Apologies for the delay, I've had my first lot of uni exams. BUT now I'm on a break, so I have set myself a goal of 2000 words a day, meaning I am PROMISING an update on this every 4-5 days for the next month (potentially less if I get super caught up in the chapter, for example I wrote 4800 words yesterday to finish this). So watch this space!
Episode AUs aren't always my favourite, but the further I got into this one the more I loved it, mainly because Doctor/TARDIS is everything.
Enjoy!
Aliya sipped at her hot chocolate and tried to focus on what the Doctor was saying to her from the other side of the kitchen bench, but she just couldn't do it. This didn't go unnoticed. His hands dropped and he frowned at her.
"The dreams haven't stopped yet, have they?" He asked sympathetically.
She shook her head. "It doesn't make sense, I feel fine now, my brain's not scrambled, so why the hell are my dreams just white?" It had been a couple of months since Paternoster, which meant she was beginning to worry quite deeply.
"Didn't you say there were voices, sometimes? What do they say?"
"They're always sort of…muted, I can never really be sure."
He patted her free hand where it lay on the counter. "It'll come right, I wouldn't worry too much. Minds are funny things. Even Time Lords never claimed to know everything about them, and we definitely use them more actively than most."
"Yeah, I know," Aliya murmured, taking a larger gulp from her mug and savouring the comforting sweetness of the drink on her tongue. She nearly spat it out, however, when a rectangular section of the wall she was staring at slid open to reveal a woman watching her. She wore an eyepatch and eyed Aliya with a sort of singular scientific curiosity. More disconcerting than the woman, however, was the purely white background behind her that was disturbingly familiar.
"Aliya? Aliya, what is it?" The Doctor's concerned voice made her blink and look to him instead, and when she glanced back, the wall was as it had always been.
"I'm not so sure I've recovered at all," she said, horrified at the realisation. "My mind seems determined to convince me that I'm still as scrambled as I was at Paternoster."
"How?"
Aliya just shrugged and put her mug down, no longer possessing any appetite at all. "I need a planet. And a distraction. Now."
After staring at her for one more moment with understandable concern, he grinned easily at her. "That I can do."
They walked to the console room quickly, the Doctor's enthusiasm as he babbled slowly calming Aliya's nerves and bringing her back into a positive mood. "What sort of planet? Any preference? Or should I pick something for you? This was this place that me and Amy visited, with a robot king-"
A knock on the TARDIS exterior doors silenced him in a heartbeat.
"Aren't we drifting in space?" Aliya asked, alarmed.
"…yes." He went to the doors and slowly pulled them open. A hovering glowing cube was floating in front of his face. "Oh, come here. Come here, you scrumptious little beauty." The cube darted inside and flew around madly before hitting him square in the chest. Finally he caught it securely in his hands.
Aliya just gaped. "Is that-"
"It is," he breathed, "We've got mail." He brought it up to the console platform so that she could see it properly for herself.
"But how can we? Who could it be from?"
The Doctor turned it over in his hands until they could see the circular snake pattern on one of the faces of the hypercube. "There. Mark of the Corsair. It must be him."
"Did she regenerate into a male again? Last I saw of her, she was all big boobs and long blonde hair," Aliya remarked.
"Regenerated middle of the Time War, into a bulky sort of bloke with rather impressive arms, tattoo on the forearm." He glanced at her curiously. "I didn't even know you knew him."
"I didn't know him well," she said, shrugging, "But he went on a bunch of secret missions for the Council. I had to fix his TARDIS once on one of his stops back on Gallifrey, after he had managed to completely rewire the chameleon circuit for reasons he refused to tell me. He asked to sit in while I worked so we ended up chatting a bit. And then when Romana came into power I was a bit more privy to some of what the Council was up to, so I saw a bit more of her."
"Didn't you end up having to fix what I did to the dimensions of the Monk's TARDIS, back in the day? He was how you found out I was travelling with humans, wasn't he?"
"Yes," Aliya confirmed. "But Mortimus was a right little shit and I never did much like him even before he caused all that trouble for you on Earth. I'd take the Corsair over him by a light year."
"Which is good, under the circumstances," the Doctor said, beaming down at the hypercube.
"…do you really think he might be alive?" She asked quietly. The hypercube's very existence shouldn't have been possible, but there it was. After all this time, however, the hope of another Time Lord being alive, especially one they both knew and liked, seemed far too good to be true.
"I don't know," he admitted, "But if there's even a chance, we've got to try. Come on, I'm going to need your help on this one."
The trace led them out of their universe, and into a pocket universe. Just getting there meant jettisoning some rooms they might have wished to keep, such as the scullery, squash court seven, and Amy and Rory's room that hadn't been needed for several years. That was all fine, or rather, necessary, but when they landed and all the lights immediately went out, Aliya got worried.
"That shouldn't be happening," she said.
"The power, it's draining. Everything's draining," the Doctor exclaimed, staring at the controls, "But it can't, that's impossible!"
Aliya eyed the Time Rotor. "It looks empty."
"It's like the matrix has vanished," he said, turning to look at her with alarm, "Where would it go?"
Things outside the police box weren't much better. They were in a dank junkyard full of crashed ships and bizarre household junk.
"Well, at least with all the rift energies around, the TARDIS will refuel in no time," Aliya said, trying to make the most of a situation with just not quite enough information for her to feel comfortable. "I just wish we knew what sort of trouble the Corsair was in."
"We'll find out soon enough, I imagine," the Doctor said with a little too much cheer for her to agree with. If the Corsair was alive, why now? And more importantly, how? Aliya couldn't ignore the sickness in her stomach telling her that something was going to go horribly wrong.
Of course, given her current state of wellbeing, there was a strong chance that had nothing to do with her thoughts on the Corsair at all.
How the hell did a neuron scrambler do so much damage? She wondered. Why did Time Lord physiology have to be so damn dependant on a perfectly working brain?
