Chapter Ten
The Man in Blue stood silently over the sleeping bodies.
"How long have you been here?" his longtime student asked him, stuffing a hand under the cloudy robe he wore as he slowly trudged behind his master.
The slightly wrinkled little bald man just smiled and rubbed his shiny pate, grinning like a boy more than half his age. Then he looked at his student, and spoke soft words.
"Long enough to know I would have been of more use had I been younger, my son."
The student blinked, feeling his deep-sunken green eyes widen a fraction in the spilt light of early morning as questions came instantly to mind. How long had he been sleeping? And… was it over now? Oh, right, no. Course, it couldn't be. There was still a baby to be born.
At that moment, the young angel who wore Jimmy's body and carried the child of a Time Lord chose to rouse himself from the couch at the sound of his Father's voice.
"Is it you at last, Father God? We are pleased, but… it has been so long."
The little Man in Blue laughed sweetly. Then he held out his hand to the angel, who rose, hand to the pain in his back, to join his Father on the stones of the Vimana's little room. It was one of many.
The student, clad in wide ribbons of cloudy fabric, came toward them. He took his teacher's hand and placed it across his lower waist, the apex of his womb. "I am ready when you are, my teacher," he said, his lips and eyes and all his face curling up in glory at Castiel.
Cho Ji Kanpoche Rinpoche smiled again at the both of them, turning his head so slightly as he placed the fingers of his left hand across the angel's heavy belly. Had the angel felt him kiss his forehead and whisper 'many mansions'? Castiel could not tell.
He began to glow. Light splintered before him, because he had come before the light, and it swam in pieces in every direction between and over and through, filling every space, every hole, every nook and dark place.
Then he was gone. His student the Doctor had sunk to the floor, his hands against the finely cut stones, lungs clutching for breath against the waves of life which crashed through his once-more swollen girth. Castiel came to him, wings outstretched. It was time for the Time Lord to give birth. He bore up the alien with one hand placed upon the man's bony back, collecting him in his arms as the man his uncle heaved great heaves, consumed with the all-important task. The Doctor, with his cries of pain, would soon rouse the others…
Tremors rippled through that alien body as it shoved, borne aloft by its natural brother in the history of all time's ramblings. The wakening masses peered like children from their sealed rooms, throwing jewels and flowers they had found, pushing little missives through the window-curls of alien stone.
As the Doctor shivered in Thursday's hands, wrapt in his throes, there was a thick uprush along what passed for the ground, and soon the 696 sigils written on the wreckage of the Vimana by the Morningstar began to glow. The ship was rising…
Castiel, angel of Thor's Day, smiled down through his own fast weeping at his charge, as a temporal shift fluttered around the Vimana, swirling over it, drawing it to what was missing from the Vimana's heart. Drawing them all to the TARDIS.
The Doctor gasped as pain slid through him like an avalanche of song. He needed to feel everything about this, he knew that much as he bucked upward in the angel's embrace of arms and feathers, his body spewing blood over bright wings and blue eyes as he wriggled and squirmed and willed the child in him to come free.
Nearly there, just a few more hours… nearly there…
Soon, so very soon now, the Vimana would form around the TARDIS, which would then click into place in the centre like a keystone, and Castiel would be reunited with his brothers at Nematon. Chuck Shurley, however, would not be with them.
Because in a very short time the Doctor's alien body would loose its waters over the blackened stones of the monastery catacombs , and all that had been Chuck Shurley would cease.