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UPDATED: New Doctor Who Novella "Harmony" by TBITT

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thebunnyinthetardis
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« on: May 05, 2012, 05:36:53 am »

Chapter Twelve



Jackie Tyler’s assessment of the condition of his bedroom had not been in jest. The entire north-west corner of the historical manor house had sustained considerable damage. It would be encased in scaffolding for months. He entered the room cautiously, stepping lightly over the door which now lay flat on the floor, along with portions of the ceiling and much of what had been in the loft above--including a large wardrobe in which he had placed a number of items for safe keeping some years before. Well, he thought grimly, looking at the gaping hole in the plaster, it would save him the climb. Two flights of stairs had him nearly doubled over in pain as it was. Just getting to the house had been a chore, what with Lake Tyler floating away the patio furniture. He had carried Petunia so as to save her the swim. Jackie was going to be incensed about the ruined carpets on the ground floor.

The telescope he had kept out of guilt was no longer an issue as it lay broken to bits under the weight of the wardrobe. Along with just about everything else that had been on the bookcase in that corner of the room. Pages of notation on Trans-Space Thermodynamics--a project he’d begun one night while bored--and fragments of his laser screwdriver prototype littered the floor Amy’s search for clean, dry clothing earlier had apparently required the opening of every drawer in the room. He had left Scotland with nothing more than the clothes on his back last summer. Had arrived here with less after the fire in the Tardis. He made due.  As much as he loved a little shop and the exotic bazaars on a hundred planets, he wasn’t overly fond of 20th Century department stores. Unless it was the toy section.

Lowering himself painfully to his knees, he reached inside the open wardrobe, fingers scrabbling along the floor seam in back until he found the catch. He pulled out his sonic screwdriver, all shiny and fresh-looking. It switched on at the merest touch and a short burst was all it took to spring the latch, revealing the hidden compartment beneath. A blue jacket and trousers, the ones he had donned the day he was born, were folded neatly within. He lifted them out gently, passing his hand over the fabric. He drew a deep breath at the memory of charging his old enemy, Davros, with a weapon he had assembled within minutes of consciousness, only to be struck down just paces outside the Tardis. He had constructed that weapon in no time flat. Had every intention of using it. It might as well have been a hundred years ago now.

He tossed the suit over his shoulder and reached back in for what he actually wanted.  There. His hand closed around a Cybus Industry Earpod, a nasty little souvenir Pete Tyler had kept after the downfall of John Lumic. Following the Cybermen incident, Earpods had fallen out of favour, people once more turning to less invasive forms for accessing the WorldNet. Lucky for him, Pete had possessed the foresight to retain certain items of technology. Unknown to Pete, he had palmed it the very first day he had walked into Torchwood. He tossed the silver ear set up and down in his hand. It might just do and was more streamlined than adapting the Chameleon Arch. He didn’t have the best memories of using that particular device anyway.

“The Doctor said you‘re probably going to do something foolish and I‘m supposed to stop you.”

He startled at Amy’s appearance in the doorway, sliding the Earpod into his pocket as he clambered back to his feet. Petunia trailed after her, sniffing about the room before running off with one of his dirty socks.

“Sorry. We didn’t mean to creep in on you--and I’m sorry about the mess. Well, the clothes everywhere. Half the ceiling was already on the floor when I came in.”  She was soaked from the relentless downpour, her dripping jacket hanging limp around her.   ”I see the builders patched the leaking roof at least.”

He nodded, bending stiffly to pick up his discarded suit.

“Let me,” Amy told him, stooping to grab it. “It was in there, yeah?”

He nodded again as she offered to put it away in the wardrobe.

“I thought he was kidding about you and the suits,” she said, giving the rumpled clothing a good shake.

A twist of yellow spilled from one of the pockets and he inhaled the bright scent of lemon peel. Amy brushed it aside, refolding the coat and trousers neatly, smoothing the wrinkles beneath her fingers. An odd look crossed her face and she reached into a coat pocket, taking out a monochrome photograph of a llama. A sign above the building behind it read Shangri-La Tea Rooms. He had wondered where that had gone.

