Forgive Me

Rory brought Amy and Adelaide through America's Area 52, which was a truly strange experience for Adelaide since they were inside what had once been a Great Pyramid and she could still remember the last time she'd been in it.

Adelaide was still studying her eye patch; it was clear she needed to put it on and that it wouldn't do any damage to her if both Amy and Rory, at least wore them, but she would prefer to know exactly what it did. "What exactly does this do?"

"It's an eye drive, ma'am," Rory explained. "It communicates directly with the memory centers of the brain. Acts as external storage."

"Only thing that works on them. Because no living mind can remember these things."

Rory nodded. "The Silence." He brought them into a room filled with containment chambers, all of which held Silence suspended in fluid. "We've captured over a hundred of them now, all held in this pyramid."

"Yes, I know, I've encountered them before." Adelaide stepped closer, studying one of them. "Always did want to know what they looked like."

"Well, put your eye drive on and you'll retain the information, but only for as long as you're wearing it." Adelaide did as Amy said, turning and stepping back in line with the humans.

"This way," Rory said, beginning to walk again, but noticed the way the Silence were following Adelaide as she walked. "They seem to be noticing you."

"Yes, I expect they would."

Amy stepped up to Adelaide's side. "So why aren't the human race killing the Silence on sight anymore?"

Adelaide looked at Amy with raised eyebrows, almost shocked the human would ask the question, but putting her slight stupidity down to having multiple realities fighting inside her head. "That was another reality. What's the purpose of the tanks?"

"They can draw electricity from anything. It's how they attack. The fluid insulates them. And I don't like the way they're looking at you."

"That I can agree with."

"Ma'am," Rory turned to Amy, "I'm sure it's nothing, but I should really check this out. They haven't been this active in a while." He motioned to the soldiers. "You two, upstairs. Check all the tank seals. Then the floors above, get everyone checking."

The soldiers nodded. "Sir!"

"You go ahead, ma'am," Rory nodded to Amy.

"Thank you, Captain Williams. Adelaide, this way."

Adelaide followed Amy as they left Rory to study the tank. "Do you happen to know Captain Williams's first name?"

Amy shrugged. "Captain." She stepped up to a doorway. "Just through here."

"If you would give me a moment," Adelaide stepped back, "there's something I'd like to check, ma'am." Amy nodded and Adelaide walked back to where Rory was standing. "You've remained so loyal, just waiting to be noticed. Always the pattern with you, it seems."

Rory glanced at her. "Sorry, ma'am?"

"In my opinion," Adelaide smirked, thinking of the Doctor despite herself, knowing this was something the Time Lord would have done, even with how little time there was left in this version of the universe, "you should ask your boss out; she said she likes you."

"Really, ma'am…what did she say?"

"That she'd tear the universe apart for you."

Rory's eyes widened. "Ma'am…"

Adelaide touched Rory's shoulder. "Perhaps not those exact words, but that seemed to be the general meaning of her statements." She stepped back. "Thank you for everything, Captain Williams."

She left before Rory could say anything, returning to Amy's side. "Come on, Adelaide. Time for you to meet some old friends." They stepped into the room.

"Attention all personnel," Rory said over the speakers. "Attention all personnel. Please check all assigned containment units."

They had entered a large open chamber filled with various bits of technology and scientists studying them, though Adelaide's gaze was immediately drawn to a woman standing with another woman in a lab coat. "You were right," the lab coat was saying. "Just her presence in the building caused the loop to extend by nearly four chronons." She gestured towards the large clock above them, flickering between 57 and 58.

"Terribly sorry for being late," Adelaide called to the woman the lab coat was speaking to, making her turn. "It isn't normal for me."

River Song looked at her. "Took you long enough."

"Has there been any sign of the Doctor?" Adelaide was counting on the fact that River, clearly, recognized her that the woman would also know the Doctor, even if no one else did.

"I haven't gone far," a voice called and Adelaide turned to see that the Doctor was sitting in the center of the room, legs crossed, with Kovarian tied to a chair next to him, though the woman was, at the moment, gagged. "It seems that you can't get rid of me, no matter how hard you try." He stood and strode towards her until he was only a few inches away, their faces so close to touching it almost hurt. "What the hell did you think you were doing?"

She raised her eyebrows. "Language."

"Adelaide…"

"For your information, I was saving your life." She took a step back, looking at River. "Except this one messed everything up. I did everything I could to help you and still, you refused." She sighed and looked around the room again. "How did all of this happen?"

"Hallucinogenic lipstick," River told her, ignoring how angry the Doctor currently was. "Works wonders on President Kennedy. And Cleopatra was a real pushover."

Adelaide shrugged. "She always did give that impression."

"She mentioned you," River nodded to the Doctor.

"Shut up!" the Doctor interrupted, making River blink and Adelaide look at him again. He grabbed Adelaide's hands to keep her from leaving again. "I need an explanation, right now."

