be the last time she saw it.

It had taken around sixty years to get out of the Gateway. Really, it shouldn't have taken that long, but the lack of usable technology was a major hindrance. The poor dog had only lasted fifteen of those years before breaking irreparably, and after that she was on her own. After that, nobody really used her name anymore. Of course, he had mostly called her 'Mistress', but every now and then he would call her the name he had been taught. In a way, she was glad he had stopped working - as horrible as that sounded. Her name had been given by a very dear friend; once upon a time she had despised it, but it had grown on her eventually. Especially when said in his voice. And after a very long time of not hearing it aloud, when she finally met another person she found that she had absolutely no desire to hear it again. A slight smile crossed her face at the memory of that first interaction.

"Woah, there! Are you alright?"

"Yes, I… I'm fine."

The man had looked down at her, seeing a youthful blonde carrying a piece of strange brown material about the size of a log and surrounded by shattered metal, and frowned.

"Are you sure? Be careful, some of those pieces look sharp."

He had helped her to her feet, watching as she brushed a few fragments from her shirt.

"I'm alright, thank you. Where are we? What planet?"

That question didn't seem to reassure him.

"This is Isenfel. Look, are you sure you haven't hit your head falling off… whatever that used to be?"

She laughed, kicking at a bit of the metal. "I've only just arrived here. That heap of scrap was a very rudimentary transporter. Just strong enough to get me to the nearest inhabited world. Although-" she turned on the spot, looking at where exactly she'd come out. It was a riverbank, not too far off from a little cluster of low huts that were sheltered by low hanging trees. "I assume this is still E-space."

He blinked, confused. "I'm sorry. What's E-space? I'm not quite sure what you mean."

"Never mind. It's nothing to worry about. What's your name?"

"Fennic. I live in the cluster over there, you're more than welcome to join us for a while. What's yours?"

She paused, appearing to consider the question.

"It doesn't really matter."

"But what should I call you?"

She laughed softly. "Call me whatever you like. I'm just a traveller, wandering along and trying to find a friend. My name isn't important."

"Well then," he said, offering her an arm. "I shall tell the others that a Wanderer has come to stay for a while. And perhaps you will find friends here."

She accepted. "Thank you, that's very kind. But I'm looking for a rather specific friend, actually."

"What are they like?"

Another pause.

"The most wonderful being anyone in this universe or any other could ever dream of."

She had been blonde for a while after her arrival, she recalled. That had changed a couple of times as she traversed the small world. Now able to see her little home through the branches, she picked up the pace. The small clearing had been a perfectly pleasant place to stay during her time there. Entirely surrounded by low fruit bushes and trees with hanging fronds, it was curtained off from the rest of the world by a wall of nature. A tributary of the river ran through the space before darting back amongst the trees, and when the sun was low in the sky little silvery fish flittered between the ripples. With so much available wood, it had been easy to create a cosy little hut - very much in the style of those made by the planet's natives - to provide shelter. Thankfully, the weather was never too extreme, but it kept the warmth in and the bugs out. That was all she needed, really.

Her true pride and joy stood in the centre of the clearing, covered loosely by a mat of leaves and rough string. She'd had to add to it as the structure had grown, and the pattern of colours told such a story. A central circle of deep green which faded out into lighter yellows and browns before suddenly blurring into deep purples and reds, extra green patches here and there where it had torn and been repaired. A visual tale of the countless seasons she had spent on this world. The blanket was more to hide it from unsuspecting villagers who wandered this way than to protect it from danger - here, it was far more likely that harm would come to it because of a curious person fiddling about than anything else. Lifting it, she bundled the cover in her arms and tossed it through the doorway of her little shelter, taking a quick glance over it as she did so. She would miss the little place, really.

It was just four walls and a slanted roof. She'd weaved another mat - the action had made her think of approved recreation time during school - to cover the ground, and that had served as her bed. Not that she needed to sleep very often. Her people could go without it for weeks on end. The thought of home made her shudder; she couldn't tell whether it was out of anticipation or fear.

"No." She murmured to herself. "I'm not going back yet."

She wasn't quite ready to answer the call home. Thinking about it, she supposed she could blame her friend for that. Under his influence, she had changed so much - blooming out of her uptight, well-schooled shell as they went gallivanting across the stars. Perhaps that's why the strongest thought in her mind was finding him again. His company was certainly preferable to what she would find if she returned. Patting the nearest wall fondly, she turned on her heel and stepped outside again, setting eyes on the newly exposed structure.

The thing she had been nurturing for the last 243 years was no bigger than a small dog, although it was far heavier. By the time she had arrived in this settlement, it had almost been too heavy for her to carry, so she was rather glad to make it her final stopping point. It had grown incredibly over the last few years, which was a good sign of usable energy. E-space and N-space had rather different energies, as she had discovered during her time there, and unfortunately the fragment needed to latch onto N-space to truly thrive. So she had wandered, hauling her precious cargo behind her wherever she went, in search of energy patches. Some of them only lasted for moments, but the residue left behind was enough to give things a boost. Others, however, lasted years, constantly feeding the growing machine.

