I find that adding a bit of the previous chapter helps jog the memory, so each new chapter will have a bit from the previous chapter at the beginning. This chapter gets dark with some pretty interesting implications, just to warn. Thanks for reading!


The Doctor's throat went dry. The screen presented him with a dozen Nazi soldiers and their captain, marching down the snowy streets of Chiswick in Amy's time. He recognised the street and the houses that seemed to leer down at the men and their weapons. The street was deserted except for the soldiers and he watched the screen in horror as they approached the one house he did not think he would ever see again.

The soldiers kicked down the door and burst into the house. He could not hear anything, but he could imagine what was happening. After almost exactly a minute, two of the soldiers returned to view, dragging with them a kicking, screaming ginger, followed by a dark-skinned man who was doing quite a bit of yelling himself.

The Doctor stared in shock and sorrow, letting the woman's name fall from his lips like a long forgotten dream.

"Donna."

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"As I said, Doctor. Much more to worry about," Madame Kovarian smirked. The look on the Doctor's face was priceless. The Nazi soldiers and Jeckeln still stood in the doorway they had come through, watching the exchange with impassive expressions.

"How?" he whispered, green eyes transfixed on the screen. He watched as the soldiers dragged his best friend from her mother's home, kicking and screaming the whole way. How can they be there?

"Time windows are so very useful," the woman with the eyepatch said brusquely. She returned to her desk with an air of confidence that hadn't been there before. As she moved, the Doctor noticed a thick, black bracelet on her wrist. A vortex manipulator. At least he now knew her method of travel. He could also tell that it was currently shorted-out and dead.

"How can you have the energy for-" He felt the words catch in his throat as he turned his attention from the time travelling device. It took an almost unfathomable amount of energy to open a time window, but they had an almost unlimited supply. It's World War II... They have people. His chest burned with anger.

Kovarian quietly tapped a nailed finger on the wooden desk. "What will you do, Doctor?" Her voice was condescending and grated on his nerves. "Will you save the woman or the child?"

He reached into his tweed coat. "Both."

He quickly raised the sonic screwdriver to the ceiling and the light mounted there popped and exploded, sending a surge of electricity through the rest of the equipment. He turned the device on the consoles around him and they all sparked and sputtered, sending the room into complete darkness. The soldiers yelled in surprise, but Kovarian's own voice rose high above even Jeckeln's. "Get him! Don't let him past you!"

The Doctor skillfully managed to skirt every soldier in the room using his ears and nose, sneaking past Kovarian herself to the wall that was behind her wooden desk. He had noticed the faint outline of a door there during their brief conversation, likely an escape route for the evil eyepatch lady. He aimed the sonic screwdriver and the door slid open, revealing a sparsely lit hallway. The light did not bother him, but it was enough to temporarily blind the humans in the room. He took the opportunity happily and escaped out the door, shutting it behind him with a buzz of his favorite tool.

The Doctor immediately surveyed his surroundings, finding himself in a hallway very similar to the halls in the rest of the compound. It did little to help him find his way, but he took off running nonetheless. Running, in this particular case, was helping him think. What could they possibly want with Donna?

He answered his own question again almost immediately, just as before. Donna had the mind of a Time Lord in her own head. It was a copy of his own mind, something that Kovarian would invariably do anything to get her hands on. It would be a fountain of information, something that they could both use against him and give to Melody. Madame Kovarian meant to turn her into a weapon; how better than to give her as much knowledge as possible about her enemy?

But why the Nazis in 1942? He hoped that destroying their consoles as he had would close the time window, but he doubted it. It was likely that the device was a strange combination of both eras of technology, something to convert energy from form to form. He had to push the thought of the dying people out of his mind. He knew they would have still died had Kovarian not come here, but that didn't make him feel any better.

The Doctor skidded to a halt as the hallway he was running down abruptly ended and branched off to either side. There was sound coming from his right and it took him a moment to realise that it was a cascade of running footsteps and Jeckeln's voice. That solved his dilemma; he quickly turned to his left and began to run again. The fact that the soldiers were coming from that particular direction made it more likely that Melody was somewhere ahead of him. At least he hoped so.

He briefly recalled the interior of Melody's "nursery", if it could even be called that, and remembered that the walls did not seem to be brick or concrete like everything else, but a different material altogether. He searched for any shifts in the walls around him as he ran. The compound was so uniform that it was almost impossible to discern any differences in the many hallways.

