Really, he's the last person Rose expects to see. She is on a routine surveillance, following a suspected Raxacoricofallapatorian, parked by a kerb, and she sees that long, flowing coat and unkempt hair from the back, and that is all it takes to know. She is out of the car and craning for a better look before she has fully registered what she's doing. Then she sees the small child, a little girl, her hand in the larger one, and stops. Who... a child? It couldn't be... his child? Could it?
My character vanishes one day. About a year later your character spots them out in public with a baby! How does your character react?
It actually isn’t.
But— adorable ginger little girl, who could blame Rose for thinking that?
He’s standing outside a bakery, looking a bit surprised at holding hands with the little girl— this is a little more domestic than he’s used-to, quite obviously.
And then a beautiful dark-haired woman comes out of the bakery— and not only is she very, very pregnant, but she’s holding the hand of a one-year-old boy with a mischievous glint in his eye, and carrying a fairly hefty diaper bag over one shoulder—
—a bag which The Doctor hurriedly accepts from her, such a gentleman, not so rude as he used to be, though still substantially less ginger than the girl beside him.
"Thank y’ for this," she beamed at him sheepishly. "Creeper had t’ do a thing an’ that little walk t’— I s’pose you’d call it ‘Th’ Other TARDIS’ —just seems kinda longer these days.”
"Happy to be of service," The Doctor promised. "Just because it’s not running around blowing up Cybermen doesn’t mean it’s not important.”
He sniffs at the air, though, glances at Jude, wonders if he’s gone off— and then swings his gaze around and arches an eyebrow at that suspected Raxacoricofallapatorian— to say something smelled fishy about that one would be an insult to fish.
But he can come back to that.
Because he was telling the truth: this was important.
This was the most important adventure anyone could ever have, living their life day after day, and just because he might never have that adventure himself didn’t mean he wasn’t glad to help.
The seven-year-old girl with the long red hair knelt at the side of her bed, and she pressed her palms together, and she scrunched up her eyes tightly and seriously.
"Dear Dumbledore," she invoked, sincerely and without irony, "thank you for the Chocolate Frogs and the sherbet lemons, and the Cauldron Cakes. It's Easter now, a few months before Dumbledore's Day, so I hope I'm not interrupting-- you're always so busy, my dad says, busy as a bee --but honest, it is an emergency. My friends keep disappearing into the darkness. My aunt says to try not to worry, 'keep calm and carry on,' but they're my friends, of course I worry."
She took a breath. "So please could you send someone to help find them. Or an Auror, or--"
...all of a sudden, behind her in the dark outside her bedroom window, there came a terrible whooshing ripping tearing crashing thudding noise like the world all falling down.
Hesitating, she murmured: "Back in a moment."
Hopping to her feet, she grabbed up a flashlight and hurried to the window, tugging aside the white lace curtain to peer out into her backyard. There, laying on its back half atop a crushed toolshed, was a funny looking blue box, smoldering and steaming around the edges.
On the rim around the top it said "POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX" in bright, backlit letters. Aurors were like police! Wizard police! And sometimes they used phone boxes, there was a phone box entrance to The Ministry of Magic, her dad had said.
Grateful but a little bit taken aback, she glanced skyward with blue blue eyes and murmured softly, "Thanks, Dumbledore."
Hurrying downstairs in her jacket and nightie and little red Wellingtons, she gingerly approached the fallen police box. As she drew closer to it, however, the doors on the top cracked open and a cloud of steam billowed out-- followed almost immediately thereafter by a young man's head, with thick brown hair dripping wet in his face.
They stared at each other for a moment, she transfixed by this damp, freckly stranger with the big dark eyes, he apparently getting his breath back.
"Oh," he grinned at her. "'Ello! You can see me, good, you're being let in on our little secret. What year is it?"
Understandably, she hesitated, quite puzzled.
He gestured with a thumb over his shoulder. "Only I'm having a bit of trouble rebooting the calibration on this thing and it might be good to have a bit of base code to extrapolate."
