How Fortuna Saved the Universe (13/24)

[earlgreytea68]

Title - How Fortuna Saved the Universe (13/24)
Author - earlgreytea68   
Rating - General
Characters - Ten, Rose, OCs
Spoilers - Through "A Christmas Carol," just to be safe.
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 - Fortuna gets her story. And it's pretty timey-wimey.
Author's Notes - Huge thanks to Kristin, chicklet73 , and lorelaisquared , who all talked through plot points and gave early drafts once-overs. And, last but not least, everlasting thanks to chicklet73   for beta-ing, with flair.    

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

 

Chapter Twelve

Fortuna walked confidently through Versailles, in Converse, argyle socks, scandalously short skirt by the standards of the day, and a cardigan. Sylvain, following behind her, shook his head and thought, What the hell, and kept moving with a shrug. The Time Agency drummed into you that you should never stand out in the time period you were visiting in. Fortuna clearly didn’t hold to that.

The hallways they were moving through were getting more and more crowded. People were boggling at Fortuna’s legs, but Fortuna wasn’t noticing.

“They’re having some kind of ball,” she said to Sylvain helpfully, as she pushed through the crowds.

Everyone was dressed elegantly and beautifully, accompanied by the slightly sweet stench of a time before modern plumbing. It was loud, well-bred laughter and old-fashioned French. Fortuna moved confidently through everything, eyes taking it all in.

“Do you see your father?” he asked.

“No. Not yet. Do you see a commotion anywhere? He’s usually in the middle of a commotion.”

“This whole thing is kind of a commotion,” Sylvain pointed out, as someone jostled him. It was unclear how anyone could get any dancing done in this environment.

They broke, abruptly, out of the crowd and into the ballroom, which was much less crowded, possibly because it was even bigger than the oversized rooms they’d been moving through. There were still scores of couples out on the dance floor, all of them dressed period appropriately except for a man in a brown pin-striped suit that looked more twenty-first century. He lacked the powdered wig the rest of the men wore, too.

“Is that your dad?” he asked Fortuna, who had stopped and was staring at the dancers on the dance floor.

“Yeah,” she said. She sounded stunned.

Sylvain looked back at the floor. The man was dancing with a gorgeous, richly dressed blonde who was batting her eyelashes at him. “Is that your mum?” he asked.

“No,” she said. Now she sounded furious. He was pretty sure she bit out the answer from between her teeth.

“Oh. Well, that explains the look on your—Fortuna, wait.”

Because Fortuna had walked right out onto the dance floor, dodging the swirling couples. She heard Sylvain call her back, but she ignored him. Because there was her father, blithely dancing with another woman, with her mother nowhere in sight, and of course she was going to say something.

People kept bumping into her as they danced, and a few of them commented about the length of her skirt, or made other disapproving comments, and probably they were about to call the eighteenth-century equivalent of security on her, but Fortuna kept walking until she reached her father.

The blonde he was with was laughing at him. “No, no, you know much more about dancing than you let on.” Then she noticed Fortuna and frowned over Dad’s shoulder at her.

Fortuna tapped her father on the shoulder. He turned and looked at her blankly.

“Dad,” she said, scathingly, hands on her hips. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He stared at her, and she thought he was trying to come up with some kind of justification, his eyes looked wild with panic. But what he said was, “Dad?”

There was shock in his voice, shock plain on his face, and she believed it. He wasn’t faking this; she didn’t think it would ever have occurred to him to bluff his way out of this by pretending not to know her. This was her father before he had become her father.

“Sorry,” she managed, while Dad-who-wasn’t stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. Which she knew now he hadn’t. “Sorry, sorry,” she gasped, stumbling backward, and she was causing chaos on the dance floor, couples tripping over her. Even the music ground to an offended halt. A murmur was growing in the crowd, as more and more people turned to stare at her. Her father was in the middle of a commotion, but this time she was the one who had caused it.

Someone’s hand enclosed hers suddenly, and for a split second she thought it was someone she didn’t know, a stranger seeking to detain her, but when she turned toward the person, automatically getting ready to grab her hand away, it was Sylvain.

