A summary of original characters featured in my Doctor Who/Borrowers crossover multiverse, as well as visual artwork commissioned to bring them to life! I'll do what I can to keep it updated as relevant characters are introduced.
Doctor Who belongs to the BBC, The Borrowers to Mary Norton, and these OCs belong to me!
General warning for story spoilers
Zepheera - The OG, My Beloved
art by the lovely @quackghost
Zepheera is a borrower, a diminutive humanoid race native to Earth. Shortly after she was born in 1927, an abstract creature from the stars latched onto her consciousness and granted her unique abilities. These diminished and faded as Zepheera and the creature by extension were put through incredible distress in her early life, causing it to pass away sometime after she turned 18. The only lasting impact from the creature remaining was an inability to age. Now, there seems to be no end to how long her lifespan has been extended so long as she survives. Which she's very good at as a borrower, raised with the skills needed to get by in a world much larger than her. In addition, she carries a mutated gene from her father's side that allows her to heal from injuries and wounds much more quickly than usual. The entirety of the Borrowed Time and Space multiverse centers on her as the Doctor's companion, no matter which Doctor.
She's been around for over a decade in my real life, and has grown so much from the daydream self-insert tiny companion of my youth. I have so enjoyed fleshing out her life story, expanding her universe and finding out how she responds to the different Situations™️ I keep putting her in.
Because Zepheera's Origins and the overall basis of her character stay the same throughout AU, the characters under the cut will have more in-depth summaries. Last warning for story spoilers, and TW for mentions of child abuse
Zepheera's Family
Most of the relevant OCs from this point on are more borrowers (shocker, I know) and relatives of Zepheera, a list that can and will only grow because I am insane. Most of them are featured in Zepheera's Origins, and some also appear or are mentioned in various BTaS stories.
Tack - Father; In life, he was kind and forward-thinking for his time. A man full of so much love in his heart for his wife and especially his infant daughter that it ultimately killed him. Though he carried the healing factor that he passed down to his daughter, he was fatally injured in an inadvertently devastating release of energy from the entity symbiotically linked to Zepheera.
Klerida - Mother; Devastated by the loss of her husband and without the tools to cope with any of it, she turned all that hurt onto her daughter. Blamed her for being the epicenter of the catastrophe that caused Tack's death. She spent Zepheera's childhood swinging between being cold and detached from her, and lashing out aggressively, leaving her child to feel at fault for Klerida's and her own hurt.
Author's Note: While I don't regret taking this angle with Zepheera's mother, I acknowledge that at the time of writing Episode 2: Memories, I didn't have the tools to write an abuser in a way that wasn't extreme and over the top. In what I now consider to be the proper canon, Klerida did put her hands on her child in anger, but never went so far as to break Zepheera in the way described in the Episode.
Boston - Uncle; Though he did not witness and wasn't aware of what Zepheera went through at home, Boston took it upon himself to take the girl under his wing since his brother couldn't. He taught Zepheera about borrowing, despite it being a traditionally a man's skill at the time, and kept her company when she needed a friendly presence. He loved her like his own, even if Klerida kept him at arm's length.
Baycliff - Stepfather; He and his family lived in an entirely different part of the house Zepheera's family occupied. Baycliff met Klerida in passing once or twice before Tack's death, and then properly go to know her years afterward. After their marriage, Klerida's more physically abusive tendencies toward Zepheera died down in favor of the cold detachment; Baycliff fussed more over his wife and...
Kernel - Half-Brother
art by the wonderful @mythical-cupcake (left) and @creatorofuniverses (right)
Kernel was born when Zepheera was 7 years old, and she fell in love instantly. He was a curious, high-spirited boy who looked up to his big sister, a bright light in the family that was snuffed out all too soon. While out borrowing with Zepheera, he met with a terrible fate outside of both of their control.
Klerida was none too happy about Zepheera once again being seemingly responsible for the loss of someone else she loved with all her heart, to put it kindly.
Orrick - Husband
art by quackghost
Orrick is a kind soul, a sweetheart through and through. He found Zepheera outside of his home after she ran away from hers. He and his family took her in, and their relationship blossomed over time. They made a life and a home for themselves and were happily committed to one another for over twenty years. Then Zepheera discovered she wasn't aging and, in a moment of panic, fled from the wonderful life they had. He was given no explanation, and could do nothing but despair in the wake of the disappearance of his wife.
His story is tied to Zepheera's Origins, mentioned in a few others in which Zepheera opens up about her past, and he has recently resurfaced in the Donna Trilogy story, If I Could Turn Back Time.