"Now, what about this place? Gravity's almost Earth-normal, air's breathable but smells like-"
"Humans when they need a wash," Aliya put in, and he chuckled a little.
"Smelly humans, yeah."
"Thief! Thief! You're my thief!" A dark haired woman with bizarre clothing came bolting towards them while two even odder people followed her as quickly as they were able.
"She's dangerous, guard yourselves," one of them said.
The woman in front, who had been talking about thieves, rushed up to the Doctor and came to an abrupt halt in front of him.
"Look at you," she remarked, "Goodbye! No, not goodbye, what's the other one?" She kissed the Doctor all over his face before releasing him and backing off a bit. Aliya and the Doctor just stared at her incredulously.
"Watch out, careful," the last of the newcomers said, a male with headgear that covered one of his ears, "Keep back from her. Welcome, strangers. Sorry about the mad person."
The Doctor, however, wasn't too interested in him, but in the mad woman who had kissed him. "Why am I a thief? What have I stolen?"
The brunette blinked. "Me. You're going to steal me. You have stolen me. You are stealing me. Oh, tenses are difficult, aren't they?" She seemed to be frustrated yet somehow delighted at the same time.
The other female sighed. "Oh, oh we are sorry, my dove. She's off her head. They call me Auntie."
"And I'm Uncle, I'm everybody's Uncle," the male added, shaking the Doctor's hand before glancing at their mad friend, "Just keep back from this one. She bites!"
The mad one in question brightened considerably. "Do I? Excellent!" She went for the Doctor again and bit him on the ear, making him yelp and Aliya take a step towards him, a little worried. The biter, however, was as delighted as ever. "Biting's excellent. It's like kissing, only there's a winner."
Aliya, without quite knowing why, found herself laughing nervously.
Uncle grimaced. "So sorry. She's doolally."
"No, I'm not doolally. I'm…I'm…it's on the tip of my tongue." The strange woman frowned before turning back to the Doctor. "I've just had a new idea about kissing. Come here, you!"
Auntie made to stop her. "No, Idris, no."
Idris regarded the Doctor with a tilted head and a much softer expression. "Oh, but now you're angry." She stopped. "No, you're not. You will be angry. The little boxes will make you angry."
The Doctor's eyes narrowed. "Sorry, the little what? Boxes?"
Idris chose that moment to laugh about his chin, but then her head shot to Aliya. "It means the smell of dust after rain."
"What does?" Aliya asked, surprised to even be getting attention from her.
"Petrichor."
"I didn't ask."
"Not yet, runaway. But you will."
The Time Lady frowned at her. "Runaway? Why is he the thief and I'm the runaway? He's the biggest runaway the universe has ever seen."
"But I'm not the universe," Idris replied, as if that were obvious. That was when Auntie told Idris to have a rest, only for the latter to make a comment about finding an off switch for herself and collapse on the spot.
"Is that it? She dead now, so sad," Uncle murmured, but Aliya crouched by Idris to check.
"No, she's fine, just asleep, I think."
Uncle seemed somewhat disappointed. "Nephew, take Idris somewhere she cannot bite people."
For the first time, the Doctor and Aliya noticed an Ood standing near them, one with glowing green eyes. The former greeted it with delight.
"Oh hello! Love an Ood. Hello, Ood. Can't you talk?" He looked down at the translator ball. "Oh, I see. It's damaged. May I? It might just be on the wrong frequency." Auntie mentioned that Nephew had been half dead on his arrival to the pocket universe and had been repaired, but the Doctor was more interested in fiddling with the translator.
"If you are receiving this message, please help me. Send a signal to the High Council of the Time Lords on Gallifrey. Tell them that I am still alive. I don't know where I am. I'm on some rock-like planet…"
Aliya didn't recognise the voice, but it didn't stop her from getting tears in her eyes at hearing one of her people in distress, especially when more voices could be heard behind him, all of them crying out for help until she could hardly bear it.
Are they all alive? Could they all be here? One Time Lord had been hard for her to believe, but many? How could she ignore the evidence she had just heard?
Somehow she was crying and smiling widely all at once.
"That's not possible," the Doctor said, eyes also not entirely dry but looking considerably more stricken, "That's – that's – who else is here? Tell me. Show me."
Auntie shrugged. "Just what you see. Just the four of us, and the House. Nephew, will you take Idris somewhere safe she can't hurt nobody?"
"The House? What's the House?"
"House is all around you my sweets. You are standing on him. This is the House. This world. Would you like to meet him?"
"I'd love to."
Uncle told them to follow him and began to make off inside the rocky mountain that lay ahead of them. The Doctor finally turned back to Aliya, who was biting the end of her thumb and replaying the distress calls of the Time Lords over and over in her head.
"What do you think?" He asked her.
"I honestly have no idea," she said, lifting her eyes to meet his, "It's too much, it can't be – I'm not so sure what's a hallucination and what isn't at this point."
"Hallucination? Aliya, I heard that as plainly as you did," he said, pointing in the direction the Ood had left. "You're not sick, Aliya, you're just a bit out of sorts."
"If one of them has an eyepatch, maybe I'll believe that, but otherwise I'm not so sure," Aliya told him, and tried to follow Uncle only for him to grab her shoulder.
"Aliya," he said, smiling at her with hope that made her chest ache, "Somewhere close by are lots and lots of Time Lords. And I don't know why you think you're imagining it or why you're talking about eyepatches, but I promise that I heard that recording same as you. Your brain isn't making it up. Now, come on. Let's go and meet the asteroid."
The chat with the asteroid was bizarre, but then Aliya was hardly paying attention. The Doctor had just gained permission to look around and she knew that she should be tuning back into what was happening, but she just couldn't. All she could think about was that lady with the eyepatch she had seen in the wall, with the whiteness behind her that had been haunting her dreams.
"Aliya, come on," the Doctor said, touching her arm and jolting her out of her thoughts, "Let's go and find them."
