Author's Note: Thanks so much to everyone who welcomed me back. Very glad not everyone is sick of my writing :)
Special thanks to the following people for reviewing - yulicee, GuesssWho, MayFairy, TheGreatWhite, Guest, sailormajinmoon, The Mouse's Rose, Lexy Summers, EmmaMarie, MountainLord-92, EDZEL2 and LovelyOne797.
To Guest - Thanks for the encouragement. Hopefully you'll keep reading to find out what happens with the Time-fire :)
To sailormajinmoon - Yay, a new reader, thanks for hopping aboard my ridiculously long saga. As for the Doctor's reaction, it may seem a bit harsh at first glance, but if you had a daughter you loved, would you want her marrying the Master after all he's done,let alone having his baby? Probably not, I'm thinking :) Hopefully the rest of your questions will be answered in due course. Thanks very much for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
To LovelyOne797 - Aw thanks, that was a lovely review. I'm so glad you had an emotional reaction to the chapter and it makes me very happy that you're pleased I'm back with another story!
So anyway, here's the next chapter...
- CHAPTER TWO -
"There were cracks. Some were tiny...some were as big as the sky. Through some we saw worlds and people. And through others we saw silence and the end of all things..."
Rosanna Calvierri, Vampires in Venice.
The Doctor stared in shock at the vortex manipulator dangling emptily from his hands, the sound of the crack snapping shut still reverberating in his head, terrible in its finality. A smooth, unbroken wall faced him. It looked completely undisturbed, the stones dusty and covered with the cobwebs of centuries, as though the crack had never been. There was no sign at all of Tejana. He felt sick inside. Even though he hadn't let go, just as he had promised, he had still lost her. Something...someone...had undone the buckles on the wrist-strap - invisible, ghost-like fingers deliberately loosening them so that he would lose his grip and his daughter would be helplessly sucked into the glowing white Time-fire. And he had no idea who that someone was. A goblin, a trickster or a warrior... The words of the ancient legend spun round and round in his mind. Was this something to do with the opening of the Pandorica? Or were there other forces at work here?
Already he was finding it more and more difficult to remember exactly what had happened. The grinning crack, shaped exactly like the one that had once split Amy's bedroom wall; his daughter's frightened voice calling his name, calling him "father", begging him to save her; the frantic feeling of her arm sliding out of the leather wrist-strap. It was all growing soft and hazy, fading at the edges, all the details seeping away. Even now, Tejana's face was just a featureless blur, surrounded in a halo of copper-coloured hair.
No, he thought in horror, realising what was happening. The Time-fire has wiped her from existence. My own history is changing. I'm forgetting her. Soon I won't remember I ever had a daughter.
Desperately, he thrust the vortex manipulator into his pocket and scrabbled around, trying to find a pen and some paper. He had to hold her inside his mind long enough to write himself some instructions. If it was written down, in his hand, he would know he needed to find her, even if his memories of her disappeared completely. He could get her back...he had to believe that, he had to! Rory had fallen into a crack and he had come back – somehow, it could be done. But if he didn't even know to look for her, she would be lost forever.
Come on, he told himself, mentally cudgelling his brain, fighting to stop it all slipping away. Concentrate! She's your daughter, your only family. You're going to have a grandson. You promised you wouldn't let her go - REMEMBER her!
The pen was in his hands, together with a small notebook. His recollection was already hanging by the slenderest of threads. Quickly, he flipped the book open and began to scrawl across the page, like someone gingerly placing the last ace on top of a house of cards, praying he wouldn't bring the whole edifice tumbling down.
A footstep sounded on the stairs, the crunch of a heavy soldier's boot. "They're still up there." It was Rory's voice.
The interruption shattered the Doctor's carefully-balanced concentration like a stone flung through a glass window pane.
"No, no, no!" he yelled, staring down at the notebook, struggling to hold on to his receding memories. "Rory, don't!"
Ginger. A blur of ginger hair...he was jealous because she was ginger and he wasn't...remember...she wanted him to marry her to the Master and he was angry, so very angry...remember...he loved her more than anything else in the Universe, he just wanted her to be happy...remember...
"Don't what?" Rory queried, obliviously walking towards him. His voice seemed unbearably loud in the narrow, enclosed space. Piercing. Penetrating. And as destructive as a super-nova. "There's an entire invasion fleet still circling around up there. What do we do now?" He looked more closely at the Time Lord, taking in his stiff, unnatural pose. "Are you all right, Doctor? Why are you just standing around in the passageway?"
