Interlude: Reunion

"Oh my god," Rose whispered. Suddenly the entire day came crashing down around her. She'd been running on adrenaline for far too many hours, had gone through losing Corin, thinking he was dead for several long minutes, getting him back, then the wracking fear for her daughter, which now was being proved out, with the worst possible outcome. She gasped, struggling to get air into her lungs, struggling to find something normal to hang on to. Corin saw and almost ran the four steps to her side, pulling her roughly into his arms and holding her tightly for several breaths, until she straightened up and pushed him (gently) off.

She looked past him, then, to Joshua a step behind, her eyes narrowing; her professional mien lost, at that moment she was only a mother. "You promised me she'd be all right. You promised. You call this all right? My daughter is captive on an alien space ship, being taken away to god knows where across the galaxy, to a planet you say is poisoned, facing god knows what kind of experiments and procedures and certain death, and you call this all right?" Her voice had risen to just a hair below shouting. "How do you propose to help us out with this little problem now, Traveler? She's on a space ship, heading out there into deep space – " and suddenly her voice stopped dead for half a second, as if someone pushed pause, then dropped back to conversational level. " – and you've got a TARDIS," she ended, then took a deep, shuddering breath.

Joshua grinned at her. "I was wondering when you were going to remember that."

Corin jumped in. "Can you get us on board that ship?"

He considered, then shook his head. "A moving target, with their shields, just the three of us against a whole mutinous shipload, and all their hostages besides? No. I've a better idea. We'll skip ahead to SenSaru'a and be there to meet them."

"How long will it take them to get there?"

"Several days – maybe a week."

Rose narrowed her eyes again. This was her beloved son, but technically he was now older than she was, and could obviously take care of himself. Donna was still a kid. Well, OK, twenty-two, but still impossibly young. Rose stepped right up to Josh. "And will she still be all right at the end of that week?"

Joshua looked levelly at his mother. "Yes."

"She better be. Because if she isn't, I will hold you personally responsible."

He nodded, solemn. "So will I."

General Myers had been listening in, along with most everyone else in the room. "This TARDIS is some kind of spaceship? How many soldiers can it hold? Enough for a strike force?"

Joshua turned to him, mightily affronted. "Soldiers? None. Not a single soldier will ever be carried on my ship. The three of us will go there, discover the solution, convince them of it, and bring back every one of the hostages, without any force or threat of it. Count on it, General." He turned to his parents, anger still seeping out around his edges. "Ready?"

"Ready," came two replies – no argument from either of them.

They expected him to turn on his heel and lead them out the door (wildly curious to see what his TARDIS would be disguised as – a police box? A car, perhaps?), but instead he dug into a pocket and pulled out a pair of crystal pendants, each hanging from a chain. "Put these on, and don't take them off – you'll need them each time."

Pendants around their necks, he reached into his pocket again and pulled out what appeared to be simply a hard blue ball, slightly smaller than a tennis ball. Grinning suddenly at them, he threw the ball down onto the floor between them. It didn't bounce, but landed with a sticky bloop. Then, with two huge, swift, sweeping movements, Joshua drew both his arms UP and then flung them OUT – astoundingly, pulling walls up from the floor around the three of them, then tossing them a few paces away. As quickly as that, without having taken a single step, the three of them were standing inside a TARDIS control room.

Joshua's grin got even bigger at their gobsmacked expressions. "Welcome to TARDIS two-point-oh. Pocket-sized for my convenience!"

Nudging both of them with a gentle finger to a shoulder, he added, "You may want to sit down." Right beside each of them was a comfy-looking but sturdy swivel chair bolted to the deck; they took the hint and sat – collapsed - down. Joshua half-fell into another seat behind him, spun quickly around and began throwing switches and levers. A few seconds later, they whooshed smoothly into the void, and he let the TARDIS drift for a while, turning back to enjoy his parents' astonishment.

"What did you do, graft on a spaceship?" Corin's voice was chock-full of admiration.

"Pretty much, yeah." Reaching out with one foot, he banged his heel hard in the middle of an eighteen-inch circle engraved into the floor mat right in the middle between the seats, and a knee-high column rose smoothly up, lifting his foot up with it – instant coffee table. He brought up his other foot and crossed them, casually leaning back as though in his own living room – which, come to think of it, it was.

