Tristan's Father, Part 3

As long as she was safe and secure on Earth -- or anywhere, but Earth was where she was -- then there was always the possibility of us reconciling. Even if I never saw her again.

But I was going to see her.

I was going to see her.

I skipped around the console checking readings and trying to figure out what had tripped the alarm, and all the while my hearts tumbled over crazy palpitations and my gut yawned in terror and I giggled with glee.

I was going to see her.

It smacked me then: Can't show up at Ayren's drunk.

Probably couldn't save the planet drunk, either.

I spat out another Gallifreyan oath as I shook off the inebriating effects of Jack's bottle: what a waste of good scotch. And then I had to giggle again, too. Because it had been Ayren who had told me once that she always knew I was at my angriest when the only thing I could find to say was so profane that no translation from the original was possible.

A shiver of anticipation shot through me as I remembered other, far more pleasurable moments with her that had reduced me to an incoherence that only similar such profound obscenity could overcome. But I should not be anticipating that at all. Not at all...

The alarm.

The monitor had answers, but not good ones. I took a startled step back, shook my head: but no, the scotch was well and truly gone. I was reading that right.

A waveband of submicrosonics was resonating the bedrock under Manhattan Island... it would actually start to shake skyscrapers out of their foundations if it got just a few orders of magnitude stronger. And the city certainly didn't need any more disasters like that.

It was a colder shiver now that ran through me: the coincidence! The danger was literally under Ayren's feet, at the very moment at which I decided to drop in? Although that had happened with the Nestene, too, hadn't it? Or almost, at least. Why was planet Earth practically under siege these days?

This was very bad: the waveforms were reverberating through transdimensional spacetime, threatening the city across a span of at least decades, with weaker tendrils stretching forward and backward over centuries. Before long, buildings would begin to topple from the 1960s through the 2040s, for no reason that would be apparent on the ground: small structures at first in the 2000s and then larger and larger ones radiating out in both temporal directions.

And there were other odd readings, too: rare gases in the atmosphere centered over New York, eddies of a different kind of disturbance in the temporal vortex...

It didn't ring of alien influence. It was as if people very brilliant and very stupid were playing with something they didn't fully understand. Which would be totally in keeping with human character.

I swore again in Gallifreyan. Idiot Earthlings!

***

The submicrosonics were emanating from a mansion at the corner of Riverside Drive and West 116th Street, with a particularly strong burst occurring at 4:27pm on Monday, May 16, 2005.

The TARDIS materialized at 4:24pm, in Riverside Park.

Usually when the monkeyboys were daft enough to mess around with forces of nature beyond their ken, they did it in the middle of a desert or on the far side of their moon, not bang in the middle of one of the most densely populated spits of land on the planet. Although the Manhattan Project had originated just a few blocks away at Columbia University, so perhaps the stupidity on display here was not unprecedented.

A discreet brass plaque next to the door read "Smilovich House / Rodchenko Institute." The bell, when I rang it, chimed elegantly. The door, when it opened, was guarded by a kindly looking middle-aged woman in a housekeeper's uniform.

"Don't mind me," I said with my best idiot grin, barging past her and flashing her the psychic paper and thinking, forcefully, Let me in. "Just a routine crosscheck."

"Oh, of course, sir." She stood aside, but the mountain of flesh poured into the expensive suit at the desk behind her was less predisposed to my sudden presence.

He stood, pushing his jacket back to expose the ugly automatic pistol at his waist, and scowled at me, and said nothing.

I made a great show of presenting him with my "credentials" -- I was dying to know what they saw there -- and said, far more deferentially, "The paperwork's on its way."

He snatched the wallet of psychic paper from me and squinted at it before passing it politely back. "Thank you, sir. Please let me know if you need anything."

"Thank you." I nodded professionally at him. "I'll do that. I think I'll just take a look around first."

I didn't know what to expect, but perhaps I imagined a secret entrance to a much larger underground facility, and that's why I headed to the cellars. Certainly on the main floor I passed nothing but graceful former parlors transformed into tasteful offices lined with books, softened by easy chairs and punctuated with the smallest, most powerful, most expensive computers money could buy here and now.