Day - Daughter; Shortly after Zepheera left Orrick, she discovered she was pregnant. By then, it was too late for her to be able to find her way back to him, and the notion of outliving her child was twice as painful as it was for her spouse. So she found a lovely couple to raise her daughter: Ceillo and Toffer. The two men couldn't have children of their own, and she grew up with incredibly loving parents.
(left to right) Toffer, Day, and Ceillo by the fantastic @guaxinimraccoon
Marcue - Grandson
Art by quackghost
When Day was still quite young, she met and married Brine, and the two of them had a son. He was a quiet, thoughtful boy growing up, especially with his parents' relationship growing more and more contentious over the years. He met a young girl named Laitina who lived in another part of the house, the same age as him, and the two of them hit it off. First as friends, then as something more than that. But one day, after a particularly bad fight, Brine took his son and left for another house. There he remarried and had another child, a daughter. Marcue quickly became protective of the girl, and though he longed to reunite with his mother and Laitina, he stayed to make sure his half sister would be okay.
Marcue first appeared in Episode 3: Lost Things Being Found, which is now non-canon but Marcue's side of the story remains canon.
Note: So... this one was tricky for me. Between BTaS and BAU, there are literally so many AU I could possibly choose from. It didn't quite feel fair to pick just one, even if it were an underrepresented one of the bunch.
And then it hit me. Hey, Doctor Who has its own parallel universe in canon. One where things turn out slightly differently than they do in our world, and sometimes have very different results. Anything could happen...
So today's story is set in Pete's World, featuring a Zepheera that never left Orrick. Hope you enjoy!
~~~
Every single thing that Zepheera packed into her large knapsack felt heavy in her hands.
Ordinarily, she'd never dream of leaving like this. Leaving her family behind while she struck out completely on her own. They'd gotten her through so many rough times, and she'd done her best to help them in return.
Dreams were what got her to this point, as it happened. For months, she'd been plagued with visions– they had to be, they were too vivid for Zepheera to have just made them all up in her sleep. She was always in them, running in bizarre-looking locations with some human.
Like any sensible borrower, Zepheera kept her distance from humans. They were huge, strong, and didn’t often take kindly to their belongings getting pinched, even the little things. And yet she didn't feel threatened by him in these dreams. Quite the opposite, in fact; more often than not, the sight of the man with the long coat and wild hair put her at ease.
He kept calling her name in the dreams. Every time, begging for her to answer, but she always found she had no voice before she woke up.
"You're really doing it, aren't you?"
Zepheera jumped, startled out of her thoughts. She turned around to find a young man with dark auburn hair, still dressed in his sleep clothes as he leaned against the threshold of her room.
Doing all she could to resist withering under his indigo gaze, Zepheera nodded. "I'm sorry, I just… I have to know what it all means."
Marcue gave a slow nod, but she could tell from the look on his face that he still didn’t fully understand. “Gran, are you sure–?”
“Shh!” Zepheera hissed, closing the distance between herself and Marcue. She listened down the hall for a moment, relieved by the silence she found there, then whispered to the young man, “The children could’ve heard you.”
She counted herself incredibly lucky that her family had been understanding of her unique situation. When she’d discovered that she didn’t seem to age at all since she became an adult, her husband stayed by her side til the moment he passed on. Their daughter was as supportive as she could be while remaining her own individual.
Having a grandchild was a slightly different experience, as Zepheera didn’t feel comfortable explaining to the boy that she was in fact his grandmother until he was a little older. It wasn’t necessarily that she was worried about Marcue accepting that fact, but she didn’t want him confused to meet other kids with normal grandparents that did not look like Zepheera, and to start asking questions that raised alarms. Zepheera wasn’t one to announce to others outside of her family that she was significantly older than she looked.
She took a similar approach with Marcue’s children. They were still quite small, even the oldest. In the meantime, Zepheera was seen as a friendly neighbor to them, a sort of adopted auntie that loved spending time with them when mum and dad needed a little breathing room. She had every intention of explaining the truth to them, but tonight was not the time.
Marcue sighed and insisted under his breath, “They’re asleep. But really, do you need to go this alone?”
Zepheera didn’t have an easy answer. Ever since her dreams started, she had this feeling that they were calling her somewhere far away, and left a lingering feeling when she awoke. Like there was something she needed wherever it was leading her. She couldn’t begin to explain that, and couldn’t bear to drag her family around for the sake of finding answers.
It didn’t make the decision any easier.
Overcome, Zepheera reached up to wrap her arms around Marcue’s shoulders and dragged him down into a tight hug. This startled him, but he soon hugged her back.
“I’ll be back,” she vowed, giving him one more squeeze before pulling away. “Please…tell everyone that in the morning.”
