Spoilers!
This is part 3. Please see part one here.
Part 2 here.
“Doctor, can you hear me?” shouted Emma over the sound of
the portal. Of course, there was no
harness over there any longer, and the whole mechanism to get him out was a bit
in shambles, but the first problem was establishing contact.
Unfortunately, the pocket universe had already shrunk
considerably from where it had been when the window had closed, and the Doctor
had planted himself right in the middle of the universe to give himself time to
think of a way out. He could hope that
Emma might restore herself and try again, but had no guarantees that it would
happen. He jumped when he heard her
voice calling out to him, but it was even fainter than before, and the
direction was muddled. He took his best
guess and ran.
It seemed he took a wrong turn somewhere because he ended up
on a meadow near the edge of the pocket universe, still no sign of the window
Emma had made for him. He stopped and
looked around, listening for her voice again to give him some clue where to go,
when he saw a familiar figure appear out of the mist above the trees. It was spinning and nearly out of control,
but that was definitely his TARDIS.
With a clear idea of what could happen to her if she stopped
and got stuck here, the Doctor braced himself and grabbed on when it came near
enough. He clung for dear life and hoped
she had enough sense to go through the psychic wormhole Emma was still
helpfully providing because if they went through the vortex with him on the
outside....
As they landed on the other side of the wormhole, the Doctor
leaned against the side of the TARDIS to the sound of Emma screaming from the
effort. Clara opened the door as he came
around the corner, her mouth open that she had actually somehow managed to pull
that off, not to mention at the sight of Emma on her knees and gasping for
air. An exhausted Doctor gave her a high
five on his way to check on Emma, though.
Assured that she was just strained, and would recover just
fine, he straightened up to look at the emerging sunlight out the window. The tension and fear of nearly being trapped
in a universe that was collapsing around him worked its way out in a small
smile and a soft chuckle.
Then, Clara remembered.
“Doctor!” She seized his sleeve
and spun him around to face her half-glowering, half-frightened face. “Why did that monster get through before?”
“Monst—Oh!” He
smacked himself on the forehead again.
“I thought I had a little longer, and that I would come through after
it. I’m sorry.” He put a hand to her shoulder briefly, then
turned in a circle, peering in the corners of the room. “Where did he go?”
Clara looked at the doorway, still half closed with the rope
hanging from it. “Ran off that way. I’m not sure why it just ran off so fast,
though.... But then the wormhole closed,
and I was just thinking about getting you back....” She realized that through the whole thing,
after the monster left, she hadn’t been afraid of it once. Until just now, but it was a much quieter fear. More worry than anything. Now Hilla and Alec were looking at the door
nervously, too, though Emma was far too exhausted to think of anything else.
“Ah, well, I’m sure he can figure it out.”
“What are you talking about?” Clara asked, stepping up so he
couldn’t avoid her question.
“How do sharks have babies?” he asked instead of answering.
“...Carefully?”
“No! No, no, no. Happily.”
Clara frowned at him.
“Sharks don’t actually smile.
They just, well, they’ve got lots and lots of teeth. They’re quite eaty.”
“Exactly! But birds
do it, bees do it. Even educated fleas
do it.” He threw an arm around Clara on
one side, and Alec around the other. He
smiled at the half-closed door where the monster had disappeared through. “Every lonely monster needs a companion.”
“...There’s two of them?!” Clara demanded.
“It’s the oldest story in the universe. This one, or any other. Boy and girl fall in love, they are separated
by events, war, politics, accidents in time.
She’s thrown out of the hex, or he’s thrown into it. Since then, they’ve been yearning for each
other across time and space, across dimensions.
This isn’t a ghost story. It’s a
love story!” He looked first at Clara,
then at Alec, then at his arms around their shoulders and let go. “Sorry.”
***
The Doctor stepped away into a corridor and leaned against a
window frame. He folded his arms,
frowning to himself. Emma strolled up
behind him. “You wanted a word?”