The daft bloke then sort of elevated out of the hatchway, standing atop a Persian rug that matched the outside of his box, pointing a silvery-looking blue-lit wand very carefully at that rug as he did so. He glanced back down into the hatchway, and he clucked his tongue.
"Phwoar," he tutted, "look at that!"
She squinted at him. "Are you okay?"
He snorted dismissively. "Just had a fall. All the way down into the library. Would've been a Hell of a climb back up, except Accio and Wingardium Leviosa still work perfectly well on a flying carpet even if it has been rendered flightless."
"You're soaking wet," she observed.
"Yeah, that'll happen," he bobbed his head in an exuberant nod. "I was in the swimming pool."
Okay, now he was being daft. "You said you were in the library."
He sniffed amiably, agreeably, and puffed water out of his nose. "So's the swimming pool."
This was getting them nowhere. She attempted to get down to business: "Are you an Auror?"
That got his attention. Hunching a bit on the carpet, he scrutinized her with furrowed brow. "Why? Did you Summon an Auror?"
Oh, no, she wasn't going to put up with any grown-up double-talk answering a question with a question, going in circles, she fired back: "Did you come about my disappearing friends?"
"What disappearing frien--?" at this point, apparently, he lost concentration on his Leviosa, and the carpet dropped him to the ground like a stone-- dropped him in a heap.
Dubious but not unfeeling for his plight, she wondered, frowning with concern: "Are you all right, Mister?"
"I'm fine, I'm okay," he dismissed, picking himself up, dusting himself off. "Just-- apparently-- not having a very good day for landings."
She gazed up at him with that precocious scrutiny, a fascinating mix of rebellious adventure and childlike belief and discerning wisdom, a seven-year-old conundrum. And she knew another conundrum when she saw one: "Who are you?"
He beamed at her. "My name's Tommy, Tommy Decker. Pleased as Punch to meet you. What's your name?"
"Jasmine Pond," she volunteered.
"Cor," he grinned, "that's a brilliant name, Jasmine Pond, like a name out of a Disney film."
She grinned at him. He was completely ridiculous, and she wasn't sure he was a very good Auror, but at least he was funny, and funny was good. "My aunt's not going to be very happy with you that you ruined our shed."
Tommy shook out his jacket, casting raindrops in a wide ring, shaking his head. "Oh, don't worry about me, I've dealt with worse things than aunts, and that's just in the last half hour."
"I wouldn't count on that," a woman opined as she strode through the garden, her own flashlight casting its glow on the crashlanded box, the crashed-upon shed, Tommy, and Jasmine.
She was dark of skin and dark of hair, an exquisite creature with ornate, innumerable, carefully-tended tight braids. Her gaze was ferocious, and she was very obviously no-one to be messed with.
"Oh," Tommy blinked, "'ello, 'oo're you?"
"I'm Mels," she drawled, narrowing that gaze at him. "Mels Zucker. I'm her aunt."
"Erm," Tommy hesitated, instantly on his back foot, and then whipped his gaze back to Jasmine. "Tell me about these disappearing friends, then."
******
"It's not just friends," Mels explained as they sat around the kitchen table. "It's neighbors, family--" she glanced worriedly at Jas, who looked away, perturbed.
Jas then busied herself with a funny looking calculator that Tommy had given her to play with from his pocket, tapping away at the keys, trying not to think about all of this dark and horrible stuff, as Mels continued to explain.
"It started on the outskirts," she noted, "the fringes. People we barely noticed were gone, the neighborhood stray cat, that smelly bloke always sits the same spot on the bus. Then her mates at school, teachers, the goldfish she got last Christmas. Then teachers, the postman--"
"--her mum and dad, Aunt Winny, Uncle Rory, that foxy Doctor Undecim--"
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Jas couldn't resist rolling her eyes at Mels' inexplicable crush on her grandfather. Now is not the time.
She tapped the keys of the calculator thing, 8 plus 8 equals...
