The Doctor opened his eyes a split second after he'd closed them. And let out the breath he'd been holding. The Angel was inches away, it's face contorted into a mask of rage, its hands reaching out, fingers splayed, like a demonic vision. Beneath his hands, the two teenage girls were trembling. He lifted his hands from their shoulders, gently, to not startle them.
"You can open your eyes," he murmured. They did. Emily let out a gasp and took a step back, only to ram her back into the phone.
"Ouch!" she rubbed her back with a hand. "Stupid phone."
"Ah, but that phone is actually our saviour. You see," the Doctor said, picking up the free hanging phone by the microphone end, "if I touch it to the Weeping Angel," he did and the Angel was engulfed in a white light that seared the three of them in one blazing moment, before fading, taking the vicious Weeping Angel with it.
"Tada," the Doctor finished. He dropped the phone back in its place. Nothing happened. He smiled, the grin stretching from ear to ear. "See, it's gone. All back to normal."
"What did you do?" Aria asked in disbelief. "One second it was there, and then, just…gone."
"And we're still here too. Not that anyone's complaining," Emily added. The Doctor laughed.
"Time rift. It was sending out time energy, the stuff that the Angel feeds off. So, put them together," he waved his hands about, "and they cancel each other out."
"So no more weird, travelling back in time?" Aria raised an eyebrow. The Doctor pointed a finger at her.
"Exactly."
"So what about Hanna?" Emily pointed out.
"Yeah, and Spencer. And your friend, Clara? How do we bring them back?"
The Doctor laughed again, this time pointing at himself.
"Did I ever mention?" he smirked, "time traveller."
Clara lowered her arm from in front of her eyes. Greens and oranges danced across her vision, afterimages of the light that had burst forth from the phone booth a moment before. Spencer, beside Clara, put a hand on her shoulder.
"What was that?"
"No idea," Clara replied, "but I really hope it was the Doctor."
"I don't see him. He did promise a rescue, right? I don't want to be stuck here for the rest of my life. I might not have gotten into Stanford, but a Hastings has other ways to prove herself. Besides, Melissa would just love being an only child. We can't have that," Spencer smirked thinly to Hanna.
"Screw your sister, what am I supposed to do without a mall? Or flushing toilets!?" Hanna cried.
"Actually," Caleb said in his low, steady voice, "we have flushing toilets. They're not the same as the twenty first century ones, but they work just fine."
"Why didn't you say so? I've been holding my pee for the past four hours!" Hanna growled.
"Too much information, Han," said Spencer.
"Hey wait, do you hear that?" Miranda interrupted, catching the attention of the whole group.
"No tremors," pointed out Spencer. Suddenly Clara's ears were filled with the silence. How did she miss it before? Warmth began to spread through her chest. If the earthquake was because of the rift collapsing, then the silence must mean that the Doctor succeeded. He closed the rift.
Just to prove her line of thinking, a breeze whipped up in the room, sending all the dust that had fallen from the ceiling spiraling into the air. Clara was on her feet before the familiar sound of the Tardis filled the room. Her grin could have lit up a Christmas tree.
The Tardis materialised in front of the small group and the door opened with a creak. The Doctor stepped out, but Clara was already there, almost tackling him in a hug.
"What the hell is that?" asked Spencer, gazing in suspicion on the blue box. Two more figures stepped out of it. Aria and Emily grinned.
"It's a time travel machine," Emily said.
"And space! Don't forget she does space too," the Doctor added. "It's your way home."
"But how? You just press some little doohickey and it takes us home? Back to 2013?"
Clara smiled at Spencer, at the confusion and disbelief.
"Is it any more unbelievable than a phone that could send us back in time? Or a statue? What happened to the Weeping Angel, by the way?"
"The rift ate it. Or something like that, anyway," Emily shrugged, pulling away from hugging Hanna.
"You know, I don't really care. I just want out of this stupid place. I miss home," the blonde girl said.
The Doctor pointed to the door, leaning his back against the phone compartment of the Tardis. He clicked his fingers and the door creaked open. Aria and Emily rushed back inside and Spencer began to follow in halting steps. Hanna turned to look at Caleb and Miranda.
"Well, come on, aren't you coming?" she said, inclining her head towards the door. Spencer was about to push into the mysterious blue box but stopped when Hanna's question didn't receive a reply. She turned around and saw Caleb looking at the ground, unable to meet Hanna's eye. The silence seemed to suck all the air out of the room. The seconds ticked by and felt like minutes.
"He can't," came the voice of the Doctor. He had his arms crossed over his chest and he looked at them all from below lowered brows. All his joviality had disappeared and he seemed just what he was; an old man who'd seen too much heartbreak to pretend it didn't hurt.
"Of course he can! It's a time machine, he can come back," Hanna insisted, despite the thumping of her heart and the knowledge that the strange man before her wouldn't lie about something like this. Clara touched her arm, murmuring Hanna's name, but the girl shook her off. "No," she said, "he has to come back."