She didn't think he'd noticed the chunk of Tardis coral that she'd taken from the Zero Room. It was only a little thing, really, barely the size of her palm, but it was enough to regrow one. A safety measure. A way out of E-space. She knew from the beginning that it would take centuries to be strong enough to get her out of there, but it was better than nothing.

Now, it was an intricate honeycomb of pinkish coral surrounding a crystalline structure that was probably the size of her head. That was a good sign - it was an adequate size to receive enough energy to break through the wall between the two sections of the universe. It was simply a case of scanning for an energy pulse large enough to be usable. But that was the one thing out of her control. Watching the basic display she had rigged up for promising signs, she sighed.

"Come on, come on. Please. There has to be something this time."

Once every few months, she would check for signals. Usually there were changes in the atmosphere to signify the approach of energy from N-space, but nothing yet had been strong enough to help her.

Until today.

There it was.

That little stream of lights she had been waiting for all this time.

Enough.

Looking around the clearing one last time, committing to memory the shades of green and the scent of the fading blossoms, she placed shaking hands on either side of the form, and pressed down the buttons. For a painful moment, nothing happened. Then a faint whine, and a feeling like static through her blood. She breathed deep, closing her eyes, and felt herself slip from the surface of the world and pass through into another.

It felt rather like being folded up into an origami swan, then being scrunched into a little ball and tossed into a waste bin. Or at least, what she imagined that experience would be like. She kept her eyes closed - there would be nothing to see, and even if there was she was travelling so fast that it would all be a messy blur anyway. As the weight of dimensions settled about her chest, making her hearts thrash against her ribs like panicked rabbits, the memory of their last moments together flew to the forefront.

"We've made it. Quick, quick, get inside." When she didn't follow, he frowned. "What's the matter?"

She shook her head. "I'm not coming with you."

"Inside. That's an order."

"No more orders, Doctor. Goodbye."

"What? What a moment to choose."

Brushing her hair out of her face, she sighed. "But it is, isn't it? A moment to choose. I've got to be my own person now. It's far better to do this than return somewhere I no longer want to be. I won't answer their calls."

Next to her, Biroc had nodded, arms folded across his chest. "And we need a Time Lord."

"Goodbye, Doctor."

But he had stopped her from walking away one more time. Unable to let go just yet. "No, no, no. Wait, wait. There's something else. K9. He'll be all right with you behind the mirrors."

As the dog trundled over to her side, she smiled. "I'll take good care of him, I promise."

He smiled back, that wonderful wide grin beneath the mess of wild curls that she had grown so fond of. "I'll miss you. Oh, how I will miss you. You were the noblest-"

She felt herself slam back into reality - quite literally - as her feet made contact with wet pavement and she slumped against a brick wall. A deep breath in, and she could taste smoke in the air, mixed with the recent rain and a hint of fuel fumes. It took a moment for her to regain balance, muscles twitching as they got used to the new gravity while she waited for her eyes to focus on the pattern of bricks in the wall in front of her.

This had to be somewhere in N-space. Nowhere in E-space had been anywhere near as developed as this. She had made it.

Allowing herself a relieved chuckle, she hauled herself out of the alleyway where the Tardis chunk had dropped her. Looking down, a harsh pang struck both of her hearts at the crumbling remnants of the machine that had carried her so far, that she had tended to for so long. There was hardly anything left. A few spongy lumps of coral that disintegrated in the puddles even as she watched, and a thumb sized piece of the central crystal. Leaning down, she picked up the crystal and tucked it into a pocket; a last reminder of the time she'd spent in the other places.

"You okay over there ma'am?"

The accented voice made her jump a little, and she turned to look. It was a young man, tall and lanky. He seemed anxious, like he regretted even speaking to her in the first place, and she offered a smile.

"Yes, thank you. I… just got a little lost, that's all."

At the sound of her voice he tilted his head a little.

"You aren't from around these parts, huh?"

"Not exactly, no. Where exactly am I?"

"This is Lower Manhattan, ma'am. If you're a tourist, this ain't the part of New York I'd think you'd be wanting. The Midtown's much nicer."

She mulled over his words for a moment. New York - she remembered that name from a conversation, long ago. It was a place on Earth. So she really had made it! Not only had she managed to get out of E-space, but she'd ended up on one of the Doctor's favourite planets to boot. That would certainly make finding him much easier.

"Well, thank you. I appreciate your help. This might be an odd question, but… what year is this?"

He stared at her, concern marking his pretty features.

"Are you sure you're alright ma'am? You didn't… hit your head or nothing?"

"No, I promise I'm okay. Just tell me what the year is."

"It's 1929, same as it has been for the last eight months. Look, do you want me to help you find a doctor, or something? If you're hurt, then-"
She cut him off with another smile. "That's very kind, but there's only one Doctor I could need - and I don't think I'll need help to find him again. You go on, now. I'll be alright."

