Chapter Text
They were gone. They were gone. He’d said to wait right here, please, and they were no longer here. He’d said would you wait right here, please, this is a Chula War Cruiser and Not the place to be wandering off, and they’d gone and wandered off! Honestly. Those ridiculous, idiotic, adorably stupid apes, wandering off(!) into a Chula War Cruiser when he’d specifically told them he was almost certainly going to end up blowing it up, so would you please mind staying aboard the TARDIS just this once? Please? He’d said please!
“Doctor.”
He’d left them alone for a second . Two seconds . Barely more than a minute, really. Hardly five. A maximum of twenty, forty-five at the most. No more than an hour. Had they gotten bored?
“Doctor.”
He picked up the trash bin and checked underneath. He checked inside the trash bin. He put the trash bin down, then looked behind it. He picked his mug up from the TARDIS console and looked inside that. Nothing. River, they’ve wandered off—!
“Doctor! I am aware that they’ve wandered off, now will you please stop muttering to yourself and come help me deal with this!”
The Doctor looked up, blinking owlishly. “Ah,” he said. Had he been saying all that out loud?
“Yes,” River sighed. She was standing at the TARDIS entrance, blaster tight at her side, peering through a sliver in the doors. A shower of sparks exploded perilously close to her nose; she stuck her blaster through the crack and fired back without flinching.
She looked back at him. The Doctor noted that her lips were downturned. This indicated bad things for him in the future, and possibly the present.
Actually, come to think of it, River had seemed quite more through with him than usual during last week’s (for him) adventure. Upset with him in the past, too — he was bollocked every which way in all four dimensions.
River opened her frowning mouth. The Doctor flung his arm out and pointed at her. “Wait! Before you say anything!”
River closed her mouth. She looked at him. She kept looking at him. She raised her eyebrows.
“Before you say anything,” the Doctor said again, and then he stopped saying things and grabbed onto the TARDIS console instead, because everything had just started shaking very violently.
“Doctor!” River shouted. “What are you doing?! We have to find Amy and Rory!”
“That wasn't me!” the Doctor shouted back, indignant. “I haven’t started blowing it up yet! Look!” He let go of the console to show her his blow-uppy thingy, unactivated, then promptly fell over when another tremor shook the TARDIS.
“THE DOCTOR,” said a metallic, echoey, quite loud voice from outside the TARDIS. “WE ARE IN POSSESSION OF YOUR APE-PET-THINGS. EXIT YOUR CRAFT AND SURRENDER YOUR REMOTE-DESTRUCTION-DEVICE, AND YOUR APE-PET-THINGS WILL BE SPARED.”
“Oi! I swear, if you don’t stop poking me with that—” came Amy’s voice.
“Sorry, Doctor,” said Rory; much less Scottish and much more dejected.
River put her face in her hand. “Oh, Mother dear, Father dear,” she sighed.
“Look at that, I’ve found them,” the Doctor said. River shot him a look.
“THE DOCTOR, ACKNOWLEDGE OUR POSSESSION OF YOUR APE-PET-THINGS.”
“Yes, yes, I acknowledge your possession of my so-and-sos!” the Doctor shouted back. He picked himself up and dusted himself off, grumbling all the way up. Teach him to ever trust Amy and Rory to look after themselves again. “River, I assume you know what to do?” he said, quieter.
River rolled her eyes, but now her lips were decidedly upturned. Good. She raised her blaster, bracing herself by the door.
The Doctor raised his voice. “Listen, Mister/Missus Collective Chula Hivemind-Machine-Organism… Thing. I think my actions have been very reasonable under the circumstances, but you will find I become very un reasonable when people do things like threaten my friends and call them apes. I am the only one allowed to call them that, because when I say it they know I’m only kidding.”
“Right,” Rory said.
“WE DO NOT FIND DESTRUCTION OF OUR WAR CRUISER REASONABLE,” the Chula Collective said.
“Really?” said the Doctor. He put his hand on the TARDIS gizmo responsible for sending her hurtling forward. “Well, I don’t find the existence of a war cruiser very reasonable. Especially when that existence is directly responsible for the enslavement of two hundred children!” The Doctor spat this last part, getting a bit worked up despite himself. The children were all safe now, but the memory of coming across the lot of them all huddled together in the cargo bay was still fresh and raw in his mind. “I don’t find that reasonable one bit!”
