"The Substitute Bride", Chapter 6
Sep. 29th, 2020 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverTitle: The Substitute Bride, Chapter 6
Fandom(s): Doctor Who
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Donna Noble, Nerys
Pairing(s): None
Rating: G
Genre: Adventure
Summary: The Doctor investigates one of the most serious time anomalies he's ever encountered, right here on Earth.
Word Count (chapter): 4694
Previous | Master Post | Next
Nerys didn’t bother to sit down at her table before taking her first big gulp of her pint. The moment it had appeared on the bar before her, she’d grabbed it and downed half. She didn’t care that the bartender eyed her suspiciously: she might look like a lightweight drinking way too much before noon, but this was a special - no, bizarre - occasion and she needed it. Besides, for her, it was easily past six in the evening, and the meal she’d ordered here was her dinner, not her lunch.
She settled into one of the large, cushy armchairs by a small table next to the window and stared out at the pedestrians passing by, crossing and uncrossing her legs as she tried to find any position that might relieve her apprehension. Everything about her current situation felt wrong. It wasn’t just the time travel, though that was disturbing enough. The thought that she herself was out there, just five miles to the west, was enough to sour her drink, and she dropped the glass none too gently on the table. At least she remembered what she’d been doing on this day well enough to reassure herself that there was no chance she’d accidentally run into herself: she’d spent the day trapped in her idiot brother’s house, babysitting his three brats as he and his wife fixed the fence he’d crashed into driving home from the pub the night before. Donna’s distraught phone call after the argument that was about to happen had given her the excuse she’d needed to escape.
No, the wrongness she sensed was the Doctor. Part of it was that he’d waltzed back into her life at all. With that regrettable business with Lance and the alien spider - and what kind of carnivorous arachnid laughed at puns, of all things? - she’d hoped never to see the man again after he’d dropped her off at her flat in her soaked, ruined wedding dress. Too pleased with himself by half, that one. Nerve of him to ask me to go with him. Bet he does that to all the women. Flash a smile and say, “Time machine,” and they’re falling over themselves to go with him, I’m sure. Leaning forward, she grabbed her glass again and toyed with it as she stared out the window. Won’t work on me, Doctor. I’m not a fool.
The crux of the problem, however, was that she knew he hadn’t told her everything. If there was one thing she was good at, it was sensing deceit. Donna often mocked her cynicism, saying she’d accuse the Pope of lying if she got the chance, but it was simply healthy scepticism. The one time she’d ignored her instinct, she’d ended up trussed up in a spider web over a hole leading to the center of the Earth. If there was one good thing that came out of that mess, it was that Lance taught her to never ignore her inner voice, especially when it came to men.
“Bangers and mash, extra gravy.”
Nerys caught the waiter’s accusatory glance as he placed the loaded plate in front of her, and she gave him a sultry wiggle as she sneered back at him. Judge all you want. This figure doesn’t come easy, but I’ve had it with salads and diet pop today.
She mused over this bewildering day as she ate her dinner, trying to sort out everything the Doctor had said to find the holes and figure out what he was really after. It simply didn’t make sense that he’d be concerned about Donna. He’d met her briefly at Nerys’ wedding reception over a year previously and hadn’t shown her the slightest interest then, so little that he hadn’t even known she was married. What was it about her that would attract the attention of an alien time traveller?
Once the sausages were gone, Nerys toyed with the remaining potatoes, making patterns with her fork until the uncanny resemblance to that scene from that American alien visitation film made her shiver. She threw down the fork and retreated into the shadow of her chair, arms crossed in pique. The Doctor cared too much about Donna, had something more than mere interest in her, and he didn’t want Nerys to know. That should be reason enough to demand to be taken home.
She forgot that decision a moment later as she glanced out the window and saw the Doctor dragging himself down the pavement toward the pub, pale and shaken. She sprang to her feet then fell back in her chair, staring at him impotently. Though she’d known him for less than a day, she sensed that physical distress was rare for him and meant something bad had happened. What’d he see? Nerys wondered as she pressed a hand over her mouth. Couldn’t have just been the argument to affect him this bad. What happened?
She composed herself whilst the Doctor entered the pub, and by the time he dropped uninvited into the armchair across from her, she appeared tolerably bored. “About time you got back,” she snapped. “Can I go home now?”
Slumping in his chair, the Doctor mopped at his brow and peered at Nerys from under his palm. His eyes twinkled, and Nerys knew he hadn’t fallen for her front of apathy.
“All right,” she sighed. “What happened out there?”
“Something changed again,” he grunted, his voice hoarse. “Something about Donna changed.”
“How do you know?”
“I felt it. Dizzy spell hit me, right in the middle of their argument, bam.” He clicked his fingers.
“I didn’t notice anything.”
“You wouldn’t. Humans aren’t time-sensitive.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Thing is,” he groaned, “I can’t figure out what changed. You’re here, I’m here, and Donna and Sam were still snapping at each other. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe nothing did change. Maybe you’re coming down with Time Lord flu or some alien virus from planet Gargaron.” That would be a blessing, she thought. Then he could take me home and I’d be done with him forever.
“Nah,” the Doctor snorted as he pinched at the bridge of his nose, and Nerys deflated, sinking into her chair. “Gargaron’s quite safe. Temperate and non-threatening, with just a bit of a breeze in the summer. And fire ferns with quite the pollen sacs. Stay away if you’ve allergies. But no viruses. Besides,” and he wagged a finger at Nerys, “I’ve experienced this kind of temporal disjunction before. We used to work with these kinds of anomalies back at the Academy, during our practicals.”
Nerys waited not-so-patiently whilst the man rambled, staring daggers at him. “If you’re such the expert, then you must know what’s causing it.”
