How Fortuna Saved the Universe (14/24)

[earlgreytea68]

Title - How Fortuna Saved the Universe (14/24)
Author - earlgreytea68   
Rating - General
Characters - Nine, Ten, Eleven, Rose, Mickey, Jack, Jackie, Amy, Rory, 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 - Ch. 12

Chapter Thirteen

Fortuna stood, her hands against the solid yellow wood of her TARDIS, terrified to open the door and find that it was just a phone box, no longer bigger on the inside at all.

“What do you mean, gone?” asked Sylvain. “I don’t know what that means.”

She ignored him, bracing herself and opening the door. There was her TARDIS, warm and welcoming and bigger on the inside, just like always. She exhaled the breath she’d been holding and closed the door again.

“What are we doing?” Sylvain asked, watching her.

She turned to him. “We’re telepathic, remember I told you? But every other Time Lord in the universe just went out, inside my head. Like the flipping of a light switch.”

“What does that mean? Does that happen?”

“No. It’s never happened. And the only thing I can think that it means is that everyone’s dead.” Her voice trembled only a little bit as she said it.

“They all died all at once, how can that be?” Sylvain sounded bewildered.

“I don’t know, but no one’s here anymore.” She pointed to her head, and then she took a deep breath, biting at her lower lip, which was trembling.

“Can you, I don’t know, ring them or something?”

“Oh!” she realized. “Yes.” She dug into her cardigan, pulling out her mobile. Which was off. Probably a dead battery. She’d had to make do with a twenty-first century mobile, given the time period she’d been inhabiting, and she was rubbish at remembering to charge the thing. She zapped it with her sonic screwdriver, which gave it a charge, and then she called everyone in her family in succession. TARDISes, then mobiles. Every single number, the operator informed her, was beyond the galaxy.

Sylvain had watched her silently while she did this. Now he watched her shut the phone and put it back in her pocket. He waited, clearly uncertain as to how he needed to react to this crisis.

“My father is here,” she decided, calmly. “He doesn’t know he’s going to be my father yet, but he’s here, and he’ll know what to do.”

“Can you still feel him, then?”

“No. But maybe that’s because he’s not my father, really. Maybe that’s how it works. He was just here, Sylvain, he must still be here.” She thought she might start crying, and she told herself not to. “We’ll find him, and he’ll know what to do.”

She started walking toward the doorway, but Sylvain stopped her, tugged on her hand and then firmly interlaced their fingers. He squeezed her hand, and smiled very slightly, and she found herself smiling back in relief. Her head was empty, but Sylvain was right here. She wasn’t alone, she reminded herself.

They walked toward the doorway together, hand-in-hand, but they hadn’t yet reached it when the man walked through. A platinum blonde man in a bedraggled black hoodie, and Fortuna had seen that man before. She took an automatic step back, away from him. Sylvain, confused, looked between the two of them.

He held out his hands in an expression of glee. “Look! It’s a Doctor child! Fancy meeting you here!”

Fortuna’s sonic screwdriver was out, in her hand. She tugged Sylvain back, behind her.

“I bet,” continued the man, “that you were just looking for a Time Lord, weren’t you? Maybe not me, but won’t I do?”

Sylvain was struggling with her attempts to keep herself between him and the Master. He kept stepping out, and she kept side-stepping to push him back.

“Aren’t the two of you so adorable?” asked the Master, amused. “Now, Fortuna. Any questions for me?”

“I’m all set, thanks,” she said, around a tight smile. “Just on my way out, actually.”

“With your TARDIS?” asked the Master, an avaricious gleam in his eye.

Was her TARDIS locked? Had she locked it? She couldn’t remember. She refused to glance in its direction.