...the display blinked something inexplicable at her. "'A suffusion of yellow?'" Jas wondered, flummoxed.
"Now you say disappearing," Tommy mused, hands wrapped around a warm mug of tea-- he'd dried himself with a wave of his wand easily enough, but there was no taking chances.
"We mean disappearing," Jas put her foot down at that, glancing up from the calculator.
Tommy stared at her. "What, like spring dwindling except with people instead of bees?"
"They just go off into the darkness," Mels murmured, "and they don't come back."
"Have you tried, erm," Tommy winced, feeling like an arse even as he said it, "not going out into the darkness?"
Jas shook her head, sliding the calculator back to him across the table. "You don't understand."
Mels smiled a faint, faint little smile. "There hasn't been an actual morning for what we're guessing is at least a month. The darkness is all there is."
"What, like the sun's disappeared?" Tommy frowned incredulously, pocketing the calculator without ever taking his eyes off of Zucker.
"No, I mean, we'd freeze to death, right?" Mels pointed out. "No, it's more like the world's... forgotten what the sun looks like."
Tommy tried to let that sink in for a moment, but instead felt like he was sinking. He was sinking and he was so far out of his depth.
Before he could sink too far, however, a sharp sound reported through the house-- a knocking at the front door.
An awkward moment of hesitation gripped them as they stared in the direction of the front, and then exchanged a look-- as though performing a headcount. Well if we're all here, then who is that?
And then, the moment passed, and they were all to their feet and hurrying in the direction of the door-- as they drew closer, they heard it, echoing, mournful, pleading: "ZUCKER! ZUCKER!"
Decker was fast, but Mels was plenty light on her feet and knew the space better, she hauled the door open--
--a spindly-looking old man stood there, wearing a knit cap, gloves, a coat, and yet still he was shivering, shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.
Craggy lips mouthed Mels' surname before he found his breath again: "Zucker! It's-- it's taking me--! I can feel it! You can't-- you can't let it take me!"
Mels frowned-- "Rog'? Rog'! How are you still--? Get in here, if there's someone chasing you, we'll hide you!"
"Sir!" Tommy pushed forward next to Mels, "what's trying to take you? Can you describe it?"
But before Rog' could reply again, he started to tremble all the harder, and he started to grow pale-- not just pale, translucent-- not the skeletal translucence of Harold Saxon, but through and through-- through the knit of Rog's cap, through his forehead, they could see the darklit street behind him... Through his chest, they could see the trees of the garden.
He lost strength in his legs, sank to his knees, clutching at Mels' arms as he fell, croaking up at her-- "I was the best-- I could run-- I could hide-- from anything-- they never could catch me-- but this-- not this-- I was a legend and I can feel it-- all-- wiping away--" he whimpered softly-- "--they told stories about me and now I'm all gone away..."
...and the translucence deepened to transparency...
Tommy hauled out his wand, brandished it, wracked his brain-- "C'mon, Decker, think! The Counter-Charm for Annihilare, the-- the-- Untransfiguration for Evanesco--!"
--he fumbled his wand but instinct and memory took over, swish and flick, he spouted words, conducted power-- REINCORPUS! DEVANESCO! --but nothing took effect, nothing was good enough, and like the sand of an hourglass the image of Rog' faded through Mels' fingers.
Jasmine buried her face against Mels' side and, rather impressively, did not scream, did not shout, did not weep. She just hid. For a moment. Just hid.
Tommy stared disbelievingly, defiantly at the space where Rog' once stood-- "Accio Rog'! ACCIO ROG'!" But there came nothing-- nothing.
"Roger the Dodger," Mels murmured, staring down at the hands that Rog' had just faded through. "Best car-thief in the history of London, The Yard never laid a finger on him. He taught me how to twoc my first 'Vette. And he's-- gone."
Tommy roared in disappointment and frustration the man had been right in front of him and he had been useless! --he whirled and threw his wand, sending it end-over-end--
--the stonesilver wand cracked hard into a picture framed on the wall, shattered the glass, knocked the frame from its nail.