“Not at all,” he replied, waving away the suggestion. “It’s like getting a bucket of water dumped on you whilst you’re blindfolded. You know what just happened, but not who did it or why, or even how.”
‘All right.” She grabbed her beer and took a big swallow, then slid the glass back onto the table. “So you’re sure something changed, but nothing did.”
“That’s the thing. It doesn’t make sense. I mean, this is the third one so far today. Well, ‘today’ for me anyway. Not in the cosmic sense. Today’s not the day that I came to see you, or even the day that, well, when this all started.” Nerys snatched the beer back up and downed the rest of it, fuming at the Doctor over the rim of the glass. “Oh. Right. Well. So there’s been three now. The first one was tiny, and I couldn’t figure out what had changed then either. The second knocked me flat on my back, and when I woke up, Donna was gone and I was on a different planet altogether. This one was in the middle. I’d say it wasn’t large enough for a huge change but I should have been able to see it.”
“Wait.” Setting the glass on the table with a pointed thunk, Nerys glared at him over her forgotten dinner and hissed, “What did you say?”
“This should have been big enough to see some effect.”
“No, before that.” She tapped on the table. “You said that after the big… the big… thing, Donna was gone. You were with Donna!” she accused him. “You were with her and you don’t even know her.”
The Doctor couldn’t quite bring himself to look at Nerys. He scrubbed at the back of his neck with one hand. “Well…”
“You do know her, don’t you?” She peered at him, eyes narrowed, then gaped. “Or you did, until all of this changed.” Realisation dawned on her face, and lashing out with a quick hand, she snatched the Doctor’s wrist and forced his fingers open. The drawing of Donna, calling for rescue, stared up at her. “You lied to me! You do know her!”
The Doctor’s guilty grimace told her she’d hit it spot on.
“You know her far better than meeting her at my wedding, don’t you?” she continued, working through all her questions out loud. “But you didn’t know she was married, and that thing you just said, Donna was gone and you were on a different planet, that means everything was completely different for you. Which means… which means…”
Suddenly it all made sense.
“It all happened to her, didn’t it?” She hadn’t thought that that pasty-faced alien could turn any paler, but he managed it. “She was the bride that that spider bint wanted, not me. Then, she went with you when you asked. And now it’s all changed, and you want to put it back.”
“No! That’s not it at all!” the Doctor protested, but Nerys was buying none of it.
“You told me you were trying to fix some changes in Donna’s life, but really, you want to change everything about it. You’re trying to take away her family and her career, her entire life. And…” Her eyes widened as the implication hit her. “That means you want to change everything! You want to throw out my life and everyone else’s!” Horrified, she collapsed back in her chair, her shoulders slumped and her arms hanging.
“That wasn’t the point!” the Doctor insisted, propping his elbows on his knees to lean in and argue his case. “Time snapped and everything changed! This isn’t how things are supposed to be. I’m trying to put it all back.”
“How it’s supposed to be? Who are you to decide how it’s supposed to be?”
“I’m a Time Lord. That’s what we do. I can see all that, and…” He faltered. Whilst he tried to defend himself, he’d glanced at the timelines and it hit him: there was nothing weighting the original timeline more than the present one. There were no fixed points to defend, no momentous events. Sure, he’d seen patterns forming around Donna from the moment she’d been drawn into the TARDIS and they had continued to solidify as she had travelled with him, but now the threads of time swirled elsewhere. Not around Nerys or this timeline’s Donna or anyone else he’d met since, he noted, and they weren’t looping back toward Martha or Rose, so it must be someone he hadn’t yet met. One thing was clear, however: the universe cared not which way this went; whatever happened, it was compensating.
“What, Doctor?” sneered Nerys. “Conscience catching up with you? Or is it too hard to come up with more holier-than-thou lies?”
“No.” Nerys reared back at the confusion in his suddenly soft voice. “You’re right, you know.”
“Oh, geroff!” she snorted.
“No, I mean it.” Sighing, he mopped at his face with both hands, acutely aware of just how exhausted he suddenly was. “I’ve just been running on adrenaline, since the moment I woke up in this reality. All I’ve been trying to do is get my best mate back.”
“Your best mate?” squeaked Nerys. “Donna?”
“Yeah. You were right about that, too. In rea- in the original timeline,” he corrected himself with a shake of his head, “Donna was the one marrying Lance. After all that, I asked her to travel with me and she said no, just like you did, but we met up again and we’ve been together since.” He stuttered at the twitch of Nerys’ disbelieving eyebrow. “No, no, not ‘together’ together. Just together. Just mates out to see the universe.”
“That’s what you’re trying to get back?”
“Yes,” he sighed, wearier than he’d been in centuries.
“And what happens to us, then?” she hissed. “We just disappear?”
“No, not disappear. This timeline gets replaced,” he hastened to clarify. “Yes, you as you are now won’t be there, but you’re still there. I know you are, Nerys. I met you at Donna’s wedding.”
“And what am I like, then, in that world?”
“Well,” the Doctor drawled as he gazed up at the rafters above them, his head bobbing as he thought. “You’re Donna’s friend, and you looked lovely at the reception, and…” He groped for anything he could remember about the original Nerys he’d met. “And you got along great with Lance. You were dancing with him, though I suppose that isn’t a great recommendation.”
Nerys barked a sardonic laugh. “You don’t know.”
The Doctor had nothing he could say.
She threw her hands up in helpless derision. “You really don’t know. You only just saw me, I bet, never even talked to me. You never talked to Donna at my wedding, so why would you talk to me at hers? How can you do this, Doctor? How can you just throw away my life like this? All of our lives?”
“Nerys -”
“I don’t know why I trusted you,” she shouted over him. “You’re no better than Lance. At least he had a good reason to kill me, bonkers though he was.”
“I’m not killing you, Nerys. You’re not going to die -”
“You just want Donna back and you don’t care what happens to the rest of us.”
