CHAPTER 46
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Robin struggled to think of an answer to Persephone's request for his identity as she waited anxiously for him to say something. He then decided to just go with the identity that he last gave her when she was Sekhmet. She wouldn't remember it anyway.
"I'm John Little. This strange glowing crack in the air opened up near me and sucked me into it. I then found myself here. Where am I exactly?" Robin answered.
Persephone's earlier suspicion turned into a look of concern for him. She grabbed his arm and dragged him inside of her house. She kept looking around the entire time as if she feared that he might be discovered at any moment.
Once they got inside and away from any potential eavesdroppers, Persephone said, "You are so lucky that I found you first. You are from Earth, right?"
"Yes, Miss. Am I to believe that I am not on Earth any longer?" Robin asked as he played at being ignorant of his current situation.
"No, you are not. The crack in the air that you saw was a crack in time and space. It deposited you here on Gallifrey. Humans are not allowed on Gallifrey under penalty of death," Persephone explained.
"Are you going to turn me in then?" Robin asked.
"No, I would never do that. I don't believe in the banning of humans from Gallifrey in the first place for one thing. I like humans. That stupid law goes back to that idiot Rassilon who was obsessed with the genetic purity of the Time Lords. It should be done away with. I certainly don't think that you should be executed because you were brought here against your will either. It's hardly your fault that you wound up here. You can stay here with me until I find a way to take you back to where you came from. I have a TT Capsule that belongs to my family, but I never use it much. It's an antique and doesn't work very well. It has a lot of navigational problems. I keep meaning to have it repaired, but I can never find the time. I'll finally send it in to be repaired; and then when it's finished, I'll take you back," Persephone said.
"How long should that take?" Robin asked anxiously. He wanted to be back with his version of Lily not this one.
"Don't worry. It won't take too long. I'll have you back home in no time. You have someone that you want to go back to, don't you?" Persephone asked with a smile.
"Yes," Robin answered in surprise.
"Does it surprise you that I could figure that out? It wouldn't if you could see the look on your face. You have this look of pure desperation. I'll get you back soon enough. Don't worry, Mr. Little," Persephone said.
"Thank you!" Robin said.
"You're very welcome. You can take the room at the end of the hall and use it. Hopefully my ship will be fixed in a week," Persephone said.
"A week?" Robin said in despair.
He was beginning to wonder if he would ever see his Lily again, or if he was doomed to be trapped with past versions of her for the rest of his life. He began to despair that he would ever find a Lily that actually knew him.
"John, it's going to be alright. I'll get you back home I promise," Persephone said as she saw the utter despair on his face.
Then to her complete surprise, she actually kissed him right on the lips! She quickly pulled back in shock. She had no idea why she had just done that. He was a complete stranger who she had only met minutes ago.
"I'm sorry. I don't know why I did that. It just happened. I won't do it again," Persephone apologized.
"It's quite alright, Lady Persephone. You were trying to comfort me. Besides, I have no complaint about being kissed by someone as beautiful as you," Robin said as he let his true feelings slip out for a moment. He mentally kicked himself immediately.
Persephone blushed bright red and stammered, "I – I – I am so sorry. I promise it won't happen again. I'll just go and lie down for a while. I suddenly don't feel so good."
Robin realized that he had just greatly embarrassed and confused her, and he felt terrible for it.
"Lady Persephone, please don't do that. I didn't mean to embarrass you. It just slipped out of my mouth," Robin apologized.
"I understand. I think we both just got caught up in the emotion of your recent ordeal. I'll forget about it if you will," Persephone said.
"Of course I will. I'll just go into that room that you pointed out, and I won't bother you anymore the rest of the week," Robin said.
"You can come and go as you please here, Mr. Little. Don't worry about bothering me, okay?" Persephone said warmly.
She then went to her bedroom to calm herself down after what had just happened. She had no idea why she had just acted that way towards him. She had obviously embarrassed him, and she had certainly embarrassed herself. It just felt like she knew him or someone like him from somewhere before a long time ago. She wondered if his resemblance to someone from his past had caused her to kiss him because it had triggered some buried long repressed memory. That must be what it was. That would explain it completely she reassured herself.
Apparently even after all of this time, her mind was still full of things that she no longer remembered that still lay buried deep within it somewhere. She wondered just how much of her memories that she had really lost and if they would ever be brought to light or not. She hoped that someday that she would regain them all and be the person that she had been before once more. She often wondered if she was anything like that person that she had once started out as so long ago. She couldn't really remember her anymore.
