Alia fell into the rhythm of leaping. In and out, in and out, like a needle and thread, except she wasn't bringing things together—she was taking them apart. She didn't think about it too much anymore. She just did as she was told. It was easier that way. Most of the time, Zoey would tell her how to go about it, whatever she had to do. But sometimes she had an idea of her own, which Zoey encouraged, and the assignments after those times never seemed quite as hard as the ones which had come before.

Perhaps it was her imagination.

The material of the mission aside, not much changed. The memory loss was consistent, but never as bad as it had been the first time, and she could generally recollect what she had been told. Zoey always turned up shortly after she'd leaped in and briefed her on who she was and what she was there to do. She didn't spend much time back at the Project itself; she barely returned from one assignment before she was sent on the next. It was almost as if they were making up for lost time—a laughable concept for a time travel experiment.

She wondered, occasionally, about the man she'd encountered on her first leap. It wasn't Thames; she knew that now. It was Dr. Smith—or rather, the Doctor, as he insisted on being called. But what confused her was how she'd come to meet him while on assignment. She hadn't dared mention it to anyone, especially now that she'd kept it a secret for a spell, for they would punish her as much as they would punish him if they found out about the illicit visit.

She didn't recall seeing him holding a handlink, but her mind did provide him with a shadow in her memory. For that matter, she also remembered seeing him leaving tracks in the long grass. Absurd, of course; a hologram wouldn't be leaving a trail of bent and broken grass stems.

But he had.

And that wasn't possible.

Hadn't he said they couldn't be leaping two people about in time at once? And even if they could, what would be gained by sending him there? He hadn't appeared particularly Swiss-cheesed, either, unless she counted the questions he'd asked, but those weren't the sorts of questions she'd been asking when she'd first realized what was going on, and—

No, no, she was being silly. Of course he wasn't a leaper like her. She'd recognized him. She wouldn't have recognized him if he'd leaped into somebody. He had to have been a hologram. How he managed it, she wouldn't know, but if he'd managed to get the experiment to work in the first place, perhaps it wasn't so far of a stretch to believe that he could manage to rig up a hologram without a neural connection.

He'd probably had the handlink in his pocket. He'd had his hands in his pockets. And he surely wouldn't have one as large as Zoey did if he were trying to be surreptitious when he was making it. Why Lothos would allow it was not something she could fathom at the moment, and as clever as she believed the Doctor to be, she was not sure that he could hoodwink Lothos as well as he thought he could.

She was just imagining the shadow and the bent grass. She knew the mind played tricks like that, filling in holes in memories with this and that. Or perhaps he'd been standing in someone else's tracks and the shadow, if not a trick of the light, had been cast by something else. There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, anyway. She simply wasn't experienced enough to decipher what that was.

Still, when she finally had worked up the courage to casually ask about Dr. Smith, Zoey's temper had turned. This gave Alia a small measure of relief—if he'd been dead, Zoey wouldn't have that same look in her eye. However troublesome he was for them, he still had potential, and that was the only thing keeping him alive. Alia knew that if he ever crossed the line, if he ever became just a bit too troublesome to bother dealing with, then he'd be killed.

Zoey's temper, however, also told Alia that the Doctor wasn't being given a chance to prove his worth. He was being kept somewhere, and she had the unpleasant thought that she knew precisely where. She'd been in there, once. It hadn't been terribly long, not really, but it had felt like an eternity.

She wondered if he had known that he would end up there. He seemed to know an awful lot, considering the short time he'd been here. He'd told her a bit about what leaping would be like. And he had been right, even though she hadn't believed him. The longer she thought about it all, the more questions she had.

Perhaps she ought to see if she could find the Doctor after she completed her current assignment. Perhaps, then, he'd be able to give her some answers.

The Doctor would rate the last week or so among the more unpleasant tortures he'd inflicted upon himself. That's not to say that he hadn't put his time in isolation to good use, especially seeing as Zoey had thoughtfully extended the time he was spending in there, although she did love to play around with the temperature and lighting a bit too much for his liking.

Right now, it was bright enough that he might as well have been on a stage under the lights. Well. Not really. These lights threw no heat, and it was cold enough now that he could see his breath. He knew it wasn't a good sign that he'd stopped shivering, but his arms had been numb from being kept above his head long before the cold had settled into his bones. Of course, this wasn't an ice world, so it was hardly the coldest place he'd ever been locked up, and he wasn't an ordinary human. His mind might be a bit sluggish but still worked well enough, and he would last far longer than they'd ever expect.

Still.

He wasn't invincible, and he'd by lying if he claimed that he didn't feel any of the effects Then again, that was partially his fault. He was using this as an opportunity. After all, it gave him time enough to assess his work. Not that he knew precisely how well it had gone, seeing as he still had no information about Alia's leaps, but he was fairly certain that he'd kept history intact. Well, intact in terms of making sure the Evil Leaper Project tore it apart at the appropriate places.