Caleb said nothing, but he understood what Hanna hadn't realised yet.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," the Doctor shook his head. A tear ran down Hanna's cheek. It wasn't true. She didn't want to believe that it could be true, that this was the last she would see of Caleb, the man she could see herself married to one day, when they were old enough and all this business with Ali was over.
"Why?" she whispered.
"Time travel," the Doctor stated. "We closed the rift, meaning that Caleb from your time can't travel back to this time. He can't go back to the future because there can't be two of him in the same universe at the same time."
Comprehension dawned on Hanna, and she fervently wished that it hadn't. Caleb stepped forward and took her hand.
"Don't you understand, Hanna? You'll still have me. Not this version of me, but the version of me that you already have. This isn't a bad thing. I never came here, which means in your time, I'm still yours. When you go back I'll still be that guy who's had the same hoodie since he was twelve, who loves computers, and who loves you."
"But-"
"No, Han, listen. You won't see me again, but that doesn't mean you won't see Caleb."
They stared at each other, the words sinking in for Hanna, the realisation that the man standing before her wasn't her Caleb, not really, and a happy sort of ache started in her chest. She flung her arms around the man.
"I won't forget you," she whispered in his ear. He held her tighter, knowing this moment was the last he'd ever see of the girl he'd loved since he was sixteen, the girl he thought he'd never see again.
"Promise me something?" he asked, his voice struggling to come out, "visit my grave?" His voice cracked and Hanna's heart broke. Wiping the tears away with the back of her hand, she nodded.
"I promise."
"Tell me stories of your life. Tell me about all the things I couldn't be there for," he tried to smile. Hanna nodded, and without another word, strode into the Tardis. Spencer, Clara and the Doctor followed, and a moment later, Caleb and his wife were standing as the dust of their house settled back down around them.
Sunlight filtered down through the trees lining the paths of the cemetery, dancing along the ground in ever shifting patterns. Beneath Hanna's fingers, the sepia portrait of Caleb was dusty, as though no one had visited for a long, long time. The headstone, black marble, was cracked and worn, but his name was still legible, and the photograph of him still recognisably him. She sighed.
"I miss you already," she murmured, then walked away, to where her friends and the Doctor and Clara stood beside the Tardis, making their farewells.
"What about Ali? You said you'd help us find her," Emily pointed out.
"She wasn't in the past. And it's 2013; humans haven't decided to start inserting everybody with inter-galactic positioning trackers yet, so I have no way of honing in on her. But she's here somewhere. I think she's hiding. When she's ready, she'll come to you. They always do," the Doctor smiled.
"So there's nothing you can do?" said Emily, disappointment filling her voice. He shook his head.
"If there was, we would," Clara reassured. "She'll come back to you. The people you think you've lost have a way of doing that."
"Will we see you again?" Spencer asked, staring at Clara, who smiled and shrugged.
An amiable silence enveloped them. Clara always hated these goodbyes, these moments where you knew you wouldn't see those people that you'd temporarily given your heart to. She and the Doctor, they flitted in and out of people's lives, helping them when they could. That's what the Doctor did - he fixed them, their broken lives, their unsalvageable planets, their hearts. And that's what kept him going, all this time, the knowledge that he was making things better, to make up for all the bad he'd done before. But moments like these reminded Clara that she missed home.
Without warning, Spencer pulled Clara into a tight hug.
"Don't forget about us," she murmured furiously into Clara's hair.
"Of course not," promised Clara in return. "Of course not."
"Well then," the Doctor said, "off we pop. People to meet, worlds to save, all that."
He paused, his hand on the door of the Tardis, and looked over the four girls smiling at him and his magical blue box. For a second he allowed himself to feel something for them, a love that warmed his hearts and lifted the ache of a millennium off his back. He smiled. Then he pushed open to door and disappeared out of sight. Clara followed a moment later.
The four girls stood back as the Tardis slowly disintegrated from view, whipping up a small wind about them. A piece of paper fluttered towards them, getting caught on Aria's leg. She was about to brush it away, when on an impulse, she caught it up in her hand instead. She read it. Disbelieving, she showed it to the others, who all agreed, they would have to find out if it were true. Spencer took hold of the note, folded it and put it in her pocket, a memento of the two most extraordinary people she'd ever met. She thought about the contents of the note for the rest of the afternoon. Hours later, after the four of them had washed the dust out of their hair and off their faces, she pulled it out and ran a finger over the words.
She's at the cotton factory.
Good luck
And down in the bottom right hand corner, where Spencer's finger lingered, was imprinted a small Tardis.
A/N: And so there you have it, the last chapter. Thanks to everyone who was patient and who took the time to read this to the very end. You're fantastic. I hope it didn't disappoint.