Rating: PG-13
Fandom:: Doctor Who
Pairings: Nine/Rose
Timeline: Ninth Doctor Era
Spoilers: Through 'The Doctor Dances'
Summary: The past – even a past that isn't supposed to exist any more – still has an impact on the present.
Disclaimer: Do I look like RTD?
Betaed by caitie_m. Lots of thanks with a chocolate covered Doctor of your choice on top! ;-) Any remaining errors should be hunted down and shot on sight.
Special nod to lm_jillybean who's, Twenty Second Century Girl was the inspiration for this story. You rule!
Prologue 
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Prologue
Coming of Age
"The age different between us..."
"Doesn't mean anything."
"I'm too old for you," came the tired sigh.
"Don't be ridiculous. You're only as old as you feel."
She laughed as she leaned back in her seat, smiling indulgently up at the young man before her. "More of your alien wisdom? I know what our theorists would have to say to that. Age is..."
"...as relative as anything else," he interrupted breezily and smiled. It was that smile that would be her undoing, she knew that. He was so confident, so sure of himself. No other so young would have dared to go before the High Council and tell them that each and every one of them was wrong. He was so sure there was a better way of doing things, so passionately devoted to trying to force the highly conservative Council to see how much could be learned from the so-called "lower races" of the Universe. He was determined that the Lords of Time begin to take a hand in what was happening beyond their world, instead of simply observing as the lower-beings fended for themselves.
His passion was infectious and invigorating and she was well aware that despite her age, there was no way she could hold out against him forever. Not when she so wanted the life he could give her, the love and joy he offered without thought or hesitation. He would have his way in the end, her determined and unconventional boy.
He sat down beside her and drew her hands up to his lips, kissing first one and then the other. "You, my dearest Patience, are like the finest of wines," he declared grandly. "Your age makes you all the more intoxicating."
She laughed again. "Oh, you are impossible. But in all seriousness, I'm nearly ten thousand and your not even two hundred yet. I haven't any more than this one lifetime left, whereas you have all yours ahead of you."
The young man shook his head. "You know I don't care about that."
"What if I do?"
That devastating, know-it-all grin that could stir her blood in spite of her age and make her feel young again. "Then you should take a page out of my book and be more sensible about it. Life is what you make of it, not how long it is. So, you only have this one lifetime left? Share it with me and I promise you, I'll make it everything you could possibly want."
One lifetime.
It had gone by so quickly. So much shorter than any of her preceding twelve. It had passed in laughter and discussion and quiet contentment where words were entirely unnecessary.
Her breath came shorter as the fever intensified and she knew she would not see another morning. There would be no regeneration this time. But she wasn't sorry he'd eventually had his way as she'd always known he would. For all it had been too short, she had never laughed so much in any of her lives nor lived more joyously.
He had kept his promise. He had made this final lifetime everything she could have wished for and more.
The room around her faded in and out of focus, her mind taking her back to the home of her childhood or the apartments in the Citadel she had shared with her first husband so many thousands of years ago. Only one thing remained constant, the beloved face of her beautiful boy. Older now, age had begun to take its toll on this, his first form. But his eyes were still the same bright eyes, so clever and so deep. Still so young. Without even a single regeneration behind him, his lined face belied the impetuousness of youth.
"Doctor," the healer addressed her husband and Patience couldn't help but smile, just a little. It had been centuries since he'd acquired the title and insisted on its use to the exclusion of the name he detested. But still, the title that had become more of a nickname than anything else, continued to amuse her.
"It won't be long now," continued the healer, kindly. "Her temporal focus is beginning to degenerate and..."
Her husband waved away further explanations with an impatient motion of his hand. No one had to tell him what was happening. His was widely known to be one of the most brilliant minds on Gallifrey, though he was loathed by many for his unorthodox opinions and impatience with the slow procedures of the Council on which he now sat. The youngest member on it, and by far the most controversial.
Images flashed through her mind, as her consciousness began to float through time while her body slowly gave up the battle with age and illness. A girl with blonde hair laughed as she grabbed a proffered hand and ran, confusing Patience for a moment before her place was taken by a dark-haired girl who's eyes were full of too many questions.
Patience smiled.
"Look after her, my love," she whispered softly.
"Look after who?"
"My daughter." His brows drew together in confusion and she struggled against her fading strength to continue speaking. "The one they will weave to take my place when I'm gone. She will be... so much like you. Promise me you'll look after her."
"If... if you want." She could see him swallowing past the threat of tears and wished she could give him more comfort.
"She'll be... far too much like you," Patience said, her eyes closing as images of the girl who had yet to be loomed faded from her mind like mist.