Adelaide pulled her hands away, stepping around him to look at Kovarian. "And I already gave you one." She pulled off the gag. "Hello, Madam Kovarian."

Kovarian snarled at her. "Why couldn't you just die?"

"Trust me, I wanted to, but you made a basic mistake." Adelaide sighed. "You took a child, raised her into a perfect psychopath, and introduced her to the last two Time Lords. What did you expect would happen?" She turned back to River. "Do you understand the results of your actions, River? You tried to change a fixed event. Reality is fatally compromised."

River shrugged. "Dinner?"

"River, there isn't time, there will never be time, because time is dying as long as I'm alive." She stepped closer to the woman. "Because of you." But she couldn't get any closer because the Doctor snatched her back, gripping her arm far tighter that time.

"You know what happens if you touch," the Doctor told her, his jaw tense.

"And that is precisely why I want to do it." Adelaide tried to pull herself out of his grip again, but the Doctor pulled her tight to him. "Don't tell me that you want time to destroy itself?"

"I don't want you to die," he corrected her.

"Sadly, those two outcomes are closely linked. I have to die for time to reset itself."

"You're not going to die."

She frowned. "Are you just going to keep holding me until time tears itself apart?" Amy stepped forward and, with a slightly pained expression, offered the Doctor a pair of handcuffs. He looked conflicted, but he took them anyway, locking her arms behind her, though he kept a tight grip on one of her arms. "Really, Doctor?"

"You and River are opposite poles of the disruption. If you touch, you short out the differential."

"And time will begin again."

"But you're going to die."

"You keep saying that like I don't already know that would be the outcome."

River stepped forward, though she was quite careful to stay a safe distance away from her. "I don't want to kill you, Adelaide."

"And you don't want time to fall apart; the two desires are contradictory. Reality needs to continue. There isn't another way."

River glanced at the Doctor before speaking. "I didn't say there was."

The Doctor pulled Adelaide further back from River. She looked up at him. "Please, Doctor, just let me do this."

He shook his head. "I'm not going to let you die."

"You and I, out of anyone in the Universe, should know about the importance of fixed events."

He shook his head again. "I'm the one who's supposed to die, Adelaide. I'm the one who's made all of the mistakes, who's ruined everything. The Silence was created to stop me."

She tilted her head, considering him. "The Silence was created to stop the Time Lords, specifically, because don't you dare think that I do not have ruin in my past. Don't think that I haven't turned entire civilizations to dust with a wave of my hand." She sighed. "I have been responsible for just as much destruction as you, Doctor. And…I want to die."

"Don't say that."

"There's no reason to lie, Doctor." She wished he didn't have such a good grip because even if it didn't hurt she wanted to be far away from him at that moment. The closer she was, the more she had to fight the voice of Caroline.

And it wasn't even that she could hear Caroline, just that she could feel her. She could feel her human self pressing against her consciousness, trying to break through. Could feel her fear of death.

"I'm not going to let you die."

Adelaide sighed. "For all you appear to have thought about this, you have failed to actually ask me why I am so determined it be me who goes to that beach and not you." She looked at Kovarian. "She believes that, by killing one of us, the other succumb to death in the act of revenge. Killing two birds with one stone."

"I would tear the universe apart," the Doctor hissed.

"And therein lies the problem. Because I wouldn't." The Doctor said nothing. "If you were to die, Doctor, I would abandon the universe. I would hide within the TARDIS and, eventually, return to the life I'd been living before the war: observing, cataloging, learning. I wouldn't save anyone unless it was accidental."

He shook his head. "No, you wouldn't…"

"But you…even if I died, you would still help. You would find it within you to help. You would make the universe think that you'd died, or killed yourself, but time would pass and you would help all the same. And, Doctor…I want to die."

The Doctor said nothing and neither did Adelaide. They simply stared at each other until River stepped forward again, risking getting close to Adelaide again. "There are so many theories about the three of us, you know."

Adelaide clenched her jaw. "Idle gossip."

"Archaeology."

"Irrelevant."

"Am I the woman who saves him," she nodded at the Doctor, "or the woman who murders you?" she nodded to Adelaide.

"I don't want you to save me," the Doctor said.

River shrugged. "I don't want to murder Adelaide."

"You need to." The Doctor looked at Adelaide again. "You need to kill me, River, and you need to let her."

"What's that?" Amy called, and they all looked at her, following her gaze to a line of water dripping from the ceiling.

"The pyramid…" Adelaide frowned. "How many Silence are there?"

"They're all trapped," Amy said, but Kovarian interrupted her.

"Nope, they're not trapped." They all looked at the woman. "They never have been. They've been waiting for this, Adelaide, for you!"