“Norman,” she read off the back, nonplussed, then slid it back where she had found it.  “Why am I not surprised.”

“Nothing surprises you,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He picked up a framed photograph of Rose and himself that had apparently fallen to the floor but had been picked up and placed on the bedside table. He traced the cracked glass with his fingers.  “You haven’t just travelled together. You’ve known him a long time, haven’t you?”

“I met him when I was a little girl. He… just took awhile getting back. I started to think he was a fairy tale.” She smiled as she spoke, but her bright eyes were older than her years.  Eyes that had seen too much.

“Oh,” he said softly. “Oh.”

It wouldn’t be the first time he had been accused of being a child’s imaginary friend. For the first time in years he thought of little Reinette Poisson, looking back at him through her bedroom fireplace in 18th Century Paris, as surprised to see him as he was to see her. Especially considering he was onboard an abandoned ship, deep in space. Ah. Beautiful Reniette, who grew up to be one the most remarkable women in the court of King Louis XV’s. A woman not only possessed of uncommon beauty, but an uncommon intellect as well. She had seen the lonely little boy inside of him. The lonely little boy that lingered still in the Doctor Amy clearly adored. She had waited for him. She had waited a long, long time.

“I’m sorry,” he began, but she cut him off.

“Don’t be. It’s fine. It’s good. He’s good.”

And he could see in her dark eyes that she meant it. No matter what else had happened in between times, no matter what had happened since, she meant it. He wondered how much her devotion had cost her. It came with a price, being the Doctor’s Companion. Some had paid more dearly than others.

Thunder rolled in the distance.

“Raining again. I mean, I know it is England and all, but--   At least it isn’t raining cannon balls, yeah?”

“It’s the Tardis,” he told her, putting aside the picture frame. He stepped over a fallen lamp to get to the broken window.  The longer it took to get off world the less likely it was that Amy would ever see her home again. And if they ripped the universe in two, he would never see Rose again. He was not going to let that happen. To either of them.

“He should have taken you home. By coming back for me he may have jeopardized your ever getting out of this universe. Mind you, if he hadn’t come back I’d probably be buried in an unmarked grave outside St. Lawerence’s in Brentford.”

“He always comes back,” Amy said absently as she put his suit away and closed the wardrobe doors. The broken hinge on one prevented them from closing properly. Something else to fix,

“Oh, now I know that isn’t true.  Don’t forget who you’re talking to. You have no idea how many times we’ve--”

“But you always try,” she told him, looking up at him, looking into his eyes.

He wished he could tell her that was true.  “And if he hadn’t come back?  What if he can’t get you home this time?”

She picked up the photograph and looked at it.  “That’s Scotland, yeah?  Glencoe?   Thought so.  So it’s a lot like home.   And Rory is here.  That’s all I really need.  All I ever really needed.  So. Yeah.  I… could live with it.” She lifted her gaze to his once more.  “Can you?”

He took the picture frame from her outstretched hand.  Rose

“We couldn’t just leave you back there.  Besides, he didn’t really have much of a say in the matter, did he? Not after I rang up Rose and she told the Doctor that if he didn’t go back for you she’d go herself. Should have heard them going on about vortex manipulators and the portals reactivating a dimension hopper. Then he turned off the speaker and chased us out of the Tardis. Whatever she said seemed to motivate him pretty quickly, though.”

“Did she? Did she really?”

Amy laughed a little. “What is it with the two of you? Why can’t you just accept that people actually care about you? Love you. Rose told me… is it true you burned up a star just to say goodbye?”

“I, I--” he stammered, surprised by her words. Rose never told anyone about that. “I... yeah.”

“And she crossed parallel worlds to find you again? Whoa. You two really are proper love birds, aren‘t you?” But her smile faded after a moment. The room was growing dim as sun set drew nigh. “That must have been terrible. Leaving her here. Leaving you when he‘s always going on about being the Last of the Time Lords. No wonder he’s so broken. No wonder you‘re both so broken. You’re like… two parts of the same melody but in different keys.