They were already chuckling as he arrived, a few minutes late for the welcoming of the newest member of his house. Just as Patience had predicted, the house had chosen to loom a girl. The laughter of the others echoed in his ears as he pressed forward to find she hadn't opened her eyes yet.
Somewhere behind him someone murmured something about a "throwback", the same term they'd used for him. He remembered all too well when he'd first opened his own eyes to look up into the laughing faces of his house, knowing himself to be the source of their amusement though as yet unable to fathom why.
Well, that wasn't going to happen to Patience's daughter. He'd promised after all.
He forced himself to the front as her eyes began to flicker and when the child opened large dark eyes, it was to look up into his face. Devoid of laughter, his smile was one of welcome.
The new widower felt too old to be a father, even though his wife had claimed this girl as her daughter. A grandfather, perhaps? Yes. Yes, he thought he might be able to manage to be a grandfather.
Her hearts beat too fast as she followed him across the dark field clutching her little bag of things to her chest. This was where the remnants of decommissioned TARDISes sat waiting to be harvested for parts once they were dead. Most of the shadowy shapes in the darkness around her were silent, the strange life-force that lay at the heart of the living space-and-time ships having faded beyond recall. But somewhere in this TARDIS graveyard there was one...
Oh, she was exited. He'd talked about it for so long, as long as she could remember. All her short life he had complained bitterly about the stupidity of the Council and how much of the Universe he wanted to see for himself. And finally, it was all happening. His temper had snapped that morning and after nearly an hour of haranguing the lot of them, including the president whom he'd called a fool to his face, he'd joined the very small number of individuals in the history of Gallifrey to resign their positions on the Council.
And now, before anyone could guess his intentions, he was leaving. It was finally time to see this wider Universe the council claimed to be protecting. And even better, he was taking her with him.
"This one," he said quietly, stopping before one shape in the darkness that seemed as lifeless as all the others until she put her hand on it. Then she could feel it, the thrum of life that still resided somewhere deep inside.
Her hearts skipped a beat as he unlocked the door and they stepped into the darkened interior. A fitful, flickering light began and grew until the circular control room was brightly lit, walls gleaming white and the console shining silver. Still only a child, she'd never been inside a TARDIS before. Already she could feel the warmth of the telepathic connection with the life that powered the ship reaching out to her.
She'd dreamed of this. All her life she'd wanted to travel, to see what was out there. And best of all, to do so in a TARDIS, the ships like no other in the Universe...
She dropped her bag and ran toward the consol in the centre of the room.
"Will it really fly, Grandfather?"
"Don't touch that! Yes, it will fly. This one's not too far gone yet. It's only a Type 40, a bit out of date. But all she really needs is a few minor repairs. Really, they're so ready to toss out anything that isn't the latest thing these days."
He joined her at the consol and began flipping the controls that brought the systems online. The consol lit up like the nighttime sky and the girl felt what she was sure was the ship's surge of joy at being woken from its slow decline into oblivion.
She threw her arms around her grandfather as the ship's engines ground to life, barely containing a squeal of excitement.
"It's really all ours?" she demanded breathlessly.
He chuckled indulgently at her excitement. "Yes, it's all ours. No one else wants the poor old girl, so she may as well be ours. Like her?"
"She's perfect."
They had a TARDIS all their own and an entire Universe out there to explore.
Chapter 1
Ghosts
The sudden jolting of the ship nearly catapulted Rose out of her bed... well, out of the Doctor's bed, but that was semantics and this was too damn early. She managed to untangle the sheets and blankets around her enough to struggle into a sitting position just as another shudder went through the ship. This time she was tipped onto the floor where she landed with an, "oof."
"I'm gonna kill 'im," she muttered as the picked herself up. Couldn't he have waited until she was awake at least? Tinkering with the TARDIS while the puny little humans got their sleep was one thing. Tossing them through time and space – not to mention out of bed – was very much another.
Jack was already there by the time Rose made it to the consol room. He'd probably been woken as rudely as she and had dressed just as quickly but he managed not to look it. Bastard.
"Have you checked that the co-ordinate charts aren't off?" Jack was asking, holding onto the console for dear life as the ship gave another lurch that sent Rose staggering into the wall.
"I do know how this ship works, Jack," the Doctor snapped. The tone was enough to tell Rose that he was in a worse mood than she was even if his expression as he bent over the console hadn't.
"I was just asking," Jack said reasonably. "What about the input systems? Do you think that rewiring the directional control could have compromised them?"
"No, I don't," came the flat reply.
"What's goin' on?" Rose demanded, finally reaching the consol and desperately grabbing it to keep herself upright.