The Master looked at Sylvain. “So you’re Sylvain,” he said. “Sylvain San Broglio.” Fortuna was surprised, but hoped it didn’t show. She didn’t dare look at Sylvain. She once again determinedly stepped in front of him. “Oh, come on, don’t you want to know how I know your name? The two of you are so uninquisitive.” When they stayed silent, he continued, looking at Sylvain, “I’ve heard so much about you, in particular. From your brother.” His eyes moved to Fortuna. “You, however. Well, that’s just some good, old-fashioned stalking. You lot are messy, messy Time Lords. Your dad’s got sloppy, you know it? He’s not used to having Time Lords around him anymore. Any good Time Lord knows to keep a secret, but your dad’s timeline, ooh, it’s so clear, clear as crystal, clear as morpite, clear as the Golden String of the Golden Harp of Palmyssius. He’s not even hiding it, it’s just out there, for anyone to see. All the forks, all the choices he made, everything. Do you know where we are right now, Fortuna?” He took a step closer to her. She was about to move back without Sylvain’s assistance, but Sylvain gave her a little shove anyway. “This is Versailles, 1745. This is the night your father dances with Madame de Pompadour. He doesn’t realize it, but this is the most important night of his nine hundred years of life. Because this is where he makes the decision, to stay who he is, in the life he always had, or to have all of you. That decision gets made tonight, with what he does tonight and how he lets it affect his little domestic scene on the TARDIS. You just changed history tonight, Fortuna. Your history.” The Master waved his hand about. “Oops,” he grinned.

There was a sudden explosion of smoke right in front of the Master. Fortuna jumped, as the Master started coughing, but Sylvain reacted immediately, grabbing her and pulling her to the TARDIS with him. She hadn’t locked the door; they tumbled right in, and then she scrambled to shut it behind them, making sure every lock that held it was secured.

She nearly stumbled in her haste to get to the console, to get to the controls.

“What?” he asked, standing on the opposite side of her. “What should I do?”

She spoke between short, panicked bursts of breath. “There are three red buttons. Press the second one three times and the third one two times.”

“Got it,” he said.

“And then the crank, turn the crank again.” She checked over her coordinates quickly, making sure they were right. Then she brought the mallet down. “What was that thing?”

“Standard issue Time Agency stealth smoke device. I figured we’d heard enough out of him. Was he making any sense to you?”

“No. And yes. And that’s the kind of sense the Master makes.” The TARDIS was struggling thickly through the Vortex. Fortuna walked around the console, nervous, watching the readings.

“You know him, then?”

“Oh, yes. He’s an old friend of my father’s. An old friend of my father’s.”

“Is he another Time Lord? He said he was.”

“Yes.”

“But I thought there was only…your family. Is it your family and him?”

“I forgot about him. We knew about him, but it had been so long since any of us had…And we can’t feel him, he hides in our heads. I forgot about him.” She tapped her fingers impatiently on the console, and then looked at Sylvain. “I wonder how he knows your brother.”

Sylvain would have answered, except that the TARDIS chose that moment to crash. He fell to the floor, although Fortuna, who had been expecting it, stayed upright and regarded the TARDIS’s surroundings in the monitor.

“Where are we now?” Sylvain asked, picking himself back up and looking at the monitor as well.

“My grandmother’s flat. We’re supposed to all meet here in a time of crisis like this.”

“Can you feel anyone else?”

“No. Not yet.” Fortuna kept examining her surroundings. “But it’ll be okay. This is the plan.” She turned away from the monitor and pulled open the door determinedly, stepping out into the Powell Estates with what she hoped was more confidence than she really felt.

She felt Sylvain step out behind her, and she made sure the door was pulled closed and locked.

“This way,” she said, and led the way up the stairs to her grandmother’s flat. She knocked on the door, and turned back to Sylvain. “Normally we land inside her flat, but the TARDIS was fighting that.”

“So your grandmother is…human?”

“Yeah. My mum’s mum.”

“But you said your mum wasn’t human.”

“It isn’t that my mum’s not human, it’s that she’s unique.”

The door opened, and Fortuna turned, smiling, because she felt now like she was on the verge of everything being okay.

“Who are you?” demanded the woman who opened the door, belligerently. She wasn’t much older than Fortuna, and she looked like she was very plainly drunk.

“S-sorry,” Fortuna stammered. “Wrong…flat. Sorry.”

The woman frowned and slammed the door shut.

