earlgreytea68 | Something About Stars (17/20)

Title - Something About Stars (17/20)
Author -

earlgreytea68
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, Master, OCs
Spoilers - Through the specials.
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids, they're all mine.)
Summary - Four Time Lords and a Bad Wolf human, gallivanting through time and space. What could possibly go wrong?
Author's Notes - Huge thanks to Kristin and

chicklet73 , who talked through plot points. Special thanks to Kristin for coming up with the title. And even more thanks to

jlrpuck and c73, who so graciously beta'd.

The icon was created by

swankkat , commissioned by

jlrpuck for my birthday.

Prologue - Ch 1 - Ch 2 - Ch 3 - Ch 4 - Ch 5 - Ch 6 - Ch 7 - Ch 8 - Ch 9 - Ch 10 - Ch 11 - Ch 12 - Ch 13 - Ch 14 - Ch 15

Chapter Sixteen

Fortuna was materializing the TARDIS in random places in the building. She would materialize it, and they would wait to be discovered, watching the guards run to set up fresh battle stations, and then she would de-materialize it again. Brem had slipped out, after one fresh materialization, before anyone had figured out where they were, and Rose had been quiet ever since, clearly fretting about having two children off where she could not keep them safe.

Matt looked at Fortuna, who was sitting on the captain’s chair, watching for the guards to appear on the monitor.

“So,” he said. “Correct me if I’m wrong here.”

“Okay,” she said, shifting her gaze from the monitor to him.

“Athena’s in trouble because she’s part of the signal, right?”

“Right.”

“What if we broke the signal?”

“If we broke the signal, it would send the Time Lords back into the time lock, Athena with them.”

“But what if we made it that the signal had never existed in the first place?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why can’t we go back in time, to whenever the Time Lords created this signal, and stop them from doing it? Take the white-point star before they can do whatever it is they did to it. Make it so that the signal never triangulates.”

Fortuna stared silently across at Matt.

“It would cause a paradox,” said Rose, wearily.

“It would,” agreed Fortuna, slowly. “But this whole thing is a paradox. I mean, it’s all a circularity, the escaping of a time lock, because the purpose of a time lock is to make it so you never existed in the first place, so how could you set it up so you could escape it? This whole thing is a paradox. So what’s one more paradox?”

“Athena’s TARDIS log was re-writing itself, right?” persisted Matt. “So why can’t this be just one more re-write?”

“Why can’t it? Why can’t it?!” exclaimed Fortuna, jumping up. “Matt, you are a genius.”

Matt looked surprised. “Wait, am I really? I didn’t expect for you to go for it.”

“No,” said Fortuna, darting around the console, tugging at controls. “It makes sense. Actually, that’s not true, it makes no sense. Which is why it makes perfect sense. It’s wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. It’s perfect.”

“It’s a paradox, Fort,” said Rose, worriedly. “You’re changing an historical event that we’re involved in.”

“It’ll be fine. It’s going to fix this. It’s going to bring it back to where we’re supposed to be, trust me. Matt’s right, about the TARDIS log re-writing itself. It was doing that because it couldn’t reconcile all the paradoxes it was being exposed to. The only thing Athena’s TARDIS could think to do was re-write it so it made sense. And that’s what we should do here. We should re-write it, so it makes sense. It’s the only thing we can do. The timelines in our heads are so in flux, they need us to untangle what’s going on.” Fortuna brought the mallet down with finality, and the TARDIS jerked into motion. “So that’s what we’re going to do,” she pronounced, looking satisfied.

The TARDIS landed gently, and for a second they all three sat in silence, looking at the scene outside the monitor. They were in the same building they had been in before—the unusual pattern of the marble tiles was the same—but it looked like it was in slightly better repair, so Fortuna was fairly sure she’d gotten the timeline right. Nobody was paying the slightest attention to the TARDIS, but that was because it looked like they had more urgent matters to attend to. Everyone was walking very quickly and talking very fast.

“What’s the plan?” asked Rose, finally, into the silence.