“WE DO NOT FIND YOUR REASONING REASONABLE. THEY WERE NOT CHILDREN.”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous.” The Doctor eyed River. She did a thing with her face and shook her blaster.
“Can we speed this up?” Rory said.
“Give us a minute, Rory,” the Doctor said. “Not children? What do you mean?”
“THEY WERE NOT CHILDREN.”
“Of course they were,” the Doctor said. “All of them were pre-adolescent. No older than a hundred, a hundred and twenty at the oldest. River, how old are children?”
“I think you’ve got it.”
“THEY WERE NOT CHILDREN,” the Chula repeated.
“What do you mean?”
“Doctor!” Amy shouted.
“YOU HAVE REFUSED TO MEET OUR TERMS. YOUR APE-PET-THINGS WILL NOW—”
“Oh, forget this,” River interrupted, and threw open the doors.
“River!” the Doctor yelped.
“Doctor,” River chirped.
The full, naked, kaleidoscopic glory of the Chula Collective greeted them through the open doorway. They raised their cannon-arms as one.
“Right,” the Doctor said. “Geronimo!”
He threw the gizmo at full throttle.
The TARDIS shot forward. River braced herself in the doorway as they rocketed toward the Chula. “Left!” she shouted, knuckles white on the doorframe as she carefully aimed her blaster.
The Doctor twirled the steering doodad to the right. The TARDIS banked left. Metal shrieked as they scraped along the floor, and the Doctor briefly saw Amy and Rory’s very white faces as they blasted by. Then the primary head(ish) of the Chula flashed into view, and before the Doctor could say “River, I normally wouldn’t approve of this sort of thing, but seeing as how the Chula are a multi-faceted hive mind organism with a collective consciousness split between billions of individual bodies and it’s therefore impossible to effectively kill one, I’ll consider it a moral grey area if you shoot this particular alien in the face,” River had done just that.
“Well,” she said, shaking her hair out of her eyes as the Doctor yanked back on the handbrake. “I think that went rather beautifully.”
The TARDIS crashed gently back onto the floor, skidding to a graceful stop. “Well done, old girl,” the Doctor said, patting the console. “It’s not every day we get to use that one.”
The TARDIS hummed.
“Righto!” The Doctor got his feet back under him, clapped his hands together, and hurried to the door. “Amy! Rory! Chop chop, we don’t have all day. I’m supposed to be blowing things up right now!” River had gone ahead of him; he hopped out of the TARDIS and followed the scorch marks back to where the Chula shells were laying. Singular mind split into billions of bodies though they were, all the little node-y ones still had to connect back to the big important commander-y one, and shooting said commander-y one in the face when it was threatening to do horrible things to you and all your friends made for a wonderfully simple solution.
“Doctor!” River said. “Doctor, come here!”
He just had to think it.
The Doctor quickly picked his way through the little node-y ones, rounding the sizable wreck of the commander’s shell and hurrying toward River’s mop of blonde hair. Her back was turned to him and her gun was tucked into her holster, and she was looking down at something in front of her.
“What is it?” the Doctor said, feeling his hearts lurch. It wasn’t Amy and Rory. It couldn’t be.
He stepped next to River. He looked down.
Two very small people looked back up at him.
“Hello,” the Doctor said. He looked over his shoulder. Then he spun around completely, and then he looked down at the little people again. “You’re very small, aren’t you. I’m looking for two friends of mine, they were just…”
He trailed off. One of the little people looked very familiar.
“Oh, dear,” he said. “Hello, Amelia.”
#
They were not children. They were not children; “were” being the operative word. They are children, now, what they were was adults. Little, de-aged soldiers turned to helpless children to be shipped off to Chula prison camps and re-aged into adoptive Chula citizens the long way round. A repurposement of their nanogenes, he should expect, and in his opinion an impressively pacifistic solution to war—
“‘Impressively pacifistic?’” River said. “Really, Doctor.”
“I didn’t ask you to listen!” the Doctor said. Unbelievable. He didn’t know how it was possible to hear him at all with the racket little Rory was making.
“I have a very good ear,” River said. Then winced when Rory wailed into it.