Suddenly, a familiar smell reached his nose and he stopped abruptly in front of an inconspicuous white door. He inhaled through his nose again and-

The door handle began to turn. He reached into his coat for the sonic, unsure of what he would find. A woman with dark brown hair turned up into a bun stepped from behind the door, but gasped when she saw the Doctor standing just outside the room. The Doctor recognised her immediately as the woman who had been tending to Melody. The scent had been from the woman's close contact with the baby and from walking in and out of the room. She raised her hands to her mouth. "Please don't hurt me-"

"Hurt you?" The Doctor furrowed his eyebrows, then realized that he had the sonic screwdriver pointed directly at her heart. He quickly lowered it. "I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here for the baby."

"B-but-" The woman stepped completely out of the doorway and tried to shut the door behind her, but the Doctor quickly reached out and stopped her.

"She has parents who are missing her," he replied softly, looking as deeply into the woman's blue eyes as he dared. She looked no more than twenty-two. He watched as she silently nodded and released her grip. "Thank you." He threw open the wooden door and rushed inside.

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"Is it finished yet?" Kovarian snapped. She paced angrily from one side of the room to the other, glaring at the consoles that were slow in powering back up. She knew that the Doctor had briefly disrupted the time window, causing the battalion of soldiers and the ginger woman to be temporarily stranded. This was far from ideal and the Fuhrer would be furious. They needed Donna Temple-Noble and they needed her as quickly as possible.

Madame Kovarian could not keep the Doctor from taking the child. She knew that. In fact, she was counting on it. But he didn't know that.

"I am trying, Madame," the man replied. He had been trying to repair her vortex manipulator for the last month, but to no avail. He had been the only person other than the child to accompany Madame Kovarian from the 51st century, someone who could repair and build the equipment she would need. In his opinion, it had been more trouble than it was worth to drag everything here, but he couldn't tell her that. She was convinced that the ginger woman, whose name he knew was Noble, was the key to everything. "I do not know what more I can do. I am sorry."

Kovarian clenched her fists in anger. She couldn't believe that something as simple as that could have destroyed her vortex manipulator.

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The blank room seemed even more sparse from the inside. The camera that had shown him his initial glimpse of Melody was mounted in a corner and he quickly dispatched it with a buzz and a shower of sparks. Her crib was to his left and he heard her whimper as the camera creaked and popped. A smile crept onto his face as he approached her. He realized that she had been sleeping before his arrival.

He peered over the edge of the crib and Melody's dark eyes stared back at him. "Hello Melody Pond." She made a gurgling noise and he smiled. "Of course I'm here to get you. I'm going to take you back to Mummy and Daddy." He gently picked her up, cradling her in one arm as he scanned her with the other. This time she was one hundred percent real, no programmable flesh involved. In addition, he had come to the conclusion that she was only about one month older than Demon's Run, making this rescue a resounding success, in his humble opinion. If they could get out, that is.

A sudden thought occurred to him and he spoke to Melody. "Do you know how Madame Kovarian's vortex manipulator got broken?" The baby gurgled and he shook his head. "No, the black thing." He waved his wrist in front of her face, then she made a sound that could not have been mistaken for anything but laughter. She made a squeak of glee and the Doctor almost burst into laughter himself. She had apparently drooled all over it. Go figure. Already in trouble...

He gathered up the only blanket that Melody had and wrapped her in it as quickly as he could manage. "Do you know how to get out of here, Pond?" She gurgled and he rolled his eyes. "Of course you were asleep when they brought you here." He hoped that he could get out without any altercations, but it wasn't very likely. He did have one advantage that he would use to its full potential: there was no way they would shoot at him or attack him in any way if he had Melody in his arms.

With that thought at the front of his mind, he moved to the exit. The brown haired woman was no longer there and he could not discern which direction she had gone, toward or away from the coming soldiers. Speak of the devil...

The echo of the footsteps were louder now. He hoped that the soldiers would have passed him by this point, but there must have been many more halls than he had originally thought. He almost sighed. He had to get Melody out of here soon. She couldn't stay here. Even though...

He pushed that thought away. It wouldn't do to dwell on it. He could feel the threads of time bending around the child in his arms and he knew what had to happen. He couldn't stop it or change it. He turned his green eyes briefly to Melody and smiled sadly. "I am so sorry." He gently kissed her forehead, then ran.