The fragile, elusive moment stretched...and shifted...and turned...and, just like that, was gone. The Doctor blinked and glanced up at Rory, as if waking from a dream. Then his eyes fell back down to the open notebook he was holding. He wasn't quite sure what he was doing, to be honest, standing like a statue in the middle of the dank, dark tunnel. Not that he would ever admit that to Rory, of course – he had an image to maintain, after all. His fingers were clenched tightly around a pen in his hand. Had he been writing something? Oddly, now that he looked at it, the notebook was marked with circular, squiggly script. Gallifreyan, he thought in surprise. It was definitely his own writing. Just a few letters, trailing away into an indecipherable scrawl...it appeared to be a name. TEJANA. He wrinkled his forehead. Another Time Lord, perhaps? Why else would he have written the name down in Gallifreyan? It didn't ring any bells though, not that he could think of.
"Rory, did I come down here with anyone else?" he asked, not quite sure why he was asking the question. After all, there was obviously no-one else here now, certainly no other Time Lords. Apart from himself and the Master, they were all long dead. But something kept nudging at the back of his mind and wouldn't leave him alone.
The young centurion looked at him with a bemused expression. For a brief moment, he seemed to hesitate, as if he wasn't certain what his answer would be. But then he said, "The girl, you mean?"
The Doctor tensed, all his senses suddenly on red alert. "What girl?"
"Tiny little thing, with long red hair," Rory replied, his brow wrinkled in concentration. "She turned up out of nowhere when you were giving your speech to the invasion fleet. She didn't look well, so you said you were bringing her down here, out of the rain."
A feeling of cold uneasiness began to emerge in the Doctor's brain, like a bloated corpse slowly rising to the surface of a pond. "And did it look like I knew who this girl was?"
"Well, you gave her a big hug when she first arrived, if that's what you mean."
"You don't happen to know her name, do you?"
Rory shrugged. "Sorry. I've never seen her before. Why? Is it important? More important than an invasion fleet circling around up above us, for instance?"
"I'm not sure," the Doctor replied, deep in thought, his companion's pointed sarcasm going completely over his head, as usual. Closing the notebook and slipping it back into his pocket, he walked back into the chamber containing the Pandorica, with Rory following in his wake. The tall grey cube sat impassively, unchanged from when he had left it earlier. Somehow, without even trying, the thing gave the Doctor the unpleasant impression that it was watching him. All around, the cavernous room seemed to crawl with shadows. "Except that I don't remember her at all. Which might not be impossible, because nothing is impossible, but it is improbable, because I'm the Doctor, and forgetting things isn't something I tend to do. Not to mention that, whoever she was, she doesn't appear to be here now, does she?"
"Perhaps there's another exit?" Rory suggested, glancing around nervously. "Who knows how many tunnels there are in this place."
"Mmmm, perhaps," the Doctor murmured, crouching down and tracing his finger around something on the ground. "But I'm starting to get a very bad feeling about this, Rory."
The young centurion craned his neck to see what the Time Lord was looking at. "What did you find?"
Imprinted in the dust was a small, delicate-looking boot-print. Even as the two of them watched, the fine grey particles seemed to stir in an unseen breeze, sifting and sliding sinuously across the floor, until all trace of the betraying mark had been erased.
"Unless I'm very much mistaken, the footprints of the Neverwere," the Doctor said grimly.
Tejana knew all about cracks in Time. Back in her Academy days, her tutors had covered the subject extensively, drilling the details into the heads of their students with methodical insistence. Determined to hold on to her sanity, she retrieved every last fragment of information from the depths of her brain and carefully studied them, trying to find something she could use.
Firstly, she knew what caused a crack, namely two pieces of space and time colliding that were never meant to touch. Which, now she thought about it, was a bit of a vague explanation that could cover many contingencies, without providing any helpful specifics. Like, for instance, how this particular crack had suddenly turned up without warning under Stonehenge, not to mention how the hell she had ended up inside it.
Secondly, she knew how to close them. With a small crack, it was as simple as widening it with something like a sonic screwdriver, until the forces inverted and the crack snapped shut. With a larger crack, you needed to seal it with a significant space-time event. As it happened, she had proven that herself once before, on the Isle of Avalon, using the White Point Star from Rassilon's presidential scepter to close a crack that had been menacing Jack and the Master. However, as bright and encouraging as that memory was, knowing how to close a crack wasn't particularly useful when a crack had already shut and you were on the wrong side of it.
And lastly, she knew what happened when someone fell into a crack and was engulfed by Time-fire. They were wiped from history, as if they had never been, forgotten by everyone except for time-travellers, who had a slightly different perspective from everyone else. But even a time-traveller could forget, if the removed person related to their direct past. So the odds were, since she was his daughter, and you couldn't get much more direct than that, the Doctor had most likely forgotten her already. Which wasn't a very comforting thought, when you considered that he was the only one who knew where she was.
