Tristan's Father, Part 6

It was a perfectly gorgeous late-spring day, the air warm but crisped by a cool breeze, the sky between the buildings sunny and clear azure. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, and let it go in a sigh: I'd been getting used to the idea that I was safe here from all the nightmarish bursts of life since I'd met the Doctor. I guess that's over.

The Doctor tensed beside me, and gave my arm a quick squeeze, which I pulled out of just as lightly. Comfort was not what I wanted from him right now, but answers, and the tight inward coiling of his mind, like he was shrinking away from me, told me I wasn't going to get any.

A metallic lurch echoed behind us, and we, the Doctor and Peter and I, swung around in time to see the giant neon M of the McDonald's restaurant a block up -- one of its legs was already crushed -- collapse off its moorings with a shower of electric sparks. It dangled like a gaudy toy from one slender wire for a long moment, sending dozens of people running in a tidal wave of panic, and then it crashed to the suddenly empty sidewalk in a swell of broken glass.

When the frenzy subsided, my gaze was drawn up and past the new mess to notice that, a block beyond and ten or twelve stories up the manmade canyon of Times Square, the big Batman movie billboard had a ragged, tentacle-size hole punched through it.

Peter saw where I was looking.

"What we've gathered so far," he said, "is that there were... manifestations of from four to six of the tentacle things, all apparently disembodied, like what we saw. Except for the piece that Michael and I shot off, they all disappeared after, well, doing a lot of damage."

"Not just to buildings and billboards," I suspected.

"No," Peter sighed. "They, er, skewered people with smaller appendages that shot out and stabbed them in the gut. At least that's what witnesses are saying. I've got uniforms talking to people -- we might get lucky and find some tourist's videocamera with footage. And we'll look at every security camera in the area. For whatever good it'll do."

"Check cell phones, too," I said. "There's new ones with videocameras in them. I got Tristan one of those for Christmas--" My head was clearing but now a cold dread gripped me. "How widespread was it? Other parts of the city?"

"Just around Times Square," Peter soothed. "If he's at school he's fine."

One less worry then... though I longed to phone my son and hear his voice, even if it had only been the night before when last we'd spoken -- it seemed like years.

"Did anyone survive the stabbing?" I asked.

"Initially, yeah," Peter said. "But then all of them had their middles scooped out by something no one saw. Though maybe we'll get something on video."

"How many?"

"Twenty people dead like that." Peter's face screwed up into a grimace. "Another man who wasn't stabbed went into cardiac arrest and died before help could get to him."

"Ah, gods..."

"Lots of walking wounded," Peter went on. "Fender benders, people knocked down in the panic, cuts from flying glass, bumps to the head..." He smiled at me, came closer, and stroked one hand through my hair and gingerly over the lump on the back of my head. "You okay?"

"Yeah." On the same impulse that made me kiss him in the park the day before, I snaked an arm around his waist and leaned my head against his shoulder, knowing that the Doctor was watching but also just because I wanted him to hold me -- and as if he could read my mind, his hand slid from my head to my shoulder and cuddled me against him. "When I saw you standing over me, shooting at that thing, I'd never been more glad to see a gun in my life."

"Guns aren't so bad." He'd said similar before, and now I didn't dispute it.

"Peter," I said, sighing into his chest, "I don't know what we can do here. We can't stop it, we don't know when it's coming, we don't even know what it is."

"Oh, for the good old days of the First Avenue Murders, huh?" That was the case we'd met on, three years earlier, a straightforward matter of alien bloodfeud spilling over into diplomatic circles.

I chuckled. "Yeah." I squeezed him tight for a moment, and it occurred to me suddenly that we didn't need to be able to Share to know each other's thoughts: it went without saying that we'd reconnect later to compare notes on whatever Ada learned from the shot-up tentacle and whatever Peter's team found in their investigations, and to exchange whatever speculations we might have. "Talk to you later," I whispered.

"Right," he said softly, and then his hands on my waist thrust me gently toward the Doctor, hovering near us. "She shouldn't be alone," Peter told him, "not if she might have a concussion."

"I'll be with her," the Doctor assured him.

"Good," Peter said.

"Yup," the Doctor replied.

"Hey," I said, "where'd Michael go?"