"The TARDIS has got her systems in a jam and won't take us where the Doctor's setting the co-ordinates for. Every time he tries to take us somewhere, she just keeps landing in the same spot."
"So, where are we?" she asked as the ship gave a final shutter that Rose knew from the feel was a landing.
"Doesn't matter," the Doctor muttered, not looking up. He was already resetting the co-ordinates and starting them up again.
"Earth," Jack answered. "London, to be exact. Sometime in the twenty-second century."
"So, what's in the twenty-second century that's so important?" When she'd gone to sleep the night before they'd been orbiting above a little planet five solar systems from Earth sometime before her planet had even formed.
"Nothing," the Doctor growled, not looking up from the controls. The ship lurched again with a grinding sound that did not sound good before landing with a violence that tossed all three of them to the floor.
Rose sat up and frowned at the irrate Time Lord, who was already on his feet and trying to take off again. This time the ship failed to respond at all. "I don't think the TARDIS agrees with you, Doctor."
"What do you mean?" Jack asked, pulling Rose back up to her feet.
"Maybe there's nothing wrong with her systems," Rose said. "She's alive after all. Maybe she wants to be here for some reason."
"There nothing here." The violence with which the Doctor spoke caught both his companions off guard. Jack and Rose glanced at one another in confusion.
Before either of them could ask though, the Doctor was already diving under the consol, sonic screwdriver in hand. Jack hurried over and started checking through the TARDIS's system reports.
"She says nothing's wrong," he reported. "All systems operational. Nothing..."
There was a sudden electrical snap beneath them and the Doctor said something forcefully. There were times, Rose had learned, when you didn't have to know the language to know a curse when you heard one. Her mother would probably have washed his mouth out with soap on principal.
"Correction," Jack said. "Now the control room audio is off-line. So, that's music out of the question."
"Doctor..." Rose began, leaning down beside where he was. He was already pulling himself out though, heading over to where Jack stood. He nudged him aside and started checking through the system reports himself.
"Maybe it's..." He got no farther as Rose grabbed a hold of his hands with both of hers.
"Doctor, stop!" He looked up at her, clearly startled. "If nothing's here now, what was here? 'Cause if you ask me the TARDIS thinks that this is pretty damn important."
The Doctor closed his eyes, the manic energy of the moment before draining out of him. "Something was here," he admitted finally. "But it's gone and that's all."
"Maybe it's not," Jack suggested kindly, from the Doctor's other side, concern etched into his usually carefree expression. "Time's always in flux, you know that as well as anyone. Probably better. What if something's left..."
The Doctor shook his head. "There's nothing left." The bleak certainty in his tone was painful to hear; reminding Rose just how old he was.
"I think Rose might be right though," Jack said. "There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the TARDIS. She seems to think we should be here."
"There can't be," the Doctor sighed, staring down at where his hands were still being held by Rose. "I already looked."
"Then we'll help you look again," said Rose firmly.
The Doctor shook his head. "There's no point. Unless..." His head suddenly snapped up, an idea obviously having just occurred to him. "Oh God."
Then he was moving, the manic energy of before back times ten. He'd pulled away from his companions and was to the door before either could register what was happening.
"Doctor, wait!" Rose called, but it was no good. He was already gone and she and Jack were sprinting after him.
They were parked in dingy, out of the way spot beside the Thames across from a bunch of warehouses. Definitely not a beauty spot. The Doctor had somehow already managed to scramble up a concrete embankment beside them and was heading toward the skyscrapers that announced the city centre.
Jack called after him as he and Rose scrambled up the embankment, but he didn't slow. They followed as best they could as he ran along the river into the heart of a busy London afternoon. The three of them dodged in and out of traffic made up of vehicles the likes of which Rose had never seen before. The lot of them nearly got hit more times than she wanted to count. There was one thing for sure though, the car horns of the future didn't sound much different.
Jack grabbed a hold of her hand and pulled her along with him as she began to slow, her lungs burning and stich beginning in her side. But the Doctor kept inching further and further ahead until finally his companions turned a corner into another street of shops on the other side of the river to find no sign of him.
"Where..." Rose managed to pant, but Jack shook his head and shrugged helplessly. The two stood looking around at the bustling crowds.
"This is hopeless," Jack sighed.
"Can't you scan for him or something?" Rose asked.
Jack nodded. "Yeah, but it's hard to track a moving object. Until he stands still for two seconds its going to be almost impossible to for us to navigate our way to him."
Rose groaned and sat down on a nearby bench.
She suspected Jack would have had a shot at keeping up with the Doctor if he hadn't insisted on dragging her along with him, helping her to keep up. She wasn't sure if she was grateful or annoyed with him as he took a seat next to her. She was glad she wasn't left alone with no idea where either of the others were, but at the same time she was worried about the Doctor and would have felt better if Jack had been with him.