The horrible truth was, when you came down to it, even she didn't know exactly where she was. Because, even after all those extremely useful lectures at the Academy, the one thing she didn't know about cracks in Time was what actually happened to people after they were absorbed. Logic dictated that there was probably a very good reason for this, since nobody had ever returned from a crack to tell the tale, just as she would probably never return again either. But right now, she didn't want to listen to logic. That kind of reasoning was the path to madness, so as far as she was concerned, logic could take a running jump.
Up until now, she supposed she had always assumed that a person swallowed by a crack just...well, disintegrated...or atomised...or ceased to exist...or something along those lines. But as far as she could tell, she was still very much in existence. She was even corporeal. She could feel her chest rising and falling as she breathed. And when she dug her fingernails into the palms of her hands, she could feel the sharp pain as her skin punctured, which she took as a hopeful sign that she wasn't dead, at least not yet. She appeared to be floating – or maybe still falling, it was hard to tell - in a cloud of silver mist. It didn't hurt and it wasn't particularly frightening in any way. In fact, it was oddly beautiful, if you liked that kind of thing.
All at once, she felt a sudden acute longing for the Master. Oh gods, she'd gone and done it again, hadn't she? Disappeared on an errand of her own, without telling him, and now she'd ended up neck deep in trouble. When would she ever learn? He'd promised he would always come for her, that there was nowhere in the Universe she could go that he wouldn't find her and bring her back. And on Mnemosyne, he'd proven that he meant it, by intentionally putting himself in deadly danger to save her. But what if she was no longer inside the Universe? What if she was outside Time itself, beyond even his reach? Despite her attempts to remain positive, a wave of despair threatened to engulf her. She was his lover, his life-mate, she was carrying his baby – she was part of his direct past. Like the Doctor, he would forget both her and his child, as if they had never been. Just the thought of it made her want to cry out in pain. Bad enough to be dead, but not even to remain as a memory in the minds of the people she loved, that was something no-one deserved.
As if in response, an invisible hand brushed her cheek. The touch wasn't harsh or threatening. It was gentle and almost tender, as if intended to comfort her. But Tejana started and pulled away, both her hearts beating wildly, the terrifying feeling of being dragged into the crack by an unseen assailant still fresh in her mind.
"Who are you?" she demanded, forcing some anger into her voice to hide her fear as she stared around her. "What do you want with me?"
But there was no answer and nothing else touched her. Not far away, the argent mist swirled and sparkled. Tejana could see a dark, distorted shape emerging through the swathes of fog, parting it like the Red Sea. A strange muttering noise drifted eerily towards her, accompanied by a high-pitched squeaking sound.
"Hello?" she called apprehensively. "Is someone there?"
As the apparition came closer, she realised it was nothing more menacing than an old woman pushing a shopping trolley through the mist, piled high with a peculiar variety of odds and ends. Tejana could see crushed tin cans, empty bottles, pile of old clothes, ragged umbrellas with broken spokes, a few books with most of the pages hanging loose, an old bed-roll and numerous plastic bags with unidentified contents. The squeaking noise was coming from the badly balanced wheels as the trolley clanked along. The old woman had long iron-grey hair, sticking out haphazardly from under a knitted woollen hat. Tejana assumed she was elderly from her pronounced stoop, but it was impossible to tell her true age under all the accumulated grime. She was dressed in a filthy, frayed old coat about five sizes too big for her, while several pairs of fingerless gloves were layered on to her gnarled hands. On her feet, she wore a pair of scuffed old army boots with the soles flapping loose. She seemed to be having some kind of ongoing argument with herself, mumbling unintelligibly in a tone that alternated between aggressive belligerence and a kind of indignant whining.
"Hello?" Tejana tried again. "Ma'am? Can you hear me?"
The raddled old woman simply kept muttering and walking, as though the Time Lady wasn't even there. She can't see me, Tejana thought in frustration, watching as the tramp vanished into the mist. For a few seconds, she could still hear the rough old voice muttering in the distance and the receding clank of the trolley wheels. Then there was an ominous grinding noise and a flash of white light shone opaquely through the mist. After that, there was only heavy silence.
Before Tejana could try to draw any conclusions from the weird sequence of events, a tall man with dark hair burst into view in front of her. He was wearing a smart, beautifully-cut business suit and was carrying a leather briefcase. He was looking worriedly at his expensive gold watch, as though he was afraid of being late for an important appointment.