"You can," she muttered, "I'm going back to the TARDIS."
"What?" He spun her to face him. "Aliya, don't you care?! There are Time Lords here, we're not alone any more, and you're acting as if I'm talking about, I dunno, seashells!"
"Of course I care!" She shouted. "But right now, separate to all of this or so I think, I'm confused and seeing things and everything feels wrong. So I'm going back to the TARDIS because I need something that feels familiar, alright?" She took a deep breath, calmed herself a little, and touched his lapel. "Look, they're not going to care much about me anyway," she said, speaking more quietly, "You're the one they'll want to talk to, and there's stuff you'll need to explain to them that you'd probably rather do on your own. It's not like you can't bring them back to the TARDIS to see me after all that."
His eyes, those soft and deep eyes she adored so much, regarded her with worry and a very limited understanding. "Alright. If you're sure. Just…try not to worry, okay? You might not feel like yourself but I promise that you are." He smiled at her and lightly touched her chin. "You're shouting at me, how could you not be?"
Aliya laughed, but it came out sounding more like a hiccup. Still, she felt better, if only marginally. "Thanks. I'll see you soon."
She went back to the TARDIS, shut the doors, and curled up on the jump seat. The empty Time Rotor stood tall, and she found herself wondering where the TARDIS matrix could possibly have gone, and if it was going to come back.
The Doctor rehearsed a number of potential ways to break it to the other Time Lords what he had been forced to do to Gallifrey. It was hard to say if they were likely to react more strongly than Aliya; after all, he wasn't as close with any other Time Lord as he was with her, but the fact that they had been so much to each other had been what made it such a betrayal. The average Time Lord already considered him a menace and wouldn't likely be surprised to hear how he burned their home.
"Come on, now," he said as he continued along the corridor, hearing the minds of his kindred closer than ever, "Where are you? Where are you all? Where are you?" He followed the voices to a curtain, which upon being pulled back revealed a small alcove that barely had enough room for a single person, let along the number of Time Lords he had heard. He frowned. "Well, they can't all be in here."
He opened the cupboard in the wall to reveal shelving that held a multitude of hypercubes. The glowing boxes were the sources of the chorus of Time Lord voices, each one a different plea from another Time Lord who had very likely never received the rescue they had sought.
The Doctor wanted to be sick. His false hope turned to poisonous ash in his mouth.
Behind him he could hear Auntie and Uncle approaching. He was half aware of speaking to them in a dead tone, congratulating them on their Time Lord distress call collection and asking how many had been lured in like he had. And, more importantly, what had happened to them. The last bit came out low and rough, enough to make the inferior beings gulp.
Auntie tried to placate him with some vague spiel about House's abilities, but his cold rage had turned his mind sharp and he was suddenly noticing everything that he had been too busy to take in before. All the irregularities in the two people before him.
Eyes of a twenty year old. Two left feet. Mismatched hands and ears.
He couldn't be sure if he was speaking his findings aloud because his mouth seemed to be on automatic even as it conversed with Uncle about his eyes.
But Auntie's forearm was what drew his attention. It was familiar in the eeriest way, and when the Doctor's eyes landed on the snake tattoo that decorated it, his nausea returned.
"Corsair," he breathed, internally taking a moment to grieve for the friend he had fought alongside, whom he had liked so very much and now knew had died a gruesome death.
The patchwork people nattered on about which parts they had gotten when the Corsair had been butchered. Completely unaware of what they were waking within him or what it was capable of. He locked eyes with them, and his voice held the pain of the Doctor as well as the Oncoming Storm when he spoke.
"You gave me hope, and then you took it away. That's enough to make anyone dangerous. God knows what it will do to me."
When they just stared at him with trepidation, he yelled at them to run and that's exactly what they did.
He knew that he needed to go to Aliya in the TARDIS and tell her what he had found, that there were no Time Lords because though some had made it here, they had all been killed and used to spare parts. Something that was particularly insulting due to how little value Time Lords placed on their bodies – the idea of killing a Time Lord for any of their physical aspects was close to sacrilege.
But something held him back from returning to the TARDIS.
The little boxes will make you angry. The memory of Idris' words stuck in his head. How could she have known?
He set off to find the mysterious mad woman.
When the Doctor found Idris, she was sitting in a cage with her eyes shut, looking surprisingly peaceful in her meditation.
"How did you know about the boxes?" He asked her as he entered the room. "You said they'd make me angry. How did you know?"
Idris opened her eyes and smiled at him. "Ah, it's my thief."
"Who are you?"
"It's about time."
"I don't understand. Who are you?"
She tilted her head at him curiously. "Do you really not know me? Just because they put me in here?"
He eyed the cage she was in. "They said you were dangerous."
"Not the cage, stupid," she retorted, her hands coming to gingerly touch the sides of her head, "In here. They put me in here. I'm the – oh, what do you call me? We travel. I go-" She made an astoundingly accurate imitation of the sound of the wheezing TARDIS brakes.
Bemused, he ventured, "The TARDIS?"
Her face lit up. "Time And Relative Dimension In Space," she recited, "Yes, that's it. Names are funny." She smiled at him. "It's me. I'm the TARDIS."
It was just a little too nonsensical for the Doctor to truly consider. "No, you're not. You're a bitey mad lady. The TARDIS is up and downy stuff in a big blue box."
Idris' cheer was undiminished. "Yes, that's me." Her tone turned nostalgic as she leant her head against the bar of the cage and he turned away from her. "I was already a museum piece when you were young, and the first time you touched my console you said-"
"I said that you were the most beautiful thing I had ever known," the Doctor finished, without really thinking.
"And then you stole me," Idris said, amused, "And I stole you."
He frowned. "I borrowed you."
Idris just sounded like she was smirking at him. "Borrowing implies the eventual intention to return the thing that was taken. What makes you think I would ever give you back?"
His hearts kicked up a notch as the truth of everything she was saying finally began to register in him. Slowly, he turned back to face her.