“I do care what happens to you! It’s just that…” He faltered again, and ran a hand through his fringe as he weighed what he should say.
“What, Doctor?” she growled. “What can you possibly say to make me think you care at all?”
The Doctor’s head snapped up, and Nerys jerked back at the storm in his eyes. “All right. Look. Putting aside all of that with you and Donna, even if I don’t change anything one way or the other, someone is still messing with Donna’s life. They’ve changed it so radically that everything’s different, not just Donna but everyone, going years past, and they’ve gone and done it again. Is it better? Is it worse? I’ve no idea. But whoever did it, I’ve got to stop them.”
“You think they’re still doing it.”
The Doctor nodded emphatically as he blurted, “I know they are. That’s what I felt out there, an unnatural shift in time.”
“But nothing changed,” Nerys insisted.
The Doctor held up a finger. “Correction: nothing seemed to change. Doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a change that we haven’t noticed yet.”
Nerys held on to her last shred of hope. “But this change, it could have been good, right? It didn’t have to be a bad thing.”
“Whether it was good or bad doesn’t matter. It could have been anything, but whatever it is, it’s wrong, and the more it happens, the less likely I’ll be able to stop it. You see, Nerys, you know I’m a Time Lord, right?” He tapped his temple. “I’m doing everything I can to keep these alternatives alive, and I can do that, I have that power. I can hold the fragmenting timelines in place, but every time a new one branches off, the oldest one gets fainter and harder to grasp. Donna was my companion, and then everything changed and you became the bride. Now something else has changed and Donna’s receding into the distance. I’m starting to forget her. You see?” He held his hand out to her, showing her the drawing of Donna. “I drew this when I first arrived in this timeline, and it’s only here because I’m holding onto it as hard as I can. It’s not two hours old and it’s already starting to fade. I don’t know how many more changes Donna’s timeline can take, but I know that eventually, I’ll lose the timeline and it’ll be gone, and then the next one, and then the next one. Eventually, even this timeline, the one we’re in right now, is going to go. Donna’s existence, and everything else, is crumbling. I need to stop these changes now, and I need your help to do it.”
“I don’t care!” she snapped, leaning across the table and and stabbing it with a finger “None of that tosh matters to me. All I know is that you’re trying to destroy my world, and I’m not helping you do that.”
“I’m not destroying it,” repeated the Doctor with a heavy sigh. “I’m just changing it back to the way it was. You won’t even notice.”
“And you think that makes it right?” she demanded, her furious voice going shrill.
“No.” The Doctor swiped a hand across his eyes, then sighed. “All right, Nerys. I’ll tell you what. Stopping these time shifts, that’s the most important thing right now. If you’ll help me, I promise that I will make no decisions about what should be restored until after we’ve stopped them and I’ve discussed it all with you. We’ll figure it out together, and I’ll give you fair consideration.”
“Fair?” she spat at him. “There’s nothing fair about this! Look me in the eye and tell me there’s even a chance that you’ll leave things the way they are!” Biting his lip, the Doctor glanced away, unable to meet Nerys’ glare. “I thought so. You’re just going to do whatever you want, and that’s going to be putting it all back the way it was. It doesn’t matter that you’ll be wiping my life out, and so many other people’s. And you’ll be destroying Donna’s happiness as well, because if she was marrying Lance and temping at H.C. Clements like I was, then she was living my wreck of a life and she didn’t have Sam and her children and a career.”
The Doctor drew in a breath to protest, then choked on it as what Nerys had said sunk in. “Wait. Children?”
“Yes!” she barked, exasperated. “Children! You saw them!”
“No, there was -” The Doctor sputtered again, stood stunned for a moment, then pumped his fist. “Yes!” he exclaimed, and Nerys reared back, startled. “That was the change. Two children!” The image of Donna emerging from her house carrying her tiny son whilst clutching the hand of her daughter next to her flashed through his mind, brighter than the alternate memory of her with Sarah alone. “Matthew! Matthew and Sarah.” As he grinned at the confused woman, his memories of the last two hours gelled around that moment, some of them deviating significantly from the older, fainter recollection.
“Of course, Matthew and Sarah,” she growled in fair mimicry of the Doctor’s gravelly tenor. “What are you talking about?”
“When we went to see Donna, she only had one child, her daughter Sarah,” he explained. “The event in the square, it changed it to two children.”
Nerys rolled her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head. “Oh, that’s nonsense.”
“I’m telling you, that’s what happened. Here, Nerys,” he beckoned, waving to get her attention, “tell me, what happened after they left Trafalgar Square? How did their argument end?”
“I told you that, just before we went there!”
“Humour me.”
“All right.” She sighed and began in a bored, pedantic tone,” They were in the square, I don’t know why, and Sam got mad cos he thought Donna wasn’t planning on working after all her schooling. They argued most of the day, but they managed to work things out and settled some things.”
“Donna didn’t go to your flat and stay there for a week?” the Doctor asked.
“No!” she spat. “Good thing, too, cos I was at my brother’s looking after his brats whilst he mended his fence. Ended up staying there all day and overnight.”
“And Sylvia didn’t mediate for them?” he prompted her once more.
“No, why would she?”
“Don’t you see, Nerys? That’s not what you told me, not originally.” He pointed out toward Trafalgar. “You told me that Donna left the square alone and stayed with you for a bit, and they almost divorced until they made up with Sylvia’s help.”
“I did not!” she protested. “That’s not how it went at all.”
“To you, no, it didn’t. You’re only human -”
“Oi!”
