The Doctor approached the town in strange new clothes. His people favored long flowing robes even now, it seemed. For a while, he just wandered. Taking in ancient Gallifrey with his own eyes. Perhaps it was all that time he spent staring at the recordings, but he felt strangely comfortable here. That, and ancient Gallifrey bore a remarkable resemblance to twenty-first century Earth. Cars, mobile phones, even something that smelled remarkably like chips. Rose would have been overjoyed. He felt a pang at that. Rose would have loved to run around his ancient homeland the way he ran around hers. She would look at the pikut vendor and insist on going over to pet one of the hideously fluffy creatures. And the soft-serve malikut would have her in an almost orgasmic bliss over its sweet flavor all afternoon. She would have loved it here. And she would never see it. Still, as different as they were, they were Gallifreyans. He was back amongst his people, and it felt good.
He entered a shop that, had it been on Earth, he would have called a deli.
"Good morning!" the woman behind the counter called to him in what would one day evolve into Old High Gallifreyan and he had to fight back his reaction to being addressed in the old language. He focused on the differences on what she was saying and what would one day come to be known as 'traditional', stabilizing his emotions enough that he could respond in a normal tone.
"Good morning," he skimmed his eyes over the menu, unable to determine which type of food he wanted to try first. He wanted to eat it all, it had been so many years since he'd had real Gallifreyan food… He looked back up at the woman with a grin. "This all looks so good, I can't decide what I want. How about you surprise me?"
She laughed at his enthusiasm. "You got it! You ahead and grab a seat, and I'll bring it to you."
The Doctor settled down at the bar and propped his head in a hand while he lazily watched her go about getting his meal together. She placed a glass of sytaan juice before him and he stared down at it for a long moment, struggling with his dual impressions of what it would one day mean and the obvious lack of meaning at this point in time.
"Don't like it?" she asked and reached out to take it away. "That's fine. Some people don't. My sister –"
He snapped out of it just as her fingers closed over the glass. "No," he reached out and laid a restraining hand on her arm. "No, I like it. It's just…my friend used to like it. She's gone now and, well…" he swallowed. "Brings back memories."
The woman smiled kindly and removed her hand, leaving the glass behind. "All right, then." She turned away to continue gathering his lunch. "So, you're new in town. What are you here for?"
The Doctor picked up the glass of juice and took a long swallow, savoring the bittersweet taste before he answered her question. "Since my friend…well, since she's been gone, I haven't really wanted to be tied down to anything. So I've sort of been wandering around. Developed an interest in geology, of all things. She'd laugh at me if she knew I spent my time mucking about with rocks." He looked down and fiddled with his glass a bit, drawing his finger up the side of it and watching the condensation bead along the way. He'd already decided to stick with the truth as much as possible. He needed a cover story, a reason to explain his presence here as well as why he would be spending so much time digging in the grounds around the town. He could have kept Rose to himself without lying, of course. But…well. She was constantly in his thoughts now that he was hip-deep in his mad quest to get her back. And he wanted to talk about her. If only enough to vent a little of the sorrow and grief he felt at her loss.
A plate appeared and slid across the bar at him. He looked up to meet sympathetic eyes. "You loved her."
The Doctor nodded, his tongue thick. "With both my hearts."
She smiled again and patted his hand. "Eat up," her smile brightened into a grin, "it's my special!" When he grinned back, she turned away to tidy up. "You planning on staying long? Will you need a room?"
The Doctor swallowed his bit of kaflah, "This is marvelous! And yes, I'll need somewhere to stay. Heard there were some interesting rocks around here. Figured I'd do some digging, see if I could find any."
"You're in luck, then. My Aunt runs the local bed and breakfast. A little old fashioned, but she'll have a place to put your head."
"I'll be fine with whatever she has. No doubt I've slept in worse places."
He finished his meal while they chatted about inconsequential things. Then he fished some of the local currency out of his pocket and paid for his meal. "It was all wonderful, thank you."
"You're welcome. My Aunt is just down the street," she gestured, "go out the doors, turn left, and go down till you see the big fountain. That's the square. She's just on the other side. Look for the dancing hanar."
"My thanks."
The Doctor left the shop and wandered down the street towards the square. Every so often he would check to see if the recording disk was tracking him as it was supposed to. He wanted to record every second that he was here. Every moment, no matter how mundane, would be meticulously catalogued. He hadn't appreciated Gallifrey when he'd had it. He refused to make that mistake again.
He found the inn quite easily, the image of a dancing hanar quite possibly the funniest thing he'd seen yet this regeneration. Of course, this was nowhere near the form the hanar would eventually take. The image on the sign was of two jellyfish looking things swirling around each other. The hanar of the future were six-limbed speed boats with no discernible orifices that communicated via colorful flashes along their snouts and flanks. The hanar of the future had a legend that the 'enkindlers' had given them speech. He'd always meant to find out for sure. But now…well he was reasonably sure he knew who the enkindlers were. Somebody had wanted a smarter pet.