***

We wandered the stunned-quiet clutter of Times Square, the Doctor and I, stepping over discarded shopping bags, and lost jackets and baseball caps, and the wrappings of paramedics' bandages and hypodermics. We stopped to help an elderly woman regain her feet from where she'd been sitting on a curb -- she seemed okay and refused any more assistance -- and a few meters on we joined a group of cops and civilians pushing a damaged car out of a traffic lane.

"Deja vu," I said, as we moved on, down Broadway toward 42nd Street. "Didn't we do something like this-- What was the name of that planet? The earthquake..."

"Midgard," the Doctor said. "The TARDIS was buried in rubble, and we slept in a tent for a month."

I grinned at him, and took his hand, and leaned in close to him as we walked. "It was cozy."

He grinned back. "It was."

We were looking for Michael, and it was only after I lent my phone to a young man pushing a screaming toddler in a stroller so he could call his wife -- the Doctor making distracting, amusing faces at the kid all the while -- that it occurred to me to try calling him.

Michael answered right away. "Ayren!" He sounded elated. "How's your head?"

"I think I'm gonna live. Where are you?"

"Um... 43rd. In front of the Reuters building."

"Oh, we're practically there -- we're near the NASDAQ studio." I looked around and saw Michael, near an ambulance with flashing lights, waving at us from across the junction of Seventh Avenue and Broadway.

"You're okay?" I asked. "The ambulance isn't for you?" I was teasing him: he was bouncing up and down as he waved, and he was not a bouncing-up-and-down kind of person. Ever.

"Yeah, I'm fine!"

It was but a moment to dash across the streets and join him, flushed and grinning and gulping down a bottle of water. He was a mess -- sweaty and dirty, his jacket gone and his sleeves rolled up and his shirtfront covered in blood -- and I don't think I'd ever seen him so happy.

"What happened?" I asked with a laugh I caught like an infection from him.

His grin got impossibly wider. "I delivered a baby!"

"What?"

He shrugged and laughed. "This girl, she went into labor in the middle of" -- he raised his hands into the air -- "all this, and then her water broke and all the paramedics were busy..." He waved now to the woman on the stretcher -- the woman cradling an infant -- being loaded into the ambulance.

"Excellent work, my friend!" said a small man in a white deli apron to Michael, grabbing Michael in a fierce, back-thumping embrace. "Excellent work!"

"You too, my friend," Michael laughed in return.

"Here, please to take," said the aproned man to me and the Doctor, pushing bottles of water on us, which he'd grabbed from his handtruck laden with flats of drinks. "Stress is dehydrating! Very bad to be dehydrated! Monsters are very bad for stress!"

We took the bottles -- I suddenly realized how thirsty I was -- and Michael laughed again. "I love this city," he said.

***

The three of us walked toward 42nd Street, looking for the end of the police barricades and, hopefully, a cab. As we approached the blue wooden horses strung across the south side of 42nd and Seventh, though, we caught the attention of a rangy uniform, a tough-looking veteran. He glared at us, then muttered into his radio, then held up an imperious hand.

"Hold it right there," he barked. I started digging around for my UN ID, and Michael for his badge, and the Doctor for his psychic paper, but the cop didn't even wait, and zeroed his glare on me. "Are you Erin Tobooth?"

"Well... yes," I replied, wary.

The cop held up his radio again and said into it: "I got her, Lieutenant." And then he broke into a crooked smile for me. "Varela says, 'Be on the lookout for a gorgeous blonde, and someone give her a ride home.' I said, 'I should be so lucky.' And whaddaya know, I am.'' He lifted aside a sawhorse to let us pass, indicating a squad car parked just beyond on Seventh Avenue. "Your chariot awaits, madam, and I will be with you in a moment."

Even better than a taxi...

I slid into the center of the backseat, the Doctor on one side and Michael on the other. Michael was crashing fast, his euphoria apparently more the result of something closer to medical shock, though he wasn't physically injured, than surging adrenaline, and he was quiet and deflated now, toying with his suit jacket, recovered from the sidewalk and covered in drying tentacle slime. There had to be limits beyond which even a professional soldier could be pushed, and Michael was past that point, and he probably didn't realize it.

"Michael," I asked him quietly, "when was the last time you fired your gun?"

"Other than at the range, you mean?"

"Yeah."