Suddenly, heartachingly realizing how futile and impotent was rage in the face of this, Tommy slumped his shoulders in shame at his lack of discipline. "Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"It's okay," Mels murmured, though she was obviously shaken, kneeling to hug Jas close. "It's all right. I can empathize. Seriously, I can empathize."
Tommy moved slowly over to the shattered glass, reached down to carefully pick up his wand, and-- "Reparo." --magic the glass back into place within the frame. As he then went to pick up the frame, however, he glanced at the picture-- and hesitated.
It was a wedding picture.
Tommy stared at it for a long, long moment.
It was a Muggle photograph, stationary images, though at least two of the people depicted certainly weren't Muggles.
"Jasmine," he murmured, glancing over his shoulder at the little red-haired girl, "who did you say your parents were again?"
"I didn't, I don't think," Jasmine reflected, leaning back from pressing her face into Mels' side. "Their names are-- were-- Isaac Harvey and Amy Pond. Mum kept her name, I took after her."
"Isaac 'Creeper' Harvey," Tommy repeated, turning to face Mels and Jas, "and Amy Pond." He turned the picture so Jas could see it. "And the people with them, the maid of honor, the best man--"
"My Aunt Winny," Jas blinked, "and my Uncle Rory. Not really my aunt or uncle, any more than Aunt Mels is, they're friends who are family--" she hesitated-- "were family."
"You call her Winny," Tommy shook his head disbelievingly. "But her name is Mae. Mae Cardwell." And so it was, his school friend, his neighbor in the safehouse flats, baker of the most amazing banana walnut muffins he'd ever chanced to try-- this was her. In that picture.
"Mmhmm," Jas nodded. "Winter Mae Cardwell. I'm the only one who gets away with calling her anything but 'Mae.'"
Mels smiled a faint little smile. "I give that another year, tops."
Year, the word echoed in the back of Tommy's brain, and Tommy's brain whirled along at shatterneck speed. "....how long were they together, before they got married?"
Mels squinted. "Think Creeper once told me they got together, what, summer before his fifth year at that fancy school? I didn't know them then. Moved in different circles."
"Mm," Tommy murmured absently, "you're not in the picture."
"Yeah," Mels nodded agreeably enough, a smirk gracing her lips as she rose from her kneel to stand-- she shook a bit, plainly rattled by the loss of her mentor, but she was strong --and take Jas' hand. "I don't do weddings."
Tommy really wasn't listening to her-- he'd barely listened to himself when he'd murmured about the picture-- his mind was off and running. This didn't make sense! Mae had told him about this-- how she had heard word that Isaac and Amelia had become an item, but after their fifth year and the bursting of The Eternity Turner, The First Eternity Turner, things had become muddled, things had shifted-- Isaac had never been with Amelia-- Amy-- and had only ever had eyes for Mae.
Isaac had been friends, then, with a lad named Rory-- and a girl named Mels.
This didn't make sense.
If Mels hadn't known them back in school, how could Creeper have name-dropped her? If Isaac had only ever longed for Mae, how could he and Amy have been childhood sweethearts with a child of their own--? This was a convergence of contradiction and it stuck like a splinter in his brain.
"Oh," he blinked. "Oh."
Mels furrowed her brow at him. "Penny in the air?"
Tommy slapped his forehead with force enough to echo in the front hall, clawed his hand right through his hair, snapped his fingers and pointed at Mels-- "OH!"
Mels and Jas shared a bewildered look, and Mels observed: "Aaaaand the penny drops?"
"Time was rewritten!" he roared, brandishing the photograph like a fire and brimstone preacher might brandish a Bible. "Time was rewritten! The Rifts were unleashed, and history rearranged itself, and-- and that whole course of the timeline just ceased to be--!"
He hesitated-- "Except. What if it didn't? What if it didn't just cease to be? What if it lingered on, like a ghost of things never to come, and gradually-- crumbled? Time got rewritten, and you're getting unwritten, line by line?"