Now she just sat here in this lonely home all alone and wished that she had someone to share it with. She didn't dare though. She was afraid that someone might discover her secret. However, if that someone didn't really belong there in the first place then they might not care so much about any secrets that she might have, would they? Especially if she were their only company since they couldn't leave without being discovered.
She shook her head to clear it of such foolish thoughts. She wasn't going to keep that poor man here with her against his will. She would keep her promise and take him back as soon as she could. She was ashamed of herself for even entertaining such thoughts. She knew now that that was the real reason that she had kissed him. She was drowning in a sea of despair all of her own. No wonder she could so easily recognize it in him. She had lived with it herself every day for centuries. She wondered if it would ever go away.
In the present day, Lily was now reliving these memories of her past against her will due to her link with Robin as she ran from the homicidal lunatic with the gun who was chasing her through the virtual reality of the Matrix. She realized now that she had kissed Robin because she had recognized him deep down inside from her days as Sekhmet. At least she knew now where he had gone to next. She was surprised that she didn't remember him from this earlier meeting when she encountered him in the Land of Fiction. Although since the memories she was currently reliving happened several hundred years ago from a time before Rose was even born, she could probably be forgiven for not recognizing him.
She shoved the memories of the past to the side for now as she concentrated on keeping herself alive in the here and now. She had no idea who the hunter behind her was because he had mosquito netting that was connected to his hat that was covering his face and concealing his identity. She also didn't know why he was so dead set on killing her, or why she couldn't return to her body. Something kept blocking her from it somehow, and she was sure that it was the man with the rifle. Somehow he had gained complete dominion over the inside of the Matrix. She would have to deal with him if she ever wanted to get out of here alive.
"Who are you?" Lily shouted as she hid from him behind a tree that had luckily appeared for her to hide behind.
"I'm not surprised that you don't recognize me through this netting. It has been a while since we last met, hasn't it? I've been trapped in here for a very long time. Ever since I was defeated by the Doctor as a matter of fact, and my physical body died. I'm sure that everyone has forgotten me by now," the man in the hunter's outfit said.
Lily stiffened as she recognized that voice. The owner of it was right. It had indeed been a very long time since she had last heard it. It belonged to Chancellor Goth.
Goth had died as a result of entering into an alliance with the Master where he offered to help him to kill the Doctor in exchange for the Master helping him to become Lord President of Gallifrey. The plan was for Goth to assassinate the retiring Lord President before he could announce his successor and to blame the Doctor for it. Then while the Doctor was being executed for the crime, Goth would run for the office of Lord President unopposed.
Goth's plan had a huge monkey wrench thrown into it when the Doctor decided to run for Lord President himself and opposed Goth in order to keep himself alive long enough to find out what was really going on. The two men fought with each other inside of the Matrix in one long final battle that the Doctor was winning until the Master intervened and sent a massive energy spike through Goth's brain in an attempt to overload the Matrix with the Doctor still in it. The Doctor managed to escape, but Goth was killed instantly with no ability to regenerate.
There was then an official cover-up put into place after Goth's death that covered up his criminal activities with the story that he had died trying to stop the Master. Lily knew the real story though. She had her own connections throughout Gallifrey that had told her the truth.
She had never liked Goth in the first place. Long before his final fight with the Doctor, Goth had been an agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency and had performed numerous shady dealings in their name of which assassinations were only one example. She knew that Goth was one of the people who had been behind sentencing the Doctor to exile on Earth, and she always had suspected that he had something to do with the attempted assassination of Arkytior by the CIA as well. She could never prove that for sure though which was why he was still alive to be able to fight the Doctor centuries later.
If she had ever known for sure about his involvement in that event, he might well have found himself involved in an 'accident'. She didn't know for sure that she would have done such a thing because she had never been a cold-blooded killer, but in the mental state that she had been in at that time she might well have done it without a second thought.
"You might as well give up, Persephone. I will capture you soon or later. I've been trapped her for centuries, and the inner reality of the Matrix now answers only to me. I have become its undisputed master. The only reason that you even have that tree for cover is because I willed it. I wanted to make the game last a little longer for the thrill of the chase. It's been a long time since I've had contact with another person after all," Goth said.
"What do you intend on doing with me once you have me presuming that that ever occurs?" Lily asked him.
"Oh, I'm going to take over your body and leave you here in my place. I don't really like the idea of being trapped as you for however many lives that you have left, but it's a much better alternative than being trapped here alone in this nightmare for all eternity," Goth said.