"You're the TARDIS?"
"Yes."
"My TARDIS?"
"My Doctor," she corrected. "Oh. We have now reached the point in the conversation where you open the lock." She coyly stepped back from the cage door and after a moment's hesitation he lifted the screwdriver and the door swung open.
As she stepped out tentatively and came to stand in front of him, he couldn't help but stare at her with wonder. Over the centuries, even if there were few people he would ever admit it to, he had imagined his TARDIS as a living, breathing woman many times. Partly out of loneliness, yes, but also due to his firm belief in her sentience and the bizarrely true form of love he felt for her.
And now, against all realms of probability, here she was standing in front of him. Exactly as he had known she would be. Not in any aspect as human or infantile as hair colour or the shape of her body or face, naturally, but in the ways that were important.
It was the eyes that were intelligent and mischievous and warm, watching him with the fond yet knowing affection of a mother or wife. And the melodious voice that was quick to call him stupid and laugh at him with a bright smile (it fleetingly occurred to the Doctor that when it came to women, he seemed to have a type, but now wasn't the time to work out what he thought about that). She was, in his eyes, still the most beautiful thing he had ever known. Just in a slightly different way than before.
The TARDIS had been doing a similar appraisal of him in the meantime, no doubt discovering how it felt to look at him with human eyes and possibly want to touch him with her new hands. He could only imagine the chaos her mind had to be in all of this.
"Are all people like this?" She asked him, her voice soft with astonishment.
"Like what?"
"So much bigger on the inside."
Coming from her, the Doctor realised that it was one of the simplest and most profound things he had ever heard. People were bigger on the inside, in an even more infinite way than her ship form was physically.
"I'm – oh, what is that word?" She wondered aloud. "It's so big, so complicated, and so sad."
The Doctor, meanwhile, had managed to bring his mind back to the problem at hand.
"But why?" He asked, changing the subject. "Why pull the living soul from a TARDIS and put it into a tiny human head? What does it want you for?"
The TARDIS shrugged. "Oh, it doesn't want me."
"How do you know?"
"House eats TARDISes."
"House what?"
Aliya had been quite content sitting on her own on the jump seat, but that didn't mean she wasn't a bit relieved when the console phone rang. They'd recently installed a communications chip into the Doctor's screwdriver so that it had a direct line to the console due to the likelihood of that coming in handy.
She stood up and hurried to answer the call.
"Hey, so what-"
"Aliya, I need you to get out of the TARDIS, House is after it and you're not safe."
She hit the button that put the phone on speaker so that she could tell him that she was following his instructions as she ran to the door. Unfortunately, she quickly ran into some trouble.
"Doctor, the door's locked."
"So unlock it!"
She ran back to the console, switched the door lock, and tried again. "No, it still won't open!" The Cloister Bell began to toll and a lump of fearful anticipation settled in Aliya's throat just from hearing it. Time Lords were taught from a young age to be very wary of the Cloister Bell because it always meant disaster. "This can't be good, can it? What does House want?"
The Doctor didn't seem too interested in answering her. "Open! Open this door!"
The entire console room shook and silence filled the space the Doctor's commands had been filling. She said his name several times, experimentally, and bit her lip when she got no answer. Whatever had happened, the connection was dead.
As she got to her feet from where she had half fallen on the floor, she found herself wishing she wasn't on her own. Although she believed she was alright at dealing with situations single-handedly, it wasn't always something she enjoyed.
"I wish you were in here with me, old girl," she said to the TARDIS, still not happy about the matrix's absence, "Then at least I'd be slightly less alone."
"Who said you were alone?" The voice was familiar, that of the asteroid House, but it did not belong in the console room Aliya cherished so much. She froze as she realised at least part of the nature of House's interest in the TARDIS. "Being in a TARDIS, what a great adventure. I should have done this half a million years ago. So, Aliya, why shouldn't I just kill you now?"
Aliya, torn between worrying about the TARDIS matrix no longer having a home to come back to and trying to work out what threat House could actually pose to her, didn't respond.
"Corridors. I have corridors. So much to learn about my new home. But you haven't answered my question, my lady." When she just grit her teeth, it pressed harder. "Tell me why I shouldn't just kill you now."
The Time Lady let out a long breath. "Seems a bit wasteful, doesn't it?" She said, trying to keep her tone light. "You have one of the last two Time Lords in existence at your mercy. Why kill me when you could use me for fun? I imagine that was why you had Auntie and Uncle, people to entertain you by you lording yourself over them."
"So entertain me. Run."
Gladly, Aliya thought as she headed up the steps and did as she was told. Petty as it was, even if she knew the futile nature of her actions, it still felt so much better to be doing something than just standing in the console room.
"So are we having fun yet?" House asked after a while. "I'm rather enjoying the sensation of having you running around inside me."
"Jack would've had a field day with that one," she muttered to herself, but gave him no direct answer. She had run into a new section of corridors that she had never seen, lifeless grey ones instead of the warm orange ones that she was used to traversing while inside this TARDIS desktop. It only served to make her feel even more isolated in the place she usually felt most at home.
The new design of the corridors distracted her enough that she nearly didn't notice the lack of floor up ahead, and it was mostly luck that stopped her from falling down a perpendicular corridor that went straight down with no visible end.
"I've turned off the corridor anti-gravs, so do be careful."
After running for about another minute, she heard something that stopped her dead.
"Aliya!"
Just as she turned around, the Doctor rounded a corner.
"Doctor?" Aliya stared at him. "How did you get in? I thought we'd taken off…"
"No, it's fine, I'm here," he said, hugging her tight, "We'll fight this thing together."
"Sounds good to me," she replied, letting out a sigh of relief. "I suppose we'll just keep running until we think of something." She grabbed his hand and they set off down the corridor once again. Except after a short while the Doctor let go of her hand and fell behind, and the moment she noticed a door slid between them. "Doctor!" Even when she slammed her hand on the metal, nothing happened. "Doctor!"