I saw no one after the housekeeper and the guard, heard no one, until I was halfway down the cellar stairs, when laughter drifted up to me, and a voice.

"That was so cool!" it squealed distantly.

I checked the sonic screwdriver: yup, the 4:27pm burst had just gone off.

The stairs led to just this one door, half open and lit bright beyond with a glare of industrial fluorescents that screamed, lab!, and I felt a sudden strange jab of nostalgia for my UNIT days. That was something new: I'd never before missed that clunky old lab in London, or the obscenely primitive equipment I'd been forced to work with. Why would I now?

I banged open the door -- surprise was always my best ally -- and startled the lab's only occupant: a boy, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, who jumped and shrieked, "Jesus Christ!"

This was not at all what I was expecting.

"You alone here, son?" I asked him, skimming the room. This was a tinkerer's workshop, not the sleek and sophisticated facility I'd thought to find.

He glanced toward a workbench jumbled with all manner of jury-rigged doodads and other intriguing sundries, and then his gaze, shaded by a mop of blond hair but suddenly wary and alert, shifted back to me. "Yeah... What's it to you?"

Something in his guarded expression kicked me in the chest: I had seen that look on Ayren's face, more than once, and that occasional caginess of hers, a fear of me that had always cut me like a razor, still haunted me.

Which meant...

This was him. This was Tristan.

This was my half-human son.

It was all I could do to keep from stumbling backward away from him. My hearts were pounding... this was not the way I wanted this to happen, she should be the one to introduce us...

It was him, I saw it now, saw my then-face in his...

But he wouldn't know me. He couldn't, even if Ayren had described me to him: I'd regenerated more than once since she saw me last. Unless...

I would always know another Time Lord, there was no hiding from one another... but I sensed nothing from him. No, there was a glimmer of something -- often it didn't blossom in Gallifreyan children till adolescence anyway. But the tiny bell of presence Tristan was psychically ringing was different even than that of late-blooming Gallifreyan children.

Still, it was there, and I was here: Did he hear me?

But he was glaring at me now with normal human teenage disdain, and nothing else. He didn't recognize me as anything out of the ordinary.

Out of his ordinary, anyway.

"What do you want?" he asked.

I snorted: my son spoke with an American accent. Of course he would, but still...

"Let's just say there's some, er, curiosity over what you're getting up to here." I waved toward the workbench he'd obviously been worried about my noticing, and took a wild guess that I knew would be correct. "This isn't exactly on your curriculum, is it?"

"My curriculum is whatever I want it to be."

I laughed: my son was arrogant. But considering who his father was, perhaps that was no surprise either. "Oh, you'd like to think that, wouldn't you?"

His glare turned imperious with anger, and he crossed his arms furiously and made himself as tall as he could. This wasn't unexpected either: or wouldn't have been if I'd bothered to think about it at all. The UNIT reports I'd been following were cautious about not stating explicitly what the UN had planned for Tristan, but it was clear they recognized his uniqueness and had every intention of capitalizing on it. It was easy to guess that he'd been more coddled than was good for him.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

Reflexively, I reached for the psychic paper, then realized I couldn't chance using it on him: whatever his Time Lord capabilities, he was Ayren's child too, and she was certainly psychically sensitive enough not to be taken in by so obvious a trick. Tristan probably wouldn't be fooled, either.

I'd have to wing it.

"I'm John Smith--"

Tristan snorted. "Riiight. Can't they give you UNIT spooks better aliases?"

"What makes you think I'm with UNIT?"

"Oh, yeah, you just happened to accidentally wander into one of the most secure UNIT facilities in New York. Haven't you guys figured out yet that I'm not as dumb as you are?"

"What, Mrs. Hudson and a gorilla in Armani: that's security?"

His eyes narrowed and he bit his lip nervously: he was trying not to laugh, and then he gave in, and it was such a joyous and unself-conscious noise that I fell in love with him instantly. "Well, there's a bit more to it than that, isn't there?" he said, mysteriously. And then: "Hey, you like Sherlock Holmes?"

"Yeah, me and Conan Doyle were like that," and I brandished crossed fingers. "Look, I know who you are, son--" I said it automatically, not meaning anything more than I'd meant the first time I used it, but I gulped the word down anyway. "You're Tristan Tabeth."