He just hoped that he'd done an adequate job. He'd prefer to have done a brilliant job, and he'd be perfectly happy to have done an ingenious job, but he certainly couldn't settle for anything less than an adequate job.

There was a chance that it wouldn't hold if he hadn't done at least an adequate job.

Considering his limitations, it was probably adequate at best.

At least, having leaped into himself this time, he wouldn't have to limit how far he went, mentally, when it came to the splicing itself. And he had a TARDIS. Couldn't get to it at the moment, but he didn't need it until he initiated the process.

He'd find out if it had worked then, preparation and splicing alike. Bit hard to tell from here, seeing as he would be trying to compensate for the lack of equipment on the other parallel. But he was nothing if not clever.

He only had one thing left to do—physically, that is—at the Project. He'd have to destroy the retrieval system. If he didn't get rid of that link now, Alia would never be able to leap with Sam when the time came. He knew they'd try to repair it, but they wouldn't be able to fix it, not completely. At best, they'd be able to pull Alia out of her current leap and force her into another. They'd have some measure of control, more than the good people at Project Quantum Leap, but he couldn't change that. From what he understood, they needed to be able to do that, moving Alia from leap to leap. All he had to do was tweak it.

Once he was done, if they did manage to pull her out and pull her back, they wouldn't be able to hold her there. She'd drift out again. Then, when Sam and Alia finally leaped together, Sam would be cutting the line that tethered her to the Project. Only, they wouldn't know it, so when Alia did finally leap out of the Waiting Room, when it was all said and done, she would be free. She'd leap away, away from the Projects, off the grid, and she'd be free.

That was assuming, of course, he hadn't influenced her enough to affect things so that she would never cross paths with Sam in the first place. Still, he was confident that he hadn't. Mostly. He needed to check up on how her first leap went, since he knew that shouldn't have been successful. Zoey had said it was, but that's all he knew. He hadn't had a chance to get at Lothos to find out exactly what 'successful' meant.

At this rate, he doubted he would.

He'd have to go there and find out for himself, once he got out of here.

Considering how brilliant he was, he'd been locked up an awful lot in all his regenerations so far.

Still, always a bright side. Like now. Peace and quiet. No need to rush about. Perfect to set out to check up on the timeline. No one would be disturbing him. He could look, prod about, prepare what he could, and even make a few tentative stitches, just to hold things in place.

Trouble was, it was terribly tiring, and he wasn't exactly faced with the ideal conditions in which to replenish his energy.

He did try venturing out now and then, but he never went too far. He didn't want to risk not coming back, which was a distinct possibility in his weakened state. He could go far enough, though, that he could start aligning all the necessary technical details for the splicing. It wasn't a process that could be rushed, and he was careful to take his time. He'd heard about botched attempts at splicing. Never pretty. Some of them ended up as temporal equivalents to black holes. Other times, everything collapsed into the Void. Records of those times tended to be lost, though, given the nature of the incident, so he wasn't precisely sure how common that was.

He had a feeling that was among the things he'd rather not know.

Still, he wasn't sure how much longer he could hold on to consciousness, not in this state. Sure, they let him down every once in a while, but only when they wanted to play. Zoey's tongue wasn't nearly as sharp as her knowledge of how to use all their equipment effectively. And, well, this body was better suited to verbal parley than physical confrontations, compared to some he'd had in the past. Not that he ever wanted to go about picking fights. Well, not unless it would save the Earth or the universe or the timeline or something of that sort. But still. He found thumbscrews as painful as the next person, and that was among the more mild tortures Zoey delighted in putting him through.

He hadn't even been alone long enough to take out that infernal chip of theirs. At least not when he had had a free hand. He should have done it earlier, after he'd gotten the thing implanted, but he hadn't wanted to alert them. He'd thought it best to play along. He knew they wouldn't trust him, but he'd thought they'd at least be more accepting of his work if they thought they had gotten the better of him.

He just hadn't expected that they would get the better of him. Not in that way. Perhaps Lothos would come up with something to surprise him, sure. He had been expecting that. Not this.

Not that he'd anticipated Lothos would play along so well, either. He really had to wonder what his motives were. It wasn't just learning about him, trying to figure out who he was or where he came from, not anymore. It was something else. For all he knew, Lothos suspected the truth. Well, at least a tiny piece of the truth. He'd never know the entire truth. But he might suspect that the real reason Dr. John Smith could turn up without a trace, claiming experience and aptly demonstrating his extensive knowledge, was because he actually had knowledge born from experience.

That was, perhaps, the reason Zoey hadn't tried to kill him yet. At least, not actively. He had no doubt that she and Thames both knew that Lothos had to be holding something back about him. Well, he at least suspected that they'd assume that before assuming that Lothos was malfunctioning. Or perhaps he was lucky and they simply thought him clever enough to work around all of Lothos's blocks. He'd been sorely tempted. It would have made his work much quicker, skirting Lothos's defences and setting up a few inhibitors of his own. But timing was everything, and he couldn't skimp on the details.