"You may find that to be harder than you think. I've got a few surprises up my sleeve that I'm sure not even you and your goons in the CIA knew about, Goth," Lily said.
"I doubt that. We knew about everything. No one could keep anything secret from us for long. Not even Arkytior," Goth said with amusement in his voice.
Lily's hearts grew cold then at those words. It was true!
"Why?" Lily asked.
"She was too unpredictable. If we couldn't control her, then we had to dispose of her. I had nothing directly to do with it of course, but I was aware of it," Goth said.
"Congratulations. That answer just saved your life or what's left of it anyway. I'm still going to tear you apart for being happy about what happened to my daughter though," Lily said as she boldly walked out in front of him now.
"You're so brave now, aren't you? Do you really think that you can beat me here where I have the advantage?" Goth asked as he chuckled at her.
"Tell me, Goth, have you ever heard of Sekhmet? If your people in the CIA knew so much, why did they never know who I really was? They never had a clue, did they?" Lily asked.
"What? Sekhmet was just a legend. A story that the rebels who overthrew Rassilon told to each other over campfires in order to keep their spirits bolstered," Goth scoffed.
"Oh, I'm very real, Goth. I'm real, and I'm angry. I've had a lot of terrible things happen to me recently, and I've had no outlet for my aggression. I've had nothing that I could take my anger out on . . . until now. Guess who just got elected my new punching bag?" Lily said coldly.
She then leapt at him and knocked the rifle from his hands with one arm as she wrapped her other arm around his neck in one swift movement. With that one arm, she began to quickly cut off his air supply. Goth didn't need to breathe anymore, of course, but it still hurt him immensely all the same to have Lily's arm tightly coiled around his windpipe.
"Stop!" Goth managed to weakly get out.
"I never stop until the enemy is destroyed," Lily said in the cold voice of Sekhmet.
As Goth began to wonder if he had just made a huge mistake, Lily let Sekhmet take control of the situation. Her mind began to wander back to the past yet again as she found herself caught up in her memories once more. She was now reliving what had happened next after Robin showed up at Persephone's house.
One week had turned into several, and then months had passed. At first, Persephone had made up excuses as to why her TT Capsule hadn't been repaired yet. After the first few months though, she realized that John knew just as well as she did what was really going on so she stopped trying. He seemed to be happy staying with her, but she could always tell that he secretly wanted to go back to his own time and place.
She asked him after the first month of his stay with her if the person that he wanted to go back to in his own time was someone that he was in love with, but all he would say was that he had only ever loved one woman. The man was textbook enigmatic when it came to not telling her anything about where he had come from or who he really was. She had figured out a long time ago that John Little was not his real name after all.
The two of them slowly became closer and closer as the months flew by until they were far more to each other than friends. He seemed to know her so well that it almost seemed as if she had known him somewhere before. She was sure that that wasn't so though. Her memories were fairly clear after her time as Sekhmet after all, and she had never met him in all of that time.
She knew that he couldn't possibly be the faceless man that she still sometimes had dreams about from that time because it was far too long ago. Or could he? She sometimes wondered if that was the secret that he wouldn't tell her, but she couldn't dare to hope that something so fantastic could be real. Even her life couldn't possibly be that crazy and convoluted!
They were very happy together until the day that she lost him. It was to become the second worst day of Lily's long life. The first would come centuries later when she thought that Arkytior had died.
The day that Persephone lost him was to have been a special day for an entirely different reason originally. She was about to give John what she hoped would be some very welcome news. She had just found out about it early that morning.
She found him at the table about to eat breakfast as he usually did every morning and smiled at the image of him sitting there. She eagerly raced up to him and said, "I have something very important to tell you, John. I hope that you'll be as happy about this as I am. I'm . . ."
She stopped speaking in horror as Robin began to disappear right in front of her eyes. She knew deep down inside that he was returning home to where he belonged, but she didn't want him to go. She didn't want to lose him. Not now.
"John!" she screamed.
"It's going to be okay, Persephone. You'll see," Robin said just before he faded away.
"I never even got to tell you," Persephone said as she broke down and began to cry.
She was eventually consoled by the fact that she had one last gift from John that was still with her. It was his greatest gift to her and one that she knew would mean that she would never be lonely again, at least not until that one horrible day so many years in the future when she thought that she had lost it forever. Thankfully she had found out centuries later that she was wrong.