“I think the white-point star will be the easiest thing to intercept,” said Fortuna, still looking at the monitor. “And I think, since we’re already causing a paradox, I’m not going to worry much about it. I’m just going to walk in, get the white-point star, and leave.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” said Rose.

Fortuna looked at her. “Mum—”

“No. I’ve already got two children out there who could be killed at any time. I am not allowing you to make it the complete set. Anyway, if you get yourself regenerated doing this, something tells me the paradox will be too great to bear. Whereas nothing can happen to me.”

There was a moment of silence. “You look wrong to us, Mum,” she admitted, finally. “Every Time Lord out there is going to stop and stare at you.”

“So?” said Rose, carelessly. “Let them. As long as I get the white-point star and bring it back here, that’s all that matters, right?”

“Yeah,” answered Fortuna.

“The tough part is going to be finding the white-point star,” Matt pointed out.

“I don’t know,” remarked Rose. “I just figure I’ll go to the place with the most guards.”

***

The Doctor stared at the flat red button Brem was holding in his hand. Big, red buttons that should never, ever, ever be pushed, that was always what it came down to, wasn’t it? Every Time Lord in the room was staring at the Moment, riveted .

Brem smiled. “Got your attention, have I?”

“Brem,” said the Doctor, and Brem looked over at him. “It only protects the person who presses the button,” he said, urgently. He needed Brem to understand that there was no fooling around with the Moment, that, once pressed, he and Athena and Fortuna and Matt and Rose—all of them except for Brem himself—would be lost to the time lock forever.

“Here’s the thing, Dad,” said Brem. “You have Hell descending upon the universe, isn’t that what you said? All of the most terrible things, all of them poised to destroy all life forms, all the things you would never, ever have let happen, the first time you pressed this button.”

The Doctor stared, feeling slightly panicked. This was true, but… “But…” he said, helplessly.

Brem’s eyes shifted to the Lord President, and his voice, when he spoke, was cold and hard, as brittle as ice, and the Doctor wondered where Brem had learned that tone. “If there is consciousness inside the time lock,” spat out Brem, “if all of you, stuck in there, sit and dwell on this moment, then I want you to know this: Brem Tyler is his father’s son.”

“Brem!” shouted the Doctor, in horror, at the same moment that Brem pressed the button.

Sparks flew from the lights overhead, as they exploded and then rained shards of glass down. The building rumbled, throwing the Doctor off his feet and painfully to the marble of the floor, where he spent a second covering his head from the shower of falling glass, hands still tightly clutched around sonic screwdriver and white-point star.

And then he felt someone grab him by the hand holding the sonic and tug. Brem’s voice spoke urgently into his ear, tinged with concern. “You’re alright, right? Come on, get up, we have to get out of here before they figure out it wasn’t really the Moment.”

The Doctor sat up and stared at Brem. “It wasn’t really the Moment?”

Brem blinked in surprise, then frowned. “Hurry up,” he said, and then took off for the door.

The Doctor scrambled to his feet, following the billowed-out velvet of his son’s coat. The bridge over the chasm had fallen into rubble. The Time Lords trapped in the conference room were screaming and shouting. A few had gotten shoved over the sides. Chaos was reigning in every corner.

“Where’s your sister?” shouted the Doctor, staring at the abyss and praying the answer wasn’t down there.

“That bloke grabbed her and took her, you know, the melodramatic one, as soon as I pressed the button. I lost track of which direction they went when I paused to check on you.”

“They’re all melodramatic,” replied the Doctor, grimly, stepping away from the chaos of the Time Lords quarrelling as to how to get out. There were clearly other exits—how had Brem entered the room, after all?—but they didn’t seem to be thinking clearly.

“Give me a second,” said the Doctor, standing off to the side, and closed his eyes and combed through the thoughts in his head, sifting through the overwhelming panic, searching, searching, for the pin prick of light that was…Athena. “There,” he said, and opened his eyes. Brem was standing next to him, barely suppressing his fidgets, hand clenched around his sonic screwdriver while he narrowed his eyes at the Time Lords rushing by them, daring any of them to challenge them. “Got a lock on her.”

“How do you do that?” asked Brem. “I can’t feel her at all in this…cacophony.” The Doctor knew Brem was referred to the mental one, not the one going on around them at the moment.