"We could go back to the TARDIS, wait for him to come back on his own," Jack suggested, but Rose shook her head.
"No. There's somethin' wrong. Whatever's going on here, we need to be with him."
Jack nodded agreement and began attempting to scan for the Doctor on his wrist-com. "At least, he's going to be the only alien around in this time period. That should make things a little easier."
It took more than four hours for Rose and Jack to find the Doctor again. There were times he'd stop somewhere long enough for Jack to get a fix, but before they could get there he'd be off again and the next time they located him he'd be on the other side of the city. It was a frustrating chase. When they did finally track him down they found the Doctor sitting dejectedly at a table outside a café.
He didn't look up as they approached. Rose sat down next to him, laying her hand over his where it sat on the table, while Jack took the seat across from him. Both watched him with deep concern.
"Didn't find what you were hoping to then," Jack said simply.
The Doctor shook his head and sighed, turning his hand over to grip Rose's and giving her and Jack a tired smile. The pain in his eyes hurt and Jack ached for him.
"Sorry for running out on you like that. I thought..." He shook his head again. "It was stupid. I knew there was nothing to find, but when she kept coming back here I thought that maybe... maybe I'd missed something. Maybe I should try again. But there wasn't anything." His voice broke on the last word and he closed his eyes, fighting back his emotions. The next words came out as little more than a whisper. "Just for a little while I'd hoped..."
Rose squeezed his hand in hers, but remained silent. He squeezed her hand back and bowed his head, eyes closed.
"I was right the first time though. She's gone. Along with the rest of them."
"Rest of them?" Jack asked, but Rose's eyes had already widened in comprehension.
"The rest of your people?"
The Doctor seemed to wince slightly even as he nodded. Internally, Jack swore realizing he should have figured that one out himself. He'd seen more battle scared individuals than he cared to think about, those who'd lost everything they had, including their souls. It was hard to imagine sometimes that the Doctor was as much a refugee as those they often helped. He could seem so full of life and energy that it was all Jack could do to keep up. But sometimes – just sometimes – the memories would catch up with him and the mask would slip. And underneath that... was pain unlike anything Jack could understand. The former Time Agent had lost two years of his life and it had destroyed his outlook on everything. The Doctor had lost both his planet and his people, was left wandering the Universe because there was nothing else left. It was beyond impossible to imagine.
The Doctor sighed, keeping his eyes tightly closed as he spoke. "I sort of... adopted her, when she was very young. And when I left Gallifrey..." his voice wavered on the name slightly and Jack realised he'd never heard the name of the Doctor's planet before. The Doctor cleared his throat and continued. "When I left, I took her with me. She was still just a kid then. The equivalent of maybe ten or so for you humans. I thought that I could teach her more about the universe by showing it to her than she'd ever learn in a classroom. Although... well, you know me. She learned a few things about the universe that I think she could have done without." He shook his head. "I tried. I tried to protect her, to give her the kind of home aboard the TARDIS that a kid needs. I... I don't think I did a very good job at that."
The Doctor sighed and shrugged slightly. "We stopped on earth, in this time." He opened his eyes then and looked up at the buildings around them. "This isn't what it was like then though. It had just been invaded by the Daleks and it was a right mess."
"Daleks?" Jack interrupted, suddenly confused. "The Daleks never managed a full scale invasion of Earth itself. Outer colonies sure, but not the planet."
"Time's always in flux, Jack. They invaded alright. We... we got involved with a resistance group and managed to break the Dalek's hold on the planet. There were enough survivors still that there was no danger of the species dying out or anything, but it was going to take time to rebuild. A lot of time. We were here for, I don't know, I couple of months total I think and... well, she was a bit older by then, more like sixteen for you and while we were here she became rather attached to a young man. You know how it works."
Jack did know how it worked very well, with humans anyway, and with most other sentient species come to think of it. He was only just beginning to appreciate that things weren't necessarily the same with Time Lords. He knew just enough from things Rose had said that the Time Lords had frowned on attachments of that kind outside their own species. It had been a problem for them early on, the Doctor stuck between what he felt for Rose and 'proper' Time Lord behaviour. Rose had won, but sometimes Jack wondered if she would have had the Doctor's people still been around to object. But Jack held his tongue for once, opting instead to await details as they came.
"I liked him," the Doctor continued softly. "And he... he cared for her. What was more, she wanted to stay. With the kind of life we led I guess it shouldn't have surprised me to find out that she felt adrift, like she didn't have an anchor. She'd never had one place or time that felt like home. But... she felt like she might be able to make twenty-second century Earth home. It needed so much work and she wanted to help rebuild it, make part of it hers. So, I left her here."