She felt Sylvain look at her expectantly, but she had run out of ideas. She had changed everyone’s future, that’s what the Master had said. Her grandmother wasn’t in this flat because it was no longer her grandmother’s flat. She had changed it, she had to fix it.

She turned, lifting up her chin in determination. “We just have to reverse it. Whatever the Master has done, we need to reverse it.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“We’re going to go back and we’re going to talk to him more until I can figure out what he’s done, exactly, and then we’re going to reverse it.” Her mobile trilled in the pocket of her cardigan, and she fumbled for it eagerly, looking at the number. It wasn’t any member of her family, but it was Jack, and she would take it at that moment. “Jack,” she said into the phone.

“Fortuna,” he replied. “Am I glad to hear you. Everybody else’s phones are off, I’m getting this weird message, can you get through to them?”

“No,” she said. “Jack—”

“The Rift is off the charts right now, I really need your father to—”

“He’s gone,” choked out Fortuna.

Jack paused. “What do you mean, gone?”

“He’s gone. They winked out of existence. I’m the only one left.”

“But…how?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and she looked off toward her TARDIS and said, grimly, “But I’m going to find out for you.”

***

“What are you doing here?” asked his bow-tied self, blinking around the library. “How did you get here?”

“Where’s Rose?” he demanded.

“Rose?” echoed his other self. “Well, she’s in the other universe, remember?”

“The other universe? What are you talking about? We got her back, and she was immortal, and…” His bow-tied self was looking at him with distinct pity. He trailed off, making connections in his head. He looked around the library. Somehow, the room felt emptier than its counterpart in his TARDIS. “You don’t have Rose,” he realized. “You don’t have children…”

His bow-tied self lifted his eyebrows. “Children?”

“Yes. I have children.” He waved a hand between the two of them. “We have children.”

His bow-tied self looked at the redhead. “He’s clearly had some serious trauma,” he confided.

“I haven’t had any trauma. And I’m not deaf,” retorted the Doctor, hotly.

“But who is he?” asked the redhead.

“Come on,” said his bow-tied self to him. “We’ll check you over, and see what to do from there.” He disappeared from the doorway.

“‘Check me over’?” echoed the Doctor, and followed him because he felt like he didn’t have a choice. “I don’t need to be checked over.”

“You’ve crossed our timeline and are babbling about children who died lifetimes ago,” his bow-tied self replied, without slowing down. “You need to be checked over.”

“What children that died lifetimes ago?” the Doctor asked, fear in his heart. “Brem and Athena and Fortuna?”

His bow-tied self sent him a confused glance over his shoulder. “Who?”

The Doctor sighed in relief. “Oh. You’re talking about the other children. I’m not talking about those children.”

“He’s me,” his bow-tied self said to the redhead.

“You?” she echoed.

“Yes. It’s complicated. If I’m hurt, to save myself from dying, I can change every cell in my body and regenerate into a new person. Oh. Turns out, I guess, it’s not that complicated. In here.” The bow-tied self gestured to the Doctor, while the redhead made guppy faces.

“I know where my own infirmary is,” the Doctor snapped, “and I don’t need the infirmary. Would you bloody listen to me?” Because his bow-tied self was scurrying all over the infirmary doing who knew what. “You are so bloody stubborn.”

His bow-tied self paused to point at him. “We are bloody stubborn.” Then he grabbed something out of a cupboard and thrust it at him. “Here. That might make you feel better.”

It was a doll. The Doctor stared at it. “Why would this make me feel better?”

His bow-tied self gestured to it. “Children.”

The Doctor stared at him now. Then he tossed the doll onto the examining couch. “My children are grown.”

“Oh, dear,” his bow-tied self said to the redhead. “His psychosis has gone on so long, his imaginary children have grown up.”

“Come. Here,” the Doctor bit out between his teeth, and leaned over and placed an index finger on either side of his bow-tied self’s head.

It took only a second of thought before his bow-tied self recoiled with a gasp. He stared at him, his expression one of dawning horror.

“See?” said the Doctor, and crossed his arms.

“But…But…” he sputtered, in disbelief. “How can that be?”

