A/N: This chapter is dedicated to Kates Master for the 150th review! It is reaching milestones like this that really encourage me to write. Thank you to everyone that has reviewed.
Disclaimer: All my characters! I own everything! Er…no. All BBC's. But I can dream.
"Come on, come on, come on, my beautiful ship!" The Tardis traces the link back. "Come on, find them, find them, you can do it."
Without warning, the Tardis lurches. The Doctor reaches towards a control but is thrown against the wall as a shockwave ripples through the ship.
Romana clings to a strut as the Doctor and Jack are flung from wall to floor to wall.
Then, just as suddenly, the Tardis settles into her normal rhythm.
The Doctor and Jack pick themselves up. Romana doesn't let go of the strut.
"What was that?" Jack says shakily.
"A bad landing," The Doctor snaps, pressing the palm of his hand against the gash in his forehead.
"We haven't landed," Jack points out.
"Overlapping timelines, then."
"Look me in the eye, Doctor, and tell me that you believe that."
The Doctor turns away and strides over to Romana.
xxx
The Tardis lands just as the Doctor finishes sealing the cuts on Romana's hands. He heads towards the doors.
Jack calls him back. "Shouldn't you check what's outside?"
"What's the fun in that?"
"Well, you don't know what's outside. You don't want to walk out into the middle of, and this is just a random example, the middle of a gangland shootout?"
The Doctor scowls and mutters under his breath.
"Now, now." Jack waggles his finger. Yet the mask of the normal banter can't hide the worry they all feel.
"I'll risk it."
xxx
Jack draws his coat around him. "Well, this is a cheery place!"
"Shut up," the Doctor snaps.
"Well, pardon me!"
"I've been here before. I know it. Romana…" The Doctor turns to discover a distinct lack of Romana. "Don't wander off," he completes.
xxx
She hasn't gone far before she trips over something.
xxx
She's screaming. Not a long sustained note, but short gasps of horror. The Doctor and Jack run towards the sound and find Romana backing away from something, still screaming. The Doctor scoops her up and holds her tight while taking a look at what had so terrified her. To say he's shocked would be an understatement. He's met his other incarnations before, of course he has. But he's never seen the dead body of his current incarnation. His tenth body still dressed in the rags of a velvet suit. Now he remembers. This is Asinta. One of many planets where he fought the Daleks. But he didn't die. Not here. Not finally. And the regeneration was Eight to Nine. This Doctor seems to have gone through two regenerations without changing his clothes.
"Doctor. Doctor! She's alive." Jack is kneeling beside the prone form of a girl, no, a woman that the Doctor notices for the first time, wavy blonde hair matted with blood and mud lying across her face.
"This is the Time War," he says slowly, trying to clarify the situation in his head. "But I've died. This is a universe where I died in the Time War. But this doesn't make sense. There aren't parallel universes of Time Lords. And…"
"Doctor!" Jack has been gingerly checking the woman over. Through a large rent in the material covering her right shoulder, he can see strangely familiar patterns etched on the skin. Romana drops out of the Doctor's arms and they both kneel down beside Jack, trying to ignore the other Doctor's body.
"Doctor, isn't that Gallifreyan?"
The material disintegrates at the Doctor's touch, allowing them full view of the swirling patterns.
"What does it say?" Jack asks.
"Romanadvoratrelundar," Romana quietly translates.
"There's some on the other arm. What does that say?"
Romana shakes her head.
"Doctor?"
The Doctor scans the pictorial text. A strange, closed look appears on his face.
"Doctor?"
"This universe is going to crash and burn," he says softly. "We have to leave."
"Will the Tardis work? I thought you said that it drew its power from the universe."
"It brought us here," The Doctor says shortly, trying to think of a way to cross a barrier that he can't accept exists.
Jack picks up the girl and he and Romana start to walk back to the Tardis.
The Doctor is left alone beside the body of his impossible parallel version.
"I'm sorry there's no one. I'm sorry there's only me," he murmurs, before taking a box from his pocket and striking a very special match. He drops it on the body, which is then instantly engulfed in red flame.