He entered the house and was approached by a lovely matron with brilliant red hair. The Doctor was instantly jealous.
"Welcome! Come in! Sharrion called ahead, said you'd be coming."
"Sharrion?"
"My niece."
"Ah, yes. She said you had a room?"
"Yes. Come see it is to your liking. Then we can talk price."
He followed her down an arched hallway and to a circular room with a round skylight and the hanging bed that was so typical of his people. He hurt all over again at the sight. Just when he'd just about managed to convince himself that these weren't his people, purely to save himself some heartache of course, here was this. A room so classically Gallifreyan it could have come from any of the Great Houses.
He swallowed hard. "Yes. This is perfect. Thank you."
ooOO00OOoo
It took him a matter of moments to get settled into the room, he'd brought a few things with him. After that, he took the rest of the day to wander the town, soaking up everything he could. He'd initially thought that he would need to insert himself into another person's timestream to dampen his influence on the fabric of time here. But that didn't seem to be the case. Perhaps it was because his people had yet to discover time travel, but the whole of Time and Space surrounding this part of the Vortex was remarkably forgiving of his presence here.
He was using his timesenses more now than he had for the last two hundred years. Usually, he was as aware of it as he was his hair: check it when you get up, clutch it when frustrated, thinking hard, or distressed. Otherwise, ignore its existence. But now he was constantly aware of it. Constantly measuring the effect any action or word had on the future of his people.
So far, so good.
He reached out to the piece of furniture that passed as a wardrobe and rapped his knuckles on it. Then looked at his hand, looked at the wardrobe and laughed, shaking his head. So much time spent around humans, he was bound to pick up some of their habits.
As he walked, he considered his plan. He'd learned long ago that things rarely went the way he wanted them to. And this was no exception. His people existed in the center of the Web of Time. A web they had admittedly woven themselves. Because of this, they had an unobstructed non-subjective non-linear point of view with which to view all of time and space. At the height of their power – which had begun approximately one thousand Gallifreyan years after they'd discovered time travel and had lasted until their destruction (no don't think about that) – they'd had an almost unlimited view of all possible futures. Of course, the future was infinite, the possibilities limitless. So they'd contented themselves with watching the top one hundred twenty-eight most likely futures and ignored the rest. A costly mistake.
The computers used to organize, analyze, and store the information on the timelines were massive. The machines spanned hundreds of kilometers. The Doctor was longing for even a fraction of their processing power right now. When he was eighty (the equivalent of a human eight year old) and had just been admitted into the Academy, each of the applicants had been taken before the Untempered Schism. There, they'd looked into the Time Vortex, into the heart of all existence. Each applicant saw something different for, just like time, the Vortex was always moving, changing, growing. Some applicants had been inspired. Some ran away. A few, a very few, went mad.
When it had been his turn to approach the rift in time and space, the Doctor had taken one fleeting look and then run. They'd found him three days later huddled against a tree, shaking. All he'd seen was his name. The only thing he'd seen was his name. Massive and daunting in its complexity, it had been everywhere: burning in the hearts of every star, weaving the galaxies together; it had carved itself into the facet of every existence. And it terrified him.
Back in his room again, the Doctor prepared for bed. He had spent the whole day exploring the town. Which would have really impressed his human companions, given that Gallifrey was twice as big as Earth and possessed two suns as well as revolving at a significantly slower rate. Night only fell once every 78.4392 Earth hours. And because of this, his people were distinctly diurnal, lending them to only sleep for the brief times when darkness covered the world.
The Doctor shook himself and returned to his original train of thought. He hated that about this go 'round. So easily distracted by the smallest things. Like the way his world looked at night, covered with the small lights meant to show the way home. Or the smell of the kaflah bread as it was left to rise. Or…where was he? The Schism. Right.
It was looking more and more like he would have to go back to the Schism. He needed to be able to track where and when in his people's history the decision that had resulted in the creation of Pete' s World had been made. Without his people's equipment and manpower, he had no other way of finding out. When he'd first thought of going to Gallifrey's past, he'd had grand notions of sneaking into one of the monitoring stations and using their equipment to find out. But he'd had to go so far into his people's history just to find a safe place to materialize that he'd completely passed by all of the times that would have had any sort of useful technology. The Untempered Schism was his only chance of finding out now.