Too much depended on them, those devilish details.

Besides, he didn't want to give them any more technology than he had to and, perception filter or not, he wasn't about to leave anything behind that they might conceivably find and put to use, not unless he absolutely had to.

But for now, well, perhaps he could risk slipping into a healing coma. He certainly needed it, and he'd wake with a clear head. He didn't fancy leaving himself defenceless, but he knew that if he were in terrible danger, he would wake up. He'd have a horrendous headache, and he probably wouldn't stay conscious long, but he ought to be able to get himself out of whatever situation he was in in the time he had.

Of course, they'd realize he'd meddled with the chip then, at least if they tried checking up on him or taking him for another round in the Holding Chamber. It would read that he was sleeping, but they wouldn't be able to wake him, and they'd be hard pressed to find so much as a pulse in the state he'd be in, what with everything slowed down while his body repaired itself.

He could only resist temptation for so long. He had a strong mind, sure, but his body would eventually revolt. It would shut down, whether he tried to stop it or not. And if it came to that, well, he risked not waking up if he found himself in danger, because he'd be using his reserve trying to resist it in the first place. He didn't fancy risking that, not where he was now, and especially not when he was so far from the TARDIS and he hadn't been able to check up on her in person since he'd left.

What if they found him, thought him dead, and disposed of his body? If they actually managed to kill him, he wouldn't necessarily have enough energy to regenerate. He'd be dead. For good. He somehow didn't think he'd be lucky enough to scrape his way back into a new body with only temporary memory loss again, not after spending any amount of time in limbo, especially if he was in a worse condition than this when he entered it.

And he wasn't particularly keen on dying. Or regenerating. That would be rewriting things too quickly and definitively, setting events beyond any brilliant manoeuvres on his part. His other self would shatter instantly, of course, and if he did manage to survive and regenerate, he'd be left trying to sort out where the splinters buried themselves. If he was lucky, he'd be able to extract them without causing any damage, or at least not too too much.

Still, he wouldn't be able to splice the timeline together, and this parallel would terminate, taking him with it if he didn't get off of it in time. And even if he did, the other parallel would be altered anyhow, since it had been reflecting the products of the splicing—splicing that wouldn't have happened, causing the parallel to revert to its diminished state. He wasn't sure how many things would hold in that state. He wasn't completely sure what every event depended upon, and he hadn't had time to explore the intricacies of the entire parallel and the interactions of the people and the specific interlock patterns of the events and—

Well. It wouldn't be pleasant. Ripping apart established events never was. That in itself would make the other parallel much more unstable than its shifting state alone. Its stability was what kept it together, made it the stronger parallel. That's why that parallel reflected what was supposed to happen, rather than what would, if he didn't succeed in his little stint of temporal patchwork. But its stability depended upon the patterns entwined within the timeline itself, the way the different lives wove themselves together, creating a stronger braid, a stronger line of events, which interacted with other timelines, wreathing isolated incidents together, tying everything up. If he couldn't interweave the stronger elements of this parallel into the other parallel, that stability wouldn't exist.

The other parallel would eventually follow this one. Just not as quickly, and probably not as painlessly. But its termination would still be premature, compared to what it would be if the parallels were spliced and the timeline held together.

He couldn't afford to make an error, let alone a few little mistakes here and there, since the effects of those would accumulate all too quickly.

He hoped that he was on edge because he was exhausted. It wasn't so much that he was under pressure. He worked so well under pressure; he was always one to think on his feet, and he was quite brilliant at it, if he did say so himself. It was more…. Well, he was worried. Because he thought he imagined that something was grating on him. And he had to hope that it was imagined. He certainly preferred that to the alternative.

The alternative meant that his other self was likely too far along to benefit from the splicing. Too many splinters were exposed, and despite the careful efforts he knew his other self would have not to rattle things about too much, something could get jarred. And the edges of those splintering shards were sharp. It would be all too easy for them to cut something.

Trouble was, the alternative—that he wasn't imagining things—was the more likely explanation. He was more sensitive to it in his current state. He didn't have the energy to simply block it out, ignore it, push it to the back of his mind. It stayed out front. To prey on him. Eating away, slowly, patiently, eroding and wearing down his defences, draining his energy.

Perhaps he'd be better off giving into temptation after all, just this once.

Then again, he wasn't sure if he could risk it, not with everything that was at stake. It wouldn't take much for something to go wrong. Good intentions were often turned sour enough by the same force that would wreak havoc on him. Even if he meant well, which he did, that was no guarantee that things would turn out well. He knew that from experience. Repeated experience.

He didn't fancy waiting, not particularly, but he couldn't bring himself to do anything else.

A/N: I just want to take this time to acknowledge Questfan, who has been so kind as to leave me multiple reviews, and to apologize for deciding against humouring her and paying homage to the Wizard of Oz because I am, unfortunately, obliged to return all borrowed characters in relatively the same state as that in which I found them.