oOo

"Well, then, what are you going to do about it?"

The Doctor raised and lowered his shoulders in a shrug as he turned away from the kitchen window to face the rest of the room. At Tegan's urging, he had explained the situation to the other occupants of the house--his friends and comrades, who had faced so much with him, who had always stood by him, no matter what. Who, he was beginning to realize, would always do so. He had always felt himself to be a disruptive force in his traveling companion's lives, and it surprised him how accepting they were of him in spite of the upheaval he invariably caused. Upheaval and turmoil, and lives turned upside down, and still their first, instinctive reaction was to help him. Even Tegan, and he marveled at that more than anything else.

He looked at them all, seeing the unexpected--and unexpectedly welcome--determination on every face. Sarah Jane, who had posed the question, was standing by the door to the parlor. Harry and Lavinia were seated at the table on either side of Tegan, while Lanie slept in a basket at her mother's feet, K-9 standing guard next to her. "War council," Sarah had pronounced it, and war council it was, no matter how much it resembled a cozy family gathering. And all of them waiting to hear what he would do next, and what they could do to help him. Astonishing. He had the feeling that even Lanie would sit up in her basket and demand to do something, if he only waited. But she slept on, oblivious to the tension around her, and he was thankful that it was so.

"Of course you have to find out if the White Guardian is telling the truth," the reporter continued after another moment passed in silence. "If he is, then we have to find out who's behind it. And why."

The Doctor nodded reluctantly. "As much as I'd like to hope that this will all just blow over, I doubt very much that it will," he replied. His gaze briefly met Tegan's, then passed over the rest of the group. Taking their measure. "I should start by saying that I have no doubt whatsoever that the White Guardian is telling the truth. No matter how distasteful a truth it may be," he added. "Finding out who has altered the natural flow of the time stream is our first priority." A pause. "Or rather, it should be my first priority." He had to make one last attempt to keep them out of it, if only because he suspected it was going to be messy. Very messy. "I have no right to drag any of you into this--"

"You couldn't possibly keep us out!" This interruption came, not from Sarah Jane or Tegan, but, unexpectedly, from Harry Sullivan. Not that the Doctor had any doubts as to Harry's courage or loyalty, but the medical man had traveled on the TARDIS for a shorter period of time than the others, and seemed to have no regrets when he'd taken his last trip. The Doctor realized with a twinge of guilt that he'd never gotten to know the MD as well as he had others that traveled with him, that he'd allowed his irritation with some of Harry's careless habits to get in the way of knowing the man behind the carelessness. At least Sarah Jane hadn't made that same mistake, no matter how long she'd taken to make up her mind to marry his former traveling companion.

Harry was looking uncertainly at the others while the Doctor's thoughts wandered. "That is, if everyone agrees--"

"Of course we do, Harry," Lavinia spoke up sharply. Another person whose life he'd affected, albeit more indirectly than any of the others. But her support was just as welcome a surprise as everyone else's; the Doctor began to feel a cautious sort of hope that he might be able to work through this. With friends like these, why not? "The Doctor knows it as well as the rest of us. There's never been any question of him playing the lone wolf on this one." Her glance moved deliberately to the baby's basket. "He's got as many commitments here as he does anywhere else in the universe. More."

"I agree." The Doctor's voice rang out, in answer to the unspoken challenge behind Lavinia's words. "However," he continued, "it does not appear that I shall be allowed to honor those commitments unmolested. Which brings us back to Sarah's question. What are we going to do?"

There was no question of not involving them, not any longer, and the Doctor knew it had never really been an issue.

"Is there any way to find out what's different now than the way it's supposed to be?" Tegan's voice was hesitant, as if she wasn't sure how to phrase the question. "I mean, besides the fact that you're here, of course."

"What would you have done if you hadn't received my message and downloaded it?" Lavinia clarified when Tegan floundered to a stop. The younger woman smiled at her gratefully. "Where were you, what were you doing?"

"Turlough had finally been reunited with his people, and was returning to Trion, his home planet," the Doctor began, his eyes growing abstracted as he recalled the events that led to his return. "I'd managed to acquire yet another companion--Perpigillium Brown, an American," he added. "Peri for short. I suppose I would have continued traveling with her. She showed an interest in staying for a while, and I've grown so accustomed to traveling with others, it never would have occurred to me to bring her straight home unless she specifically asked me to."

"Even then, you usually managed to avoid doing it," Tegan muttered, a smile softening the sting of the implied criticism. "Obviously you managed it this time, unless you've had her locked up in the TARDIS for the past two months!"