“- so you only know what happened as a result of the change. To you, that argument was significant but ended well, but you thought it was important, and to you, it’s the reason we’re here now.” He tapped his head. “But me, I can see and remember both timelines, and to me, we came here because the argument almost ended in divorce and you insisted it was the most important event in their marriage up until now.” He paused. “Well,” he drawled, “your ‘now’, not this ‘now’. But, the point is, in your memory, the argument went well and seems to have ended in conceiving their son, and you don’t know about the one in which it nearly ended in divorce and left them with only a daughter.”
“Only a daughter? You’re saying that Matthew didn’t exist? And you’re saying that I said this?” Nerys’ eyes grew wide, and she puffed a heavy breath into her cupped hands as she tried to grasp what he was saying. “But Donna… She has two children, I’m sure of it.”
“Yes, that’s right. To you, right here, right now - oh, English needs a precise temporal lexicon!” He threw his hands up, then took a deep breath and tried again. “To you, she has two children, but in the other timeline, she had only one. And in the original, she didn’t have her own family at all. Wasn’t even married. She was travelling with me. Never once mentioned anyone named Sam.” The Doctor reached across the table and took Nerys’ hand to steady her. She cringed at his touch. His words were soft and measured when he spoke again. “Donna’s timeline is branching, fragmenting into a myriad of possibilities. It’ll keep changing, and it’ll change everything around it, and who knows what any of this will end up like. That’s what I have to stop, and I need you to help me. Please, Nerys.”
Nerys pulled her hand out of his grasp and sat back, straightening the shoulders of her dress. “All right. I’ll help. But like I said before, I’m doing this for her. Not for you.”
“No, not for me at all.” He glanced down at the drawing in the palm of his hand. “For Donna.”
She mopped at her face with the back of her hand, not at all to stifle a sniffle. “What do we do now?”
“I’m not sure. The goal is to find who’s doing this to her, so I suppose we need to figure out where in Donna’s life he’s going to strike next.” He shook his head as he thought. “But it could be anywhere. It doesn’t need to be a big decision point like Trafalgar Square was. After all, the first was just a concert, and we still haven’t pinpointed what previous point in time it actually changed. Besides, even the tiniest, most insignificant change could have enormous consequences. Donna could decide to have a coffee instead of tea one morning, leading to leaving a bit of liquid in her cup, which spills on her boss’ skirt and destroys her promotion chances for a year.”
Nerys stared at him, her lip curling in undisguised contempt.
“All right. Yes. All right. That doesn’t help,” he conceded. “We can’t just visit every moment of Donna’s life. You’re the Donna expert. When do you think we should go?” He eyed Nerys expectantly.
She settled back in her chair and crossed her arms. “I’d say I’m not the person to ask.”
“Why not?”
“Cos you and whoever’s doing this have one thing in common: you don’t know a thing about Donna, not a whit, do you now?” Ducking his head, the Doctor scratched at the back of his neck with a sheepish grimace. Nerys pushed her point. “That’s right. You were surprised when I said she was married cos you hadn’t a clue if your Donna might have been previously married. You know where she lived, I’m sure, but what about where she worked before you met her?”
A memory of a rooftop conversation overlooking London proper flashed through the Doctor’s mind. “Er, she said something about double glazing.”
“Yeah? Which firm? I’m sure there are a couple dozen in West London alone. How about the schools she attended? Did you know she grew up in Croydon? Or am I lying?” She snorted at his deer-in-the-headlights goggle. “I didn’t think so.”
“Yes, yes,” the Doctor moaned. “You’re right, of course. I don’t know much, and our mysterious adversary probably knows the same. So he’d choose an important, visible event, because -”
“Cos why spend the time and effort researching an obscure moment in Donna’s life when any will do?” she finished for him.
“Yes!” the Doctor exclaimed, startling Nerys into knocking over her glass, and she barely caught it from tumbling off the table. “It’s got to be public so it’s easy for a stranger to get in without being noticed. And it’s got to be significant enough that an outsider can find out about it and know when it’ll happen.”
“No, that’s not right. This here,” and Nerys waved a hand out at the square, “it wasn’t significant at all.”
“Not to you, because you just remember them arguing and making up. In the previous timeline, when they were here, it was a huge fight and they separated and almost divorced. That’s a big, visible event.”
“I just can’t imagine…” Nerys murmured, then shook her head. “All right, then. If you’re looking for big, public, and visible, then I’d say…” Nerys paused, hesitant to suggest -
“Their wedding!” the Doctor finished for her, punching the air with an exuberant fist.
“No! Not a chance!” she protested.
“Why not? It’s perfect!” He ticked off the salient points on his fingers. “A posh public venue, cos the Donna I know would insist on it. We can get in easy, and the perpetrator could hide in plain sight. A controlled time range to search, and a manageable group of what, fifty people?”
“A hundred and thirty, actually,” she supplied, “but they’re all friends and family. Whoever it is won’t be able to get in.”
The Doctor shook his head. “No one knows every single person at a wedding, not even the bride and groom. Lots of people from obscure corners of one side or the other. This wedding’s just the thing.” He hopped up, eager to pursue this obvious target, and beckoned to her. “Come on! Now, when and where was this exactly?”
“But Doctor!” Nerys began again, refusing to rise.
“Don’t tell me. St. Mary’s, Hayden Road, Chiswick.”
Nerys sneered. “That was my wedding.”
“Ah, yes.” He popped himself in the side of the head with the heel of his hand. “I’ve got that address seared in my brain from two timelines.”
“Donna’s was at Chiswick House,” Nerys supplied. “That posh venue you mentioned. They could afford it. But Doctor...”
“Then Chiswick House it is! What’s the date and time?”
“Doctor!”
The admonishment finally penetrated. “What?”
Nerys threw her hands up. “We can’t go there. I was- I mean, I will already be there. How am I supposed to explain being there twice?”
“Oh. Yes. Well, it’s time to introduce you to the wardrobe. Come on!” With a tremendous grin, he spun and dashed out, and Nerys, stuck in a pub three years before her time, had no choice but to follow.