Tejana decided to try again. Perhaps the old woman had just been old and delusional, lost in her own mind. This man looked both sane and rational. Perhaps he would have some idea of what was going on. "Hello? Excuse me, Sir? Can you tell me what this place is?"
Once again, there was no response and the man just kept walking unseeingly right past her.
A chill of realisation struck her with the force of a bullet. They're humans! Humans who have fallen through a crack and ended up here, in this no-place. They're not time-sensitive, so they don't even know what's happened to them. They just keep on living their lives, as though nothing has happened, even though there's no life left to live.
Even as this revelation sank into her mind, pure white light flashed and another grinning crack opened up in front of the hurrying man. Blinded by the sudden radiance, Tejana managed just a fleeting glimpse of a strange, alien world on the other side of the gaping fissure, a dreamlike impression of lush, green forests and ape-like humanoid figures dressed in animal skins.
"Look out!" she screamed in warning. "Hey, you! STOP!"
But the elegantly-dressed businessman had produced a mobile phone from his pocket and was irritably stabbing at the buttons. Without even breaking his impatient stride, he marched straight through the waiting crack and it slammed shut behind him like a greedy mouth.
Tejana shuddered as it finally became clear to her what was happening. Cracks within cracks. Reality itself splintering over and over again, into a myriad of different places and possibilities, like countless reflections of a reflection. People wiped from their own existence, falling through into other worlds, other time-lines, other dimensions. Her stomach churned in dull, horrified compassion. What would happen to that poor man, thrown into a savage reality he couldn't possibly comprehend or even believe in? What chance did he have to survive? He would probably wander around dazedly asking for the nearest internet cafe, until he ended up decorated with a bunch of herbs in some cannibal's cooking pot, crocodile skin shoes and all. And what had happened to the old tramp lady? Where in all the infinite number of possible universes had she ended up? Is this what happened to everyone who was absorbed by the cracks? If so, how many more displaced souls were there out there, eternally lost and forgotten in worlds not their own?
The concealing silver mists swirled around her again, but Tejana no longer found them beautiful. Instead, they were deadly and terrible. Somewhere out there, she knew there would be a crack with her name on it, and sooner or later it would be coming for her. The only slight advantage she had was that she was a Time Lady and she could see the fragmentation of reality clearly. Perhaps, if she searched hard enough and was very lucky, she could find a crack that would take her home again.
Behind her, she could hear a grief-stricken sobbing. Turning, she saw the worst sight of all. A tiny little boy, not more than four years old, was wandering alone in the mist, crying his eyes out. He was clutching a well-worn teddy bear with only one eye, holding it up to his face for comfort. "Mummy!" he cried. "Daddy? Where are you? I can't find you! I'm scared! MUMMY!"
Tejana felt a stab of impotent rage at the terrible unfairness of it. Why the hell was this happening? Where were all these cracks coming from? What had gone so dreadfully wrong with the balance of the Universe to cause this? This child had obviously been stolen from the real world by a crack. The parents he was calling for so desperately would never come. They would have immediately forgotten him and would be living their lives without him, never understanding why their hearts were so unaccountably hollow and dead.
With a sense of mocking inevitability, the ground in front of the child split open in a blaze of white glory. But this time, to Tejana's horror, there was no other world waiting on the other side. Instead, all she could see beyond the pearly glow of the Time-fire was emptiness and oblivion, a crushing, soul-destroying blankness. Silence...she cringed inwardly, all her primal instincts recognising what she saw without understanding how or why. Silence and the end of all things!
"No!" she screamed, hurling herself forward in a doomed attempt to save the child, who was blindly stumbling closer and closer to his fate. But before she could reach him, something seized her around the waist and ruthlessly dragged her backwards, away from the toddler. "NOOOOO!"
Then everything seemed to explode. Tendrils of white flame shot outwards from the crack, wrapping around the little boy and snaking past him, reaching for Tejana with single-minded purpose.
"SILENCE WILL FALL!" an enormous voice boomed out in malicious satisfaction, shattering the air all around her into tiny sharp shards that seemed to dig into her eardrums.
She kicked and fought wildly, trying to get back to the child, frantic to rescue him. But once again, the invisible grip pulling at her was unbreakable, hauling her out of the reach of the approaching Time-fire.
"Mummy! MUMMY!" the little boy wailed, his tear-stained features twisted in anguish as he was pulled through the crack into never-ending shadow. His screams tore right through her, as though it was her own unborn son calling to her. But there was nothing she could do, nothing to save either him or herself.
Yet another crack was yawning at her feet, waiting for her. The invisible arms around her waist pulled her into it and there was a bewildering flash of orange and then everything went dark.