"No, she's home," the Doctor replied firmly. "Where she belongs. At least, where I assumed she belonged. The White Guardian seems to have very different ideas on that subject."

"And he thinks the Black Guardian might be behind it all, that he's the one that made certain you received my message," Lavinia murmured, more, it seemed, to order her own thoughts than anything. Her eyes remained puzzled as the Doctor nodded his agreement. "I'm afraid I still don't quite understand, Doctor," she continued, looking up at him. "Time travel would seem to preclude the possibility of situations like this; shouldn't you simply be able to make side trips for as long as you like--relatively speaking, of course--and then simply take up where you left off? If you wanted to?" she added with a hasty, apologetic glance at Tegan.

"You've done it before," Sarah chimed in. "Lots of times."

"I pointed that out to the White Guardian; he was not impressed," the Doctor replied dryly. "Ordinarily, Lavinia would be right; I should be able to take as long as I want and simply return to the point in time and space I was when I took my 'vacation'. Unfortunately, the White Guardian is saying it isn't working that way. Not this time. Somehow, the longer I remain here, the more out of sync the universe becomes. Things are happening that I cannot go back and alter at what would be a later date for me. Things that apparently require my immediate attention."

"It's so confusing," Tegan broke in. "It seemed like you kept things from happening that weren't supposed to be happening, sure, but your TARDIS always seemed to end up at those places by accident!"

"Not always," the Doctor corrected her. "Many of my destinations were the ones I was aiming for, even if the situation wasn't what I expected--with a few notable exceptions," he added with a glance at Sarah Jane.

"Getting back to UNIT HQ the one time was a bit on the difficult side," she agreed. "And didn't you tell us you ended up in E-Space when you were trying for Gallifrey? Not to mention the time--"

"Very well," the Doctor interrupted crossly. "So it was more than a few times. The point I am trying to make is that a distressing number of the times I went off-course was because the High Council or the Celestial Intervention Agency sent me there--whether I knew it at the time or not," he added. "And I'm positive that they were in turn directly influenced by the White Guardian when they chose me as their agent. And now, of course, it seems the White Guardian made sure I arrived at various other temporal crisis points even when I arrived at my intended physical destination." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "If I thought about it at all, I just assumed those random course changes were an eccentricity of the TARDIS, some kind of programming glitch I was never able to work out, but now..."

"But now we have some rather nebulous evidence to the contrary," Sarah Jane put in. "Is there any way to gain more concrete evidence?"

"Why bother?" Everyone turned to Lavinia in surprise. "No, really, think about it," she insisted. "Does it truly matter why, or even if, the Black Guardian sent you off course? Isn't the point of all this to find out what it is you were supposed to set right this time, and didn't? Or haven't done yet? Do you have any way of figuring that out?"

The Doctor nodded. "You're right, Lavinia; I let myself get sidetracked on details that may ultimately have no importance, although they are questions I plan to have answered eventually," he warned. "How, why, and who--but now is not the time for those answers. Right now we need to concentrate, as Lavinia so succinctly put it, on what I was supposed to set right." He gazed off into the distance. "Unfortunately, there are a distressing number of possibilities."

"Aren't there always?" Tegan muttered. "So why don't you toddle off to the TARDIS and see what's going on in the universe, see what's different than you remember it?"

"The problem with my memories is that they aren't always reliable, and neither are the TARDIS computers," the Doctor replied. He stared at the others with an expression suspiciously close to hopelessness in his eyes. "The chances of finding something--"

"Are better if you actually try to do it than if you just sit around worrying about how hard it will be," Tegan interrupted firmly. She seemed determined to keep him on track, and the Doctor wondered what had happened to the hysterics she seemed on the verge of earlier, in the laboratory. "Just scan the computer records or whatever, and if anything seems funny…" She shrugged.

"What, just go on instinct?" the Doctor asked with a small grin. "It's certainly an idea." He paused. "Of course, I could use some help looking things over--you've seen the future enough, would you care to look over my shoulder for a while?"

She seemed surprised by the offer, but a pleased smile spread across her face as she nodded. "That'd be super!"

Sarah seemed about to say something, but kept her thoughts to herself as Harry and Lavinia both shot her warning glances. Once she thought about it, she was glad she'd kept her offer to help to herself; it seemed obvious now that the Doctor hadn't wanted so much to pick Tegan's brains as to spend some time alone with her.

"I'll mind Lanie," she volunteered instead, smiling back in acknowledgment of the Doctor's grateful smile for her understanding. It had taken her years of travel and even more years of separation, but she thought she was finally beginning to understand him. Just a little, but that was probably as much as anyone ever would.