Blinking quickly, Marcue nodded with more confidence than before. “I will. Be safe, Gran.”
~~~
It was incredibly lucky that the human beings that Zepheera and her family borrowed from had decided to take a trip to London. That journey would have been exponentially longer for a borrower on her own. Once there, the real hunt would start.
Part of her dreams that stuck with her when she woke up was the image of a massive clock tower, which she later learned was named Big Ben. It was a city landmark, so Zepheera hoped it wouldn’t be overly difficult to find and get to.
More than that, she hoped that all this was worth the risk of proximity to human beings. They were a troublesome lot; recent technological advances made it harder and harder for borrowers to remain hidden like they could in the old days. And if that weren't bad enough, one of them had decided to unleash a horde of mechanical monsters all over the world years back. It was all over the news, even borrowers were aware of the threat of the Cybermen. They were spread out enough that the humans could put up a decent fight against them, but borrowers? No chance in hell against those things.
Most, like Zepheera and her family, found safety in the country. The chances of cyber-attacks weren't zero, but slim enough that they could hope to live in peace, the traditional borrower way. Zepheera would be mad to try and get to the city, let alone on her own.
And here she was, doing just that.
Thankfully, the borrowers who had chosen to remain in the city had a decent handle on navigating it safely. She got very helpful tips to point her in the right direction, and once she was in the actual building, she could make her own way around the walls.
Zepheera stuck closely to them, as it appeared Big Ben was full of scientific and government types, both of which were up there in the types of humans she did not want to find her. If they did, she might never fulfill her promise to see her family again, lost to experiments or goodness only knew what. Still, she’d come this far, and couldn’t turn back until she could find a way to figure out what these dreams of hers meant.
The sight of a tall, slim, wild-haired man giving the other humans a fair bit of sass sent a jolt through Zepheera that felt like lightning running up and down. That was the man in her dream! He dressed a little differently and didn’t have the coat she saw, but he looked and sounded exactly the same otherwise. Maybe if she caught him alone, she thought, he might be willing to hear her out.
It was a risk, especially since he seemed to be one of the scientific types, but he was her only lead.
Lucky for her, it seemed that he spent quite a lot of time alone in his personal lab. Unlucky for her, that was all the way at the top of the clock tower, a hell of a climb for a borrower.
The lab was cluttered enough that Zepheera could make her way around easily without being detected. This human, referred to by the others only as ‘the Doctor’, seemed a bit of a volatile personality. If that was how he was with humans, she couldn’t help being a bit nervous about how he might react to her. But she steeled her resolve and snuck ever closer to the towering man.
He was hunched over his work, muttering to himself all the while. She took solace in the fact that it mostly seemed to be technological tinkering and not so much to do with anything biological, and she hoped that was a good sign. Biding her time, Zepheera seized the opportunity after someone brought him a cuppa and it seemed he was taking a break.
Zepheera stepped out into the open near the corner of the man’s work table, took a deep breath and cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” she said, doing her best to keep the nerves from putting a tremble in her voice.
Brown eyes turned quickly to lock onto her, going through an incredible range of emotions in a few seconds. At first he looked almost annoyed by the interruption to his day, then surprised by the sight of her, and finally an expression of deeper realization and a hint of awe.
“Zepheera??” he exclaimed, setting his tea aside and leaning in for a closer look at the borrower.
She took a few steps back from his sudden approach, but stood her ground. There was something to all this, to this man, that she had to understand!
“How do you know my name?” she demanded with a much stronger tone than she thought she had in her. “Who are you?”
“Ohhh, well…” The man leaned an elbow on the work top and rested his chin there as he considered the tiny woman before him. “The answers to those questions are…complicated.”
Not one to put up with such an enigmatic non-answer, she crossed her arms and fixed him with a stern glare. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”
That earned her an actual smile from the man, one that seemed strangely sad to Zepheera. “I know you do.”
Both of Zepheera’s hands were clasped over her mouth as she stared at him, perhaps shocked by what Marcue was telling her. He in turn carried quite a bit of tension in his posture, clutching something small in his own hands. The Doctor couldn’t see what it was, but Marcue held it close to his chest and looked askance, like he couldn’t meet Zepheera’s gaze.
Hardly seemed like a confident love confession, in the Doctor’s opinion.
Five years ago, I commissioned this piece from the lovely @quackghost for a chapter I had yet to write for a story I hadn't updated (at the time) in two years.
Now, seven years later, and the chapter has finally come! One chapter left, and the series of Borrowed Time (and Space) is officially closed. If you don't know why that is, I refer you to this post.
In the meantime, it's finally time for the emotional buildup of the character of Marcue to reach its climax...