With new determination, she kept going, knowing she needed to find him again. She hadn't gone far when sure enough there he was, passively leaning against the wall.
"Doctor?"
He turned to look at her with surprise. "Aliya?"
"Come on, we need to keep going."
"You've been gone for hours."
Aliya blinked. "What? Then why would you stay here? Why wouldn't you come looking for me?"
He approached her and looked at her seriously. "You're right, we need to keep going." He pulled her along and although still confused, she let him lead her through the corridors until he dropped to the ground without warning.
"Doctor!" Aliya dropped to her knees and shook him violently when he didn't answer in any way other than a groan. "Doctor, what's wrong?"
"I do not require more than one Time Lord for entertainment," House told her, turning her blood cold.
The Doctor had gone completely still. When she checked his hearts, they weren't beating. For a second she just stared at his body in horror, until –
You've been gone for hours. The Doctor would never just wait around, as easily the least passive person she had ever met in her life, he was physically incapable of it. And she had felt the TARDIS take off, and heard the Doctor trying everything to get through the doors and failing.
He had never gotten back inside the TARDIS. And the second she realised that and looked back down, the Doctor's body was gone as if it had never been there. She was alone again and had been the entire time.
"So this is what it's come to, House?" She asked, still sitting down. "Mind games already?"
"Are they not fun games, Mother?"
The voice she had not heard in centuries made her head snap up to look at the boy standing next to her. Auburn curls, dimples, and eyes not quite the same shade of brown. Dressed in red and gold Prydonian chapter robes expertly tailored to his small frame.
"Heta?"
"You've regenerated," he said, tilting his head at her, "And you're wearing funny clothes."
"And you're not real," she said, a new lump in her throat from seeing him again.
"Does that matter?" He stretched his hand out towards her and she touched it experimentally. Just like the Doctor had, he felt solid. Real. Even if she knew he couldn't be. She would have known it anyway, but Heta was speaking English to her, and he had never learned the language.
Aliya gave her dead son a small smile. "Right now? Not really." She lifted herself off her knees and pulled him into a tight hug, breathing in his unique scent that she had spent so many years missing without realising. When she pulled away, he smiled at her and her hearts swelled as her love for him rushed to the surface from the place she kept it stowed away. "Oh, look at you," she breathed, her hands cupping his face and pushing his curls back from it, "I'd almost forgotten how beautiful you were."
"You haven't forgotten me though, have you?"
"You're my only son and only biological child, of course I haven't." She took his hand and stood up. "Come on, I should probably keep moving."
"We should be running," he agreed, and pulled her into a quicker pace. Time Lords on Gallifrey didn't do a lot of running, so Aliya savoured the chance to grip his hand and run alongside him for a first and last time that was really neither because it wasn't real.
But false company was better than none at the moment.
Auntie and Uncle dropped dead around the Doctor, and he flailed helplessly.
"You can't just die!" He cried, but of course, they could and already had.
The TARDIS, however, had other priorities. "We need to go where I landed, Doctor," she told him, "Quickly."
"Why?"
"Because we are there in three minutes. We need to go…" She paused, readying herself, "Now." When she tried to run, she stopped and her hand flew to her torso. "Ow. Roughly how long do these bodies last?"
The Doctor scanned her with the sonic screwdriver. "You're dying." The thought was more dismaying and surprising than it probably should have been.
"Yes, of course I'm dying," she said offhandedly, "I don't belong in a flesh body. I could blow the casing in no time." When she spotted him looking upset, she frowned. "No, stop it. Focus. That's what the runaway says."
"Why do you call her the runaway? I'm your thief, makes sense enough, but Aliya-"
"Ran from you, and then from Gallifrey, and from Gallifrey to you and from you to Gallifrey, over and over again," his TARDIS explained, "What else would I call her?" He supposed she had a point; even if Aliya was rather the opposite of a runaway in his eyes. he could see how his ship would see it quite differently. "But she's right, you're the Doctor and you need to focus."
"On what? I'm a madman with a box, without a box!" He exclaimed with great frustration. "I'm stuck down the plughole at the end of the universe in a stupid old junkyard!" Then he froze as inspiration hit him. "Ooh."
"Ooh what?"
"I'm not."
"Not what?"
"Because it's not a junkyard. Don't you see? It's not a junkyard."
"What is it then?"
"It's a TARDIS junkyard."
After that followed an inquiry about her name and some rather surprising flirting that he could certainly not have predicted at the beginning of the day but found himself enjoying thoroughly. Eventually, they were on their way to the junkyard, and able to make a start on his rather brilliant plan.
When Aliya's head started pounding, she stopped in her climb of the ladder of a vertical corridor.
"What is it, Mother?"
"I'm getting a message," she said, even though she knew she was telling House more than she was telling Heta below her.
Hello, runaway, the mad woman Idris said, her face appearing in Aliya's mind, you have to go to the old control room. I'm putting the route in your head. When you get there use the purple slider on the nearest panel to lower the shields. You'll have about twelve seconds before the room goes into phase with the invading Matrix. I'll send you the pass key when you get there. The Doctor appeared next to her in Aliya's mind's eye, and he just nodded to show that she should listen to the woman who had been been biting him earlier. She assumed she was going to get a more substantial explanation at a more convenient time. Good luck.
"Who was that?" Heta asked her as they continued to climb.
"A friend, I think."
She was more than a little relieved when they reached the top of the ladder and got back into one of the normal horizontal corridors. At least, until the lights went out and she screamed involuntarily.
"No, not now," she whispered, dropping to her knees as the terror of the darkness closed in on her, suffocating every thought and breath inside her.
"Why are you afraid of the dark, Mother?" Heta had come to stand in front of her, and she reached out to pull him to her.
Is that House asking, or him? It hardly mattered. "It was my prison once," she said, "Just like my grief over losing you was once too. But I escaped both before, and I'm strong now."
"Are you?"
