The year was 1963, and the month was November. A lone, wrecked Dalek ship sat upon the moon of the planet that was designated Sol III, and known also as Earth.
Inside, the ship appeared deserted. Amidst the gleaming, polished surfaces, a blue wooden box began to slowly materialise, until it was standing in the middle of the round control room, the battered walls and sharp edges looking out-of-place.
The door swung open with a creak that echoed off the metallic walls. John poked his head out, looking around carefully before stepping out into the ship. One hand was in his pocket, firmly gripping his hand-made sonic screwdriver.
A moment passed, then Harry hopped out also, glancing around before going to stand beside her brother. She had no weapon, not even a screwdriver, but her stance was aggressive, as if daring anything to appear out of nowhere and attack them. "Are you sure we shouldn't bring a gun?" she asked. "It would be good security."
"No guns," John told her firmly. "Dad never uses guns, and neither will we."
"You never had a problem with them before," Harry muttered. Then she frowned and peered back into the TARDIS. "Are you coming, Sherlock?" she called through the half-open door.
"Just a moment," came the reply, floating from within. They heard footsteps clattering over the metal grating inside, and soon Harry could see Sherlock's silhouette coming towards them.
Just before he reached the doorway, however, the door swung shut unexpectedly. A locking sound could be heard, trapping Sherlock inside.
John and Harry exchanged a confused, panicked glance, then rushed towards the TARDIS as one. Harry tugged at the handle, to no avail. John pulled out his sonic screwdriver and tried opening the door with that, but again, nothing happened, to his consternation. "It must be deadlocked," he said with a frown. Then he hammered on the door. "Sherlock? Can you hear me?"
A tense moment passed, then came Sherlock's reply. "Just barely. What happened?"
John's shoulders relaxed slightly. "I don't know what happened," he explained. "We can't get in. Can you get out?"
The door rattled for a moment, then Sherlock said, "Negative. Do you have a key?"
"A key!" Harry said. She rummaged in her pocket for a moment before triumphantly holding up a small silver key, fitting it into the lock and turning it. Or rather, trying to turn it. "It's stuck!"
"Stuck?" John demanded. "How can it be stuck?" He gently pushed her out of the way, taking matters into his own hands. "TARDIS keys don't just get…what the hell?" He frowned, removing the key and staring at it.
"What's happening?" Sherlock asked from inside.
"Nothing," Harry called back. "We can't open the door at all. Even the key isn't working, which should be impossible, by all the laws of physics."
There was a pause. "What can we do?" Sherlock asked after a moment.
Harry raised an eyebrow at John, who sighed. "There's nothing we can do, Sherlock," he said apologetically. "Something's blocking the door of the TARDIS, so nothing can get in or out. This is advanced technology."
"Probably Dalek technology," Harry chipped in. "Only they could do something this strong to our technology."
"Great," Sherlock said, the irritation in his voice almost palpable. "I'm caught up in a battle of technologies."
"Sherlock," John said seriously, "I am so, so sorry that you have to be in this situation. Maybe you should have just gone home."
"And let you get killed somewhere in space?" Sherlock asked incredulously. "Please, John. I might not be much use right now, but I will help you, I promise. I'll find a way. You go on."
John gave a small smile in spite of the situation. "Alright, Sherlock."
"Are you sure?" Harry sounded unconvinced.
"I'll be fine," Sherlock said reassuringly. "You go ahead. I'll catch up."
Harry pursed her lips. "Fine," she said eventually. "Don't you go anywhere," she warned him.
"I'll try and remember that," he said, his smile audible in his voice.
"Bye, mate," John said. "We'll be back as soon as we can." If we get out of this alive, he thought but did not say out loud.
"Goodbye, John," Sherlock said. "Hurry up, before the Daleks are all gone."
John turned and walked away regretfully. Harry followed him after a moment. "Are you sure he'll be okay?" she asked when they were out of earshot of the TARDIS.
"What could happen to him?" John said. "Nothing can get in or out. The TARDIS won't let anything hurt him in there. He'll be fine." His voice was a lot more confident than he felt.
The Time Lords strode on together, out of the control room, entering the maze corridors upon the Dalek ship, each step taking them further away from their friend. They knew what they needed to do.
Inside the TARDIS, Sherlock's smile disappeared. He turned off the sonic screwdriver that John had given him earlier, stepping away from the door which he had secretly been keeping closed during his conversation with John and Harry. Tucking the screwdriver inside his stolen cape, he turned and walked towards the console, his face set in stone. He knew what he needed to do.