Previous | Next
Fandom(s): Doctor Who
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Donna Noble, Nerys
Pairing(s): None
Rating: G
Genre: Adventure
Summary: The Doctor investigates one of the most serious time anomalies he's ever encountered, right here on Earth.
Word Count (chapter): 4694
Nerys didn’t bother to sit down at her table before taking her first big gulp of her pint. The moment it had appeared on the bar before her, she’d grabbed it and downed half. She didn’t care that the bartender eyed her suspiciously: she might look like a lightweight drinking way too much before noon, but this was a special - no, bizarre - occasion and she needed it. Besides, for her, it was easily past six in the evening, and the meal she’d ordered here was her dinner, not her lunch.
She settled into one of the large, cushy armchairs by a small table next to the window and stared out at the pedestrians passing by, crossing and uncrossing her legs as she tried to find any position that might relieve her apprehension. Everything about her current situation felt wrong. It wasn’t just the time travel, though that was disturbing enough. The thought that she herself was out there, just five miles to the west, was enough to sour her drink, and she dropped the glass none too gently on the table. At least she remembered what she’d been doing on this day well enough to reassure herself that there was no chance she’d accidentally run into herself: she’d spent the day trapped in her idiot brother’s house, babysitting his three brats as he and his wife fixed the fence he’d crashed into driving home from the pub the night before. Donna’s distraught phone call after the argument that was about to happen had given her the excuse she’d needed to escape.
No, the wrongness she sensed was the Doctor. Part of it was that he’d waltzed back into her life at all. With that regrettable business with Lance and the alien spider - and what kind of carnivorous arachnid laughed at puns, of all things? - she’d hoped never to see the man again after he’d dropped her off at her flat in her soaked, ruined wedding dress. Too pleased with himself by half, that one. Nerve of him to ask me to go with him. Bet he does that to all the women. Flash a smile and say, “Time machine,” and they’re falling over themselves to go with him, I’m sure. Leaning forward, she grabbed her glass again and toyed with it as she stared out the window. Won’t work on me, Doctor. I’m not a fool.
The crux of the problem, however, was that she knew he hadn’t told her everything. If there was one thing she was good at, it was sensing deceit. Donna often mocked her cynicism, saying she’d accuse the Pope of lying if she got the chance, but it was simply healthy scepticism. The one time she’d ignored her instinct, she’d ended up trussed up in a spider web over a hole leading to the center of the Earth. If there was one good thing that came out of that mess, it was that Lance taught her to never ignore her inner voice, especially when it came to men.
“Bangers and mash, extra gravy.”
Nerys caught the waiter’s accusatory glance as he placed the loaded plate in front of her, and she gave him a sultry wiggle as she sneered back at him. Judge all you want. This figure doesn’t come easy, but I’ve had it with salads and diet pop today.
She mused over this bewildering day as she ate her dinner, trying to sort out everything the Doctor had said to find the holes and figure out what he was really after. It simply didn’t make sense that he’d be concerned about Donna. He’d met her briefly at Nerys’ wedding reception over a year previously and hadn’t shown her the slightest interest then, so little that he hadn’t even known she was married. What was it about her that would attract the attention of an alien time traveller?
Once the sausages were gone, Nerys toyed with the remaining potatoes, making patterns with her fork until the uncanny resemblance to that scene from that American alien visitation film made her shiver. She threw down the fork and retreated into the shadow of her chair, arms crossed in pique. The Doctor cared too much about Donna, had something more than mere interest in her, and he didn’t want Nerys to know. That should be reason enough to demand to be taken home.
She forgot that decision a moment later as she glanced out the window and saw the Doctor dragging himself down the pavement toward the pub, pale and shaken. She sprang to her feet then fell back in her chair, staring at him impotently. Though she’d known him for less than a day, she sensed that physical distress was rare for him and meant something bad had happened. What’d he see? Nerys wondered as she pressed a hand over her mouth. Couldn’t have just been the argument to affect him this bad. What happened?
She composed herself whilst the Doctor entered the pub, and by the time he dropped uninvited into the armchair across from her, she appeared tolerably bored. “About time you got back,” she snapped. “Can I go home now?”
Slumping in his chair, the Doctor mopped at his brow and peered at Nerys from under his palm. His eyes twinkled, and Nerys knew he hadn’t fallen for her front of apathy.
“All right,” she sighed. “What happened out there?”
“Something changed again,” he grunted, his voice hoarse. “Something about Donna changed.”
“How do you know?”
“I felt it. Dizzy spell hit me, right in the middle of their argument, bam.” He clicked his fingers.
“I didn’t notice anything.”
“You wouldn’t. Humans aren’t time-sensitive.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Thing is,” he groaned, “I can’t figure out what changed. You’re here, I’m here, and Donna and Sam were still snapping at each other. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe nothing did change. Maybe you’re coming down with Time Lord flu or some alien virus from planet Gargaron.” That would be a blessing, she thought. Then he could take me home and I’d be done with him forever.
“Nah,” the Doctor snorted as he pinched at the bridge of his nose, and Nerys deflated, sinking into her chair. “Gargaron’s quite safe. Temperate and non-threatening, with just a bit of a breeze in the summer. And fire ferns with quite the pollen sacs. Stay away if you’ve allergies. But no viruses. Besides,” and he wagged a finger at Nerys, “I’ve experienced this kind of temporal disjunction before. We used to work with these kinds of anomalies back at the Academy, during our practicals.”
Nerys waited not-so-patiently whilst the man rambled, staring daggers at him. “If you’re such the expert, then you must know what’s causing it.”
“Not at all,” he replied, waving away the suggestion. “It’s like getting a bucket of water dumped on you whilst you’re blindfolded. You know what just happened, but not who did it or why, or even how.”