“Come on,” he murmured. “Let’s get out of here.”

She nodded, and followed him as he wended their way through the crowd. He was apologizing, flashing French charm everywhere, and, while people still looked disapproving, the music had started up again, and she heard the swish of dresses behind her, the muted clicking of shoes underneath those dresses as the couples began to move in time again. One of those couples being a father who wasn’t her father, and a woman who wasn’t her mother. Which was worrying enough, without the fact that she’d crossed another timeline.

She was following Sylvain blindly, but, when she finally started to pay attention, she realized that he was going the right way. His sense of direction must have been excellent, because Versailles was a veritable maze.

“What happened in there?” he asked, over his shoulder, as the hallways began to grow less crowded, as the sound of the music became muted and faded. It could all have been a terrible dream.

“He didn’t know me,” she said. “It’s before he…I crossed a timeline.”

“Do you do that a lot?” he asked. He sounded as if he doubted her time-traveling ability.

She bristled and took her hand out of his. “I never do that. I’ve done it only once before, ever, and that wasn’t very long ago. It’s concerning, actually, because the TARDIS crashed us here. The TARDIS brought us here, I didn’t set any coordinates.”

“Does the TARDIS normally do things like that?”

“Sometimes. If we’re needed somewhere. But we weren’t needed here, this is the wrong place in the timeline for me. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I wasn’t being accusatory,” Sylvain said, after a moment, as they entered the room with the TARDIS, “it’s just that a crossed timeline is serious. And dangerous. If you’ve altered the timeline—”

“Sylvain, I was a time traveler before I was born,” she said, pausing to fish out her key. “You don’t need to tell me—”

“Fortuna, really, I’m not being critical. I’m asking you what you think we should do.”

Fortuna fit the key in the lock and took a deep breath. “Sorry, I’m being defensive, aren’t I? The thing is, this has only happened once before to me, and…” She decided it had to be said. She looked at him. “And you were involved then, too.”

He blinked. “What?”

“I crossed my own timeline in Paris. And I ran into you.”

“You already knew who I was? That day you tried to use the psychic paper on Madame Richaud?”

“No. All I knew what that you were going to know me, and I was going to know you. The thing is, before the day I met you, I never crossed a timeline. And now I’ve done it twice.”

He looked incredulous. “And you think I have something to do with it?”

“I think you’re chasing a master criminal capable of somehow harnessing the power of a black hole. Or, at least, making it look like he’s done that. I don’t think you’re manipulating timelines, but I think it’s fairly clear you’ve got an enemy who’s probably capable of doing it, of throwing off the way time machines are carving their way through time.”

Sylvain looked at her for a second. He looked anxious and uncertain. “I have to tell you something,” he said, finally. “About Valentin.”

She wanted to hear it, she really did, except that, at that moment, her head went empty. The effect of it was as if someone had reached out and abruptly cut off her arm, or squeezed all the oxygen out of her lungs. It wasn’t that it hurt physically, except that somehow it did, deep inside of her. She gasped, clawing mentally in panic.

“Fortuna,” said Sylvain, in alarm, and reached for her. “What is it?”

“Everyone’s gone,” she managed. “Everyone’s gone.”

***

The Doctor was in the library. He was studying a book of ancient runes. It had been a couple of centuries since he had read the book, and it was always good to keep up with ancient runes. Because he’d already read the book, because he’d already studied these runes, his mind was wandering, turning over the puzzle of Fortuna and her Time Agent and her black hole. He’d rung Fortuna’s TARDIS, and she hadn’t picked up. He’d rung her mobile, and it had gone straight to voicemail. Fortuna was fine, he was sure—there was no real panic in his head from her, although she did seem to be miffed about something at the moment, and she would call him immediately if there was an issue. But he couldn’t shake off the idea that he was missing something, something obvious, something about the black hole…

Getting a new memory was an odd and not entirely pleasant experience, because it always shifted the ground all around it, and it took a while for the rest of your memories to settle into place around it. New memories, inserted into old, always announced themselves like clarion calls. No one could change your timeline quietly. There was a comfort in that. And it was the reason why he knew immediately the moment when he first remembered running into Fortuna at Versailles with Reinette. Fortuna before he had known who Fortuna was, when she had just been a naggingly familiar blonde (she looked like Rose, of course, he just hadn’t been able to recognize it then) dressed as if she’d been out of time, who had called him “Dad.”