“It takes practice,” replied the Doctor. “It’s this way.” He took off at a run, then stopped abruptly and pulled Brem into a crushing hug.

“You know,” said Brem, into his shoulder, sounding annoyed even as he let himself be hugged, “when we get out of this, we’re going to have a conversation about how you thought I was actually going to kill you.”

“It looked like the Moment,” said the Doctor, letting him go. “How did you know what the Moment looked like?”

“I found it, on the TARDIS, and made a replica. A big, red button? Really? That’s what ended the Time War?”

“Welllllll.” The Doctor shrugged. “Yeah. What’d you expect?”

“I don’t know, something a bit more flash than that. Let’s get Athena and get out of here before they figure out entirely that my ‘Moment’ was just a low-level sonic resonance reflecting off the glass and marble.”

***

Rose discovered that she could basically go anywhere she liked in the building, because, whenever she approached, Time Lords fell silent and froze in horror. It was kind of convenient, being considered some type of inappropriate monster. She was glad her Time Lords didn’t look at her this way, but she was pleased that these evil Time Lords did. She suspected it was even more jarring because of how tense they already were. It was clear the city was under siege, she could hear the unmistakable sounds of a war outside, and the building periodically shook with the force of something, bits of marble dust crumbling from the ceiling, and Rose walked through it all, leaving stunned fear in her wake.

She found the most heavily-guarded room in the place, and walked over the bridge that led to it, past the guards who fell silent and stepped away from her in fright. She threw open the doors dramatically, but none of the Time Lords in the room turned to look at her. They seemed utterly engaged in what they were doing.

“It has been seen everywhere,” proclaimed a woman sitting at the table. “It has been appearing, spelled out in hallways, etched into windows, the very stars in the sky form the words. ‘Bad Wolf.’”

Rose smiled and walked forward.

“It matters not,” said a man sitting at the head of the table with his back to her. He sounded impatient. “It changes the plan not at all. The prophecy remains the same, of the two to survive. The signal has been planted. All that remains is for the white-point star to be flung into—”

Fortuna’s timing had been perfect. Rose was going to have to be sure to tell her that, as she stepped forward, as the man pulled the white-point star out of his pocket and held it dramatically aloft. The rest of the Time Lords ringed around the table had caught sight of her now, were staring at her in horror. The man holding the white-point star fell silent at their expressions, turned to see what they were staring at.

“Hello,” she smiled at him. “Mind if I take that?” She plucked the white-point star out of his hand. She winked. And then she ran.

***

When the Doctor and Brem skidded into the room, still going at full speed, they froze pretty quickly, since what was happening was that Athena was holding a gun on the Lord President of the High Council of Gallifrey. The room was thick with silence, into which the Doctor and Brem’s heavy breathing sounded very, very loud.

The Doctor looked from Athena to the Lord President and back again. “Theenie,” he ventured, finally. “Where’d you get the gun?”

“There are guns everywhere here,” answered Athena, “the guards have been dropping them left and right while they flee.” Her eyes flickered briefly to Brem. “Good bluff.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Good enough to fool even Dad.”

“I wasn’t thinking clearly,” the Doctor retorted, automatically, and then, to Athena, “Put down the gun.”

“I don’t think so. See, this is what he was counting on.” She nodded her head toward the Lord President. “He was convinced I wouldn’t pick up a gun, wouldn’t try to break the signal myself. But I’ve figured it out now. You can send them all back to the time lock, you can do it very easily, you’re holding the white-point star in your hand right now, you could destroy it before another rhythm of four sounds. But you won’t, because it will send me into the time lock with them. Have I figured it out properly?”

The Doctor was silent. “Athena, put down the gun,” he said, finally.

“Absolutely not. I will not let you destroy the universe to save me. How dare you do that? How dare you take the choice away from me? How dare you not even tell me what had to be done? If it were you in my place, you would have done it already.”