Amelia kicked her feet. She was sat on the edge of the TARDIS console, watching them with the unnervingly calm expression of a child who didn’t know what was going on but was used to the feeling, and so wasn’t terribly worked up about it. Little Rory, on the other hand, was inconsolable the moment the Doctor had confirmed he didn’t know where his mummy was, and River had her arms full of father trying to get him to calm down.
“Are you a doctor?” Amelia said.
“Yes,” said the Doctor testily. “Pay attention. Say ‘ahh.’”
“Ahh.”
“Wonderful. Now, hold still.” The Doctor stuck his sonic screwdriver into Amelia’s mouth.
“Ahh!”
“I said hold still, I’m trying to work out how to fix you!”
Little Rory continued to wail into River’s shoulder. River shushed him, bouncing him up and down, but it seemed to have little effect.
The Doctor pulled the sonic out of Amelia’s mouth, squinted at it, smacked it against his hand a couple of times, and then squinted at it again.
“What is it?” River shouted over the sound of Rory’s meltdown.
“I’m not sure,” the Doctor said. “Amelia, how old are you?”
“Six!” she said.
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Amelia said, indignant. “Is this yours?” She held up the Doctor’s mug.
“Please, calm down,” River begged Rory. “Look— lights! Buttons! So pretty!”
“Yes, it’s mine,” the Doctor said. “Amelia, have we met before?”
“I saw you outside by that big shiny cow.”
“Have we met before that?”
“I don’t think so.” She bounced the mug up and down in her lap. “Are we going to find Rory’s mummy?”
At the word ‘mummy,’ little Rory cried harder. River made a distressed sort of dying noise.
“You know Rory?” the Doctor said.
“He’s at my school. What’s that?” She pointed at his neck. The Doctor looked down.
“Oh, this?” he said, pleased. “It’s a bow-tie. Do you like it?”
“No,” she said.
The Doctor made a face. She giggled.
“Right! That’s it!” River said. “We're trading. Here you are.”
The Doctor spun around and got an armful of Rory, then nearly dropped him as he tried to lurch out of the Doctor’s arms. He reached his arms out toward River, tears streaming down his reddened face, and though the Doctor couldn’t be sure without testing the TARDIS for stress fractures he thought his friend’s already deafening cries may have somehow gotten even louder.
“River!” the Doctor said.
“It’s your turn!”
“He doesn’t want me, he wants you!”
Rory wailed.
Amelia said something that might have been, “Will you make him stop crying?” but the Doctor could barely make out any of it. He started to bounce little Rory as River had. This accomplished basically nothing aside from moving him up and down very loudly. The Doctor briefly wondered if he could get away with stashing him in the Zero Room until he settled down, but quickly and somewhat guiltily discarded the idea.
“Rory!” he tried instead. “You’re being very immature right now. Not that that’s necessarily any fault of yours, but I’m sure you can see the humor in it. Be logical — if you go on crying much longer you’ll run out of tears, and then where would we be?”
“My head hurts,” little Rory sobbed. Tears poured down his small cheeks. “I want my mummy.”
River made another dying noise.
“Your mummy’s not here,” Amelia said crossly. “And if she were she’d say pipe down!”
The Doctor suspected this may have been something Amelia’s own mummy may have shouted her way once or twice.
Rory hiccupped. “Okay,” he sniffled, rubbing his reddened eyes. Tears continued to stream down his face and he had a look about him like a small tomato who’d just watched a dog die, but blessedly, miraculously, inexplicably, no further eruptions followed.
“Quite alright,” the Doctor said. Feeling as though he had just watched a toddler disarm a bomb, he ventured, “Would you like a drink of water?”
“My daddy says not to take foods and things from strangers,” Amelia said smartly.
“Doctor,” said River.
“Yes please,” said Rory. Then he stopped, looked at little Amy, and said, “No, please.”
Amelia preened.
“I’m not a stranger,” the Doctor said crossly. “I’ve known you both for ages, you just can’t remember it. Though if any other grown-ups — besides River — say that to you, you’d do well to run the other way.” He bent over, making to set Rory down on the glass floor, then quickly straightened up when the little boy’s arms tightened around his neck with an angry whine. “Righto. Never mind.”
“Doctor.”
“Then can I have some water too?” Amelia said, then paused to think. “And a lolly?”