In the present day, Lily came back to reality to find her body still strangling Goth. Sekhmet was on automatic pilot now and had been holding Goth in place like that for who knew how long. Time was meaningless in the Matrix after all as was death for someone like Goth who was already dead. He would have died a long time ago from Sekhmet's attack if they had been in the real world. As it was, he was still in a lot of pain and trapped in the unbreakable hold of Lily's headlock.
Lily wasn't concerned with Goth at the moment though. She was more concerned about what she had just realized about just how big an impact that Robin had really had on her life. She wondered how she hadn't put two and two together before.
She realized though that she had forgotten what he had looked like as one memory crowded out another one as much as she hated to admit that. She felt guilty about that but knew that it was bound to happen in a mind filled with thousands of lifetimes' worth of memories. There were so many memories hopelessly jumbled inside of her brain now that she couldn't possibly clearly remember them all. She also thought that maybe Robin disappearing again may have had something to do with her loss of memory as well. It was the Web of Time making sure that all was as it should be perhaps.
The question on her mind now was: where was Robin now?
Allison continued to stare at her mother's unmoving body in concern. She began to wonder how long was too long for her to be in there. She was about to go find her Aunt Ivy or Rose and ask them when suddenly there was a huge flash of light to the side of her.
Allison began to cry when Robin materialized in front of her. He was back! She ran forward and hugged him tightly. Her father was home at last!
"Allison! I'm so happy to see you again! You know who I am to you now, don't you? I can see it in your eyes," Robin said as he returned her hug back.
"Yes I do. I'm so glad that you're back, Dad. It's okay to call you that, isn't it?" Allison asked.
"It certainly is. I'm so sorry that I wasn't there for you when you were growing up. I would have been, but I was sucked into yet another crack in time. I'm so sorry!" Robin said in a voice filled with sorrow.
"It's okay. We're together now, and that's all that matters to me," Allison said with a huge smile of pure joy on her face.
Then Robin noticed Lily for the first time as she lay motionless on a table hooked up to the Matrix.
"What's happening?" Robin asked.
"She went into the Matrix to try to find out what happened to you. She's been in there for a long time now and still hasn't come back out. I'm starting to get worried about her," Allison admitted.
"I might have to go in there and get her back out," Robin said.
"Wait. Only a Time Lord should probably try that. I'll have to do it," Allison said.
"What?" Robin asked in confusion.
"A lot's happened while you've been away, Dad. I'm not human anymore even though I'm still the same old Allison at heart. Or should that be hearts now?" Allison said with a wide grin.
"I don't care what you are now. You're not going in there by yourself, Allison," Robin said firmly.
"You've only been my dad for two minutes, and you're already being overprotective. I love it!" Allison said with a laugh.
Back in the Matrix, Goth was still trying to speak to Lily. He was saying anything and everything to her in an attempt to get her to let him go. Finally, he hit the mother lode as he said, "Let me go now, Sekhmet, and I'll let you leave the Matrix. Then you can go find your son."
Lily came fully back to herself at those words as she said, "I've already found Ron. You're a little late with that one."
"I'm not talking about the human. I'm talking about the other one. The one created from your stolen genetic material if you are really are Sekhmet. I'm probably the only one left who even knows about his connection to you," Goth said.
"What are you talking about?" Lily asked in complete disbelief.
"I'm talking about the secret experiment that the Celestial Intervention Agency conducted centuries ago with the genetic material that they found in one of Rassilon's old labs. It was labeled as belonging to Sekhmet," Goth explained.
"Rassilon destroyed all of my samples. He didn't want anyone to discover the secret of immortality from them," Lily said.
"Someone must have forgotten to destroy this one. We found it buried underneath a mountain full of other samples from other Time Lords of that time period. Somehow it was still able to be used for genetic extraction even after all of those millennia. I never believed that it was actually the real Sekhmet's though or that she even existed in the first place. The others did however, and they were obsessed with using it to create a new life. We used it to create what we hoped would be the perfect weapon someday once he had grown to adulthood. We were sorely mistaken about that though. We created someone who ultimately became an out of control menace instead. He was our greatest failure," Goth said.
"Who? What is his name?" Lily demanded.
"Let me go, and I'll tell you," Goth said.
Lily agreed to his demand, and then he told her the name of the son that she had never even known that she had. She gasped in shock. She would never have believed it. She still wasn't sure that she believed it now.
She was going to go find him as soon as she left here, and then she was going to find out the truth for herself. If that man were really her son though, she wasn't sure how she would react to that. It wasn't every day that you found out that you were the mother of one of the biggest renegades in Time Lord history after all!
Next: Lily and Robin are reunited at last! It's about time I know!