The control room was vaguely triangular, with big, smooth curves at each corner rather than sharp angles. Sleek workstations ran around the entire perimeter, save a single arched entryway - double doors closed snug - between Corin's and Rose's chairs. Each seat was tucked into one of the corners, giving its occupant easy access to several feet of workspace curved around it. Corin's experienced eyes picked out flight controls around Joshua's space – obviously the Pilot's chair. Rose's station held comms, sensor arrays and environmental controls, while he was apparently sitting in the Navigator's seat. In fact, the only thing that marked the room as a TARDIS control room rather than a 'regular' spaceship – or luxury space yacht, for that matter – was the Time Rotor filling up the rounded corner in front of Joshua, his station's panels bending gracefully outward around it.

"Wow. Just wow," Rose said softly, eyes huge and shining. "This is incredible." She grinned, quickly, "It's even got windows!" Two long narrow panes stretched across the walls above the workbenches between the chairs; the swirling, sparkling Void currently lay beyond.

Corin was simply drinking it all in. "Seriously," he said slowly. "This... is a work of art. It's magnificent." He turned and smiled at his son. "You do good work."

"It wasn't all me, by a long shot. We made a damn good team: me, the Doctor, and Jenny. And others, here and there. Baby here had a lot of helpers and godparents."

Rose glanced at the arched doorway, wondering what lay beyond. "How big is it, really? As big as the other one?"

"Not a chance. We really did graft the coral into an existing spaceship; currently that's how big she still is. Eventually she might expand beyond the outer bulkheads, but for now, this is plenty of space. She's about the size of your mansion back home – or more accurately, the size of a large luxury yacht." He grinned. "Don't worry, you won't get lost."

Corin: "What impresses me most is that super-powered chameleon circuit. A blue rubber ball? Pocket-sized? You've got to be kidding! And that dramatic entry? How...?" He snapped his fingers. "Oh-ho-ho! You married the chameleon circuit to a transmat, didn't you? And keyed them both to these crystals?" He touched the pendant he was wearing, and Joshua nodded. "Oh. My. Stars. Brilliant! Utterly bloody brilliant! Who thought that one up?"

Joshua grinned and held up his hand. "I got the idea from an old movie, believe it or not."

Rose was spluttering, finally catching up. "Wait, what? You mean that ball IS the TARDIS? That's not just a... communicator or something?"

Replete with satisfaction, Joshua just sat back and grinned at their reactions, all his designer's heart could ask for.

Corin shook his head, laughing. The view outside the windows caught his eye. "You put us in the Void already? And nary a bump." He turned and grinned at Rose. "The Doctor must be jealous as hell." Then, back to Joshua. "But we should get going."

"Aye-aye, sir!" Joshua swung back around and began working the controls again, concentrating. After a moment, the Time Rotor began its mesmerizing, glowing action, pumping them across the universe. Joshua peered at his monitor, puzzled. "That's not quite right." He held his hand out towards Corin without looking. "Brandon, would you punch up – ." He swung around and winced, choking off the sentence. "Sorry. Dad. Can you call up the nav program to SenSaru'a? Should be right on top there," motioning to the screen beside his father.

Corin didn't turn. He gazed at Josh, a bemused expression covering his face. "Who's Brandon? A companion?"

Josh spluttered a bit. "Um... Yeah... More or less."

Corin glanced over at Rose, more amused by the second. "That's a very enigmatic answer. Are you trying not to shock your doddering old folks?"

"What?" It took Joshua a second to catch on, then he burst out laughing. "No," he said emphatically between snorts, before he caught his breath again. "No, that's not it." A deep sigh. "I'm wrestling with spoilers, actually. I honestly don't know what I can or shouldn't tell you guys right now... The story's not over yet. I haven't closed the loop."

Corin turned back to Rose again. "He gets more enigmatic with every sentence."

She nodded, as amused at her husband as her son. "Well, he came by it naturally."

"Oi! I'm not that bad, am I? .. Any more?" he added as an afterthought.