“This isn’t a surgery,” the Doctor said. “But alright, if you want.”
“For the love of— Doctor!”
The Doctor jumped, then spun around. River had her back pressed to the TARDIS doors with her arms flung out. The doors bumped inwards. River glared.
“I locked those!” said the Doctor. “Who— Amelia!”
Amelia shoved her hands guiltily in her lap. “You never said not to touch the buttons!”
“That doesn’t mean you can touch them!” the Doctor shouted. Rory began to cry again. “Oh, no, Rory, it’s alright, don’t—“
The TARDIS shook. Amelia screamed, nearly pitching off the console. The Doctor lunged forward and snatched her up in the arm that wasn’t holding Rory before she could fall.
“THE DOCTOR,” boomed the voice of the Chula Collective. Unless the Doctor was imagining things — and as the TARDIS continued to shake violently, he didn’t think he was — they sounded a good deal angrier than they had before. “YOU WILL RECEIVE NO FURTHER WARNINGS. YOU HAVE ELEVEN SECONDS TO MAKE PEACE WITH YOUR GODS BEFORE YOUR DESTRUCTION AT THE COLLECTIVE HANDS OF THE GLORY OF THE CHULA. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.”
“Why eleven?” the Doctor wondered aloud, then shut up when River shot another look at him. She was getting good at those. “Right, not important, sorry.”
“I shot it!” River said. The doors bumped again; she planted her feet and strained back against them. “Why is it alive when I shot it?”
“Well, they regenerate, you see,” said the Doctor, somewhat distractedly. Amelia had her arms wrapped ‘round his neck and little Rory, bless his soul, had gone back to doing his best to blow out the Doctor’s eardrums. “Artificially, of course, but still. Nanogenes. Miracle workers! Have I ever told you about the time I chased an ambulance into the London Blitz?”
“Doctor!” shrieked little Amy at precisely the same time as River. Like mother like daughter, he supposed. “Make it stop!”
“Working on it!” the Doctor shouted back. “I haven’t got any hands!” He needed to get his blow-uppy thing out of his pocket to detonate the Chula War Cruiser, was what he needed to do, but he could hardly do that with two six-year-olds hanging off him and the TARDIS shaking with barely absorbed cannonfire beside. But he couldn’t do that anyway, he needed access to the nanogenes to be able to turn said six-year-olds back into— into whatever they were normally. Fifty somethings? And a blown-up War Cruiser meant he’d have to go looking for more, and there was no telling how long that would take. How was he supposed to look after Amy and Rory when their legs were too little to run properly?
And he’d forgotten about the eleven second countdown. Easy to do that when there wasn’t a big mean voice counting it down out loud. Very easy to remember when a deafening BOOM! shook the TARDIS so hard the floor dropped out from under him.
He came crashing back down with barely enough of a mind to keep the children on top, his head bouncing off the floor hard enough to leave him dazed. Something sharp dug into his breastbone, then jarred loose. Something sharper rang in his ears.
He opened his eyes, not having entirely realized they’d closed. His two— the two little ones, the— Amy and Rory. Amelia was still bundled close to his chest, wrapped around him as tightly as he’d wrapped around her, but—
“Rory!” the Doctor shouted. He sat up, with some difficulty, hearts pounding. The cloister bells were ringing, deep and slow.
He spotted little Rory quickly. He was kneeling on the floor a little ways away, his face stretched and pale, making the crimson trickle of blood streaming from his still sizable nose all the starker. The Doctor wondered if anyone had ever told him he’d grow into it. If they had, they’d been lying.
Rory was also holding the blow-uppy thing, in both of his tiny, trembling hands.
“River!” the Doctor shouted, and twisted to see her picking herself up off the floor, the TARDIS doors wide open behind her to a vision of shimmering chrome.
Deja-vu. Only no clever maneuvers, this time.
“River, shut the doors!”
She threw herself toward them, just as little Rory pressed the button.
The last thing the Doctor recalled before deafening sound overtook them all once again were visions of the past. Hoards of little children with their faces all blurred, running ragged under a burnt orange sky. A cold yard with gnarled, silver trees, boys and girls swinging from the branches like silly little apes. The satin skin of a baby’s cheek, smoothed beneath his thumb. An empty wooden cot with stars hanging above.
Then black.