"Are you sure?" There was a look in his eyes that made it very clear he wanted to do nothing more than just leg it and go back to whatever he had been doing; he clearly wasn't too confident with talking to strangers.

"Yes, I am. Thank you again - what was your name?"

"It's Frank, ma'am."

"Well, thank you Frank."

Taking that as his cue, he nodded politely and walked away, speeding up ever so slightly as he reached the next corner. His mama had always told him to be wary of people who said odd things - now he felt pretty sure that she had been right.

Finally feeling stable enough to move, she started walking in the direction Frank had indicated, her gaze flicking over the buildings she passed. Red brick high rises adorned with black tangles of metal stairs framed the road, where a handful of basic vehicles wove their way between the throngs of people walking there. There were a handful of sparse trees dotted on each side of the pavement, leaves fluttering in the slight breeze under the cloudy sky. Spotting a newspaper on a nearby bench, she stopped to check the date.

"The ninth of August." She muttered, skimming the article on the front page. "But Earth, 1929? What could possibly have created enough power for my Tardis fragment?"

And then the thought hit her. Stupid, stupid. It was so obvious. The energy source had to have come from something from another world. Her knowledge of Earth history was a bit rusty, she had to admit, but she was very sure that there was no way anything the human race had created at this point would have generated the right type and amount of power. She put the paper back down, and took a moment to think.

What would the Doctor do?

The answer came to her immediately. Stumble along until he walked into something important. Well, if that worked for him…

Using this method, it took less than four hours to find something that looked promising. Having noticed the poor conditions that so many of New York's residents were living in, the opulence of the half finished Empire State Building stuck out as a good place to start looking. Bluffing her way through the front doors and various areas of building work by claiming to be a variety of things - an electrician, an architect, a safety inspector - she scoured as much of the building as she could for anything out of place. She had almost given up before spotting a half-open manhole in the street outside. Moving carefully, she made her way down the ladder, boots making slight squishing noises against the wet floor. She didn't particularly want to think about what she was probably standing in. In the near distance, she could hear movement and machinery; she had to be on the right track. Following her senses, she took the tunnel to her right, walking as quietly as possible. But something made her stop, piquing her interest: a shard of mirror. It was cracked and covered in a thin layer of questionable grime, but she crouched to look at herself anyway.

She hadn't seen her face before.

Of course, she'd taken a look at her reflection in the river from time to time, when the sun was in the right place in the sky, but it had always been relatively distorted. All that she definitively knew was that her hair was ginger. But now, she could finally see what three regenerations had done to her. Both times she had changed in E-space had been entirely uneventful. The first was due to accidental poisoning - in hindsight, she probably should have checked the plants she was eating a bit more thoroughly before putting them in her body. The second had been down to sheer exhaustion after she'd worn herself out trying to power the Tardis fragment enough to get her where she wanted to go. Funnily enough, she'd changed the tactics after that little incident. So she hadn't really known what she looked like for a very long time - only knowing that this was now her fifth body, and that for now it was functioning nicely.

The woman that looked back from the mirror was rather pale, she thought, but the sprinkle of freckles across her nose and cheekbones made her look a little less like a ghost. Her eyes were a light hazel colour, framed by neat blonde-ish eyebrows and darker lashes. There were shadows beneath them, but she rather liked that; they added depth. A soft nose and cheeks sat above slightly chapped lips and a rather strong jawline. Her hair - remarkably ginger even in the dingy light of the sewers - fell to around the middle of her back, and looked rather tangled at the ends. Well, she supposed, time and dimensional travel without a protective capsule would do that to you. She took a quick look at the rest of herself: subtle muscles running through her limbs from decades of manual activities, slender fingers, a relatively curveless waist beneath the layers of clothing. It certainly wasn't bad.

Straightening up again, she continued down the tunnel.

"Focus, idiot." She found that muttering to herself the way she had often dreamed of talking to the Doctor was rather a good method of motivation, and her progress towards the noises was relatively smooth for the next few minutes. There came a point where clumps of cabling came into view, and she felt herself smile.

"Gotcha."

Moving silently now, up on her toes and steadying herself against the walls, she peered through an archway.

The room in front of her was clearly being used as some kind of laboratory. A multitude of covered beds were suspended from the high ceiling - had she been able to reach, she would have liked to pull the white sheets back and see what lay beneath. Clear tubing was wound between the beds before trailing down in large bundles to machinery in the next section. She followed it along, running a hand along the walls and staying in the shadows, very well aware that she may not be alone in there. Reaching the next room, she glanced over the smooth bronze constructions with their pulsating screens. There was movement, and she pressed herself into the cool stone to avoid being seen.

And for the first time in a very long time, Romana said,

"Oh, fuck."

Because the shape lurking in the sewers with her could only be a Dalek.

Ha! Now how's that for a return? I hope you've enjoyed this one - get looking forward to the rest!

Much love,

Azzie x