He snorted again. "Yeah, well, that only proves you're a UNIT spook."

"I'm not a spook. I'm with the Scientific Investigation Department--"

"I've never heard of that--"

"God, you really are a little wanker, aren't you? You think you know everything about UNIT?"

He shrugged, pouting. "You can't talk to me like that."

"I bloody well can, mate. And you are going to show me absolutely everything you've been up to in this lab. Right now."

In fact, there had been an SID at UNIT in London in the 1970s: it was me and Liz Shaw, and some officious bureaucrat had invented the name so he'd have something to put at the top of all the memos that passed through my hands on their way to the wastebasket. And whatever Tristan was up to here, it was exactly the kind of thing Liz and I would have been screaming to the Brigadier had to be stopped immediately.

It had been a lot easier in those days, though: then it was merely monsters and mad scientists. Now it was a wayward child who -- I hoped -- had no idea of the damage he was doing.

And not just any child. My child.

My child, glowering at me and steaming with resentment.

*** *** ***

Wednesday morning

Ayren

I dreamed of the last time we had made love, the night before the day we were ripped apart. I dreamed of that night often, in all sorts of strange dream guises, but this was one of those oddly straightforward dreams in which everything was exactly as it had been. It had been a typical day for us, a little jaunt to San Francisco in 1982 for a quiet exploratory stroll and dinner on Fisherman's Wharf, then back to the TARDIS, where it took very little seduction to entice him to my bed. And in my dream he was as precisely as beguiling as he'd been then, a sweetly serious and attentive lover who always made me feel adored... but particularly so on this evening.

Except... I hadn't realized it then but I was already pregnant, and maybe it was just some surge of maternal hormones adamant on holding on to the father of my unborn child. Or maybe it was a marker of how in love with him I had been, a feeling that had only deepened as my hold on sanity had become precarious at times and he was something solid and real to hang on to. Probably, though -- some distant part of my brain told itself -- that night hadn't been anything special at all, and it was only my desolation since that had recolored a memory that was wonderful only in its ordinariness.

"I think about that night all the time," the Doctor whispered, and I realized that we had dreamt the same dream, and were grasping to the last wisps of it as we stirred ourselves from sleep.

We were on the sofa still, but we'd somehow managed to work our way down to lie together on the narrow seat. The dawn sun was streaming low through the windows, and Malcolm had his snout in the leftover General Tso's on the coffee table, and I was cradled in the Doctor's arms. The morning couldn't have been more perfect.

Or maybe it could...

We had drifted into Sharing while we were asleep, which used to happen sometimes, if we hadn't actually fallen asleep in that state... and then we had sometimes dreamed each other's dreams. I had felt him resisting, the night before, keeping us from what had once been so natural and spontaneous, to let our minds surrender to this most ardent embrace imaginable, a joining of our emotions and thoughts that was so much more intimate than anything our bodies could do to the other's yet was deeply physically erotic anyway. But his guard had fallen in sleep... And now, even if we hadn't been pressed this tightly against each other, I'd have been able to tell anyway how aroused he was, because I felt every sensation, every urge of his body like it was my own.

I raised my head from his chest and met his shadowed gaze and stroked his stubbled cheek and drew his face to mine and kissed him fierce and deep... and he responded hungrily, his strong hands gripping me hard. Overwhelmed by a desperate urgency the likes of which I'd never felt with him before, I reached for his waist and yanked open his belt and--

"No!" he cried, jerking away from me to fall off the sofa and crash to the floor. Worse, he recoiled from our Sharing, wrenching his mind from mine, leaving me cold and alone.

"What?" I yelped, bereft.

"I can't... I can't..." he moaned, not looking at me, shaking his head miserably.

"Why?" I reached for him and he drew away and that stung like a slap. "Why not?"

He just crouched on the floor with his head in his hands.

I lolled on the sofa in a lonely daze. What had gone wrong? Everything had been fine -- had been perfect -- and then he was pushing me away...?

No, not fine: he had been holding back, I suddenly realized now that I had been shocked fully awake. Holding back even as we Shared. "You were hiding something?" I whispered. "I didn't even think that was possible..." Always before, when we Shared, there had been no way to keep anything from the other... At least not that I knew of. Maybe he'd been hiding things from me all along...