‘All right.” She grabbed her beer and took a big swallow, then slid the glass back onto the table. “So you’re sure something changed, but nothing did.”
“That’s the thing. It doesn’t make sense. I mean, this is the third one so far today. Well, ‘today’ for me anyway. Not in the cosmic sense. Today’s not the day that I came to see you, or even the day that, well, when this all started.” Nerys snatched the beer back up and downed the rest of it, fuming at the Doctor over the rim of the glass. “Oh. Right. Well. So there’s been three now. The first one was tiny, and I couldn’t figure out what had changed then either. The second knocked me flat on my back, and when I woke up, Donna was gone and I was on a different planet altogether. This one was in the middle. I’d say it wasn’t large enough for a huge change but I should have been able to see it.”
“Wait.” Setting the glass on the table with a pointed thunk, Nerys glared at him over her forgotten dinner and hissed, “What did you say?”
“This should have been big enough to see some effect.”
“No, before that.” She tapped on the table. “You said that after the big… the big… thing, Donna was gone. You were with Donna!” she accused him. “You were with her and you don’t even know her.”
The Doctor couldn’t quite bring himself to look at Nerys. He scrubbed at the back of his neck with one hand. “Well…”
“You do know her, don’t you?” She peered at him, eyes narrowed, then gaped. “Or you did, until all of this changed.” Realisation dawned on her face, and lashing out with a quick hand, she snatched the Doctor’s wrist and forced his fingers open. The drawing of Donna, calling for rescue, stared up at her. “You lied to me! You do know her!”
The Doctor’s guilty grimace told her she’d hit it spot on.
“You know her far better than meeting her at my wedding, don’t you?” she continued, working through all her questions out loud. “But you didn’t know she was married, and that thing you just said, Donna was gone and you were on a different planet, that means everything was completely different for you. Which means… which means…”
Suddenly it all made sense.
“It all happened to her, didn’t it?” She hadn’t thought that that pasty-faced alien could turn any paler, but he managed it. “She was the bride that that spider bint wanted, not me. Then, she went with you when you asked. And now it’s all changed, and you want to put it back.”
“No! That’s not it at all!” the Doctor protested, but Nerys was buying none of it.
“You told me you were trying to fix some changes in Donna’s life, but really, you want to change everything about it. You’re trying to take away her family and her career, her entire life. And…” Her eyes widened as the implication hit her. “That means you want to change everything! You want to throw out my life and everyone else’s!” Horrified, she collapsed back in her chair, her shoulders slumped and her arms hanging.
“That wasn’t the point!” the Doctor insisted, propping his elbows on his knees to lean in and argue his case. “Time snapped and everything changed! This isn’t how things are supposed to be. I’m trying to put it all back.”
“How it’s supposed to be? Who are you to decide how it’s supposed to be?”
“I’m a Time Lord. That’s what we do. I can see all that, and…” He faltered. Whilst he tried to defend himself, he’d glanced at the timelines and it hit him: there was nothing weighting the original timeline more than the present one. There were no fixed points to defend, no momentous events. Sure, he’d seen patterns forming around Donna from the moment she’d been drawn into the TARDIS and they had continued to solidify as she had travelled with him, but now the threads of time swirled elsewhere. Not around Nerys or this timeline’s Donna or anyone else he’d met since, he noted, and they weren’t looping back toward Martha or Rose, so it must be someone he hadn’t yet met. One thing was clear, however: the universe cared not which way this went; whatever happened, it was compensating.
“What, Doctor?” sneered Nerys. “Conscience catching up with you? Or is it too hard to come up with more holier-than-thou lies?”
“No.” Nerys reared back at the confusion in his suddenly soft voice. “You’re right, you know.”
“Oh, geroff!” she snorted.
“No, I mean it.” Sighing, he mopped at his face with both hands, acutely aware of just how exhausted he suddenly was. “I’ve just been running on adrenaline, since the moment I woke up in this reality. All I’ve been trying to do is get my best mate back.”
“Your best mate?” squeaked Nerys. “Donna?”
“Yeah. You were right about that, too. In rea- in the original timeline,” he corrected himself with a shake of his head, “Donna was the one marrying Lance. After all that, I asked her to travel with me and she said no, just like you did, but we met up again and we’ve been together since.” He stuttered at the twitch of Nerys’ disbelieving eyebrow. “No, no, not ‘together’ together. Just together. Just mates out to see the universe.”
“That’s what you’re trying to get back?”
“Yes,” he sighed, wearier than he’d been in centuries.
“And what happens to us, then?” she hissed. “We just disappear?”
“No, not disappear. This timeline gets replaced,” he hastened to clarify. “Yes, you as you are now won’t be there, but you’re still there. I know you are, Nerys. I met you at Donna’s wedding.”
“And what am I like, then, in that world?”
“Well,” the Doctor drawled as he gazed up at the rafters above them, his head bobbing as he thought. “You’re Donna’s friend, and you looked lovely at the reception, and…” He groped for anything he could remember about the original Nerys he’d met. “And you got along great with Lance. You were dancing with him, though I suppose that isn’t a great recommendation.”
Nerys barked a sardonic laugh. “You don’t know.”
The Doctor had nothing he could say.
She threw her hands up in helpless derision. “You really don’t know. You only just saw me, I bet, never even talked to me. You never talked to Donna at my wedding, so why would you talk to me at hers? How can you do this, Doctor? How can you just throw away my life like this? All of our lives?”
“Nerys -”
“I don’t know why I trusted you,” she shouted over him. “You’re no better than Lance. At least he had a good reason to kill me, bonkers though he was.”
“I’m not killing you, Nerys. You’re not going to die -”
“You just want Donna back and you don’t care what happens to the rest of us.”