But that was a problem.

Because Fortuna had never been at Versailles.

The Doctor dropped the book he was holding, although he didn’t notice. Fortuna had never been at Versailles, and, even as he was absorbing the implication of that, Fortuna winked out in his head. Not just Fortuna, but Brem and Athena as well and the tiny flickering presence of Athena’s child. The Doctor had experienced that sudden headful of silence once before in his life, after he had pressed the Moment. He had never wanted to experience it ever again, the suffocating blanket of it. Something had gone wrong somewhere. Something had gone very, very wrong.

“Rose!” he shouted, starting to take off at a run from the library, but he didn’t even make it to the doorway before a redhead in a far-too-short skirt appeared in it, looking at him wide-eyed.

He drew to a stop and stared at her. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“Me? Who the hell are you? How did you get in here?” she demanded.

“What?” he sputtered at her, in disbelief. He had a million responses for her, about how this was his TARDIS and she was the intruder and how had she gotten in here and where was Rose.

But every single one of them died on his lips when another person appeared behind her, a ridiculously young man with far too much hair and a bowtie. The Doctor didn’t have to be told he was looking at a future version of himself. These were thing s Time Lords just knew.

They looked across at each other for a moment.

And then this younger/older bow-tied version of him commented, “Oh, dear. This can’t possibly be good.”

***

Rose woke up, and she sat straight up in alarm. The room was silent. There was no hum. She had never heard the TARDIS silent before.

Beside her, the shape of the Doctor shifted in his sleep. For a moment, she felt panic. Silent TARDIS, sleeping Doctor—was her Doctor sick?

“Wake up,” she said to him, somewhat desperate.

“Rose,” mumbled the shape next to her. “’S the middle of the night.”

It wasn’t the Doctor. Not his voice. Not her Doctor. She was in bed with a strange man in a strange room.

Rose, panicked, reached for the bedside table, fumbling around. There had to be a light, somewhere, there had to be. She found a lamp and managed to switch it on.

“Oi,” said the man next to her. “Bloody hell, Rose.” He squinted up at her.

She stared down at Mickey.

And then she screamed.

***

Brem was sitting in his library. In front of him were stretched pages and pages of Gallifreyan calculations, all of them having to do with black holes, and all of them matching Fortuna’s sonic screwdriver readings. It was almost too perfect, the whole thing. Stars were like people. There were ways in which they should function, but no two functioned exactly alike, it was unheard of. Fortuna’s sonic screwdriver readings matched those of the definition of a black hole down to the kiosecond. That was so unlikely. As unlikely as a black hole showing up in Paris in the first place.

The multi-planetary multi-directional arundifylius that his father had given him for his birthday dinged where he had left it on his coffee table.

Brem looked over at it in surprise. A dinging multi-planetary multi-directional arundifylius. Probably not a good sign.

It dinged again. And then again. And then again. Brem, alarmed, stood up and walked over to it. It was now dinging so violently that it was in danger of shaking itself off the table. Brem caught it, and it vibrated in his hands frantically, before falling abruptly silent.

Brem didn’t notice the sudden silence of the multi-planetary multi-directional arundifylius. Because what he primarily noticed was the sudden silence in his head.

He dropped the multi-planetary multi-directional arundifylius and raced to his control room, tugging at the controls. He had been in the Vortex, but he knew he couldn’t stay there. They had had this plan from the moment they had begun traveling separately. If we ever can’t reach each other, meet at Grandma’s. Even as he set the coordinates, he dialed every TARDIS in his family, and then every mobile. He kept getting the cool, amused voice of a thirty-second century operator. You have dialed beyond the galaxy. Please remember your limitations.