-o0o-
John and Harry strode through the unfamiliar corridors of the Dalek ship. He walked slightly ahead of her, taking charge in this mission as he would in any mission.
The ship was eerily quiet, the only sound to be heard being their footsteps. The rubber soles of Harry's combat boots squeaked as they rounded a corner, and both jumped slightly before they caught themselves.
John led the way down a ramp to another level of the ship. He chuckled internally, remembering the time before the Daleks had anti-gravity plates, and had to roll around everywhere. He guessed that the ramps were a throwback from that era.
They walked around a few more corners before Harry broke the silence. "What exactly are we looking for?"
"Some sort of a hidden room," John explained. "Hidden how, I'm not sure."
"It could be out of step with the rest of time," Harry suggested. "They'd only need to put it a second out of sync with the rest of the universe, and it'd be virtually undetectable."
John stopped abruptly in his tracks, and turned to stare at her. "Of course," he breathed. "That's brilliant! Why didn't I think of that?"
"Like I said earlier," she replied nonchalantly, "you need me." And with that she winked and started walking again, taking the lead.
John frowned and hurried to catch up with her. "But if it's out of sync with everything else," he said, "how the hell are we going to find it? It'd be virtually undetectable."
Harry frowned and slowed down, allowing him to walk alongside her. Eventually her face cleared. "The scanner," she said. "If the Dalek scanner won't detect any life forms in the room, it won't detect the room either. So we go back and scan it again…"
"…and look for the missing piece of the ship!" John finished for her. "Of course! You are brilliant, did I mention?"
"I am good," she admitted with a grin.
John turned around and started walking back the other direction. "Let's go!"
"Allons-y!" she agreed, and ran back up the ramp after him.
-o0o-
The TARDIS control room was quiet, the time rotor sitting still upon the console. The whole room seemed to be emitting a low-pitched humming sound, barely noticeable, just in the background. Sherlock approached the centre of the room slowly, his footsteps on the metal grating disrupting the silence.
He stopped by the console, looking up at the time rotor. He cleared his throat. "Um, hello," he began. "Harry told me that you are alive, so with any luck you can hear me now, and I'm not talking to a machine for no reason.
"Thank you, by the way," he said. He held up the sonic screwdriver. "I assume it was you who kept the door closed for me? I'd imagine I wouldn't be able to do it by myself, even with this." He placed the screwdriver carefully on the console. "I am just a human, after all. John and Harry are Time Lords, but you kept them out for me. Why?"
Sherlock walked around the console, and stopped next to the lever which John had earlier pulled to send them into flight. He leaned against the console and stared up towards the time rotor, aware that he had subconsciously pinpointed the time rotor as being the TARDIS's consciousness. He felt the console vibrating lightly under his palms. "Is it because I'm right?" he asked. "I am, aren't I? The Daleks haven't taken the Doctor, have they?"
The TARDIS couldn't reply, but it felt to Sherlock as if the ambient humming sound increased in volume, just for a moment. "And if the Daleks didn't take the Doctor," he continued confidently, "it wasn't them that corrupted the screwdriver. It was him. He corrupted his own screwdriver so that his own children wouldn't find him. When John plugged it in, you could tell that, couldn't you? Two pieces of Time Lord technology would surely be compatible with each other. But why didn't you tell them?"
A light on the console flashed red, a clear warning. "Are you telling me not to go through that line of questioning?" he asked, and the light stopped flashing. "All right," he said, trying not to think how crazy it was that he was taking advice from a machine. "If not that, then what?"
Sherlock glanced around, lips pursed in thought, until his gaze fell upon the door. His eyes widened. "The cat!" he said. "You let a cat in, but why? Maybe you wanted it in out of the cold, sure, but there's something else. Were you trying to give John and Harry a clue?" The humming became louder again, then quietened.
"Or were you trying to give me a clue?" he mused. "Either way, I think I need to go back to London. John and Harry won't believe me. I need to prove it to them, before it's too late for them. Before they do something stupid."
Sherlock took a breath and looked straight at the time rotor. "Please," he said. "I need to help them, but I don't know how to fly a time machine. Can you take me back to the alley we were in?"
A light on the console flashed green, and the console began to beep and move about, buttons pressing themselves and levers flicking up and down. Above him, the time rotor began to move steadily up and down in a rhythmic motion, and the vworp, vworp sound of the engines began, steadily becoming louder.
