Chapter Six
Callie closed her eyes, afraid but excited for the impending results. When nothing happened, she opened one to peek.
"It's loading," the Doctor explained, noticing her confused look at the blank screen.
Callie rolled her now-open eyes. "You have, and I quote, an 'ancient time machine that contains a universal searching system', and you're telling me that the bloody INTERNET is being slow?" Suddenly, something popped up on the screen. "Hell-o," she said, redirecting his attention to it.
"People with Time Lord DNA," he explained. "See, there's me, River, you, and..." He trailed off, not mentioning the fourth.
Callie looked. "John Tyler," she read in awe. "Oh, my God. We've been missing it this whole time."
He looked at her strangely. "You can read Gallifreyan." Again with the questions-that-sounded-like-statements.
She blinked. "That's what it is? I didn't even notice."
"Current place of residence," the Doctor said, turning back to the computer. This girl hadn't ceased to surprise him since he'd met her. Her likeness to both Rose and his previous self was.. uncanny. It was kind of weird for him, but he liked it too.
The Doctor rattled off the name of an apartment building in London. "Flat number 14," he said.
"I know where that is," she said, hardly believing her sudden stroke of luck. "It's like two blocks away from the high school I go to. In my universe, that is."
He glanced at her. "Anything could be different in this universe, Callie. But I think you're right."
Callie took a deep breath. "Will you take me there?"
He nodded, smiling. "Of course, Callina!"
She could barely get out the words, "Excuse me," before bolting to Rose's room.
Pulling out a suitcase from the seemingly unending closet, Callie realised that Rose never got the chance to get any of her things from the TARDIS before she was trapped in the parallel world. Besides the heaping mountains of clothes, there were books, magazines, picture frames on the desks and walls of her with her dad - well, the previous Time Lord version of her dad. One of them seemed to be a Christmas dinner. A considerably younger version of Callie's mum sat, laughing, happier than Callie had ever seen her, while the Doctor, a red paper crown perched on his head, sat next to a fairly good-looking African American man, presumably telling Rose a joke or something. Callie figured that her grandmother had taken the picture. There was another that stood out to her: A tall man in a black leather jacket stood behind a nineteen-year-old Rose, his arms wrapped around her while they both made silly faces at the camera, while her uncle Jack stood off to the side, rolling his eyes at the pair but smiling as well. Callie realised with a start that the tall man must have been the Doctor's Ninth incarnation, before her dad.
Callie opened the suitcase and opened her eyes wide, looking inside. "Bigger on the inside," she mused. "That's fairly convenient." Not even bothering to look through it all, Callie shoved thing after thing into it. The clothes were, as far as she could tell, really pretty and just about her size. She paused, coming across a small zipper purse. Opening it, she found a couple of expired credit cards, a stale pack of gum, and a very substantial wad of cash.
Within hardly any time at all, all the contents of Rose's old room aboard the TARDIS were neatly packed away into the small, flowery, bigger-on-the-inside suitcase. Callie sat on the bed, trying to process all of this.
Suddenly, something very important occurred to her, and she leapt out of the room in a panic, the suitcase trailing behind her. "Doctor!" She yelled, running into the control room.
"What?! What is it?" He asked in alarm. He was standing by the console, looking at something.
"After I find my dad," she took a breath, "how are we going to get back to Mum?"
He looked sad. "Callie," he began.
"There's no way back," she deduced. "I'm never going to see my Mum again."
"We... we don't know that," he said uncertainly. "Your mum broke through once. I broke through once; that's how I accidentally met you and your father all those years ago. But I closed the walls when I left. And you ended up here by touching the breaks of the very skin of reality."
She brightened. "So if I find the crack again, it could send us back to my bedroom. Or Torchwood. Somewhere."
"No," he said firmly, touching her face gently. "I told you before, the cracks in this world are very different. You'd be erased from existence the second you touched one."
Callie's lip trembled, but she remained strong. "Well then, I guess I'm going to have to keep trying. For my mum."
**** • ∞ • ****
Callie faced the closed doors of the TARDIS, terrified to open them. Outside was the flat building her father supposedly lived in. It was so hard to believe that this was an entirely different universe from her own. It seemed almost exactly the same. Aside from the very small differences, like trees slightly out of place or the wind blowing in a different direction than normal, Callie could've been fooled into thinking that this was indeed her home.
The daughter of the Doctor and Rose Tyler closed her eyes, and felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned around to face the Eleventh.
"Do you have a mobile phone with you?" He asked softly. She nodded, and held it out to him. He buzzed it with the sonic screwdriver, and handed it back to her.
"Now," he said, "you can call anyone, from anywhere in the universe. Only a select few people have ever known the direct line to my TARDIS, Callina Tyler, and you are now one of them." He smiled a goofy smile, and she surprised him by quite suddenly attacking him in a hug.
Taken aback, the Eleventh Doctor hugged the daughter of the love of his life back. She wasn't his daughter, by any means, but she was still the daughter of the Doctor, and that was good enough for him.
"Call me if you need anything," he said sincerely. "Really. Anything at all. I will always be here, Callie."
She smiled, a single tear rolling down her cheek. "I know," she said softly. "Thank you." She opened the door, and stepped out onto the bright spring green grass. She was in the same park as when River had found her unconscious.
"Oh, and Callie?" He shouted out the door, the TARDIS already mid-flight.
"Yeah?"
"Have an extraordinary life!" He shouted, and the TARDIS disappeared completely.
Callie grinned, looking at the sky. She went into the building, pressing the 14 button on the lift.
Butterflies crashed around her stomach. Her thoughts raced a thousand miles a minute. Trying not to think about anything else, Callina Tyler knocked on the door.