“Right. So,” she changed the subject quickly and he took a deep breath, realising that he’d stopped breathing somewhere in the last few minutes. “This clever Time-Lordy plan of yours. Is it as mad as he says it must be?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, tossing the Earpod up and down in his hand.

“And I suppose he’ll try to talk you out of it?”

“Probably.”

“And you’re going to do it anyway and he’s going to help you because he’s already had the same brilliant plan himself. Are the two of you sure about this?”

“About as sure as we ever are,” he told her, following it up with the biggest grin he could manage.

Amy sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

He opened the top drawer of his bureau and took out a pair of  tortoise shell rimmed glasses.  He was going to need the real thing.



By the time they ascended the steps to the orangery, the falling sky had pinched all light from the day. He set to work immediately. By the sound of the Tardis engines, and given that the Tyler’s hilltop home now boasted an indoor swimming pool in the cellar, there wasn’t much time left.  Time.  How many times he would have traded the curse of a long life for a stroll on the Slow Path, then, given his hearts’ desire, realized it wasn’t what he wanted at all.  The Out-of-Time Lord, out of Time.  How was that for irony?  The ship sighed around him.  Whatever was holding her in place wasn’t going to hold much longer.   

Though he had structured the hexagonal console in much the same order as any Type 40 capsule he had ever been in, he was still digging deep to sort this jumble of resident and synthetic instrumentation.  Nothing approximating this had ever been preserved in the antiquities museum though he had briefly examined—all right, nicked and then lost-- scrolls in the restricted archives at the Academy that lent credence to what he now saw before him. To say it had been ages since his time-travelling ancestors had harnessed the raw power of a time ship with such native configuration was an understatement.

For thousands of generations before he had been born, Time Lord engineers had been rigorously modifying Time Ships to suit their own purposes.  He had accelerated the growth in this one--a mere peapod compared to the vastly complex Tardis from which it had been taken--and allowed it to develop more closely to its native form out of necessity, single-handedly adapting ship-wide systems with whatever corresponding technology he could come up with but without any kind of systematic timetable.   It wasn’t like cobbling together an unshielded space hopper or riding the Time Winds on the back of a cold-fusion-powered sentient metal bird for a one way, wild ride through space.  Though, he had to admit to himself, that had ben one of his more brilliant moments—even if it had taken almost three years on the cold prison planet of Volag-Noc to accomplish it.   This was a whole ship.  A whole living ship and one that appeared to be as feisty as its sister.   It seemed rather a shame she already looked so hodge podge when her systems were only just fully coming online.  That she had grown at all was a testimony to someone’s genius.  His, or his.

Or Donna’s.

Hear me.  Do you hear me?  Help me.

“I hear you, Little Girl,” he said softly, but the ship only shuddered and groaned.

The Doctor bounded into the control room not long after he had set to work. 

“Give it over. You aren’t going to finish in time. Wait. What are you doing?”

“Sorry!” he snapped, refusing to be deterred and refusing to make room for the Doctor to slide in next to him. He needed to create a neural relay to the telepathic circuits and was only too conscious of the time constraints. “It’s been awhile since I’ve done programming code in Old High Gallifreyan!”

“What are you even doing with neural interfacing and… that’s a Cybus Earpod!” The Doctor snatched it from his hand.

“Yes it is,” he said, snatching it back. He ripped handfuls of carefully assembled lash-up down, much to the Doctor‘s consternation.  “I need to tap into the telepathic interface system more directly. Think of it as a stylish option to adapting the Chameleon Arch, which I‘ve already thought through and dismissed so don‘t even suggest it.”

“All right, I won’t. But what do you mean, ‘more directly’? Wire yourself into the Artronic Mainframe? Are you insane? I mean it most certainly could work. Maybe. Probably. But more likely it could kill you! You won’t Regenerate!”