“Well, if that’s—”
“It’s fine.” She
smiled at him when he faced her. “You
didn’t come here for the ghost, did you?”
He smiled back. “No.”
“You came here for me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I needed to ask you something.”
“Then ask.”
“Clara.”
“...Yes?”
The Doctor stepped up close, peering into Emma’s eyes
carefully to get as much information as possible out of what she was going to
say. “What is she?”
Emma smiled uncertainly, not knowing what to make of the
question. “She’s a girl.”
He didn’t so much as crack a smile, now. “Yes, but what kind of girl specifically?”
“...She’s a perfectly ordinary girl.” Silence for a moment, as she looked at the
Doctor and tried to figure out what he wanted.
“Very pretty.” He laughed a
little and turned away, no longer sure he’d get anything useful from the
psychic. “Very clever.” He nodded agreement to that one. “More scared than she lets on.”
Several paces away now, back to Emma, arms crossed, the
Doctor pushed once again. “And that’s
it, is it?”
“Why?” Emma demanded.
“Is that not enough?”
***
They all walked the Doctor and Clara out to the TARDIS in
the morning sunshine. Hilla and Emma
embraced. The Doctor threw his arms
around both of them, pleased with the happiness after all the tension and fear
during the night. “Where will you go?”
Emma asked Hilla.
“He can’t take me home,” she explained. “History says I went missing.” The Doctor nodded along.
“But he can change history,” Emma suggested.
“No, no no, I can’t actually. There are fixed points in time, you
see.” Clara popped up next to him as he
was about to launch into an explanation, glomming onto his arm. “What?”
“Hi,” she whispered, but just dragged the Doctor away with
her, to let the two women talk.
“I knew you were there,” Hilla told Emma. “I could feel you. I knew.”
They smiled at each other.
The Doctor tried to rejoin them, but Clara held on.
“...Have we...?”
“We can’t have,” Emma answered, though she was thinking the
same. “You haven’t even been born yet.”
Finally, he pulled away from Clara because this time, he
absolutely had to speak up. “No, you
can’t have met, but she can be your
great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter.”
He had to do some math in his head as he counted out the ‘greats’. “Eh?
Yours, too, of course,” he said to Alec as the major walked up. “But you guessed that, already, didn’t you?”
he asked Emma, not noticing the baffled looks he was getting from the couple
who had not yet gotten together. At
least not until he’d finished speaking.
He looked between the three people staring at him. “...Oh.
Apparently not.”
“...But the paradoxes—” Alec started to protest.
“Resolve themselves, by and large, that’s why the psychic
link was so powerful. Blood calling to
blood. Not everything ends, eh? Not love.
Not always.”
“Doctor,” Alec called as he chased after the retreating
Doctor. “What about—what about us? Emma and me....”
“...What about you?”
“Well, what’s supposed to happen? I mean, what do we do now?”
Emma was standing beside Alec, now, and the pressure was on
the Doctor to say something helpful, though he was rather terrible at doing
that on purpose. Accidentally romantic
things, he could do. Simplicity, that’s
what he had to go with. “Hold hands,” he
said to them. “That’s what you’re meant
to do. Keep doing that, and don’t let
go. That’s the secret. Eh?”
He looked up through the window to see two knobby heads peeking out of
it.
Then, he jumped and smacked his forehead. “Oh, stupid!”
He dashed for the house again.
“Doctor?!” Clara ran
after him. No way was he going to leave
again without her.
“I can’t just leave them here,” he explained over his
shoulder. “I can take them somewhere
safe quite easily, now they’re both out of the pocket universe. I just have to get them to—” He skidded to a stop as he went careering
around a corner, and Clara nearly ran into him.
Once she regained her balance, she looked up to see what the Doctor was
already staring at—the alien standing over them, with another one, slightly
smaller, behind it. “—trust me. Hello.”
No response, though that wasn’t unexpected. “I can take you somewhere safe. I got you out of that collapsing universe,
yeah? Trust me.”
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