Much as he quaked at the thought of going back and staring into the Schism for an undetermined amount of time, he knew he had to. It was the only way. Still…night time. Tomorrow. He'd do it tomorrow.
ooOO00OOoo
Before he left, he stopped off at the desk and told Sharrion's aunt that he'd be gone for the next several days to explore for rocks in the surrounding area. He paid up for the rest of the week, twelve days later. If he hadn't found what he was looking for in the Schism by then, he would come back and reevaluate his decision to avoid times where his people knew how to time travel. He set off towards the TARDIS. If he really was going to go back and stare at the Untempered Schism again, he was going to need a few things.
ooOO00OOoo
He traveled at a leisurely pace, his data disc hovering loyally at his elbow. He'd picked up six more while at the TARDIS, wanting to be sure that he had enough memory space to cover the whole trip. This trip, and the mad quest that had inspired it, was good for him in so many ways and as much as it hurt, he savored every personal interaction, every sight, scent, and touch of this world. He would never have it again.
He arrived at the Untempered Schism a few days later and was surprised to find it buried deep in a wood. All of the histories about the Schism had always spoken of it as being surrounded by fields of dead grass. Supposedly nothing could grow or survive near it. And yet, here it was, surrounded by shining silver trees standing tall against the light of the setting first sun…no wait a minute, that wasn't right. These trees were indeed silver and tall. But they certainly weren't straight. Time flowed unfettered around them, and they existed in all of their stages of life at once.
They were the bright quicksilver color of saplings, but with the height and girth of the most ancient of trees. Their branches bowed under the weight of snow that didn't exist while bright white fruit hung from their ends. And their trunks were bent and gnarled from a storm that seemed to have only just ended, and they'd yet to straighten back out. No wonder his people had cut down the trees when they'd found the Schism. At least the grass had only managed to look a peculiar shade of dead.
From this angle, and with all the temporally-confused trees in the way, it was hard to pinpoint the exact physical location of the gap in timespace. The Schism seemed to…wander.
First it was directly in front of him, then it was three and a quarter meters to the right. A few seconds after, it had migrated to the other side of a transposed flowering cactus from Primarch Prime. It hopped around randomly, the only consolation in that it stayed within the same small area of twisted trees. How had no one noticed this yet? It was just a few days stroll from a village. Surely some adventurous soul had wandered into the woods and found it.
The Doctor took a step back and studied the surrounding area some more. It was the femur peeking out from under a bush that explained it. None of the people from this planet had time senses yet. None of them had grown up around the Schism. None of them had evolved defenses to the uncontrolled flow of time around it. Any hiker approaching this area that had gotten too close to the Schism had suffered the same fate as the trees and died for it.
He shook his head at the tragedy, but knew there was nothing he could do. He set his things down just outside the zone of twisted trees and approached this Schism warily. His hands felt slick and he moved to shove them into his trouser pockets only to remember that pockets were a human concept and he had no such thing in these native garments. Grumpy now, he settled for crossing his arms and stared balefully down at the red bushes hunching dejectedly at the base of the nearest tree. Spying what looked like the skeletal remains of a hand, he thought of how many people had probably been lost to the Untempered Schism. Perhaps he could return them to their families…? But, just like measuring the distances in meters and kilometers, the sanctity of the dead was a human concept. So much time spent away from his own people – even when they had been around – had lent him to picking up his companions' values, quaint though they had been.
Of course, some of those customs changed with time, and he mostly ignored those. But things like loyalty? Reverence for the dead? A love of small, yappy dogs? Those stayed the same. Rather like him when he regenerated. He shuddered. Hopefully he never picked up a love of small, yappy dogs. Though a larger one, perhaps with an intimidating bark –
All right. He was stalling.
His inner child was a gibbering wreck at the thought of staring into the Vortex again. Point of fact, so was an alarmingly large part of his adult self. He wasn't sure if staring into the Schism would even get him the information he needed. Perhaps it would be best if he just went back to the TARDIS and jumped forward a few hundred years. Then he could just make use of the technology of his people.
Only…
Only that would involve not just piloting past the traps in the Vortex, but actually landing in the middle of them. Rather like taking a large metal disk, standing on top, and then sending it hurtling towards a minefield. You could possibly make it, if you adjusted the angle of your giant Frisbee to account for wind shear and elevation and the fact that you had a Time Lord standing on top. You could even make all sorts of hideously complicated calculations designed to predict where the mines were likely to be placed so you could aim your metal-frisbee-come-deathtrap elsewhere …but it wouldn't help. You'd still be standing atop a Frisbee hurtling towards a minefield, and the only thing you could be certain of would be that you were going to regenerate in quite a splendidly messy fashion. And then you'd wake up in the middle of a minefield occupying a strange new body with limited regenerations left and quite a lot of ground to cover before safety was once again achieved.
Or, he could stand a safe six kilometers away from the minefield and stare into a black hole in the ground that would give him horrendously bad nightmares.
Well, when put that way, the Frisbee was looking better and better.
He turned away from the wandering Schism, intent on picking up his things so he could find a nice rock quarry to dig up some rocks – and came face-to-gap with the Untempered Schism.
Once again, his time spent with humans asserted itself.
"Bloody-"
Author's Note: Hanar are a credit to Bioware and Mass Effect. I just stole the idea.