But no, I remembered with a start: I had hidden things from him, hadn't I?

Ah, gods, what a pair we were...

"I've seen terrible things, Ayren," he said, softly and harshly. "Done terrible things. I don't want you to see them."

"But I can help you, can't I? Help you feel better? I sense how unhappy you are. Let me help you..."

He stared up at me then, his face ragged with wretchedness. "You made me promise once not to forget how badly I hurt you, and I haven't forgotten. I don't want to do that again."

That first time we Shared, when there was nothing mutual or loving or joyful about it... But now it was everything special about what we had. How could he think it would be like that again? What has he been through?

"Oh, Doctor," I cooed, unsure what else to say, but I held out my hand to him and he took it, and came to kneel on the floor in front of me, and I wrapped my arms and legs around him and squeezed him to me, felt him trembling, and ached for more. "I want you to make love to me," I sighed.

"I can't," he gasped, clutching me tight, hiding his face in my neck. "Not yet."

And yesterday I'd wondered whether I'd be able to embrace him like this... If he wouldn't Share with me... sex without Sharing was just fucking, and we were so far beyond that. With someone else, sure -- but not with him.

"This is so much harder than I thought it would be," he said.

"What did you think? That'd we'd just pick up where we left off?"

He thought about that for a long moment. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess I did. Stupid, huh? What did you think would happen?"

I laughed, but gently. "Hey, you came to me..."

"But you said you'd thought about it..."

"I dunno what I thought." I held him even closer. "Not this..."

He looked up at me then, and I was struck by the most peculiar feeling, that this strange new face of his was as familiar as the one I'd fallen in love with so long ago. I traced his lips with one finger. "It's so odd..." I whispered. The tip of his tongue brushed my fingertip. Such a different mouth. Such a nice mouth...

"I--" we both said at the same time, and then my phone rang.

He rolled his eyes and groaned exasperation, and when he saw I wasn't going to ignore it he pulled out of my embrace with a grimace and retreated to the bathroom off the kitchen.

Godsdammit.

I grabbed the phone and barked into it. "What?"

"This is Miriam at 1515 Broadway," came the cool voice of the unflappable UNIT secretary -- "1515" was the code for HQ over an unsecured line, though it wasn't much of a code, since that was actually the address. "A sitrep meeting has been called for this morning, 10am. Your presence is required."

"Right," I sighed. "Sorry, Miriam. I'll be there."

The Doctor came back out of the bathroom, his face and hair wet...

"Should we send a car for you?" Miriam asked.

...and he sank into the sofa to pull his boots on.

"No, that's not necessary. Thanks." I closed the phone. "I have to go to a meeting at UNIT this morning," I said to the Doctor.

He nodded, and stood, and looked despairingly around the room like a man who'd just lost his best friend. Which had been me, once.

Oh, gods, this was unbearable.

"Hey," I said, and took his hands in mine and tenderly kissed that nice new mouth of his.

He smiled sheepishly. "You still want me to stay, then?"

"Of course."

"Even if--"

"No matter what." And I kissed him longer and slower and tried to pour everything I was feeling into it, but it wasn't enough. So I finished saying what I'd started when the phone interrupted us. "I love you. Is that crazy? I still love you."

He sighed relief. "Oh, I love you. We'll never be like we were before, but I do still love you."

"So," I said with a smile, "we'll be different."

And we clung to each other silently for what seemed like a long time, until finally he said, "I'm gonna go back to the TARDIS and get a few things."

I glanced at the clock: it was just after 7am, plenty of time to get to my meeting. "You want some breakfast first?"

***

And so an hour later, after eggs and toast and fresh fruit, I was giving him my cell phone number and a set of keys to the house, and we were kissing a temporary good-bye on my doorstep, like we were just any other couple fumbling toward a new togetherness.

***

Back inside, I dialed Michael's cell phone upstairs.

"Ayren," he said, answering the call like he was snapping to attention.

"I've been summoned to UNIT. Will you come with me? I hate going there alone."

"Of course."