Rory ran into the room. "They're out! All of them!" A pair of soldiers worked to lock the door as they could hear gunshots from the other soldiers. "No one gets in here! Ma'am," he turned to Amy, "my men out there should be able to lock this down. We have them outnumbered."

"And you're wearing eye drives based on mine, I think," Kovarian grinned. "Oops."

The Doctor looked at her. "What do you mean?" Electricity surged through the eye drive on the woman from earlier. "Help her! Help her!"

Amy ran for the woman as other soldiers fell to the ground, grabbing their eye drives. "She's dead!"

"Eye drives off, now," the Doctor ordered. "Remove them!" he snatched Adelaide's off for her, pulling off his a second later, as Amy just managed to get her's off before it sparked.

"The Silence would never allow an advantage without taking one themselves," Kovarian informed them. "The effects will vary from person to person. Either death or debilitating agony. But they will take you all, one by one." But, as she spoke, her own started to spark. "What are you doing? No, it's me. Don't be stupid, you need me. Stop it…stop that!"

Adelaide looked at River. "We can stop this, right now, you and I."

"Get it off me!"

"Doctor, please."

Amy stepped forward. "We've been working on something, just let us show you."

"I need to do this, Amy. Time needs to be fixed."

The Doctor turned Adelaide to look at him. "We're trying to help you!"

But her face was hard, as emotionless as ever. "People are dying because of this, Doctor. I don't expect you to allow that to happen."

"Just let us show you," Amy tried again. "Please." The Time Lords didn't say anything, and she turned to Rory. "Captain Williams, how long do we have?"

"A couple of minutes."

River nodded. "That's enough. We're going to the Receptor Room right at the top of the pyramid. I hope you're ready for a climb." She led the way, and the Doctor forced Adelaide to go with them, as much as the Time Lady had made it clear that she didn't want that to happen.

|C-S|

They reached the top of the pyramid, the Doctor having been extremely careful to keep Adelaide away from River despite her many attempts to reach the woman. She raised her eyebrows when she saw what was built there; based on what she knew, it was a beacon. "Why did you build a distress beacon?"

"I'm a child of the TARDIS," River said. "I understand the physics."

"It's more than just a distress beacon," the Doctor said and River nodded.

"It's sending out a message, a distress call. Outside the bubble of our time, the universe is still turning, and we've sent a message everywhere. To the future and the past, the beginning and the end of everything: Adelaide is dying. Please, please help the Doctor save her."

Adelaide raised her eyebrows. "Why in any timestream would you do something so foolish? It's ridiculous! It's pointless!"

Amy rushed up. "We barricaded the door, so we've got a few minutes."

The Doctor turned Adelaide so that he was looking at her directly. "You heard those reports of the sunspots and the solar flares; they're wrong. There aren't any. It's not the sun, it's you. The sky is full of a million, million voices saying yes, of course we'll help." His grip softened on her arms, and she had the sense that he wanted to shake her. "Don't you see? You've touched so many people and you've decided that the universe is better off without you, but the universe doesn't agree."

She tightened her jaw. "You aren't listening to me, Doctor, and you need to. Right now, the most important thing in the entire universe is that you listen to what I have to say." He nodded. "This, what you've just told me, may have worked to heal your hearts and change your mind if you were the one dying, but this is exactly why I want to die." His eyes widened. "Do you remember the Time War? And Demons Run? What I had to do?

"I will not deny that my actions have made quite a few civilizations indebted to me. I will not deny that, in some cases, I have had a positive impact on the lives I've left behind. But that has no bearing on why I want to die." She took a breath. "I haven't been able to forget Caroline. That faulty Chameleon Arch has had an everlasting effect on me; I am not the Time Lady I was before the war. I'm something different, something wrong. Whatever I am…I don't want to be that anymore."

"That doesn't mean you have to die forever."

She smirked and leaned closer so that she was just whispering to him. And when she pulled back, she looked back at River, ignoring the Doctor's expression. "If we don't do something, River, the explosion from you changing a fixed point will engulf all of reality."

River shook her head. "I don't want to kill you!"

Adelaide looked towards Amy and Rory. "You really should have taught your daughter to listen to her betters."

Rory frowned, looking at Amy. "I'm not sure I understand."

"We got married and had a kid and that's her," Amy nodded towards River.

"Okay."

Adelaide looked back at the Doctor. "It's time, Doctor. I will explain more later but, please, we have to do this now."

The Doctor's jaw was tense and he didn't seem willing to look away from her. But he still, slowly, unlocked Adelaide's wrists and let her step away from him.

River, immediately, started to back away. "No, Adelaide, don't make me do this."

Adelaide held out a hand. "Just stay calm, River, and let me explain." She let herself smile. "As a Time Lord who's past is peppered with fixed events, I have determined various ways to identify them. There was a fixed event on the shore of Lake Silencio, but it was very, very specific." She stepped closer so that only River could hear her, though the Doctor already knew what she was going to say. "The fixed event doesn't say that I die on that beach. Only that I get shot. Once."