“Assuming this ship flies at all we may still have dimensional instability once she‘s in motion, and judging by these readings she simply isn’t processing all the data that‘s required.  Trust me, I know how that feels. Timing is going to be everything. If I don’t get every command right, dot every “i,” cross every “t,” then we are going to have ship-wide failure. If we‘re trapped in mid-dematerialization she‘ll bleed to death; if she materializes too soon who knows where or when we‘ll end up; and if we get thrown sideways through one those open Rifts it could rewrite history. Either way, I’ll be dead.

“Listen to me,” he pinned the Doctor with his fiercest gaze. “You saved my life and I thank you for that. Really. And for all your help, I-- couldn’t have done it without you, and I’ve been a fool not to see what was happening. An old fool. What’s new? But you have to leave. You have enough residual power. It‘s the Tardis. Your Tardis drew power from this one, which drew power from me at the start, and has been converting power from the Rifts which--oh, never mind. Why am I even explaining this to you?

“Take Amy and Rory back to their universe.  Take them home.  Go get Rose and her family--at least give them the option.  No, no options.  Take them.  If I can‘t save the planet, at least I can save them. Just get out of here. As soon as we dematerialise, the portals are going to start closing, but if this Tardis explodes you won’t have enough rooms to jettison to get the thrust required to punch though to the other side. You could end up anywhere. You could end up in the Howling.”

Green eyes rolled in response. “Oh, you do have a flair for the dramatic! There’s another option.  There’s always been another option but like usual you aren‘t listening. Pull the plug. Shut down as many systems as we can, wrap a stabilization field around her and we hand deliver her safely to another location in Space and Time.“

He looked at the Doctor over the rim of his glasses.  “Use a tow rope through the Time Vortex? Are you mad?”

“It can’t be any harder than towing a planet--” the Doctor shrugged.

“It can be a whole lot harder if she doesn’t want to go!” he cried, slipping out from under the console and getting to his feet.  “She isn‘t going to let us take her off-line without a fight.”

“If she was functioning properly, she’d understand that she‘s ripping holes in the universe. And if you were functioning properly you‘d have seen it, too.”

“Searching for Rassilon’s Star is an inherent part of her organic programming!”

“That you should have taken into consideration and compensated for a long time ago. I didn’t realize I was going to have to leave the manual. If I even still had the manual. We sorted that little issue out after--you know--when all that stuff happened. With the fire and the ships and, you know--” the Doctor said, hands waving, cheeks puffed up to make explosion noises any small boy would have envied.

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.  “The Time War?”

“Yes, yes, yes. That. Dreadful business. I try not to think about it.”

“Try not to--? But you, we--”

“I especially try not to think about that!” the Doctor cried, arms flapping again. “The point is, the modifications can be made. Haven‘t we been working on the same project?”

“That took months and the final solution was a happy accident involving a wedge of Flosserkase and a bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc ‘79.”

“I made the necessary modifications while you were…resting,” the Doctor told him carefully, taking the glasses from his hands and putting them on.  Off. On again.  “I can override her systems from my Tardis and program her to--go somewhere. Sacrifice herself if necessary—how do you see out of these?”

“You won’t either!” He spread his arms protectively in front of the Time Rotor column, appalled at the mere notion of condemning the Tardis to certain death. Lights flashed on the main console and the ship shuddered so fiercely they were both nearly thrown to their knees.  The glasses fell to the floor between them.  “I can‘t send her out there alone. She‘s alive.”

“More than you realize,” the Doctor muttered, grabbing one of the buttresses for support.  “Fine. Have it your way. Which I suppose is my way. But, this had better work because I don’t want to have to come back here and explain your death to Rose. I don‘t have enough Regenerations left to survive her wrath!”

That was a fact.  He picked up the broken glasses.

“Let me talk you out of this,” the Doctor pleaded, then, seeing the determination on his face gave a yowl of exasperation. “Then... what? Race you to the end of the Universe?”

He bent back to his work, cursing his middle-aged human eyes.  “I’ll settle for the edge of the galaxy.”

“As if you’ve ever settled for anything. Don’t start now.”
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