Chapter Fifteen

A/N: Thank you to RandomPerson for reviewing the last chapter.

Silence had fallen, and for the first time in a long while, the Doctor could not find the words to speak. He had been so excited to return to the young woman, even if he had not quite known what he could say to her. But now, his world had come crashing down about his ears. She was gone.

'I was going to take her to the stars, show her things she could only have dreamed of.' he reminisced. 'I could have shown her the future, the real result of the rights she had been fighting for. Women's votes, equality of the sexes, the rise of the Liberal party.'

Ever since he had decided to return for Sybil, he had spent so much time dreaming up the places that he could take her to, the moons and planets and shooting stars all across the galaxies. He had imagined the lights reflecting in her eyes as she smiled in wonder. But now none of that would happen, because the light had left her eyes and her lips would never curl into a smile again. She was dead and gone. He had been too late.

Distantly, he heard someone ask if he was alright, and he nodded, vaguely recognising the voice of the Irish man. 'Sybil's husband.' he reminded himself. 'How did she have the chance to marry before I came back?'

He saw Sybil's husband open his mouth to speak again, but before he had the chance to do so, the Doctor stumbled out of the door, making his way back down the hallways, and away from Sybil's bedroom, and the memories held within those walls.

As his eyes began to fill with tears, the Time Lord stumbled through the endless twists and turns of the Abbey, blindly trying to find his way back to the TARDIS. However, just as he caught sight of the deep royal blue box standing out against the pale papered walls, he heard the sound of a wail from a nearby room, the door of which he had just walked past. Weighing up his options, the man wondered whether or not he should simply ignore the cry and walk away, leave the past behind him and move on, as he had done so many times before.

But then he remembered the one rule he had resolve to teach his companions in the future, the one rule he had never had to impose on Sybil, as it had been she that he had really learnt it from; time travellers should never interfere in the events of the planets around them, unless there are children crying.

Knowing that the sound had most certainly been the cry of a child, and a baby at that, the Time Lord decided that he would take just a few more minutes before he left. With that decision made, he entered the room, which appeared at first glance to be a nursery.

He looked from the large windows to the rocking chair, his eyes finally coming to rest on the bassinet in the corner of the room, where the cry was coming from. A few steps forward, and he was stood over the crib. Despite the intense sadness he felt, he could not help but smile slightly, as he saw the tiny child, red-faced and bawling, calm a little at the sight of him. 'It's almost like she knows me.' he thought vaguely, recognising that the girl must be Sybil's namesake daughter. 'If she's Sybil's daughter, then maybe she does. Perhaps Sybil told her about me.'

But a quick glance at the girl, so weak and fragile, told the Time Lord that she could not be older than four days, at most. This made sense of the reason behind his friend dying so prematurely. 'She must have died in childbirth.' he realised, this seeming to be the only real possible cause for her death. 'There must have been a complication, eclampsia or something like that. The doctor mustn't have noticed the signs.'

Unbidden, the man felt a bitterness rise in him, as he thought that the child in the crib had been the cause of the death of his friend, but he did not have the heart to sustain his anger for even a moment. She was only a baby, she did not decide to be born, and she had suffered and would continue to suffer for the remainder of her life with the loss of her mother; he could not blame her for that.

For a moment, the Doctor closed his eyes, and he saw the room in which he stood throughout all periods of time. Generations of children riding the rocking horse and slumbering in their cribs, the swirling patterns of moons and stars on the walls giving them pleasant dreams. Around fifty years before the current time, he guessed, he could see a chubby little boy and girl, playing with a toy train set. Only twenty years past, he saw three girls sat together on the carpet, playing at dressing up with clothes he assumed were sneaked from their mother's wardrobe. Even at such a young age, barely able to sit upright without assistance, he could recognise Sybil in the trio. And then his mind flew in the other direction, showing him two or three more generations of children, rocking on the horse and gazing at the patterned wallpaper, starting with the girl that now slept in the cot.

"Little Sybil." the Doctor sighed, stroking a hand along the baby's cheek, trying not to wake her now that she'd finally managed to drift off to sleep again. "Oh, the things you're going to do. You'll live, and you'll fight, and you'll make the world a better place, but most of all... you will be brilliant."

And with those final words, the Time Lord left the room, returning to the blue wooden box he called his home.

He disappeared just a few moments later, and the whooshing sound of the TARDIS woke young Sybil from her slumber. But she did not cry at the sound, merely smiled, as if it were the sound of an old friend. Subconsciously, she stored the sound at the back of her mind, though she would later doubt that she had ever needed to.

Until the day when she heard that sound again.

A/N: One more chapter to go. Please review!