“Theenie,” inserted Brem, desperately. “Stop this. We’re going to figure something else out and—”

“Theenie,” said the Doctor, softly, taking a step closer to her. “I wouldn’t have done it already. Didn’t you hear, what he said to me in there? I delayed, when I had the Moment. I delayed, and delayed, and delayed, because of how much I didn’t want to do it, and I wasn’t even condemning myself to the time lock, just the rest of them. I delayed, and I gave them too much time, and they set all of this up, and I caused this, and I will not let you make me live with that for the rest of my life, do you understand me? We haven’t thought nearly hard enough about this, we will find a way out that doesn’t have anything to do with you. Put down. The gun.”

She didn’t put down the gun but she did look at him, brown eyes shimmering with tears. “Daddy,” she said, helplessly.

“Please,” he begged her. “Please.”

She looked back at the Lord President. She sighed tremulously. And she lowered the gun.

The Doctor could have collapsed with relief, but he didn’t have time, because something happened then that he would never have expected to happen, not if he had lived for a million more years.

The white-point star disappeared in his hand.

One instant he was holding it, fingers wrapped around it, as he watched Athena lower the gun and he tried to convince myself that they would find some other way of saving the universe that did not involve sacrificing Athena. And the next instant it was gone. He stared down at his empty hand, and then time began to prickle around them. The hair stood up on the back of his neck, as a sound like the rushing of water after the break of a dam began softly and then rose and rose and rose. The building, which had gone relatively quiet as the Time Lords had realized that the Moment had not been pressed after all, suddenly began to fill with screams. It jerked as the entire planet began revolving away from the space it was occupying.

The Doctor looked up from his empty hand to the Lord President, who was staring at him in horror.

“What have you done?” demanded the Lord President.

“I…” said the Doctor, in bewilderment.

And then the Lord President lifted a gun the Doctor hadn’t noticed. The Doctor stared at it. Songs ending, he thought, as the unmistakable sound of a sonic blaster zinged through the air. He closed his eyes, waiting for the moment of impact…and nothing happened. The building quaked around them as the planet moved, and the screams sounded, but he felt nothing. He opened his eyes.

The Lord President was laying dead in front of them. He looked at Athena, who was staring at the body with his much shock as he felt. He looked at Brem, who also looked shocked. And then he looked beyond Brem, to where the Master in the doorway was still holding a gun.

“Okay,” said the Master, “he was bloody annoying, didn’t you think?”

The Master looked at him, and attempted a shrug. And the Doctor, after a second of stunned processing, mouthed thank you. The Master frowned and looked away.

“He’ll regenerate, won’t he?” said Brem, still staring at the body.

The Doctor sprang into action. “He will regenerate,” agreed the Doctor. “But it won’t matter.” He leaned over and grabbed Athena’s hand, then Brem’s.

“Why won’t it matter?” asked Athena, as the Doctor dragged them out of the room at full speed.

“Because they’re being pulled back into the time lock,” he answered, threading them through the chaotic wailing crowds of panicked Time Lords.

“My God, could they be quiet,” muttered Brem, and the Doctor knew, once again, that the sound of all that panic in his kids’ heads had to be painful beyond belief.

“Am I being pulled back with them?” asked Athena, fearfully.

“No,” he said. “Because the signal was broken. That’s why the Lord President asked me what I had done.”

“The signal was broken?” echoed Athena. “How?”

“I have no idea. But the white-point star disappeared.”

“It what?”

“It disappeared. We’re in the center of a paradox right now, and we’ve got to get out. We weren’t on Gallifrey when it entered the time lock, we should be able to escape it, but we’ve got to move now.” There were fewer Time Lords now, the Doctor barreled them down a flight of stairs at such an increased pace that he half-stumbled as he hit the last step but kept them going, moving by memory through hallways that had ceased to exist lifetimes ago.

“Where are we going?” asked Brem.

“Here,” he said, flinging open a final door and breathing a sigh of relief that the fighter ships were still there. He let go of the kids’ hands and raced into action, tugging open the pilot door of one of the ships. “You left Fort and Matt and Mum with the TARDIS, right?”

“Yes,” affirmed Brem, watching his father with wide, disbelieving eyes.

The Doctor disappeared into the ship, settling himself into the captain’s chair, flipping on the controls.

