Author's Note: Gah I'm sorry today was crazy and I fried my brain with college so it took me forever to post. Also I wrote this thing 7 months ago and I'm having way too much fun reading through my own writing and cackling at Rey and Nine's dynamic, lol.

Chapter 7

"Why are you following me?" the man who called himself the Doctor snapped over his shoulder as they made their way through the dusky town, BB8 bumping along behind Rey.

"Because I'm lost in a strange world and you're the only other person I've met," she replied firmly. "And the only one who can help me."

"I wouldn't count on it." He didn't look at her. "I can't cross my own timestream."

She huffed. "If anything bad was going to happen by you meeting me, I'd say it would have already happened. So you can at least help."

"Help you what?"

"Help me find the Doctor!"

"I am the Doctor!"

She sighed. "Look—maybe you're someone who also calls themselves the Doctor, has a ship that looks like a blue box, and carries a sonic screwdriver. But I don't believe in that kind of coincidence. Either you really are the Doctor—which is impossible—or you're impersonating him. And—" She glared at his back. "Look—stop walking away—listen! If you're trying to impersonate him, you've picked the wrong person, because I know him! And you don't look a thing like him."

"I think a lesson about regeneration is in order." Still he didn't turn back, didn't look at her. "Whatever future version of me you've met obviously hasn't told you all there is to know yet."

"Yeah, you mentioned that." She shrugged. "Some way of changing your face, you said? Convenient cover story."

"Fantastic," he muttered. "Always the persistent ones. Why do I always choose the persistent ones—" And then, before she knew what was happening, he lunged towards her. "Out of the way!" he cried, shoving her to the ground behind him.

She jumped to her feet and glared at him. "What was that—"

"You almost walked through a pocket of time energy! You could have—"

For a moment she just stared at him. "Time energy? You mentioned—" She closed her eyes, pressing her fingers against her temples. Sudden dizziness…..standing and looking around to see that the sky had darkened…. "I think I already did," she blurted out. "Earlier. I…."

Suddenly he was staring at her. "Time energy's destructive! It could scatter you across ten different timestreams at once." He scanned the sonic screwdriver up and down across her. "You could have been killed."

She stared at the device. "Did you just scan me?"

He nodded. "Yep. You're not going to die. Come along then!"

"Well, that's comforting," she said dryly. "And I thought you didn't want me following you."

"I don't want you wandering around in a wasteland of time energy," he said sharply, turning away again. "You could get yourself killed. Or worse."

"That's a step in the right direction." She started after him. "So why are we going away from the TARDIS, then?"

"Because there's a whole town of spilled time energy that's a very bad thing. And very bad things are kind of my specialty."

She shook her head. "I'm starting to think you really are the Doctor," she muttered. For a moment they just walked along in silence, a hundred vague thoughts and ideas shifting through her mind. "Wait." She didn't realize she'd said it out loud until he turned. "If I stepped through one of these time energy pockets, that means I could have missed—days? Years?"

"You could be a million years in the future and not know it," he replied. "That's the danger of it. Well, one of the many dangers."

"I could have lost him then." Her eyes went wide. "We could have been in the same time and now we could be separated by—by decades or—or centuries! He could be in trouble, he could be—you've got to help!" She grabbed him by the sleeve of his leather jacket and pulled him to a stop. "You've got to!"

"I think my future self can handle himself." He pulled his sleeve from her hand and started forward again. "More time energy," he muttered. "It's like it's spilling from some kind of well."

She huffed and started after him again. "I don't see why we're heading directly towards the epicenter of whatever disaster could have spilled time itself across and entire city," she muttered to BB8. "But I'm going to assume he knows what he's doing."

BB8 beeped and looked up at her.

The Doctor—no, the man who called himself the Doctor—nodded. "That's good," he said. "Trust the droid. The droid knows what it's talking about."

She raised an eyebrow. "You speak droid?"

"I speak a lot of languages. I'm more surprised you speak droid."

"Thank you for your very flattering opinion of me. The fact that I have a droid companion should say something to my language skills." She crossed her arms. "Now. I'm going to assume you've got some kind of plan?"

"I'm the Doctor. I never have a plan."

She sighed. Of course. Of course he didn't have a plan. "Doctor—" She stopped, staring hard into the darkness. A shape hovered a little ways away, and it looked—it looked almost human. "Um." She stepped forward, keeping her gaze fixed steadily on the—thing—that hovered in the darkness. "Um. I think we've got company." She took another step forward, her hand closing around her staff. "Hello?" she said softly. "Hello—"

The shape hovered before her in the moonlight. It was human, or humanoid at least. But there was something off about it, something wrong. Something that unsettled her.

She took another step forward, holding out a hand as if to a skittish animal. It seemed to be a young-ish woman with thick blonde hair that shimmered in the moonlight. Her eyes were wide and frightened and unseeing.

"Laila?" Her voice seemed to echo, or—or, no, that wasn't it. It wasn't an echo. It sounded as if ten different versions of her were speaking all at once. And then she turned, and held out a hand, her eyes seeming to focus on Rey for a moment. "Rey?" she said.

And Rey realized what was wrong, what it was about the woman that unsettled her.

She was transparent.

She blinked. No—surely not. Ghosts were only a myth—

She held out a hand, hesitant, almost afraid of what she would find. But her fingers touched the woman's, and the hand she held was real, as real as the metal of her staff.

And yet—and yet, she could see the outline of a house, flickering through her as if through a screen.

"Doctor?" For a moment the woman seemed to coalesce, and her eyes focused on something behind Rey. She turned to see the Doctor standing behind her, the sonic screwdriver held in front of him. "Doctor?" The woman spoke again, her voice distant, almost ethereal. "Doctor, I'm…."

Rey slowly withdrew her hand from the woman's and turned fully to the Doctor—had she already started calling him that? "What happened to her?" she hissed. "She was human—"

He pulled her a few steps away. "You remember I said that time energy could scatter you across ten different timestreams at once?" He nodded towards the woman, who stood like a frightened deer. "That's what happens. Her existence is being pulled in who-knows-how-many different directions. A human can't handle that."

"Can't we save her?" The feeling of the woman's hand in hers still lingered, and she could still see the searing terror in her eyes. "Please, we've got to—"

But the Doctor was staring past her, at the place where the woman stood, his face hard. For a moment, Rey was almost afraid to turn, afraid to see what she knew she would see.

The woman was gone.

"What happened…." She turned back to the Doctor. "What…."

But the look on his face told her exactly what had happened.

"She's gone," he said, and his voice was hard. "The only thing we can do now is stop this time energy at its source so it doesn't happen again."