"Didn't you ever see her again?" Rose asked, biting her lip to keep from crying. Her eyes were large with unshed tears.
"Oh sure," the Doctor said. "A few times, but... but not all that many. I don't know why the life she was making here made me so uncomfortable. I just never stayed long, even when she asked me to." He stopped and took a deep breath, fighting back the emotions again.
Jack could see the kind of toll this was taking on the Doctor and chose to make it easier on him. After all, where this was going seemed fairly clear now.
"But when you came back after the war the timeline had changed too much," Jack offered. "The invasion had never happened and no one here ever even knew she existed."
The Doctor nodded without a word and Rose lost the battle with her tears. They began to slip unheeded down her cheeks.
"I'm so sorry," she said, her voice braking just a little.
Concern flashed across the Doctor's face and he reached over with his unoccupied hand and brushed the tears away. "Rose, don't cry," he said softly, sounding as though he might cry himself. "Please don't."
There was something in the gesture that was strangely intimate, more so than it should have been and Jack felt momentarily as though he were spying on something he shouldn't.
Rose gave the Doctor a watery smile then bit her lip and looked pleadingly up into the Doctor's eyes. "Isn't there any chance she could be alive here without the people she used to know knowing about it?"
"I don't know," the Doctor sighed. "I don't think so. I spent weeks looking for her last time I was here and... and I should be able to feel her if she were here."
"Feel her?" Jack's brow creased in confusion and then cleared as another story he'd heard about the mythical Lords of Time slotted into place. "You're psychic somehow, aren't you?"
"Telepathic," the Doctor corrected and then hurried on as Rose's eyes widened almost comically. "But only with my own people and even then, I was never very good at it. Susan was better," he said wistfully.
"Susan?" Rose asked, obviously allowing the fact that the Doctor hadn't told her about his telepathic abilities to go – but only for the moment, Jack suspected. "That a Time Lord name, then?"
The Doctor actually smiled slightly and gave a sad chuckle. "Not hardly. She chose it for herself after we left Gallifrey. She said that she wanted to blend in with native cultures. She used to get such a kick out of passing herself off as human. Susan Patience Foreman. She even went to school for a little while, in London 1963. It was a grand game to her and she was always so excited when she'd pulled it off for another day." He sighed. "My poor little Susan."
The three of them fell silent for a few moments as the early evening crowds began to thin around them. Jack frowned at his hands going over and over in his mind how one would go about finding someone when you couldn't even be sure you were in the right time period. There had to be a way. Maybe if they...
"There's another possibility then," Rose said, interrupting Jack's thoughts and both he and the Doctor glanced at her questioningly. "About why the TARDIS brought us here," she supplied. "Do you think that maybe she felt you needed to talk about it? You know, get it out of your system, deal with it kind of thing."
The Doctor looked dubious.
"I don't think the TARDIS goes in much for pop psychology," Jack answered, amused by idea the even so.
Rose rolled her eyes. "Well, it's just a thought. I mean, if Susan isn't here what other reason could the TARDIS have for bringin' us here?"
"I don't know," the Doctor said, still sounding dejected but somewhat more alive. "I've tried to think about that one myself, all afternoon. But I've gone through all the public records; telephone listings, addresses, that kind of thing same as I did last time. There are some S. Foreman's but none that could be Susan. I even checked on the couple the seemed even remotely possible."
"Could she be using another name?" Rose asked. "Like, maybe she got married or something."
The Doctor sighed. "I did think of that and checked for her under David's name as well. The young man she was involved with," he explained in answer to questioning looks from his companions. "No S. Campbells either. David is alive, but I went to see him when I was here before. He... he'd never met Susan at all. Didn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about."
"Hmmm," Rose said, frowning in thought. "Maybe..." But she was interrupted by Jack who suddenly slapped his forehead.
"Oh, I'm bright today," he muttered to himself as the answer to the problem popped into his head. "Scanning," he told the Doctor and Rose as he started punching information into his wristcom. "If there's an alien anywhere in the greater London area, other than the Doctor, I should be able to pick up on it."
The three sat silently as Jack began scanning through looking for any signal, any evidence that Susan might be there after all. It still seemed that the only reasonable solution to all this was that she was here and somehow the TARDIS had picked up on it. His heart sank though as the minutes ticked by and finally he had to shake his head.
"Not coming up with anything," he said apologetically.
The Doctor nodded as though he hadn't really been expecting anything else. At this point, he probably wasn't. "I don't know, maybe Rose is right and the old girl really is trying her circuits at a bit of psychotherapy," he said shrugging.