He thought about that for a moment. "Okay, I see where you're going. But I'm fine."

"Ever shot at a monster's disembodied tentacle before?" I asked gently, with a small smile.

"Since you put it that way..." and he sighed wearily.

I gathered him to me, and he lay his head on my shoulder and closed his eyes. I felt the quiver of displeasure that shot through the Doctor at that, and he clamped his hand to my thigh in a rather disagreeably proprietary way, and turned to look out the window, but when I only covered his hand tenderly with mine in response, he glanced back at me with an abashed grimace and loosened his grip.

And then the cop hopped into the driver's seat and we were zipping down Seventh Avenue, our host keeping up a one-sided conversation the whole way. "Varela says, 'gorgeous blonde,' and I tell him, 'This is New York, it's all gorgeous blondes,' but he was right about you, sweetheart." The cop caught my eye in the rearview mirror and grinned. "Looks like I'm not the only lucky guy today, huh? Hey, didn't I see you two in the Post this morning? Yeah, I did... Shit. Damn traffic," and he flipped the sirens on to skirt around the jammed-up cars and buses in Herald Square made more congested than usual by the diversions uptown. "So, monsters. Whaddaya know. Only in New York, right? I've been on the clock since midnight. Man, the overtime..." and he went on and on like that, not unpleasantly, till he screeched us to a halt in front of my house, and we staggered out onto the sidewalk, and he sketched a quick salute in our direction and skidded off again.

I turned to climb the stairs and Michael followed, and I felt a wave of ire roll off the Doctor, and when I looked back I saw him rooted to the sidewalk, folding his arms in an ostentatious and obstinate gesture and glowering at Michael. "Look, mate," he said, "I don't mean to be rude, as such, but who the hell are you, and are you actually going to follow us into the house?"

I groaned -- I had completely forgotten to introduce them to each other.

"Doctor, this is Michael Leatherby. He lives here. Upstairs, with George -- you met him yesterday. He works for UNIT. He's my bodyguard, and Tristan's, sometimes."

The Doctor unfolded his arms reluctantly to take Michael's proffered hand.

"It's nice to finally meet you," Michael said as they shook hands. "Ayren's told me a bit about you. I knew she'd be okay with you just now uptown. That's why I went off to see what other help I could be. I wouldn't have left her with anyone else. Not even Varela."

Well, that last bit wasn't true: he'd left Varela guarding me in other tight spots when the need had arisen. But this was only Michael playing diplomat.

"Okay?" I asked the Doctor. "Can we go in now? I'm dying for a cup of tea."

***

Inside, at the landing in front of my door and at the foot of the stairs up to George and Michael's half of the house, I said to Michael, "Are you sure you won't come in?"

"No, I wanna get out of this." He plucked at his ruined suit. "I think I'll have to burn it."

I grinned ruefully. "Sorry you came with me today?"

"Never... Oh, shit, the paperwork, though. I bet UNIT has a form specifically for reporting the discharge of a weapon at a monster in the presence of civilians."

"Probably," I laughed.

We collapsed against each other for a long moment in an exhausted hug.

"Call me if you need me," I said.

"Ditto," he replied.

***

"Are you fucking him, too?" the Doctor asked once the two of us were alone inside, turning on me with a smirk.

I didn't even think about it: I hurled the heavy jangle of my keys at him. They thumped him square in the chest, and he blew out a little oof of surprise.

"Don't you dare," I told him. "Don't you do that. Don't you reduce him to something you can just dismiss, because you can't."

He stared at me, then blinked in startlement. "I'm sorry."

I'd never been so suddenly, explosively mad at him. "I've worked hard to make a good life for myself here, and for our son, and I think I've done a pretty good job of it. But I couldn't have done it without people like Michael. And Peter." They've been protecting me when you haven't, I should have added. "They're my family. They're the only family I have."

"I'm sorry," he said again.

I could feel his shock like it was a sharp slap across my cheek. We had rarely been genuinely angry with each other -- little annoyances and squabbles had flared between us, sure, and a few misinterpretations of each other's feelings so profound that they'd nearly caused rifts we couldn't overcome, but true anger had been hard to maintain when we were each so in sync with the other's emotions. It was just too draining, and too easy to appreciate the sense of another perspective, if not necessarily the reasons for it. But that effortless intimacy was gone from us, and now it was so awkward being near him, like we were separated by thick glass through which we could only half see and half hear each other.