"Yes." She found his forehead with her hands and kissed it slowly. "It's time for you to go. And time for me to face this on my own."
The solid feel of him under her fingertips vanished and she was alone again in the dark. Her breath caught in her throat and she just wanted to curl in on herself and give up, to let the darkness take her because she was just so tired, but that wasn't a possibility.
The only way to be rid of the darkness was to escape it.
She got to her feet and took a step forward, and then another, small sobs of panic shaking her body all the while. But then it occurred to her that House had been playing with her mind this far, what would have stopped him from continuing to do it? What if the darkness was an illusion too?
She stopped dead and focused on her mind and where it was being invaded. A few deep breaths in and she had pooled her strength for one forceful shove.
Get. Out. Of. My. Head! She yelled as she flung the asteroid's entity from her mind and put up a thick barrier to stop him re-entering. Sure enough, the darkness fell away in less than a second the moment he was gone.
Aliya laughed at her triumph, for joy and pride and liberation. But then she noticed the Ood, Nephew, standing only a few feet away with his eyes glowing bright green.
"Ah, right," she said, and even though she knew she should be more alarmed, her high from escaping the darkness had her sounding more amused than anything else, even as she started running away from him and in the direction Idris had told her to go.
Nephew was following her. Luckily, she was considerably faster than he was so she managed to not worry too much. When she reached the door, Idris appeared in her mind again. Crimson. Eleven. Delight. Petrichor.
Aliya considered everything in the list, knew it would be her thoughts that would unlock it, and quickly began to list them.
Crimson. The Gallifreyan grass, running through it and laughing.
Eleven. The Doctor as she currently knew him, smiling at her.
Delight. Hugging the Doctor and Jenny, laughing and crying because she had a family again, the most wonderful and tiny family that she loved more than anything.
Petrichor. The smell of dust after rain.
The door slid open and she ran inside a console room she had never seen but heard descriptions of from a few others. Coral spirals ran from the floor to the ceiling, and the console was perfectly round and the room itself darker than it likely had been when it had been the main control room.
She shook herself and knew there wasn't time to admire the old desktop. It only took a few second for her to find the shield controls and turn them off.
"How did you find this place? It's not on my internal schematics. I had hoped you could join Nephew as my servant. But you are nothing but trouble. Nephew, kill her."
Nephew came through the console room doors. Before Aliya could work out where to run, Idris appeared in her head yet again. We're coming through. Get out of the way or you'll be atomised.
"Where are you coming through?" I don't know. She disappeared and Aliya sighed. "Helpful." Still, she gripped the console in case their entry – whatever the hell it was going to be, because she had no idea what they had been doing – was in any way rough.
Sure enough, with a flare of golden energy and a shower of sparks, a disfigured TARDIS console appeared in the old control room, right where Nephew had been.
"Doctor," Aliya said with relief, knowing somehow that he wasn't an illusion, if only from the complete lack of likelihood of what he had just done actually working. She would never have thought it up, and neither would have House.
"Aliya, you're alright," the Doctor said, coming to hug her briefly and plant a kiss on the side of her head.
"Not good, not good at all," Idris exclaimed, clutching her abdomen, "How do you walk around in these things?"
"We're not quite there yet, just hold on," the Doctor told her, worry evident in his voice. He turned to Aliya. "Aliya, this is, well, she's my TARDIS." Aliya frowned. "Except she's a woman. She's a woman, and she's my TARDIS." His audible delight along with how it was hardly likely for him to make such a thing up had Aliya suddenly grinning.
"Seriously?" She asked. When he nodded, she had to laugh a bit. "Did you find a wishing well back on that asteroid or something?"
The Doctor blushed. "Shut up."
"Hello, I'm Sexy."
Under Aliya's raised eyebrow, he turned a deeper shade of red. "Still shut up."
"I suppose this answers the question of where the matrix went," Aliya considered, and turned to the TARDIS. "It's nice to finally be able to say hello to you," she told the other woman before giving her a hug that the eleventh dimensional being hesitantly returned.
"And to you, runaway."
"The environment has been breached. Nephew, kill them all."
"He was standing right where you materialised," Aliya told the Doctor as she let go of Idris.
"Ah, so we're breathing him." He sighed sadly. "Another Ood I failed to save."
"Doctor. I did not expect you."
The Doctor clapped his hands together and beamed. "Well, that's me all over, isn't it? Lovely old unexpected me."
"The big question is, now you're here, how to dispose of you? I could play with gravity…" They were all pulled to the floor roughly, but it only lasted a few seconds. "Or I could evacuate the air from this room and watch you choke." They all started gasping and dropped to their knees as they clutched their throats.
"You really don't want to do that," the Doctor managed to get out. The air returned to the room.
"Why shouldn't I just kill you now?"
"Because then I won't be able to help you," the Time Lord told him, "Listen to your engines. Just listen to them. You don't have the thrust and you know it. Right now I'm your only hope for getting out of your little bubble through the rift, and into my universe. And mine's the one with the food in. You just have to promise not to kill us. That's all, just promise."
Idris, meanwhile, had not gotten up off the floor and seemed in a bad way, so Aliya hurried to her side. "Water, water…drowning…" Aliya cradled her head in her lap.
"I'm sorry, I don't have any right now," she said, "Doctor, she's burning up, asking for water."
The Doctor hurried to join her by his TARDIS. "Hey, hang in there old girl. Not long now," he said, and the tenderness in his voice made Aliya's hearts pang, "It'll be over soon."
Idris coughed. "I always liked it when you call me old girl," she murmured.
"You want me to give my word? Easy. I promise."
"Okay, I trust you," the Doctor said, and while Aliya wanted to challenge his apparent lack of sense, she was too busying worrying about the dying TARDIS matrix half in her arms. "Just delete, oh er, thirty percent of the TARDIS rooms, you'll free up thrust enough to make it through. Active subroutine Sigma nine."
"Why would you tell me this?"