Jack frowned, not willing to accept that explanation just yet. "Maybe if I patch my wristcom into the TARDIS console I might get a better range. I could check the whole of England, instead of just London."
The Doctor shrugged again, as though losing interest in the subject, looking down at the table. Jack opened his mouth to suggest another way when Rose caught his gaze and gave him a look that very clearly said 'drop it'. Jack dropped it. At least, verbally. And at least for the moment.
Chapter 2
The Last Time Lord
The last of the Lords of Time sat staring disconsolately at the dregs of a cappuccino, contemplating the perversity of the Universe as a whole.
The Time Lords of Gallifrey had been the most powerful race ever to have lived or ever would live. They had had mastery over Space; Time itself obeyed their commands. Their technology had be second to no other, in any time. For hundreds of thousands of years they had observed the Universe from a position slightly outside of it, separate and secure. And now they were gone, wiped from the Universe as though they had never been. Now, the final representative of their species sat in a café on a backwater world, in a backward time, drinking a truly pathetic attempt at coffee.
The whole thing was funny if looked at from the right perspective. And slit-your-wrists depressing if viewed from the wrong one.
Susan wasn't sure yet which way she felt like looking at it today.
Normally, of course, she thought about anything but. She still didn't entirely understand what had happened. She'd been aware that the Gallifrey had been at war, but with who she hadn't known. Nor had she realised how bad it was until she'd awoken to find everything changed. Her husband didn't know who she was, her city was twice the size and with nearly six times the population it had had, and everything she'd known was gone. She'd had nothing. No home, no family, no friends – there were times in those first days when she'd even questioned her sanity. But when push came to shove, as Barbara would say, Susan was still the Doctor's granddaughter. She'd managed.
Nearly a year later, she had a job, a flat, and a shed in which she was creating a very basic ship. Nothing much really, just something to get her off Earth. Once she managed to get someplace a little more advanced she could get something a little better and get to a race with basic time travel. From there...
From there, Susan didn't know. She didn't really have a plan beyond getting back to Gallifrey and finding out what the hell had happened.
There were certain basic facts she didn't need telling, of course. Something of a catastrophic nature had occurred and only amajor timeline shift could have resulted in what she'd experienced. She was still surprised every day that the Reapers didn't appeared to clean up the mess.
What worried her far more, though, was the silence in her head. It was possible all her questions would remain unanswered, because there was no one left to answer them. Whatever it was that had happened, she may have been the only one far enough away at the time to survive it.
Susan pinched the bridge of her nose, fighting back another headache. Her head always seemed to hurt these days and instead of getting easier to bear, it was as though the silence was eating away at something inside of her.
She'd never really thought about her telepathic connection to her people. It just was. Even when she was living among humans, passing for human every day, trying even to think as a human, there was a corner of her mind that did, and always would, belong wholly to her people. It was rather like someone who'd lived their whole life on the seashore. The sound of the ocean would be so all-pervading and ever present that it wasn't heard at all. In that way, the white noise of thousands of other Gallifreyan minds had been so much a part of who she was that it hadn't needed thinking about. It was barely noticed unless she focussed enough to touch another individual's mind. Now, it was gone. Where there had once been hundreds of thousands of other minds, there was only silence.
It was beginning to seem that there were some silences that you just couldn't get used to. No member of a telepathic race was meant to live entirely alone inside their own heads, Susan's psyche just wasn't designed for that kind of isolation. There were days when she felt like the lack of those minds was going to drive her mad and days when she couldn't make herself care if it did.
Of course, she didn't need to go to some human doctor to be told that, on top of all this, she was also suffering from Clinical Depression and probably even some kind of Survivor's Guilt. That is, if she could find one that wouldn't lock her up for being delusional once she'd explained the situation. She was THE Doctor's granddaughter, thank you very much. She was perfectly capable of diagnosing herself. And dealing with it herself as well. Kind of. Her flat was almost pathetically full of plants and she'd got a job at a pet shop. She surrounded herself with as much life as she could and just tried to keep going, day in and day out. Grandfather would have expected no less of her and just because he was dead was no reason act any differently.
She automatically swallowed back the tears that rose to choke her whenever she thought of her grandfather.
This was stupid, Susan decided, picking up her purse and placing her empty mug in the dirty dishes bin. She'd finished work for the day and sitting in a café feeling sorry for herself wasn't going to get anything done. She'd go to the shed she'd rented and work on her ship. It would, at very least, keep her mind occupied.
However, as she got out into the late afternoon Susan found herself wandering without direction, unable to make herself head for her ship just yet.