Sherlock watched as the TARDIS began to fly itself, and a small smile appeared on his face, slowly growing as he watched dials turning, seemingly by an invisible hand. He watched as a small readout appeared on the monitor, with symbols that he recognised as numbers from observing the sphygmomanometer earlier. The numbers began to steadily count down, until they stopped at a date in the late 19th century.
The time rotor slowed down and stopped, and the console beeped once, before becoming silent once more. The door swung open, showing the dark alley outside.
"Thank you," Sherlock said sincerely. He picked up the sonic screwdriver from the console and walked towards the door. He turned once to smile in the direction of the time rotor, before turning and stepping out into the cold depths of old London town. The door squeaked shut behind him.
-o0o-
In 1963, John and Harry were jogging towards the control room of the Dalek ship when they heard a noise that sounded horribly familiar. They exchanged a glance, then as one they broke into a sprint, dashing towards the source of the sound.
A pit settled in John's stomach as he ran. Part of him hoped that his ears were somehow wrong, that he had made a terrible mistake. But underneath, he knew that he wasn't wrong, that he could hear what he thought he could hear.
His fears were confirmed when he entered the control room at breakneck speed, skidding to a stop on the polished floors. Harry did likewise, staring aghast at the spot where they had left the TARDIS. They could do nothing but watch as the familiar blue box finished disappearing, the sound of the engines fading to nothing.
Harry looked at John in consternation. "They're gone," she said faintly. "Sherlock and the TARDIS, they're gone?"
John slowly walked forwards, to the spot where the TARDIS had stood only a moment earlier. He reached out one hand and waved it through the air, finding nothing. "They're gone," he confirmed grimly. "Someone's taken them."
"The Daleks," Harry stated. "Must have been. They made Sherlock real, trapped him, and now they've taken him to Rassilon knows where." Her nose was wrinkling in disgust at the thought of the Daleks' apparent actions.
John closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then opened them again and turned to his sister. "Well," he said determinedly, "soon it won't just be Rassilon who knows where they've taken him." He strode towards the ship's controls and began working furiously, pressing buttons and inspecting readouts. "Because," he explained over his shoulder while he worked, "the Daleks have made a mistake. A big mistake, which they will regret."
Harry came up behind him and began to help, scanning the many screens around the walls. "What mistake?"
"They've taken someone I care about," John said grimly. "Nobody in this universe takes somebody I care about, and gets away with it. Nobody."
-o0o-
Sherlock stepped out of the TARDIS and looked about himself. It was still night-time, and the darkness made it difficult to see, although the light spilling from the open door of the TARDIS offered some illumination of the scene. His eyes darted around the small alley, inspecting all of the cracks and corners. The cat was nowhere to be seen.
He walked up and down the alley once, but the feline could not be found. Rolling his eyes in irritation, Sherlock walked back over to the TARDIS and pulled the door handle. It did not open.
He frowned and tried again, but the door would not budge. He stepped back and looked right at the TARDIS. "What is it?" he asked. "What do you want me to do? This is more than a century before my time, I don't know anywhere to go. The only place we've been is 221B Baker Street, and that was thoroughly searched. There was nothing there."
There was no reaction from the blue box, although in all honesty, Sherlock didn't know what he had been hoping for. He sighed deeply. "All right. If you won't let me in, you want me to go somewhere else, correct? But where?" He pursed his lips, and noticed that the stolen cape he was wearing had begun to slip down his shoulder. He absent-mindedly pulled it up, then froze with his hand in mid-air. He looked down at the cape, then back up at the TARDIS.
"Of course," Sherlock breathed. "You want me to go back and see Arthur Conan Doyle. Although I think we somewhat burned our bridges on that front," he said with a frown.
The TARDIS remained still and silent. "All right, fine," Sherlock said. "I'll go and see Conan Doyle. Again." He stuffed his hands in his pockets and began to walk down the alley, when a thought occurred to him.
Sherlock wheeled around and walked back. "You stay here until I'm back," he said warningly to the TARDIS, suppressing the urge to waggle his finger at it. "Do not disappear on me."
The TARDIS stood silently, unmoving. Sherlock carefully turned his back and walked away, craning his head around at the end of the alley to make sure the TARDIS was still there. It was.
He continued walking down the street, keeping an ear out for the unmistakeable sound of the TARDIS engines, which thankfully did not come. Sherlock squared his shoulders against the chilly night, and strode towards where he remembered meeting Arthur Conan Doyle earlier.