Then he turns and runs away from his nightmares.
xxx
She's been lying comatose in the medical bay for eight days, through the endless calculations greatly hampered by the Doctor's complete incomprehension (after all, how can you work out how to leave a universe that is not supposed to exist?), though the ride back which is just as bad as the first time, through her treatment and external recovery. The Doctor and Jack take in turns to look after her: they've discovered another patch of Gallifreyan decorating her stomach. The Doctor wouldn't tell them what it meant; Romana said part of it said Delta.
The Doctor is embroiled in calculations, trying to work out how such a parallel universe exists, in order to take his mind of the implications and Jack is taking a break while Romana sits with her when they are alerted to her awakening by a terrified screaming.
When they enter, the woman is hunched against the headboard, sobbing wretchedly and hiccupping "You're not…no, you're not…you're not."
"What happened?" Jack asks.
Romana shrugs helplessly. "She just woke up screaming. I tried to calm her down, I told her my name and she just froze and burst into tears."
The woman looks up at their voices and catches sight of the Doctor.
She screams again and topples sideways off the bed. She huddles desperately against the wall as they approach her.
"Go away! Leave me alone! You're dead, you're dead!"
The Doctor crouches in front of her, careful to leave a sizeable gap between them.
"Delta…"
She freezes and peeks out from between her fingers. "How do you know?"
"I imagine that was the whole point of…those." He vaguely indicates. "I'm not him but I am the Doctor. I'm the Doctor from…from a parallel universe."
She gives a shaky laugh. "Don't be ridiculous. Whoever you are and whatever you want, make it quick and relatively painless."
"I know. It is ridiculous. It isn't possible. Yet here you are."
"Shut up," she snaps. "I'm not interested in any stories. Can we skip to the torture? Not that'll do you any good."
"We're not going to torture you. Why would we bother healing you to torture you?"
"I can't give you any information unconscious."
"Of course you can. I know of half a dozen places within ten light years of anywhere where you can buy truth drugs. They'll completely destroy the victim's mind but you get the information. Why would I go to all this effort?"
"I don't know!"
"No. No, you don't. You're scared and confused and nothing makes sense. You'd prefer it if we wanted to torture you because that you would understand. But we don't. And you don't. I'm not asking you to trust us; that's far too much. I'm asking you not to disbelieve us."
She stares at him for a long while. She stares at Romana and Jack standing over them. Then slowly she nods.
xxx
She picks a room. It has nothing in it except a bed. It's perfect. She visits the wardrobe room and spends hours in there, eventually emerging with a pair of jeans and an oversized sweatshirt.
They don't see much of her for the first week. She never appears in the console room and very rarely in the kitchen.
Ten days after her awakening, she's standing in the kitchen when they arrive for breakfast, amazingly early (counting the hours since the end of the Tardis' night cycle) and together as the Doctor and Romana had dragged Jack from his bed so that he can fulfil his promise of making breakfast.
She's wearing the same sweatshirt but a long loose skirt. She tells them that she has accepted that she is in a parallel universe, that they are who they say they are and that this is their Tardis. She asks whether they can return to hers and receives a negative answer.
"I wish I could say sorry" is her only reply before she walks out of the kitchen. The Doctor knows what she's doing. It won't help. It might numb the pain for a while but she'll have to face it eventually. When she does they'll be there.
She meets them in the console room in the third week, wearing a simple dress and a cardigan, and asks if they can go somewhere. After nearly a month of being Tardis-bound, perhaps they can get some semblance of not-at-all-normal-normality back. They go to Earth. After all, Jackie hasn't seen them for about a month.
They don't tell Jackie about her; they couldn't anyway. The only one who knows her story is Delta and she's not telling. Yet.
So they just say they picked her up on Asinta. Any questions about time period, background or species are either avoided or met with edited answers. As in the entire truth omitted.
They ignore the awkwardness and throw themselves into the universe.
xxx
"Doctor."
The Doctor pokes his head out from under the console. "Hello there, Delta."