Today had been a bad day. Nothing bad had happened, really. It was just that since this morning she'd been unable to concentrate on anything, unable to care all that much. And since early afternoon she'd been hopelessly restless, as though there was somewhere else she urgently needed to be if only she could remember where that was. It was like an itch under her skin and in the back of her mind, making it nearly impossible to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time.
Ah, the joys of depression, she thought with a certain grim humour. And here she'd thought that she had been doing better lately. Well, a bad day here and there wasn't the end of the world. A topic she knew something about since she'd seen the end of a few of them. She was Gallifreyan, she'd get through.
An unexpected laugh bubbled up inside her at the thought. She had reached the river and she began wandering along it, watching the light of the sun reflected in the water. She'd spent so much of her life pretending to be human. She'd taken a human name, a human husband, a human life. It was funny that now, when her people were gone and she really was stuck with a human life, all she wanted to be was Gallifreyan. She spoke to her plants in Gallifreyan, just to hear her native language out loud. She'd taken to doing even the most basic adding and subtracting in Gallifreyan, just to use their numerical system.
Once it was entirely out of her reach, she finally wanted to back to a home she barely remembered.
She sighed and reminded herself once again that moping wouldn't help. She could only imagine what Grandfather would say if he caught her being silly and whining about what couldn't be changed. It was that, of course, that had kept her together over the last year. Grandfather would have expected her to pull herself together and keep going, because there was nothing else to be done. Sometimes she could almost hear his grumpy old voice chiding her for being silly and mooning about instead of being productive. But she supposed she could allow herself a walk this afternoon. She'd worked hard today and as long as she got a good amount of work done tonight as well, there was no real harm in it.
Everyone needs a good wallow sometimes, Barbara had always said. And oh, how she missed her and Ian. Almost as much as she missed Grandfather, though without the added emotional baggage. Barbara and Ian she simply missed. Grandfather was more complicated.
She loved him and missed him and sometimes she was so angry with him she could scream. He'd lied to her, that much had become obvious. He'd pretended this war was nothing, more of an annoying little skirmish than anything important. After all, it wasn't as though any other species could ever be a real threat to the Lords of Time. And she'd believed him. There had been so much here that needed doing, so many threats close to hand that worrying over much over something so trivial as he'd made this conflict sound had seemed silly.
It wasn't as though she didn't understand. He'd always done everything he could to protect her. He'd wanted her safe, wanted her to be as far from this threat to their people as possible. Rational understanding, though, couldn't stop the feeling of betrayal. Grandfather had always believed a hard truth to be better than a kind lie and so she'd had no reason not to take his words at face value. But when it came to this war, a war that may well have destroyed their world, their people... he'd lied to her. Understanding why couldn't ease the sting of betrayal.
Susan's foot struck a large stone, yanking her out of her thoughts. Looking down, she realised that at some point she'd wandered off the sidewalk and was now standing on top of a steep embankment, overlooking the river. She glanced around and groaned inwardly. Here again.
If she were to go down the embankment just there she would find the place where she'd last seen her grandfather's TARDIS all those years ago, when he left her here to make her life with David.
She'd slept down there for the first few days after the timeline shift that had left her without any other home. She'd known what the silence in her head probably meant and even if she hadn't her constant attempts to reach out to her grandfather would have been enough. She'd stretched her mind desperately trying to find him, trying to find someone. She'd strained herself to the point of blacking out more than once in those days and still there'd been nothing. But she'd slept here anyway, trying to believe that in spite of everything, he'd come back for her. After a while, she'd finally come to accept that he never would, that he was gone along with the rest of them. At least, mostly accept it.
Every once in a while though, she found herself here. Looking for a ship that probably didn't even exist any more.
Leaning against the wall behind her, Susan wondered whether she shouldn't just leave. Was it helping or hurting her that she still allowed herself to check every once in a while? Confirmation that he wasn't here was probably good for her sense of the here and now, but did giving into the impulse to check mean that she wasn't really accepting that he was gone? Or was she hopelessly overanalysing this?
Oh hell, how would she know? She wasn't a psychologist. She hadn't even managed to stick around long enough to get her O-levels in 1963! She'd check, again. She knew that having arrived here she had to check. If she left without doing so it would only nag at her all night and there was no point in that.
Decision made, Susan pushed herself away from the wall and stepped over to the top of the embankment looking down onto the cemented river bank bellow.
She stood there staring for a whole minute before something in her brain finally registered that there was a box down there. A tall blue box, of the sort used during the mid-twentieth century on earth. A Police Public Call Box, in fact.
Ten seconds later found Susan nearly falling down the embankment, scraping up her elbows in the process. She didn't notice.
It couldn't be real, it simply couldn't be real. She was going to get there and it wasn't going to be there. She'd finally gone 'round the bend and was hallucinating because it simply could not be real!