“I do care what happens to you! It’s just that…” He faltered again, and ran a hand through his fringe as he weighed what he should say.
“What, Doctor?” she growled. “What can you possibly say to make me think you care at all?”
The Doctor’s head snapped up, and Nerys jerked back at the storm in his eyes. “All right. Look. Putting aside all of that with you and Donna, even if I don’t change anything one way or the other, someone is still messing with Donna’s life. They’ve changed it so radically that everything’s different, not just Donna but everyone, going years past, and they’ve gone and done it again. Is it better? Is it worse? I’ve no idea. But whoever did it, I’ve got to stop them.”
“You think they’re still doing it.”
The Doctor nodded emphatically as he blurted, “I know they are. That’s what I felt out there, an unnatural shift in time.”
“But nothing changed,” Nerys insisted.
The Doctor held up a finger. “Correction: nothing seemed to change. Doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a change that we haven’t noticed yet.”
Nerys held on to her last shred of hope. “But this change, it could have been good, right? It didn’t have to be a bad thing.”
“Whether it was good or bad doesn’t matter. It could have been anything, but whatever it is, it’s wrong, and the more it happens, the less likely I’ll be able to stop it. You see, Nerys, you know I’m a Time Lord, right?” He tapped his temple. “I’m doing everything I can to keep these alternatives alive, and I can do that, I have that power. I can hold the fragmenting timelines in place, but every time a new one branches off, the oldest one gets fainter and harder to grasp. Donna was my companion, and then everything changed and you became the bride. Now something else has changed and Donna’s receding into the distance. I’m starting to forget her. You see?” He held his hand out to her, showing her the drawing of Donna. “I drew this when I first arrived in this timeline, and it’s only here because I’m holding onto it as hard as I can. It’s not two hours old and it’s already starting to fade. I don’t know how many more changes Donna’s timeline can take, but I know that eventually, I’ll lose the timeline and it’ll be gone, and then the next one, and then the next one. Eventually, even this timeline, the one we’re in right now, is going to go. Donna’s existence, and everything else, is crumbling. I need to stop these changes now, and I need your help to do it.”
“I don’t care!” she snapped, leaning across the table and and stabbing it with a finger “None of that tosh matters to me. All I know is that you’re trying to destroy my world, and I’m not helping you do that.”
“I’m not destroying it,” repeated the Doctor with a heavy sigh. “I’m just changing it back to the way it was. You won’t even notice.”
“And you think that makes it right?” she demanded, her furious voice going shrill.
“No.” The Doctor swiped a hand across his eyes, then sighed. “All right, Nerys. I’ll tell you what. Stopping these time shifts, that’s the most important thing right now. If you’ll help me, I promise that I will make no decisions about what should be restored until after we’ve stopped them and I’ve discussed it all with you. We’ll figure it out together, and I’ll give you fair consideration.”
“Fair?” she spat at him. “There’s nothing fair about this! Look me in the eye and tell me there’s even a chance that you’ll leave things the way they are!” Biting his lip, the Doctor glanced away, unable to meet Nerys’ glare. “I thought so. You’re just going to do whatever you want, and that’s going to be putting it all back the way it was. It doesn’t matter that you’ll be wiping my life out, and so many other people’s. And you’ll be destroying Donna’s happiness as well, because if she was marrying Lance and temping at H.C. Clements like I was, then she was living my wreck of a life and she didn’t have Sam and her children and a career.”
The Doctor drew in a breath to protest, then choked on it as what Nerys had said sunk in. “Wait. Children?”
“Yes!” she barked, exasperated. “Children! You saw them!”
“No, there was -” The Doctor sputtered again, stood stunned for a moment, then pumped his fist. “Yes!” he exclaimed, and Nerys reared back, startled. “That was the change. Two children!” The image of Donna emerging from her house carrying her tiny son whilst clutching the hand of her daughter next to her flashed through his mind, brighter than the alternate memory of her with Sarah alone. “Matthew! Matthew and Sarah.” As he grinned at the confused woman, his memories of the last two hours gelled around that moment, some of them deviating significantly from the older, fainter recollection.
“Of course, Matthew and Sarah,” she growled in fair mimicry of the Doctor’s gravelly tenor. “What are you talking about?”
“When we went to see Donna, she only had one child, her daughter Sarah,” he explained. “The event in the square, it changed it to two children.”
Nerys rolled her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head. “Oh, that’s nonsense.”
“I’m telling you, that’s what happened. Here, Nerys,” he beckoned, waving to get her attention, “tell me, what happened after they left Trafalgar Square? How did their argument end?”
“I told you that, just before we went there!”
“Humour me.”
“All right.” She sighed and began in a bored, pedantic tone,” They were in the square, I don’t know why, and Sam got mad cos he thought Donna wasn’t planning on working after all her schooling. They argued most of the day, but they managed to work things out and settled some things.”
“Donna didn’t go to your flat and stay there for a week?” the Doctor asked.
“No!” she spat. “Good thing, too, cos I was at my brother’s looking after his brats whilst he mended his fence. Ended up staying there all day and overnight.”
“And Sylvia didn’t mediate for them?” he prompted her once more.
“No, why would she?”
“Don’t you see, Nerys? That’s not what you told me, not originally.” He pointed out toward Trafalgar. “You told me that Donna left the square alone and stayed with you for a bit, and they almost divorced until they made up with Sylvia’s help.”
“I did not!” she protested. “That’s not how it went at all.”
“To you, no, it didn’t. You’re only human -”
“Oi!”
“- so you only know what happened as a result of the change. To you, that argument was significant but ended well, but you thought it was important, and to you, it’s the reason we’re here now.” He tapped his head. “But me, I can see and remember both timelines, and to me, we came here because the argument almost ended in divorce and you insisted it was the most important event in their marriage up until now.” He paused. “Well,” he drawled, “your ‘now’, not this ‘now’. But, the point is, in your memory, the argument went well and seems to have ended in conceiving their son, and you don’t know about the one in which it nearly ended in divorce and left them with only a daughter.”