"How much do you know?"
"Not much. It's mostly guesswork, after I have struggled with the concept of there being at least one parallel version of me."
She smiles faintly. "Your thinking is still constrained by Gallifrey."
She doesn't miss the sudden flicker of pain that crosses his face.
"How much do you know?" they whisper together.
Delta kneels down to his level and slowly, deliberately, they reach out to each other.
xxx
The timelines split, cross and run parallel again. They can see this golden thread running throughout the fabric of space and time, the gap between the two strands widening. The thread that Delta is following suddenly snaps, throwing her onto the Doctor's.
She watches Romana walk away into E-space.
He watches Romana decorate an infant's shoulder, arm and stomach with Gallifreyan text before leaving her in the care of Causpian nuns and turning back to Gallifrey.
She watches screaming hordes decimated by Daleks; once pleasant planets turned to desolate battlegrounds.
He watches burning material being ripped from skin. The Doctor only takes a second to skim the characters revealed. They fight side by side from then on.
She watches a planet burn, indiscriminate millions screaming their last.
He watches them surprised by a patrol. The Doctor pushes her to the ground, hiding her. The Daleks sweep away. The Oncoming Storm is ended.
She watches countless Daleks dissolve into golden dust.
He watches countless Daleks pollute every corner of that universe; Gallifrey still physically there but devoid of life.
She watches a woman be torn from his side by a time storm.
Then they both see a great expanse of blackness. They watch a Tardis throw itself away from a strangely shining patch of darkness, rip through a barrier it shouldn't even know exists and drop into another patch of darkness with the same strange luminescence.
It performs the reverse manoeuvre and suddenly their consciousness expands. They can see the blackness stretching into infinity in all directions, patches with the strange luminescence scattered throughout. Some burn brilliantly, the watery light of the universe the Tardis comes from glows almost imperceptibly brighter as it re-enters, the light of the one that it had visited slowly dying away.
Then their consciousness suddenly retracts and they find their awareness shrinking so rapidly it feels as if they are racing towards something. Multiverse, universe, Tardis, console room, figure…
Two figures that slump, unconscious.
xxx
"Doctor? Doctor? Delta?" Jack adds as an afterthought. She's been with them for a while, but she's still not really one of them. It might help if they actually had any idea about her background. She knows about them, knows about Rose and Matthew but her own history is a blank. It might help if he could read the Gallifreyan.
He wanders into the console room and instantly spots Delta sprawled across the floor. He rushes over and also discovers the Doctor underneath the console.
"Romana!" he calls.
She quickly appears in the doorway. Her eyes widen and she's at his side in an instant.
"What happened? Are they all right?"
Jack hauls the Doctor out and lays him across the grating. "Hello?"
He shakes him by the shoulder. The Doctor's eyes flick open and he smiles.
"Doctor, thank goodness."
"There are others," the Doctor says dreamily before his eyes flutter shut again.
This time, Jack gets no response.
xxx
Jack wakes and discovers that two previously occupied beds and one previously occupied chair are no longer occupied by their respective occupants.
He discovers them all in the most-used kitchen; the Doctor cooking breakfast, Romana in her favourite spot perched on the worktop and Delta sitting at the table.
Romana waves at him and they all look round.
"Hello Jack. Sorry about not waking you, but you looked so peaceful. And you humans need your beauty sleep."
Jack remembers this argument being used against him before. Like before, he splutters indignantly and asks why he needs more sleep than someone else. This time it's Delta.
"Because you're human. As the Doctor said." she answers.
"And you're not?"
She gives him a look. It's the Doctor who answers.
"Are you telling me that you never noticed the heartbeat, Jack?"
"Huh?"
"In fact, I'm the one with the least human blood. You're a pure human, Romana's three-quarters human, the Doctor's half-human and I'm a quarter human."
"Gaahh…" Jack's vocal chords finally catch up with his brain and he manages to splutter "Time Lord."
"Have you been drinking Pitrainian vodka again?" the Doctor raises an eyebrow.