It took Sherlock several attempts to find the correct street. He strode up and down darkened streets irritatedly, pausing once to duck into an alleyway to avoid a passing policeman. He knew that his failure to remember where they had been could easily be put down to the different layout of the streets that had once been familiar to him (a lot can change in a century), but he was still irritated at himself.
His brain was normally the one thing Sherlock could rely on, and it was letting him down in the one time he needed it – to help his friends, before they did something stupid. Sure, he had a time machine, but from what Harry had told him it wasn't always accurate. He needed to hurry.
Finally, after nearly an hour of searching, Sherlock arrived back at the residence of Arthur Conan Doyle. He knew it was late, or even early morning by now, but that didn't stop him from nearly hammering the door down to get Doyle's attention.
Eventually, there was the distant sound of footsteps on a staircase, and a light of some sort turned on in the hallway. The lock clicked, and the door opened slowly, revealing a bleary-eyed Doyle wearing a deep red dressing-gown. A red-and-white striped nightcap sat askew upon his head.
He squinted in Sherlock's direction for a moment, his shoulders slumping when he recognised him. "Mr Holmes," he said curtly. "To what do I owe the pleasure of this late-night visit?" The tone of his voice indicated it was anything but.
Sherlock did not bother to reply, instead pushing past Doyle into the dimly-lit hallway. "I see you are now in possession of my cape," Doyle muttered, closing the door without locking it. He sighed. "What do you want, Mr Holmes?" he demanded. "Have you and your friends not disrupted my night enough? Speaking of which, where are your friends?"
"They're in trouble," Sherlock told him, shrugging off the stolen cape and handing it to Doyle. "Big trouble."
"What a shame," Doyle said sarcastically, taking his cape and hanging it back on its hook. "Now, was that the sole reason for your visit, or do you have some more good news for me?"
Sherlock gritted his teeth. He was finally understanding how Doyle could have created him – the author seemed every bit as annoying as Sherlock knew he himself could be. "Look," he said, "I'm not happy about this either. But I need your help."
Doyle raised his eyebrows. "I beg your pardon?"
"I wouldn't ask you if I didn't have to," Sherlock assured him. "But my friends could die, and I think you're the only person who could help them. Please."
Doyle's eyebrows disappeared into his tousled hairline. "I beg your pardon?" he repeated. "You and your friends come to both my commercial and personal premises, hassle me, tell me absurd lies about who you are, steal my cape," he gestured towards the hooks beside him, his voice rising, "and you stand there in front of me, at this godforsaken hour, and presume to demand my help to 'save' them?" He was almost shouting at Sherlock now, who had the decency to look sheepish. "Well, sir, I can tell you right now that the answer is most emphatically no."
Sherlock winced and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I am sorry about your cape," he said. "But to be fair, my friends and I only visited you once before now. The second time, you chose to speak to us."
Doyle dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "Irrelevant."
"And," Sherlock said with some apprehension, "they weren't lies. What John and Harry – Harriet, sorry – what they told you, they weren't lies."
Another wave. "Impossible."
"Two days ago, I would have said the same thing," Sherlock told him. "Time travel, aliens – it all seems impossible. I know. But if you think about it-"
"I have a good mind to call a policeman," Doyle cut him off. "I suggest you leave now, Mr Holmes." He opened the door again and motioned for Sherlock to leave.
Sherlock stayed put. "Five minutes," he said. "Please. Just give me five minutes to talk, and when I'm done, you can call a policeman if you want to. I'll go quietly. But please, afford me five minutes."
Doyle squinted at him for a moment, considering. Then he heaved a deep sigh and closed the front door. "I am certain that I will regret this," he said, "but you may have five minutes to speak. Then you will leave immediately. Do you understand?"
Sherlock nodded, relieved. "I understand," he said.
"Very well." Doyle led the way through to his comfortably-furnished living room.
The large brick fireplace dominated the room, flanked by two overstuffed armchairs. The fire within had long since died down, but the heat remained, leaving the room comfortably warm. Doyle sat down in one such armchair, and motioned for Sherlock to do the same in the other. He steepled his hands under his chin and looked at Sherlock, waiting for him to begin speaking.
Sherlock mimicked Doyle's pose, and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to work out how to compress all of the previous few days into five minutes' worth of speaking, even into an overview. After a few moments, Sherlock opened his eyes and looked at Doyle's faintly disbelieving expression. He opened his mouth and began to speak.
Sorry, this chapter was getting too long, so it has been cut in half. To be continued...