Brem’s head appeared in the opening of the door.

“I’ve been broadcasting to Fortuna to get the TARDIS back to Cunodys. She’ll do it, they’ll be safe, that just leaves us.” He looked at his kids’ identical floored expressions. “Come on, get in,” he said.

“Do you know how to fly one of these things?” asked Brem, in amazement.

“Bremsstrahlung,” he said, turning on the engines. “Want to know something I never told you about the Time War?” He looked back at him. “I was a general. Now get in.”

Brem looked, for once, speechless, but he slid into the ship and settled into a seat, Athena following behind him.

“I’m buckling in,” said Brem, sounding dubious of his father’s ability to fly the ship properly.

“Look, you’re not the only one with tricks up your sleeves,” said the Doctor. “’Brem Tyler is his father’s son.’”

“I liked that,” said Brem.

“You’ve got style, I’ll give you that, kid,” he said, and couldn’t resist ruffling his hair as he reached out to pull the door closed.

And then he paused, because the Master was standing at the doorway to the landing dock, looking for all the world like a bloody lost puppy, and the Doctor swore under his breath and thought how the only reason they were going to get out in time was because he hadn’t just been regenerated by the Lord President because the Master had regenerated the Lord President instead.

“What is it?” asked Athena, looking in the same direction, and then noticed the Master. “He just saved our lives,” she pointed out, after a moment of silence.

“He tried to kill your brother,” the Doctor reminded her.

Athena looked at Brem.

“Then that makes it my decision, doesn’t it?” remarked Brem, mildly. “He saved our lives. And I think, in the midst of everything that’s happened today, maybe it’s time for an answering act of mercy.”

His father gazed at him for a second, then took a deep breath and shouted to the Master, “Oh, hurry up!” he called.

The Master suddenly came crashing into the cockpit. “Really?” he exclaimed. “This is the nicest thing you’ve ever done for me.”

“Stop it,” said the Doctor, severely, “and listen to me: You antagonize me, through time and space, and that’s fine, that’s what you do. You come near any of my children, ever again, and this game we play is over. Do you understand me? You will be done.” He turned away from the Master, settling into his chair. “Now close that door and sit down and don’t say a word. I am going to regret this with every bloody fiber of my being,” he muttered, and then engaged the thrusters and backed the ship out of the loading dock.

They crashed into something that caused all of them to nearly fall out of their chairs. The Master, who hadn’t buckled in yet, did fall out of his chair. Brem hit his head against the low curve of the ceiling, winced, and said, “Ow,” rubbing at it.

“Oops,” said the Doctor. “I’d forgotten how big these ships are.”

Brem and Athena both stared at him.

“It’s fine,” he assured them, hastily. “I’ve got it covered.” He tried again, moving more slowly this time.

“Your father has always been a terrible flyer,” said the Master.

“There’s still time for me to leave you here,” the Doctor bit out, as the ship broke through into orange Gallifreyan sky and the Doctor shifted into forward gear and zoomed away from the building.

Only to be met immediately by two ships flying at them shooting what were unmistakably bullets. Brem and Athena both ducked instinctively.

“Oh, bloody hell,” complained the Doctor. “The bloody Daleks are still bloody fighting a bloody war. You are going back into a time lock!” he told them, as he swung in his seat and pushed a button that knocked one of the ships out of the sky.

“Did you just that do that?” asked Brem, sounding astonished.

“Desperate times, Brem,” the Doctor answered, distracted, dodging another Dalek ship, as he flew higher and higher and higher—

“You’re not going to take this ship past the atmosphere!” exclaimed the Master.

“I absolutely am,” the Doctor replied, through gritted teeth, glancing at his readings and urging the ship forward.

“This ship hasn’t been spacerized!” complained the Master. Upon Athena’s look, he said, “It’s like winterizing your car. Only for space.”

“Yes. And it’s a luxury, and the ship’ll be fine,” said the Doctor.

“Your speed’s not high enough,” continued the Master, smugly. “You’re never going to break gravity.”

“D’you think you could help effectuate this rescue?” asked the Doctor, zapping his sonic screwdriver at a control so he push it up to 11. “Instead of just, you know, being useless?”