"Nuh…no." How had they all known? How was it completely obvious?
"Well then, I believe that some introductions are in order. Jack, this is Delta Astra, daughter of the Doctor and Romanadvoratrelundar."
"You said it wasn't like that!" Jack says accusingly.
"It wasn't. Not for me. Would you feel better if I said a Doctor? She was brought up by Causpian nuns, but Romana visited her often. The Gallifreyan was to identify her to the Doctor. Which it did. They fought together in the Time War."
"Stupid idiot threw himself in front of Daleks to save me," Delta says harshly. It had been quite hurtful to hear her life laid out in a few sentences. "I never said goodbye to either of them. I never saw Gallifrey. I can never say sorry."
"It gets different. It gets buried," the Doctor murmurs.
"So the universe I came from is going to be overrun by Daleks, the Time Lords will all die and it's my fault."
They all opened their mouths.
"No, don't say it. I saw it. I don't exist in this universe, and you went on to save the universe. I destroyed my universe, yet I survived. Why me?"
"I thought the same. I wasn't supposed to survive. The Tardis took me away," the Doctor whispers. For a moment Jack can see the damage now hidden beneath the surface.
Tears gather at the corner of Delta's eyes. "They're all gone. They lost. Everyone lost." She takes a large, shuddering breath. "No way back. Oh God."
Romana jumps down and hugs the highest part of Delta she can reach. The Doctor is more hesitant and Jack stands by and pats her shoulder awkwardly. As the walls break down, she becomes much more one of them.
xxx
"So where shall we go? Come on! Give me a place and time! Anyone!"
"Mayblossom, 623,999," Romana says absently.
Everyone stops what they are doing, which for the Doctor is stroking the console, for Jack changing the batteries in his sonic blaster, (It never hurts to be prepared. It's already helped them a few times and it's useful to have in case the Doctor loses his sonic screwdriver again) and for Delta reading.
"Where's that?" the Doctor asks.
Romana looks confused. "Where's what?"
"Mayblossom. You asked to go there."
"When?"
"Just now."
"Oh. I don't know."
"Where did you hear it?"
"I don't…when my head hurt." She's getting scared. There's knowledge in her head that doesn't seem to be hers.
The Doctor quickly searches. "There's no record of a place called Mayblossom."
"Well, let's not go there then!"
But he won't let it go. "Do you know anything else?"
"No!" But she still searches her mind, cursing her curiosity even as she does so. A phrase barges into her mind and tumbles from her mouth before she can stop herself.
"Earth Colony 2794."
The Doctor runs another search. "Colonised in the late 624th century, a rebellion was staged just over a decade later. 623,999, I believe you said!"
His hands fly across the controls. He stands back as they start to move. It's not impossible. A human colony that has declared independence. They might be there.
xxx
They step outside into utter confusion. The air is filled with shouts and many spacecraft hang in the sky. As far as they can see, there seems to be a long queue for pods ferrying people up to the spaceships, and a confused mass of people just milling around. There are many containment capsules being ferried around and official-looking, uniform wearers attempting unsuccessfully to control everything.
Romana's attention is captured by two women, both wearing identical expressions that say clearly 'How can you be so stupid?'
"You want to stay here? Here, Lydia? How can you want to stay here?"
"I think the question is, how can you bear to go back after what happened to Father?"
"But there'll be nothing here!"
"It'll be better than out there. I am staying."
"Oh no, you're not. I promised Mama I would look after you."
"Emily, I'm not twelve anymore! I can look after myself. If you want to go, go. I'm not going anywhere."
And with that she disappears into the crowd. The woman called Emily looks between the point she disappeared and the waiting spaceships, obviously torn. With a sigh of defeat, she joins the queue.
"Jack? Jack!" the Doctor yells, looking around for the renegade Time Agent.
"Over there," Delta points.
"Honestly, see a pretty face and off he goes." The Doctor starts to push his way through the crowd.
"Two pretty faces," Delta corrects.