A man appeared in the doorway. “I just made some tea.” He looked at the Doctor. “Oh, do we have a visitor? Should I make an extra cup?”

***

“Where’s the Doctor?” Rose demanded. “Where’s the TARDIS?”

“Wha…?” Mickey stared at her, bewildered. “You’re bringing that all up again now? In the middle of the night?”

“Bringing it up again?” Rose echoed, her stomach sinking in terror. She scrambled out of the bed—it made her feel sick to be in those unfamiliar bedsheets. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, that was years ago, Rose. You know exactly where the TARDIS is, where it always is. Now, can we go back to bed?”

“Where is the TARDIS?” Rose whispered.

“Where it’s been stuck ever since the Doctor sent you home.”

Rose stared at him, as he snuggled under the covers and delivered this news like it wasn’t the most terrible thing she’d ever heard in her life. “We never got it open,” she realized.

Mickey didn’t answer.

Rose thought. She was in some kind of alternate universe, she thought. A universe where she had never gotten the TARDIS back open. Which meant she had never had her children… “The kids,” she said.

“I’m sure they’re fine,” he replied, grouchily. “If you didn’t wake them up with your sudden hysteria.”

Rose stood frozen for a moment. Then she moved gingerly out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her. She was in a hallway, and she followed it, slowly, not really wanting to, until she reached another bedroom. Moonlight streamed in through the window, pooling on two beds in which slept two little girls, not more than five or six. Well, one of them was sleeping. The other one twisted and looked at her and said, “Are you okay, Mummy?”

Rose stared at her. A child. Her child. And yet not her child. Her heart was aching with the children she was missing, and she felt nothing for the child in front of her.

“I’m okay, sweetheart,” she managed, which was what she would have said to Athena or Fortuna, if they had asked, but which felt like nothing more than playing a part to her. She smiled, hopefully comfortingly. “Go back to sleep.”

The little girl beamed at her, and then snuggled back into bed.

Rose took a deep breath and walked back into the bedroom she’d woken up in. Mickey had turned off the light and was snoring. Rose found the en suite, turned on the shower, pulled off the unfamiliar pajamas she was wearing, and stepped into the hot water. She curled, sitting on the floor of the shower and letting the water pound down on her, leaned her forehead against her knees, and wept until she couldn’t cry anymore.

Then she stood carefully, splashed water over her face, reached out, and turned off the shower.

The time for self-indulgence was over, she thought. She needed to figure out how to get home.

She pulled the pajamas back on, because she didn’t feel like looking for other clothing, and found the kitchen of the flat and put a pot of coffee on to brew.

***

“How can that blonde be your mum?” Leather Jacked crossed his arms and looked a bit smug, as if he’d just pointed out a huge hole in Brem’s logic.

“Where I come from, she goes with you, and she falls in love with you and you fall in love with her and then you have children.”

“Children. Multiple.”

“Yes. Me. And my sisters.”

“Where are your sisters?” He asked it indulgently, as if humoring an insane person into telling the whole story so that the diagnosis at the end can be proper and complete.

“I don’t know. With my parents, I guess.”

“And how did you get here?” Leather Jacked leaned his hip against the console.

“I don’t know. I was…I was on the library on my TARDIS—”

“You have a TARDIS?”

“Yes,” Brem answered, shortly. “We all do. And my multi-planetary multi-directional arundifylius started dinging—”

“And where’d you get one of those?”

“My father gave it to me.” Brem considered, then amended, “You gave it to me, I suppose. Look, can I just tell the story without interruptions?”

Leather Jacket lifted his hands expansively. “Go ahead. Tell me the story.”

“Thank you.” Brem thought. “I guess I don’t really have a story to tell,” he admitted. “Everyone disappeared inside my head, and I tried to get to my grandmother’s flat, and instead I ended up here, with you.”

“So your TARDIS is here, then?” asked Leather Jacket, still sounding deeply amused.

“Yes,” Brem answered, staunchly.

“Can I see it?”

“Yes. Of course you can see it. I’m not lying, you know.”

“Never said you were.”