Tommy's eyes frantically searched a nowhere middle distance as he talked-- "I was blown off-course. I was traveling back from a badly damaged future, and a catastrophic event blew me off-course-- so I didn't go straight back in time, I went diagonally-- I skewed into what was left of your timeline-- your abandoned tangent-- and now it's falling down around us. Being unwritten."
"Tommy," Jas mumbled, agony writ large in the blue of her eyes and the downward curve of her lips, "I don't want to be unwritten. I want to have a story. I want to have a happy ending."
"I'd just settle for an ending," Mels agreed quietly. "Not like Rog'. Not like this. Getting washed out by the rain? What kind of grand finale is that? No... no. It's better to burn out than to fade away."
"Of course," Tommy replied grimly, hooking that photo back on its nail. "I'm going to get you both out of here, that's a promise."
He turned to them, and he held out his hands.
"Come with me."
********
"...a phone box," Mels shook her head, disbelievingly awed, as they stood out in the backyard once more. "A bigger on the inside phone box. Time travel, that's brilliant."
"It is a bit, ennit?" Tommy grinned, chuffed as could be, picking up his old flying carpet from where it had crashlanded earlier.
Jas frowned. "But how are we going to get it right-side-up again? You said your magic doesn't work on wood, and I'm still Underage."
"We don't need to get it right side up again," Tommy declared, "because this flying carpet can't fly anymore."
Jas frowned at him. "You're not making sense again.'
Tommy waggled his eyebrows and beamed at her. "Well, those flying enchantments had to go somewhere, didn't they?"
And he raised one hand. And snapped his fingers.
Nothing happened.
His face fell into a scowl.
"Maybe they went somewhere... else?" Mels mused, not unreasonably.
Tommy snorted loudly, but then perked a bit as The TARDIS shifted, wobbled... "Allez-oup!" he cried. "Viens sur! COME ON YOU BYOOTAY!"
And with a massive surge, Blue the Box lurched to a standing position, and the doors swung inward to their usual configuration.
Mels and Jas stared in wonder for a second, and Tommy trumpeted, with a wave of his hand, "ALL ABOARD!"
They hurried inside, Tommy slamming the doors shut behind them, tossing his coat over its now-customary coral pillar, and the no-longer-flying carpet over the one next to it.
"Now, then," he mused, clapping his hands together, "what year did you say this was?"
Jas frowned. "I didn't, I don't think. 2006."
"Right then, Summer 1997, here we come," Tommy nodded, cracking his knuckles, hitting switches, spinning a dial... "Hold onto your socks!"
He hauled off the handbrake, grinning brightly up at The Console.
Nothing happened.
Blue made a very disappointed noise, like an R2 unit's low whistle, in the back of Tommy's brain.
"Problem?" Mels prompted, looking dubious.
Tommy stared to nowhere for a moment, looking panicked. "I got-- I got blown off course. I got sent diagonal. I don't know how to fly her diagonally!"
"I hope you figure it out fast, please," Jasmine suggested, her voice a soft squeak.
Both Mels and Tommy whipped their heads around to look at her--
--she was staring at her hand, and her hand rippled a bit and just for a moment, one could see through it as through a glass darkly.
"Oh, Christ," Mels groaned, sinking to her knees, glancing at Tommy as she hugged Jasmine close. "Please, kid, do something. Please!"
Tommy made a strangled, disbelieving noise, tried not to let his eyes blur with frustrated tears as he flicked switches and cranked cranks and dialed dials on his way around to the viewscreen... "Can't go straight back to the timelines' intersect point, no Back to The Future II shared 1955, because-- because as far as this timeline's concerned, this is all that's left, a lonely little island in spacetime, no back to go back to."
"So-- we need a sideways hop. A jump to the left, or a step to the right. Reunite with the new prime timeline. But how-- how do I do that? I can't even begin to make the calculations--"
He reflected, panicked, on the memory of the shattered Bootleg Ball on the floor of The Clock Tower next to The TARDIS, agonized over that lost data, those instructions--
--he was trying to drive a Shelby Mustang GT on The Autobahn and he didn't even have his Learner's Permit.