She laughed, taking pity on him. "No, you've definitely improved over the years. Although, you do still have your moments..."

^..^

A short time later found the TARDIS whooshing into existence on the home planet of the SenSaru. Both men stood up and leaned over Rose, punching up sensor readings on her workstation screen.

"Something's off, that's for certain..." Corin pointed to the atmospheric analysis. "Check out those heavy metal isotopes. They shouldn't even be airborne!"

Joshua called up a scan of the entire continent. "They're concentrated in certain areas – oh, don't tell me!" He hit a few more buttons and groaned theatrically. "Yup. TNP power grid. Trans-nucleic-plasma. With no safeguards at all, apparently." He looked up. "They really did poison themselves."

"And those isotopes could definitely have targeted their women first."

Josh scratched his head. "So. How do you clean them off an entire planet?"

Corin shrugged. "You can't. All you can do is – well, for starters, stop pumping more out! And then it's just a matter of time. The planet will eventually absorb them back into the environment and break them down. Eventually."

"How long before you'd consider it safe for habitation?"

Corin shrugged. "With no more being added, say... twenty thousand years?"

Rose sighed. "Not a quick fix on the horizon, then." She looked at Joshua, drilling him. "Why did you tell me there was a 'permanent solution that would benefit both species', then?"

He grinned and told them what he'd discovered up in the future. Jaws dropping at first, they discussed the details, and after a few minutes wound up smiling at each other, convinced. "Now all we have to do is talk two planets of people into it."

"Watch me," said Joshua with a wink, and reached over to tap off the screen.

Suddenly, Rose's voice rang out, strict authoritarian again. "Hold it right there, young man." She grabbed his left wrist, holding his hand up to Corin. There was a glint of gold on his third finger. "Were you going to tell us about this?" She peered up at her son, grinning – which quickly faded at the look on his face.

He'd turned to stone. Turning away sharply, he pulled his hand out of her grip, balling it into a fist before dropping it down to hold it stiffly at his side. Staring at nothing, he swallowed hard, then whispered hoarsely, "There's nothing to tell. It's over. I just... I haven't been able to make myself take it off yet."

Shocked, Corin and Rose looked at each other, then they each put a hand on his arm. "I'm sorry, son." Corin whispered.

Turning his face further away, his eyes scrunched closed, stiff as a tree. All motherly impulse, Rose reached up and took hold of his arm, pulling him down beside her chair. He resisted for a moment, then fell to his knees and buried his face in her lap, just as he'd done as a very small boy, when the world got to be too much. Sharing bewildered looks, his parents simply waited, Corin kneeling down to put an awkward hand on his son's back.

A minute later, forcing deep breaths, Joshua slowly sat up again, showing a stoic, fiercely dry-eyed face, gazing fixedly at a point on the floor between them. "You had a grandson..." he finally managed. "Five years old... He was... everything."

A long pause. "One afternoon he got sick. Just like that... in just four hours he was gone. A new, virulent influenza attacking mostly children. He was one of the first victims."

Another pause. "She couldn't take it. She left."

Corin and Rose gazed at each other, hearts breaking for their son. "How long ago?" Corin finally asked him quietly.

Joshua shrugged. "Four years? Five?" Slowly he sat up. "I know. I know. Long enough. She's not coming back. And I'm not where she could come back to, if she did." He swallowed hard, then half-turned to his father. "You have your sonic?"

Confused, Corin nodded, and pulled out his old screwdriver from his jacket pocket. Shakily, Joshua held his left hand out to him. "My knuckle's too big." Understanding then, Corin quietly clicked up a number and buzzed it against the ring, loosening it. Joshua pulled his hand back and held it, still unable to move. Rose reached out, then, and took his hand, gently sliding the ring at last off his finger. He clenched his now empty fist and choked back a sob, then closed her hand around his ring, silently asking her to keep it.

"What was his name?" she queried softly.

"Janiver," he replied, softening the J. "It's a Boruskan name – she was Boruskan." His face twisted again, halfway between pain-filled grimace and a tiny, rueful smile. "It means 'angel'. And that he was. An angel."