Brem huffed impatiently, but walked out of the blue TARDIS and confidently over to where he’d left his red TARDIS. He turned back as he stuck his key in the door, and noticed that Leather Jacket was already staring in amazement. Brem couldn’t help being smug, as he opened the door and said to him, “Don’t stand there gaping, hurry up.”

Leather Jacket did walk onto the TARDIS and looked around him in shock. Then he looked at Brem. “You have a TARDIS.”

“I told you that I did, didn’t I?”

“But how’d you get a TARDIS?”

“I told you—”

“No, you didn’t. You told me some insane story about being my future son, but you didn’t tell me how I managed to find you a TARDIS when mine is the only one left in the universe.”

“You grew it,” Brem said. “You sliced a sliver off of your TARDIS and you figured out how to grow them.”

Leather Jacket continued to stare at him. “I did that?”

“Yes.”

Leather Jacket stared around at the TARDIS.

Brem saw his opening. He ventured in slowly. “I know so much. Really. You’ve told us a lot. So much about the war and life on Gallifrey before that, so much about your travels and adventures, so much about your TARDIS. You can quiz me, if you want. But I’m telling the truth. And you know it.”

Leather Jacket transferred his disbelieving stare to him. He didn’t agree, but he also didn’t protest.

“Excellent,” said Brem, deciding the disagreement was over. “Now let’s discuss how we’re getting me back home.”

***

Not a single member of Athena’s family was answering any communication device he had for them. Matt, listening to the double-beats of the four hearts he was monitoring, paced up and down the length of his infirmary and tried to think of what to do. He knew he was supposed to go in search of the Doctor, he knew he had promised Athena, but he was loath to leave her, unconscious and alone. But he also didn’t see much of an option.

“Okay,” he said to himself, and then stopped pacing and looked over at Athena, who was silent and still, which Athena never, ever was. He walked over and peered at the IV he’d set up and checked all her vitals again. They weren’t the best vitals in the universe, but they weren’t terrible, and they were stable enough to hold while he darted quickly out of the TARDIS. “Theenie,” he said, pushing her hair back off of her forehead tenderly, “and baby-with-a-name-we-haven’t-picked-out-yet,” he added, with a glance toward the mound of her abdomen, “I have to go find your father—and grandfather—which is what I have promised to do, so that means I’m going to be gone for a bit, but it won’t be more than fifteen minutes, and then I’ll be back, with the Doctor, and we’ll sort this all out, okay?” Nobody responded to him, but four Time Lord hearts kept beating, and he supposed that was all he could ask for at the moment.

He leaned down and kissed Athena’s forehead, and then he took off out of their TARDIS at a run.

Athena had done a decent job of landing, even in distress, and he dashed across the pavement and up the stairs to Jackie’s flat, and he pounded on it. The door was going to open, he thought, and everyone would be slightly hysterical with fear and then they would come back to his TARDIS and they would tell him what had gone wrong and they would fix it and everything would be fine. That was what Time Lords did, and he had had the good fortune to marry into a whole family of them.

The door swung open. Jackie was standing in the doorway. It was very clearly Jackie, but it wasn’t the Jackie he knew. She looked far, far younger. She was holding a blonde-haired toddler. And she looked at him without recognition.

“Yeah?” she said. “Can I help you?”

“I…” Matt was at a loss as to what to say.

The toddler in her arms squirmed. “Stop it, Rose,” Jackie said to her. “Behave.”

Matt stared at the toddler. “Rose,” he repeated, stunned.

Jackie immediately held the toddler closer to her, looking at him with narrowed eyes. “Oi,” she said. “What do you want?”

Matt turned back to her and took a deep, shaky breath. “Nothing,” he said. “Never mind, it was…nothing.” He forced himself to move dazedly away from Jackie’s door, and after a second he heard it swing shut.

Which meant it didn’t matter that he stopped walking and leaned heavily against the nearest wall and forced himself to think. He was stuck out-of-time, alone, with a wife whose biology he still didn’t fully understand and a baby whose biology he understood even less. There was not only no one to help, but no one was going to show up, either.

Over his head, thunder rumbled, and Matt looked up at the sky. A storm was approaching.

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