If he would Share with me this would all go away: the disconnect, the strange sourness. Our sympathies would entangle so that we wouldn't even dream that they should be independent, and everything that was upsetting him would be clear, and easy for me to alleviate. I had wondered sometimes how healthy that was, to be so attuned to him that I almost lost myself, but now I longed for it. I yearned just to touch him, really touch him, like I had been able to before, but it was him keeping that murky barrier up between us.

Why was he here if he didn't want at least a little of what we'd had before? What else could he need from me?

So now, with him but still achingly alone, it was easy to be furious. I wished I had something else to throw at him. "You're a son of a bitch," I choked out in a whisper.

I couldn't bear to be in the same room with him, and I tried to brush past him, but he grabbed my shoulders and forced me with a shake to meet his hard gaze. "They're not the only family you have," he said, his voice bitter and frosty. "I'm your family. Or have you forgotten what we--?"

"Have I forgotten?" I barked a humorless laugh. He hadn't seen me during the long sleepless nights and endless days long ago, when I raged at him, weathering a sustained storm of anger after it seemed to me that he was the one who'd forgotten all our promises... when I sank so low into misery and despair over those apparently discarded vows that I was terrified I was hurting the child growing inside me, and even then I couldn't staunch the ferocious flow of it. And I had forgotten?

"You bastard." I tried to push my way out of his grasp, but he drew me in tighter, his arms coming around me and drawing me fiercely to his chest, and it was easier to succumb to him than to fight him. "I don't understand," I said finally, with a resigned sigh.

"What?"

"Anything," I sighed.

"Ah. Me neither."

I let him hold me, but I tried to resist those magic Gallifreyan pheromones lulling the anger out of me... and I couldn't. I wanted to cling to that anger, afraid that it was the only honest thing I felt toward him, the only thing not influenced by the memory of where that vigorous, almost palpably magnetic dominance he exerted over me could take us now, if he'd let it. I tried to nurture that anger even as he cupped my face in his hands and pressed his mouth softly to mine... it took a forceful summoning of will to push him away from me again, and this time he let me go, and the look on his face, which matched the frisson of regret and remorse that shot through him and into me, was so pitiful that I almost collapsed into his embrace again. But I took a step away, and kept him at his distance with my outstretched arm.

"You called me wife once," I said. "As a joke, as cover in a place where that's all they would understand, and I thought it was quaint, and funny. But that day, in the glen..." I could hardly bear to think on it, being alone with him, the only two people in the most beautiful spot on a lovely empty world, and how what he said to me made me feel so intensely loved, and how what I said to him dazed him in the most delightful way, and how when we Shared those emotions it was almost too overwhelming to endure. "I wouldn't have thought it funny after that day."

One corner of his mouth twitched into a small, sad smile. "I should have said it again. Not as a joke."

"After all the things we said to each other that day," I whispered, barely able to give voice to the root of the agony of all these years, "how could you leave me?"

"Ayren... I thought you were dead, I had no reason to doubt--"

"No," I sighed. How can he not understand? "Later. After you knew I wasn't."

He blinked at me, mystified. "You told me to leave you alone."

Would I leave him alone now -- really alone, not just escaping to another room for five minutes -- if he told me to? Was he capable of making a rational decision about what was best for himself in the absorbing and nameless pain he was obviously suffering? I didn't think so, and yet he'd left me when I needed him most, even if I'd thought I didn't. He hadn't wanted to deal with it -- with someone, two someones, who needed him that badly -- so he ran away, and told himself he had my permission to do so, because I was sick enough to think I was better off by myself, with a baby, among strangers in a strange world.

"I did tell you that," I said, shaking my head.

He looked completely lost. "I thought that's what you wanted."

So we'd been broken even then.

Maybe it was best to know that now.

He took a tentative step toward me, and reached for my hand to squeeze it tenderly. "Why don't you get changed," he said, "and I'll make that cup of tea for you."

"What?"

He nodded up and down at me, at my blouse and slacks, which were stiff with dried tentacle slime: I hadn't even noticed.

"Oh," I said, surprised.

"I think you got a bit on me, too," he said with a little grin, tugging at the front of his sweater, dark with spots of purple ooze.