“Your dad’s soldiers just loved him, can’t you tell?” said the Master, but he leaned forward and pressed a few buttons.

The ship jumped forward, speed increasing.

“Brem,” said the Doctor, eyes flickering between the speedometer and the space horizon he could see coming up in front of them. “There’s a flashing red button over your head, do you see it?”

There was a moment of silence. “The one that says, in Gallifreyan, effectively, ‘never, ever push this’?”

“Yes. That one.”

“I see it,” said Brem, with grim resignation, as if he knew what was coming next. “What do you want me to do?”

“Push it.”

“Naturally,” said Brem, and pushed the button.

The ship shuddered around them, its speed building, and the Doctor leaned on the throttle as hard as he could, urging it go faster, faster, faster, his eyes on the speedometer.

“You’re not going to make it,” said the Master, also staring at the speedometer.

“Then that means we’re not going to make it, doesn’t it?” snapped the Doctor, staring at the speedometer. Then he paused and glanced over his shoulder at his terrified-looking kids. “We’re totally going to make it,” he promised.

The Master said something in Gallifreyan that neither of the kids had ever heard before, and the Doctor spared a moment to think that they had all learned a new and colorful curse word, and the Master ducked in his seat, as if to not see them fail to break gravity and get pulled back down to the planet below them, except that they burst through the edge of the atmosphere, barreling now into the blackness of the space beyond, and the ship, the effort over, stopped shuddering and settled, and the Doctor eased up on the throttle and pretended not to have been the least bit concerned. “See?” he said. “What’d I tell you? Nothing to it. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. Never had a doubt.”

The Master slowly straightened in his seat, frowned, and said, grudgingly, “Okay, that was some pretty flying.”

“Yeah. General,” he reminded him, and set the course for Cunodys below them, moving the ship onto cruise control.

“Show-off,” grumbled the Master.

“The planet’s gone,” said Athena, who had twisted in her seat to look behind them.

“Yeah,” said the Doctor, and did not look behind.

“So,” began Brem, slowly.

The Doctor sighed. “Go ahead. I can only imagine the number of questions you might have.”

“I do. A lot. I might make a list in my journal. But here is, I think, the most important question: We just escaped a time lock, right?”

“Yes.”

“Which we could do because we weren’t in the original time lock, right?”

“Yes.”

“But what about this ship? How did this ship escape the time lock?”

The Doctor paused. “You know what? Don’t think too hard about that one.”

“We forget it, so often,” remarked Athena, her voice holding wonder, “but we are really incredibly lucky.”

The Doctor looked in the rear-view mirror of the ship he was flying, at the two children in the backseat. Athena was retying her ponytail in her perpetual pink ribbon and looking out the window. Brem, his hair sticking up every which way, had found the ship’s instruction manual and was frowning as he flipped through it.

He loved them both so terrifyingly much that it overwhelmed him at that moment.

“Yes,” he choked out.

The Master looked at him in alarm. “You’re not going to cry, are you? Bloody hell, I’d rather be in a time lock, if you’re going to start crying.”

Next Chapter

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

jasminetea75.livejournal.com

*squeeeeeeeeee* Yes!!!! Love this and especially love the following.

“If there is consciousness inside the time lock,” spat out Brem, “if all of you, stuck in there, sit and dwell on this moment, then I want you to know this: Brem Tyler is his father’s son.”

Of course, Rose save the day as it should be.

From:

jasminetea75.livejournal.com

See I know hitting refresh a million times work. Still don't know how to edit my reply but oh well.

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From:

tzikeh.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-06-17 03:39 am (UTC) - Expand

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From:

earlgreytea68.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-06-18 02:13 am (UTC) - Expand

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earlgreytea68.livejournal.com - Date: 2010-06-18 02:12 am (UTC) - Expand

From:

glass-moment.livejournal.com

*flails all over this!*

I love that the whole family got involved in figuring this one out. I LOVE that Matt saved the day! And I may, I seriously may, love your Master as much as I love Matt. Which is saying a lot.

From:

It depends on my mood

Something About Stars (17/20)

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