Jasmine's whole body flickered in Mels' arms, and Mels crushed her eyes shut as Jas sagged against her.
"Please," Tommy begged up at The Console, "please, Blue, please..."
But Blue the Box replied only with the sound of question marks in Tommy's head.
...and then, just as Tommy slumped helplessly against the screen, another wordless reply came in behind his eyes.
The color yellow.
...a suffusion of yellow.
Tommy's eyes snapped open. "What?"
It came again, insistent, that color smearing across his mind's eye. Yellow like a daisy. Yellow like The Roses' hair.
He started to ask again-- "Wha--"
But then his hand flew to his pocket. Found that ridiculous looking calculator that Romana had given him from Professor Gently.
And flying on a very special kind of desperate instinct, Tommy grabbed a cable dangling from the bottom of the viewscreen and jacked it into the top of that calculator.
Ornate Chinese characters sprawled and scrolled across the viewscreen and the calculator display alike, rapidly narrowing down and down and down to a hexagram, then a trigram, then--
--coordinates blinked on the screen.
With a cry like a horseman urging on a steed, Tommy again set to hitting buttons, adjusting instruments, toggling and hammering and--
--and with a groan like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill just one more time, The TARDIS ground to slow, growling, determined life...
Glancing at the viewscreen to determine his readings, he exulted in a purer joy the likes of which he'd rarely known-- "That's it! That's it! We're orbiting the timeline, closing in on a landing date, you should be clear of the deleterious--"
--but then he looked up, found Mels kneeling with Jas, both girls holding each others' hands... Jas was still fading. She was strobing in and out, timed with the whooshing vworrrping plunging noise made by The TARDIS.
"No," Tommy recoiled. "No, you should be-- you should be fine now, no, we got it to work!"
Then Jasmine turned to smile at him, and it was the softest of smiles. A smile of beneficent peace. "No, no, it's okay, I think. It's different now. It's not scary anymore. I think-- I think I'm going to be all right. It's not hurting me. It's like coming home."
"Thank you."
And then she was gone, and Mels choked back a sob as the image of the girl became an afterimage and then became nothing at all.
Mels then looked at her own hand, and it, too, was starting to fade away-- like a Force ghost from Star Wars high-lit by a blue aura, slowly, slowly-- going...
Tommy sagged against The Console, watching her helplessly. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"It's all right, Decker," Mels mused, and rose to her feet, approaching him. "She's right. It's not scary. I don't think we're being unwritten anymore. We're being rewritten. We're being incorporated into the the new events. I mean, it's anyone's guess where we'll end up, but-- at least we'll be."
"I hope you're right," Tommy shuddered, gazing up at her. "God I hope you're right."
Mels smiled at him, and cupped his cheek, and it was an odd little feeling, not quite as intangible as being touched by Reinette, and slightly warmer. "Decker. Sweetie. You don't know me. But I'm telling you. I'm always right."
And then she kissed him, soft and warm and almost-there and almost-gone...
...and then she drifted off like stardust and he was alone.
He sank to kneel, hands between his knees, and he didn't know whether to smile or cry. So lost was he in the fathoms of that moment that it actually startled him a great deal when The TARDIS shuddered to a landing stop.
Winter knew Jasmine was here. She'd seen the flash of red hair and watched Scooby and Nero follow excitedly as the teenager walked towards the kitchen. Snorting out a laugh she followed quietly while holding Jude to her chest. "Kitchen's always the best bet."
"Hey you...." she greeted. "I've someone you might wanna meet."
She looked up from the glasses she'd been washing when the bell above the door chimed. "Ye look a bit young to be in here lass." It's said with all the authority she could muster, but Tessa can't help the grin that touches her lips. "Lucky for ye we have some fizzy drinks too."
[[Watching Avalon High and only half paying attention to it. Start giggling when I realize that one of the main characters is Molly Quinn. Oh hey there Jas.]]