"Okay," I shrugged, and felt his cool alien heat lingering behind me as I turned to the stairs and climbed them, knowing with a surety that this was as good as it was going to be between us now, and that I'd have to endure it for Tristan's sake. Assuming his father would even deign to come around once in a while to spend some time with his son.

From upstairs I heard him making cozy, homey noises in my kitchen below that seemed mocking in the intimacy they implied, and I stood under the hot water in the shower and sobbed for everything that we had lost.

***

Half an hour later, I was wrung out but felt, amazingly, much better, having somehow raced through one of my regular Doctor-funks in mere minutes rather than the usual month or so. It had been more intense, but less tediously spread out. Perhaps I would try that again in the future next time I was feeling sorry for myself.

The Doctor looked up from stirring the tea in the pot on the kitchen counter as I came downstairs, and smiled at me. "You look nice," he said.

It wasn't anything special I was wearing, just a plain skirt and T-shirt, but he was trying to smooth over our earlier hostility. He didn't want to do anything else but look anyway.

"Thanks," I said.

He'd changed out of his ruined sweater, I noticed as I sat at the counter and he poured tea for us, into a white button-down shirt, with a few of the top buttons left open. And then I noticed the bag on the sofa in the living room behind us -- nothing big, but enough for a few changes of clothes. Something about that wasn't quite right, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

"You've been back to the TARDIS," I said, "and then back here again?"

"You gave me keys," he said. "I didn't think you'd mind."

"No, that's fine." But then you went back to the TARDIS again, and that's when you phoned me, all upset. He'd never have come back here to drop off his things after that, not in the state I'd seen him in when he first arrived in Times Square. Would he?

So what drew him back to the TARDIS?

"I found these in the cabinet," he said, holding up a bag of Pepperidge Farms cookies and raising his eyebrows questioningly.

I smiled. "Help yourself to whatever you want. Everything I have is yours." I was surprised to discover that I meant it.

"Thanks," he said, popping a cookie into his mouth. "I'm starving."

"Mmm, me too." I took a cookie and a gulp of tea -- it felt almost as good as the hot shower. "I haven't eaten since breakfast."

"Me either," the Doctor said. "Busy day."

I nodded, and smiled. "Monsters will do that." The clock over the fridge caught my eye. "Is it only four o'clock? Gods, this day has felt about two weeks long."

"Just like old times." The Doctor grinned over his tea.

"Almost," I acknowledged. "Almost."

His grin fell away at that.

"Hey," I covered his hand on the counter with mine. "It's early, but let's go out to dinner--''

My phone rang.

He pulled his hand out from under mine, shaking his head.

"Now you know how I always felt," I said, and he looked up and grinned at me again. "You were always at the beck and call of the entire universe. And I've just got one city on one insignificant planet bothering me."

"Fair enough," he said.

It was Ada at UNIT on the phone. "I have found something so amazingly cool," she breathed in my ear. "You have got to come see this."

"Is this about the... thing from this afternoon?"

"Oh yeah."

"Okay," I laughed. "Are you in your lab? I'll be there in a little while."

I closed the phone and gave the Doctor a sheepish smile. "You really don't wanna come to UNIT with me."

"No," he admitted, "I don't."

"I'll just be an hour or two," I promised, "and then we'll get that dinner."

He frowned. "I might eat all the bikkies in the meantime."

"You do that." And I was suddenly overcome by such a wave of tenderness and sympathy for him that it startled me. He was alone, I realized for the first time, truly abandoned, and forlorn with it. He was not close to these people he'd mentioned traveling with... and, well, if they'd gone off with each other, how close could they be to him? Was that all it was about, his coming to see me: he was lonely?

I slid around the counter to where he stood, watching me with a wary eye, like I might throw something at him again. Instead, I took his face in my hands, and drew him down to me -- further than I used to have to draw him; that was so strange! -- and kissed his mouth softly. He seemed to melt against me, and I felt myself start to climb another big roller-coaster hill of emotion, and could see the equally big drop looming on the other side. Gods, I hate you, Doctor.

"I won't be long," I said, and pulled away to gather my bag and find myself nagged again by the sight of his bag on the couch and get myself out the door before his miserable mug could stop me.

[Part 7]