And an hour after that -- after a shower that made me feel something like my old self again, and like something entirely new at the same time -- Michael was at my door, wearing a dark suit like it was a military dress uniform and a concerned smile like the big brother he seemed to consider himself to me. Which was odd, because he was at least fifteen years younger than me, though he probably didn't realize that.

"Good morning," he said formally.

"Ah, come here," and I hugged him around the gun at his hip and the portfolio in his hand.

"Had a good night, did you?" he asked with a little tease in his voice.

"That's debatable."

We'd worked our way into the kitchen, where I poured him the last cup of coffee, and he was thoughtful and polite as he stirred cream and sugar into it. "Look, Ayren, I don't mean to be nosy--"

"Sure you do," I grinned.

He grinned back. "Well, maybe a little. George'll kill me if I don't come back with something." And then he was serious again. "Just tell me he's someone I don't have to worry about. I can't protect you if--"

"He's Tristan's father."

The coffee cup stopped in its trajectory from the counter to Michael's mouth, and reversed to land back on the counter, undrunk. "What?"

"He's the Doctor."

"But he doesn't look like any of the--" and he stopped himself, lips pursed in chagrin.

"He doesn't look like what?" But I had a pretty good idea what he was going to say.

He hesitated, but I thought I knew him well enough by now -- and after all we'd been through together -- that he wouldn't lie to me. And he didn't. "I was given photographs of the different men known or suspected to have been the Doctor--"

"Not different men..."

"Yeah," he nodded, "I know. But it's so strange... Anyway, I'm supposed to report if I see any of them. Especially around here."

I forgot sometimes that Michael didn't actually work for me: he worked for UNIT. "Are you going to?"

He sighed, and shook his head, not as a "no" to me but as if he couldn't believe what he was about to say. "No, I'm not." I didn't need to feel his feelings myself to know that this was tearing him up: he was -- what was that funny phrase they used here? -- a boy scout. Honest. Principled. Even though UNIT had treated him badly in the past, his loyalty was unwavering. "For now. If it seems like they need to know..."

I nodded. "Of course." Fortunately, he was just as loyal to me as he was to UNIT, and usually those loyalties did not diverge. And when they did... well, that had been tested before, but I wasn't certain that there was no situation in which I wouldn't come out on the side that won out in him.

"Oh, but you need to see this," he said, flipping his portfolio around on the counter to me. It fell open on a kind of image I'd seen before, a still from the security video cameras he had secreted around the outside of the house: the Doctor, sitting on the stoop, from yesterday.

"I had to keep an eye on him," he said off my glare. "I'm not going to apologize. If he can change his appearance, then so can... the other one."

I nodded. "I know." I squeezed his hand on the portfolio. "I'm glad you're watching out for me."

"De nada." He shuffled through papers and photos. "But that's not the one I wanted you to see. This one is."

Another still from the vidcam: Nate Steele, the Post reporter, loitering behind a car parked across the street.

"Shit," I said. "When was this?"

"About an hour and a half ago. He was there from around six this morning -- he's gone now."

"Then he saw the Doctor leave..."

Michael smiled. "This morning? That's a mighty big torch you're carrying there. Or he is."

"Both of us," I sighed wistfully.

"So he's coming back around then?"

I nodded, unable to keep an idiot grin off my face.

"Well, I'd say I was happy for you, but you're probably in for a heap of trouble at UNIT. Look..." He pulled something else out from the back of the portfolio -- this morning's Post -- and thumbed through the first few pages to Steele's regular real estate in the city section. "I ran out to pick this up after I discovered that our friend here had been outside..." He handed me the paper.

It was Steele's usual nonsense -- well, it was pretty spot on, actually, though he didn't know that -- about "the top-secret paramilitary police force within the UN" and "alien influence in the Security Council." The headline was, well, a killer: "DID ET SLAY PARK VICS?" And there was the picture Steele had snapped of me and the Doctor yesterday, with a caption that read, "Mystery associate accompanies enigmatic UN consultant Tabeth at Wash. Sq. Park slaughter scene."

"Oh, gods," I groaned. "Well, let's just hope no one at UNIT has seen this yet."

"Yeah," Michael snarked, "that's a plan."

[Part 4]

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