She reached the TARDIS at a dead run, falling against the doors which were blessedly solid under her hands. Oh Rassilon, this couldn't be happening.
"Grandfather!" She slammed her hands against the doors over and over desperately hoping he'd hear her. That he'd open the door and... "Grandfather, please Grandfather!"
Suddenly the doors opened under her repeated blows and she fell forward, her hands landing painfully on unexpected metal grating. She looked up in shock at the room around her. Scrambling to her feet Susan almost laughed out loud. The control room she stumbled into was nothing like the one she'd first entered as a little girl. This one looked like something out of a museum exhibit of how the early TARDISes had looked long before she'd been loomed.
All of the trappings of grace and sophistication had been stripped away, leaving only strict necessity behind. The white walls that had been so much a part of her childhood were gone exposing the support struts that formed the structure of the control room. The bright, cheerful lights were gone as well to be replaced by the auxiliary lighting, making the interior dim and strange.
When had he done this? Why had he done this? But it had to be him. No other Time Lord would have their TARDIS concealed as a Twentieth Century Police Box in the middle of Twenty-Second Century London!
As she reached the console and laid her hands on it, she began to shake.
She could feel it.
After months of nothing but deafening silence in her head she could feel the TARDIS reaching out to her, touching her mind like the softest of caresses. It's wasn't the firm feel of another Gallifreyan mind, but it was something. It was so much more than she'd had only this morning. And it was so wonderfully, painfully familiar.
"Oh, I've missed you too," she sobbed, running her trembling hands over the controls. Even the console was different. Gone was all the shining silver and bright lighting. It had been stripped down to its most basic components, leaving the circuits and cables bare and vulnerable. The patch jobs and cobbled together repairs were obvious. Despite the strangeness though, there was no doubt which TARDIS this was. The welcome she felt, the overjoyed feeling of recognition in the strange singing that was the TARDIS' thoughts... this was their TARDIS. The TARDIS she'd grown up on.
Home.
But where was Grandfather?
The doorway that led to the rest of the TARDIS gaped open before her and this time she did laugh, a slightly hysterical ring to the sound. How many times had he chided her for leaving that door open? Reminding her again and again to keep it closed when she'd so often forget, too exited to be off to think about anything so mundane.
"Grandfather? You left that door open!" she called, but there was no answer.
The halls of the TARDIS were as changed as the control room, but they still felt the same as she walked along them, running her hand along the wall beside her. She was shaking harder now, shock setting in she supposed. She was still waiting to wake up, for all this to be some horrible, wonderful dream.
"Grandfather?"
There was still no answer and the TARDIS felt empty around her. No minds, just the singing of the ship itself. Where was he? Could he really be dead after all? Would she find a body around here somewhere? Oh, that was silly. How would the TARDIS have got here without someone to fly her?
Susan's thoughts chased themselves around her head as she continued through the ship, searching for some sign...
Ahead light spilled out into the hallway from an open door and she hurried forward.
"Grandfa..." she broke off as she looked inside.
It was her room.
Completely unaltered from the day she left the TARDIS that last time; the bed was still unmade, closet door wide open, and her clothes lying in heaps on the floor. 3D postcards from New Earth were pinned to the wall by her dressing table along with cut out magazine pictures of musical groups from the early 1960's. The dressing table itself was a hopeless jumble of jewellery and nicknacks and silly little keepsakes that would be meaningless junk to anyone but a teenage girl.
Susan sagged in the doorframe staring around herself helplessly. Grandfather hadn't changed anything. He'd complained so often about how messy her room was, but given the chance he'd changed nothing at all. And the TARDIS, her lovely TARDIS, hadn't allowed a speck of dust to obscure the mess Susan had left behind.
After all that though, it was the shoe that finally did her in.
Lying on top of the rumpled bedclothes lay a shoe. There'd been a hole in it, she remembered. That final walk from the Dalek mines back to London had been too much for her city-purchased shoes and one of them had had a hole in the bottom of it by the time they'd arrived. Grandfather had taken it, saying he could fix it before going back into the TARDIS, leaving her to say her goodbyes to David.
That had been the last time she'd seen her grandfather for a long time.
Her hand shook as she reached down and picked it up, not even remembering crossing the room to the bed. She didn't know what had happened to the other one anymore, but this one was fine. Grandfather had fixed it just as he said he would. Then he'd put it in her room and... And then nothing. She'd never come back to the TARDIS to collect it.
It was the last straw and she collapsed onto the bed, unable to stand any longer as painful sobs welled up inside of her. She clutched the shoe to her as she turned her face into the old familiar pillows and cried.