"Because we want to get back to our universe as badly as you do. And I'm nice."
"Yes. I can delete rooms. And I can also rid myself of vermin if I delete this room first. Thank you, Doctor. Very helpful. Goodbye, Time Lords. Goodbye Idris."
Bright light filled their eyes, and when it faded, they were back in the console room. And although it wasn't currently possible to check, likely their own universe. The Doctor thanked House for the lift to the main console room and explained how living things from deleted rooms automatically appeared there.
"We are in your universe now, Doctor. Why should it matter to me in which room you die? I can kill you just as easily here as anywhere. Fear me. I've killed hundreds of Time Lords."
The Doctor was unmoved. "Fear me, I've killed all of them," he said darkly.
Idris was still speaking to Aliya, quietly enough that no one else could here. Not that she was saying anything that made sense. "You need to know, the drowning one isn't truly lost," she breathed, with shining eyes that had Aliya pushing her hair back from her face.
"What does that mean?" She asked. "Just hang on. You're going to be okay."
"You look after him when I can't. Just like I look after him when you can't," the TARDIS said, giving her a miniscule smile, "Thank you for finally not running away."
"I'm never running away again, I promise, we'll both be looking after him for a long time yet," Aliya told her, her worry starting to choke her words.
"The drowning one isn't truly lost…one day you'll need to know...not lost…"
The Doctor had in the meantime changed his strategy. "Yeah, you're right. You've completely won. Oh and you can kill us in oodles of really inventive ways, but before you do kill us, allow me and my friend Aliya to congratulate you on being an absolutely worthy opponent." He started clapping, but Aliya was too preoccupied with Idris to join in. The dark haired woman had gone very still. "Yep, you've defeated us. Me and my lovely friend here, and last but definitely not least, the TARDIS matrix herself, a living consciousness you ripped out of this very control and locked up into a human body. And look at her."
Aliya glanced up at him. "Doctor, she's stopped breathing."
"Enough. That is enough."
"No, it's never enough," the Doctor said firmly, "You forced the TARDIS into a body so she'd burn out safely a very long way away from this control room. A flesh body can't hold the TARDIS matrix and live. Look at her body, House."
When the asteroid spoke again, it sounded confused. "And you think I should mourn her?"
"No, I think you should be very, very careful about what you let back into this control room. You took her from her home. But now she's back in the box again, and she's free."
Idris's body jerked and golden energy, the very life force of the TARDIS matrix, streamed from her and swirled around the console room. As it re-entered the console and time rotor, they could hear House dying, and the Doctor encouraged his TARDIS as she wiped him out once and for all.
The two Time Lords had time to exchange a proud smile before the room dimmed and Idris appeared on the stairs, bathed in a soft golden light.
"Doctor, are you there? It's so very dark in here."
Aliya bit her lip as she realised this would be the last time the Doctor would be able to talk to his beloved box. The sadness on his face told her that he knew it as well.
"I'm here," he said, watching her with wide, soft eyes full of longing.
"I've been looking for a word. A big, complicated word, but so sad," Idris said, "I've found it now."
"What word?"
"Alive," she whispered, "I'm alive." Aliya, from her spot sitting down by the jump seat, covered her mouth as a single sob left her.
"Alive isn't sad," the Doctor said, not quite understanding.
"It's sad when it's over," Idris told him, and his face fell. Tears filled his eyes as he beheld the one love of his life that had never left him and never truly would, but in this way was about to. "I'll always be here, but this is when we talked, and now even that has come to an end. There's something I didn't get to say to you."
"Goodbye," he whispered.
Idris smiled. "No. I just wanted to say hello. Hello, Doctor. It's so very, very nice to meet you."
The Doctor gazed at her with his watery eyes, looking like a broken child. "Please." The word cracked his voice. "I don't want you to. Please."
Despite his plea, she disappeared and the console room lights came back on. Aliya got to her feet and wiped her own tears from her eyes before looking at the Doctor, who was still staring at where Idris had disappeared.
"Doctor?"
She could see turmoil in him, his struggle with his emotions and whether or not to shut them away. But then he turned and half-barrelled into her as he buried his face in her shoulder and began to sob. The force of it sent her stumbling back, and they ended up with Aliya sitting down on the jump seat while the Doctor was sat on the glass floor with his head in her lap, a lost little boy crying for his box.
Aliya stroked his hair gently, murmuring endearments and comforts in Gallifreyan. His pain was intense enough that she could hear him mentally screaming it and partially feel it. And having him be in pain was what she hated more than anything else.
There wasn't anything substantial for her to say that could make it better. His TARDIS was still here with them, like she always had been, and he knew that. But she would never talk again. She wouldn't be alive as she had been today.
When his sobs ceased and they sat in silence with her fingers still moving through his hair, she bent down to kiss his head.
"Do you want to go to the Eye of Orion?" It was a place guaranteed to make someone feel better, the ultimate place of tranquillity. But it could be that he needed something of the opposite sort, something to distract him from his heartbreak.
He lifted his head to look at her with red rimmed eyes. "Can I just…have some time alone with her first?"
She smiled. "Of course." After giving him another kiss on the crown of his head, she got up and went up the stairs to find out what rooms House had deleted, as it had occurred to her that her old bedroom could have been one of them.
When one of the corridor walls slid open to show the woman with the eyepatch again, her hearts sank. Her hallucinations after House had taken over the TARDIS had come from him, of that she was positive, but this one had come before they had gone to the pocket universe and was back even after they had left it. They had to be separate.
"It's alright," the woman said, though she didn't seem to be talking to her, "She's just dreaming."
Aliya took a step towards her but then the hatch closed and left the wall looking as it had a moment before. Just to be sure this time, she reached out to run her hands over where the woman had been, and sure enough the wall was smooth and untouched.
What's happening to me?
When Aliya returned to the console room about an hour later, she thought she could hear the Doctor humming from underneath the console platform. Hope filled her heavy hearts for a moment and she went down the stairs. It was a welcome sight to see him in his swing chair with the absurd goggles on.
