[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4]

43.7 hours earlier (Earthtime: Monday 4:42pm Eastern)

The Doctor

"...and this projects the waveforms that excite the molecules in the groundwater," Tristan rushed on in his breathless explanation, pointing here and there at the various juryrigged doodads on his workbench, "and this reads the resulting--"

"That's a quantum spectrometer," I said. "With a digital readout. That's clever."

"I like making things," he said defensively, as if my admiration were an accusation. Perhaps I'd been wrong about him being coddled -- perhaps he was, instead, being discouraged in his natural inclinations and pushed in other directions he didn't want to go in. And the way he glared at me, his blue eyes flashing with a fury undercut by fear, told me he was terrified I was here to take this amusement away from him.

And maybe I was.

[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

Out on Eighth Avenue, while Michael tried to hail a cab, I called Peter.

"I'm sorry I missed your calls last night," I said when he answered, before he could say anything himself.

"Yeah, that's not like you," he said. "Everything all right?"

"Oh, I don't know," I sighed.

"So you weren't just too busy having a good time, then?" I could hear the grin in his voice.

[Part 1] [Part 2]

32.1 hours earlier (Earthtime: Monday 4:18pm Eastern)

The Doctor

I swore in Gallifreyan.

The TARDIS had arrived in the spacetime vicinity of early-21st-century Earth, and the transdimensional hazard alarm had started blaring, and I could only bark out a bitter laugh at my rotten luck. It was the same alarm the Nestene had set off months earlier, and I couldn't ignore it: what good would Ayren do me if her planet was reduced to a molten heap of slag by genocidal androids from a parallel universe or whatever it was that had set the TARDIS to screaming in terror?

[Part 1]

26.8 hours earlier (Earthtime: Monday 4:03pm Eastern)

Alone.

The TARDIS yawned empty.

The dimness of the console room was like a cave, like a place used and abandoned: hollow, rocky. Empty.

I wasn't there.

I was screaming myself hoarse in the temporal trenches of the Montigan Rift as weaponized timeloops razored my own cruel memories through my head again and again over endless nanoseconds.

It was a Tuesday.

Just an ordinary Tuesday of my new life that, a decade and a half into it, was no longer so new. But it was a day on which the strangeness of this new life had struck me unexpectedly, as seemed to happen at random every now and again. I'd stood in the market picking over fruit, and suddenly found myself marvelling that this fuzzy green one no longer existed when I'd lived my previous life, and found myself aching for one particularly delicious fruit not yet known here, on this still lovely world, in this impossibly distant past.