The TARDIS was fighting his landing pattern, which alarmed him even more. His TARDIS never fought with him.

Brem wasn’t really prone to fear. He’d been afraid in his life, of course—many, many times—but he had never let it take over. He had always been confident that, if he just thought, he could fix anything and everything. That had always been a truth of his life, his trust in his ability to make things right. So it took Brem a second to realize that he was frankly terrified. The Vortex could be falling to pieces all around them, for all he knew. The rest of his family seemed to have blinked out of existence. He could be in some kind of parallel universe, and he might never figure out how to get back, and he would never see any of them ever again.

Brem bit back his panic, swallowing it. It wasn’t going to do him any good. He whacked viciously on the console with his mallet, forcing the TARDIS into obedience, and even so he crash-landed violently, the emergency systems going off with an insistent whine and the lights blinking over into conservation mode. Brem caught himself from falling only just, and wrenched his arm in the process.

“Ow,” he said, moving it experimentally as he brought up his outside surroundings on the monitor. It looked like the Powell Estates, but he wasn’t sure if he should trust that. Maybe, he thought, reaching cautiously for his sonic and his coat, he’d just have a quick look around.

He winced as he shrugged on his coat. His shoulder was throbbing a bit. He hoped that wore off soon. He pocketed the sonic and exited his TARDIS and very carefully locked it behind him. He had no idea what was going on, and he needed his TARDIS to be safe.

His hands in his pockets, one hand closed around his sonic, he walked slowly through the concrete yard of the Powell Estates. It was nighttime, and it was fairly quiet, and he wandered, uncertain what he was looking for. Well, more TARDISes, but he didn’t see any more. He drew up, hesitating. He could go see his grandmother, but something told him not to. There was something not right about all of this.

And then his mother walked right past him. Well, it wasn’t his mother, not really, she looked very young, and she was hand-in-hand with a black man he’d never seen before.

“It was bigger on the inside,” the man was babbling at her, looking stricken.

“Yeah, but, wasn’t so bad, was it?” rejoined his mother-who-wasn’t. She looked uncertain, was chewing at a thumbnail, and she gave him a vacant smile as she walked past him.

He was out-of-time, he thought, turning to stare after them, that much was clear. But bigger on the inside. There was only one thing he’d ever really heard universally described as bigger on the inside.

His mother turned and looked over her shoulder at him, curious, and he realized he was staring. He quickly turned away, and, before he could think himself out of it, walked toward and then into the alley his mother and the unknown man had come out of. It was dingy, and it was empty. No TARDIS.

He was disappointed. He was stuck now in this time/place with a mother who hadn’t given birth to him yet and some bloke he’d never even seen before, and what he wanted was a—

Vworp, vworp, went the air around him, and he stared, taking a few steps back, as the wind whipped around him and his father’s blue TARDIS faded into existence.

Brem was so relieved he closed his eyes for a second. When his father opened that door, he was going to do something he hadn’t done since childhood and smother him in a hug.

When the door opened, he found himself looking at a man in a black leather jacket, and his hearts sank.

The black leather jacket Doctor looked just as disappointed to see him. “Did she go, then?” he asked.

“Who?” Brem asked, stupidly.

“Never mind,” sighed the Doctor, and went to close the door.

“Wait, wait, wait, wait.” This Doctor was better than no Doctor at all, Brem decided, and scrambled over to him and then past him, into the TARDIS.

Leather Jacket was clearly astonished. “What do you think this is?” he exclaimed. “You can’t just come barging in here!”

“I need to talk to you,” Brem said, urgently. “I need to tell you something absolutely insane, and I need you to believe me.”

Leather Jacket narrowed his eyes. “Wait a second. Aren’t you goin’ to tell me it’s bigger on the inside?”

“What?” said Brem, blankly, and then looked around him. “Oh. No. I already knew that.”

“How’d you already know that?” Leather Jacket crossed his arms. “Do I know you?”

“Not yet. You’re going to.”

“No, I’m not. Not with you standing there. You’re messing with the timelines, get out.” Leather Jacket opened the door.