River's eyes widened and, without saying a word, she stepped forward and took the hand that Adelaide had held out to her.

With another bright light, time restarted.

|C-S|

Adelaide closed her eyes and, a moment later, felt one of River's blasts strike her right in the chest.

River lowered the gun but, before anything else could happen, the TARDIS materialized around Adelaide for a split second, so quick it only passed in a blink, taking her and vanishing again, leaving behind a body that looked exactly like Adelaide's.

But inside the TARDIS, already inside the vortex, the real Adelaide was regenerating.

|C-S|

The Doctor sat beside the bed where Adelaide was lying, his head in his hands, just waiting for her to wake.

He needed her to wake.

Just to open her eyes.

She was alive. He'd watched her regenerate, but then he'd watched her fall to the ground, unconscious.

When time had been repaired, the Doctor, with his new knowledge of what Adelaide was doing and where she was, had been able to find a way to fool the universe into thinking that she had actually died.

The TARDIS had helped, creating a shell body that was nowhere near Time Lord in biology but looked identical to Adelaide in appearance. That had been the body Amy, Rory, and River had burned.

The real Adelaide had been here.

With him.

"Doctor…" Adelaide said, but it was a new Adelaide, a different Adelaide. He didn't look up. "What's wrong?"

"You didn't know."

"That River Song would refuse to shoot me, thus causing time to destroy itself and provide me a chance to inform her and you exactly what the fixed event on the beach was?"

The Doctor lowered his hands. "Yes. You wanted to die."

"Yes."

"Why?"

And she told him. She told him exactly what had been wrong with her previous regeneration, exactly why she'd wanted to kill herself, exactly why she hadn't cared if she actually died on the beach.

Told him that loving had been wrong and too much empathy had been wrong and Caroline had been wrong and Adelaide had hated herself. She'd hated herself past the point of it being rational.

The Doctor listened, of course he did, but he also heard the fact that…Adelaide didn't sound like herself. Or, at least, she didn't sound like the Adelaide he had spent the past few centuries getting to know.

She sounded like he would have expected her past regenerations to speak like.

He didn't know what to think about it.

|C-S|

A hooded figure carried Dorium's box back to the pedestal it belonged on. "Who's carrying me?" Dorium shouted, the box closed so he couldn't see anything. "I demand to know. I'm a head, I have rights. I want my doors open this time, I demand that my doors are open!" the figure slid the box open before turning. "Is it you? It is, isn't it? It is you, I can sense it." The figure stopped. "But how did you do it? How could you possibly have escaped?"

The figure turned, lowering its hood, to reveal a face Dorium didn't know, but he had a very good guess about who it was. The woman was clearly older than her previous face, but the wrinkles weren't as pronounced as they could have been and she had quite a few freckles. Her hair was ginger now, but her eyes were the exact same color.

Adelaide had regenerated.

"I know quite a bit about fixed events," she said simply. "I had to get shot on the beach, but time had been very specific about how many times." She held up a finger to make her point. "The Doctor used the TARDIS to keep anyone but River learning what had happened." She lowered her hand. "The universe knew that Adelaide died on that day, it simply didn't know that I regenerated as well."

"So you're going to do this? Let them all think you're dead?"

"We're both going to. It's the only way for us to continue to exist; we've both drawn far too much attention to ourselves."

"And Dr. Song, in prison all her days?"

"The Doctor is very adamant that her nights be spent elsewhere." Adelaide shrugged. "I can't disagree."

"So many secrets, Adelaide. I'll help you keep them, of course."

She raised her eyebrows. "You're a head in a box, Dorium Maldovar. I hope you don't mind if I don't expect you to spread rumors."

Dorium laughed. "But you're a fool nonetheless, which is surprising for you. It's all still waiting for the two of you…the fields of Trenzalore, the fall of the eleventh, and the question."

She nodded, turning again. "Goodbye, Dorium."

The Doctor stood in the doorway of the TARDIS, his arms crossed.

"The first question," Dorium called after her. "The question that must never be answered, hidden in plain sight. The question you'll be running from all your lives…doctor who? Doctor who? Doctor who?"

Adelaide shook her head at the Doctor. "Normally, I applaud when people ask questions with impossible answers. Not today."

The Doctor said nothing, and she didn't expect him to.

She'd hurt him.

She'd hurt him nearly beyond repair.

A/N: Surprise! Adelaide's regenerated! I picture her new face to look somewhat like Julianne Moore.

Two chapters left...and then it's time for Stars in Mind.

Notes on reviews:

time-twilight: In my mind, she essentially left the Doctor in an interesting place during all of her research trips and, when she finally did go to the beach, set the TARDIS to return to him.

Starangel5593: Glad you liked it! :)