“Only a daughter? You’re saying that Matthew didn’t exist? And you’re saying that I said this?” Nerys’ eyes grew wide, and she puffed a heavy breath into her cupped hands as she tried to grasp what he was saying. “But Donna… She has two children, I’m sure of it.”
“Yes, that’s right. To you, right here, right now - oh, English needs a precise temporal lexicon!” He threw his hands up, then took a deep breath and tried again. “To you, she has two children, but in the other timeline, she had only one. And in the original, she didn’t have her own family at all. Wasn’t even married. She was travelling with me. Never once mentioned anyone named Sam.” The Doctor reached across the table and took Nerys’ hand to steady her. She cringed at his touch. His words were soft and measured when he spoke again. “Donna’s timeline is branching, fragmenting into a myriad of possibilities. It’ll keep changing, and it’ll change everything around it, and who knows what any of this will end up like. That’s what I have to stop, and I need you to help me. Please, Nerys.”
Nerys pulled her hand out of his grasp and sat back, straightening the shoulders of her dress. “All right. I’ll help. But like I said before, I’m doing this for her. Not for you.”
“No, not for me at all.” He glanced down at the drawing in the palm of his hand. “For Donna.”
She mopped at her face with the back of her hand, not at all to stifle a sniffle. “What do we do now?”
“I’m not sure. The goal is to find who’s doing this to her, so I suppose we need to figure out where in Donna’s life he’s going to strike next.” He shook his head as he thought. “But it could be anywhere. It doesn’t need to be a big decision point like Trafalgar Square was. After all, the first was just a concert, and we still haven’t pinpointed what previous point in time it actually changed. Besides, even the tiniest, most insignificant change could have enormous consequences. Donna could decide to have a coffee instead of tea one morning, leading to leaving a bit of liquid in her cup, which spills on her boss’ skirt and destroys her promotion chances for a year.”
Nerys stared at him, her lip curling in undisguised contempt.
“All right. Yes. All right. That doesn’t help,” he conceded. “We can’t just visit every moment of Donna’s life. You’re the Donna expert. When do you think we should go?” He eyed Nerys expectantly.
She settled back in her chair and crossed her arms. “I’d say I’m not the person to ask.”
“Why not?”
“Cos you and whoever’s doing this have one thing in common: you don’t know a thing about Donna, not a whit, do you now?” Ducking his head, the Doctor scratched at the back of his neck with a sheepish grimace. Nerys pushed her point. “That’s right. You were surprised when I said she was married cos you hadn’t a clue if your Donna might have been previously married. You know where she lived, I’m sure, but what about where she worked before you met her?”
A memory of a rooftop conversation overlooking London proper flashed through the Doctor’s mind. “Er, she said something about double glazing.”
“Yeah? Which firm? I’m sure there are a couple dozen in West London alone. How about the schools she attended? Did you know she grew up in Croydon? Or am I lying?” She snorted at his deer-in-the-headlights goggle. “I didn’t think so.”
“Yes, yes,” the Doctor moaned. “You’re right, of course. I don’t know much, and our mysterious adversary probably knows the same. So he’d choose an important, visible event, because -”
“Cos why spend the time and effort researching an obscure moment in Donna’s life when any will do?” she finished for him.
“Yes!” the Doctor exclaimed, startling Nerys into knocking over her glass, and she barely caught it from tumbling off the table. “It’s got to be public so it’s easy for a stranger to get in without being noticed. And it’s got to be significant enough that an outsider can find out about it and know when it’ll happen.”
“No, that’s not right. This here,” and Nerys waved a hand out at the square, “it wasn’t significant at all.”
“Not to you, because you just remember them arguing and making up. In the previous timeline, when they were here, it was a huge fight and they separated and almost divorced. That’s a big, visible event.”
“I just can’t imagine…” Nerys murmured, then shook her head. “All right, then. If you’re looking for big, public, and visible, then I’d say…” Nerys paused, hesitant to suggest -
“Their wedding!” the Doctor finished for her, punching the air with an exuberant fist.
“No! Not a chance!” she protested.
“Why not? It’s perfect!” He ticked off the salient points on his fingers. “A posh public venue, cos the Donna I know would insist on it. We can get in easy, and the perpetrator could hide in plain sight. A controlled time range to search, and a manageable group of what, fifty people?”
“A hundred and thirty, actually,” she supplied, “but they’re all friends and family. Whoever it is won’t be able to get in.”
The Doctor shook his head. “No one knows every single person at a wedding, not even the bride and groom. Lots of people from obscure corners of one side or the other. This wedding’s just the thing.” He hopped up, eager to pursue this obvious target, and beckoned to her. “Come on! Now, when and where was this exactly?”
“But Doctor!” Nerys began again, refusing to rise.
“Don’t tell me. St. Mary’s, Hayden Road, Chiswick.”
Nerys sneered. “That was my wedding.”
“Ah, yes.” He popped himself in the side of the head with the heel of his hand. “I’ve got that address seared in my brain from two timelines.”
“Donna’s was at Chiswick House,” Nerys supplied. “That posh venue you mentioned. They could afford it. But Doctor...”
“Then Chiswick House it is! What’s the date and time?”
“Doctor!”
The admonishment finally penetrated. “What?”
Nerys threw her hands up. “We can’t go there. I was- I mean, I will already be there. How am I supposed to explain being there twice?”
“Oh. Yes. Well, it’s time to introduce you to the wardrobe. Come on!” With a tremendous grin, he spun and dashed out, and Nerys, stuck in a pub three years before her time, had no choice but to follow.