“I can’t,” Brem protested. “I don’t know where else to go and I don’t know what else to do. You’ve got to help me.”

“Help you? Help you do what?”

Brem took a deep breath. “Alright. You’re my father.”

“You’re very confused, you are,” Leather Jacket told him.

“I’m not at all confused. Time is confused, and I need you to help me figure out how I’m getting home.” He did the only thing he could think to do, and fished his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and held it up.

Leather Jacket stared at it. “Where’d you get that?”

“You,” answered Brem. “And you want to know something even scarier?”

“What could possibly be scarier than that?”

“That blonde you just met is my mum.”

***

“It isn’t that I don’t totally respect your heritage, because you know I do, but I just can’t give the baby some normal human name like Mycroft.”

Matt, who was sitting on the floor in the nursery trying to piece together a hyper-complicated stroller from the planet Hiccup, looked over at his wife in the rocking chair. “‘Mycroft’ isn’t a normal human name.”

“Oh, no.” She looked chagrined. “It isn’t? It’s the only name in this whole book that even vaguely appealed to me!” She held up the human name book.

“Look,” he said, turning back to the parts, “it was just an idea. You can try out some alien names on me. I might like one of them.”

Athena was silent for a second, watching him.

He didn’t look up when he said, “You can ask me about Brem, you know.”

“I don’t want to pry,” she said, in a rush.

He chuckled. “Not prying.” Matt looked up at her briefly. “Brem’s worried.”

“Worried about what?”

Matt shrugged. “I don’t know. He says he has a terrible feeling. It must be a terrible feeling, because he’s being completely irrational.” Matt tried and failed to fit two pieces together. “He says a storm’s approaching.”

“A storm?” echoed Athena.

“Yes. Do you feel that, too?”

“No. Brem worries a lot, he’s like Dad like that, I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I told him that.” Matt gave up on the stroller and leaned back on his hands. “But he made me nervous. You’re happy, right?”

She looked quizzical. “What do you even mean?”

“You’re happy. With me,” he clarified. “We’re happy, right?”

Athena was about to ask if he’d lost his mind, but what happened next was that she lost hers. Everyone vanished inside her head. Everyone except for the tiny flicker that she realized now was her son. So she could feel him, she thought, dimly, and then, But—

She didn’t even have time to formulate the thought before the TARDIS tipped to one side, enough that the parts next to Matt went sliding against the wall. Matt scrambled for purchase. “What—” he began.

“Something’s wrong. Something’s very, very wrong,” she gasped, standing up.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, anxiously, getting to his feet as well. The ship was pitching underneath them. It felt, literally, like being on a ship, on the ocean.

“I don’t know,” she answered him, distractedly, as she struggled down the hallway toward the control room. “Everyone disappeared.”

“Everyone who?”

“My family, they’re all gone.”

“What do you mean they’re gone?”

“In my head. They’re gone. It’s empty.”

“But…” He watched her move over to the controls. “How can that be?”

“I don’t know.” She was flipping at controls. She looked calm, but drawn, and her hands were shaking somewhat.

“Where are we going?”

“My grandmother’s. We’re all supposed to meet at Grandma’s, if something like this happens, if we can’t find each other.”

“But why would it happen?”

“I don’t know. Dad was never clear on that, just said if it did, we needed to go to Grandma’s.” Athena brought her mallet down. And then she turned to Matt. She took his hands in hers and said, “I need you to stay calm for me.”

He was bewildered. “I am calm. What do you need me to do?”

“The TARDIS will take us to Grandma’s. She doesn’t want to, but she will. We may crash.”

“What happens if we crash?”

“It’ll be okay, don’t worry about me. Listen to me, this is the important part.”

“What’s important about it?”

“When we get there, I need you to find my father for me, do you understand? We really need him.” She seemed close to tears now.

“Okay,” he said, confused. “Okay. Of course I will. But where will you be?”

“I think there’s something wrong with the baby,” she said, and that was apparently by way of explanation of where she would be, because the next thing that happened was she fainted dead away in his arms.

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