"Hey," she said, coming to sit on one of the lower stairs and lean her head against the railing. She needed to talk to him rather urgently, but even more important was first being sure that he was alright. "What are you doing?"
"Just putting a firewall around the matrix. Almost done," he replied, sounding cheerful enough.
"At the end, she kept saying something," Aliya told him, frowning as she recalled how little sense it had made, "The same thing over and over."
The Doctor lifted his goggles to look at her curiously. "What did she say?"
"She said, the drowning one isn't truly lost," Aliya repeated. "And that we'd need to know that someday. It doesn't mean anything, does it?"
"Not yet," he agreed. "You okay?"
Of course he was worried for her as opposed to himself. Aliya just shrugged. "I don't know. It feels like she died in my arms, even if she didn't really. It shouldn't get to me, but-"
"Letting it get to you…you know what that's called?" The Doctor asked. "Being alive. Best thing there is. Being alive right now, that's all that counts. Nearly finished. Two more minutes, then we're off." Aliya would normally have offered to help, but it seemed polite to leave him and the TARDIS to their alone time for a while after everything that had happened.
"Off where?"
"Well, the Eye of Orion is restful, if you like restful. I can never really get the hang of restful," he said, and then looked up. "What do you think, dear? Where should we take her this time?"
Aliya smiled fondly. "Look at you two. It's always you and her, after everyone else leaves. A boy and his box off to see the universe."
He smiled back. "You say that like it's a bad thing, but honestly, it's the best thing there is." Then he chuckled. "Besides, things are a bit different now. It's not like you're going anywhere any time soon."
That made her face fall and her stomach get heavy as she remembered what she needed to talk to him about. "What if I already have?" She asked, frowning.
He gave her a funny look. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Aliya pursed her lips and let her head drop against the railing again. When she spoke, it was in Gallifreyan. "I don't know, but…Doctor, I really do think there's something wrong with me. There's this woman, she's opened up the wall to look at me, and talk to me, and then she's just gone like she was never there at all."
He eyed her with new solemnity. "You're really sure something's wrong, aren't you?"
She nodded. "It's like I can just feel it. And I don't know if they're hallucinations, or if it's something else entirely."
"Only one way to find out." He got out of the swing chair and moved to sit next to her on the steps. "May I?" He reached out his hands towards her and she nodded. With her permission he leaned forward and let himself slip into her mind. It wasn't quite as easy or natural as it usually was, which only served to make Aliya more positive she was right in her suspicions.
When the Doctor let go of her, he had a deep frown creasing his face. "You're right," he said, sounding surprised and not half alarmed, "Aliya, it's like…it's like your mind wants to be somewhere else, like it's-"
"Like I'm not really here?" Aliya whispered. Her hands clenched in her lap. "You know, I almost wondered. My dreams, this woman, what if they're glimpses of reality?"
"But you're here," he said, closing his hands over hers, "I can feel you, you're real."
"My mind, maybe," she replied, her voice shaking, "But bodies can be faked. There's technology that could do that, project my mind into a false body."
"But who would do that? Why? How?"
"Scotland Yard." She spoke without even thinking it through. Somehow she just knew. "I don't think I ever got hit by a neuron scrambler. I was adjusting to whatever the hell's been done to me, that was when they got me."
"But…that means someone's kidnapped you, and not wanted us to know it," the Doctor realised, panic in his voice, "You're in danger, and it's probably because of me, they probably want to hurt you to get to me-"
Her hand came to rest over his mouth before it could get too carried away. "Not that I think you're wrong, but your ego is astounding at times," Aliya said wryly, "But if they can project this signal into the TARDIS wherever we go, it means they could be listening in. Good thing none of this conversation ended up being in English. They can't translate Gallifreyan, meaning that they don't know that we know."
He hesitated, then nodded. "And better that they not know that we know anything. Not until we know what we're dealing with." His hand ran down his face anxiously, fingers smoothing across his cheek and down to rub his chin with deep thoughtfulness. "What's the point of kidnapping someone if they don't know they've been kidnapped? If they want to use you for bait or ransom, it doesn't really add up."
"I imagine we'll find out."
He pulled her into a crushing hug that made her feel a lot safer even if she knew it wasn't the truth. "I promise you, we're going to find out how they've done this," he said passionately, kissing her hair, "And then I'm going to come and find you, wherever you really are. And I'm going to make whoever took you regret ever coming near you."
Aliya hugged him back and let her cheek rest on his shoulder. "Sounds like a plan."
I'm not sure how many people will actually be surprised by how this chapter ended, but either way, yes, we've got an emotional rollercoaster coming with the AU of Series 6, but it will certainly be VERY different. (Well, River's not involved at all, being dead, so it was always going to be.) And you should probably get a teeny warning that there is a twist heading your way somewhat soon, so prepare yourselves. Or don't, it'll be funnier that way.
Now I need to go and rewatch the Ganger episodes to be entirely sure what I'm doing there so I can get started on today's 2000 words...
Feedback is always appreciated, thanks!
Love you guys!
-MayFairy :)
p.s. congrats to toavoidconversation who after MONTHS has managed to catch up! It's exciting back to have you on the current bandwagon.
p.p.s. I am SO excited to be writing so much during this break, likely even more than you guys will be to be reading the new chapters that will be coming out so quickly! Mainly because it's the super juicy part of the story that I've been looking forward to/planning for ages.
Anonymous Review Replies:
jackjen fan - thanks for your review! There will definitely be more Torchwood, there's just some stuff that needs to happen first. Jenny IS definitely brave, but maturity and age only come with time, and while she is mature in a lot of ways (she IS mature enough to be in a relationship, as you mentioned), she is very young and naive in others. Don't worry, she's going to feature more heavily in this latter half of the story and get a lot of character development. As for a boyfriend, though, you'll have to wait and see. ;)