"Must be why I stick with you; you've all got such pretty faces. Doctor, Romana, Delta, this is Daphne and this is Hattie. Hattie, Daphne, this is the Doctor, Romana and Delta." Jack indicates them in turn. They smile at each other.
"You haven't seen a girl, by any chance? About so high, incredibly skinny. We lost her in all this. She was in a bad mood because her family's leaving but she wants to stay."
"Pixie's always in a bad mood," the girl called Hattie mutters.
"Rachelwill skin you alive if she hears you calling her that again."
"I know. Why do you think I say it?"
"Um, excuse me?" They seem to have forgotten entirely about the time-travellers standing next to them.
"Oh, are you still there?"
"Can you tell us where we are?"
They both look at Jack very strangely. The Doctor quickly intervenes.
"Don't mind him; he's been drinking Pitrainian vodka. He never believes us when we try to tell him the place and date. Would you mind?"
Hattie speaks to Jack very slowly. "This is Earth Colony 2794. It has severed all links to the Ninth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Everyone is queuing up to be evacuated."
Daphne joins in, speaking just as patronisingly. Jack shoots a poisonous look at the Doctor. "It is the year 623,991, the 624th century in Old Earth terms." She turns back to Hattie. "What is it measured from?" At her blank look, she elaborates. "What event is that system working from?"
Hattie shrugs. "I don't know. Ask an Old Earth historian. Ask Lydia. It's not important, probably some completely fictitious event, totally irrelevant. Perhaps something to do with that thing Lydia told us about, what was it…raliga."
"Religion?" Romana suggests.
The Doctor ignores them all. Romana had said 623,999, Daphne had said it was 623,991. Eight years too early. But perhaps the Tardis had brought them early for a reason. He does his best to ignore the knowledge that he's clutching at straws.
"Do either of you know a woman with blonde or brown hair? Rose Tyler, she's called. She should have a child with her. A boy called Matthew."
Daphne and Hattie both shake their heads.
"Thanks anyway." He knew they weren't here before he asked. He's now certain that it must be them on the other end of the trace. Using Matthew's blood. His heart lurches as he realises the trace hasn't affected him for weeks.
"Romana, have you felt the trace recently?" He tries not to let his worry show in his face or his voice.
"No," she frowns. "Not since I had to go to school. Ages ago."
He takes a deep breath. Please, please, don't let anything have happened to them.
"Okay then, I think we need to be going. Thanks for everything, Hattie and Daphne. I think we need to go over there." He waves a hand in the direction he thinks the Tardis must be.
Delta, who has been in discussion with Hattie and Daphne, looks up. "I… I'm not coming. I'm going to stay here. I can help these people."
They all understand.
"Do you need anything from the Tardis?"
She shakes her head just as Jack reappears with a bag.
"No." She doesn't want any more baggage, literal or metaphorical.
"Don't be stupid," he pushes it into her arms. "You need more than one set of clothes."
"Thanks," she mutters. The heavy cylindrical objects she can feel at the bottom certainly aren't clothes. While she has no doubt that tinned food will be needed, she does expect some questions as to how she has tinned food that passed its best before date over half a million years ago.
"Take care of yourself," the Doctor whispers in her ear.
"Find a place," Jack murmurs in her other ear. Everyone needs a place in life. His is with the Doctor and Romana. Hers isn't. Not yet.
"I'll see you sometime," Romana says, Delta kneeling down to her level.
"I'd like that. See you then."
She watches as they disappear in the mass of people. She doesn't move until she hears the grating engines above the noise of the crowds.
"Shall we go and find your Rachel then?"
"Pixie," Hattie corrects.
A/N: Sorry if this chapter appears somewhat disjointed and completely- blurgh. Can't think of the word. I wasn't at all sure about this idea; it was just one of those ideas. Thanks to agapi16 for listening to me when I was trying to explain it and not make it sound completely and utterly ridiculous. I hope it worked.
Thank you to everyone who has been patiently waiting for an update. Massive thanks to the small minority who are now going to review. There is a definite discrepancy as this story has 65 alerts set on it yet the most reviews I have ever received for a chapter is 15.