Flipsided (p.12) Epilogue

Rose entered the Tardis to find the Doctor checking over the controls.  Jack entered behind her and shut the door.

"So that was you, yeah?" she said.

"Yes."

"From before the Time War?"

"Yes."

She caught his eye and held it.  He held her gaze, then looked away.  900 hundred years old, she realized, and he was embarrassed. She grinned.  "He said he remembered me," she said, just to rub it in.  Jack watched the byplay with fascination.

"Yeah, well, that incarnation was a bit more psychic than I usually am."

"Cute too," Jack put in.

The Doctor glared at him blackly.  Jack grinned, virtually bouncing jovially at his discomfort.

Rose decided to have mercy on him.  Wars, unfortunately, changed a lot of things. "So what did you mean that that pulse fixed the timelines?  What did we do?  And who's Sam?"

"Sam was another friend of mine.  I met her before I met Charley."

"Hold on.  I thought you said Sam and Charley were in different timelines."

"Timestreams.  Different thing.  Individuals have timestreams.  Universes have timelines.  Timelines are made up of all the billions of different timestreams in them.  Sometimes one branches off and creates another timeline."

"So, hold on, so when we met my dad, that was a sort of alternate timestream?" she asked.

"An abortive one, yeah.  That's what the reapers were trying to eliminate."

"So how comes you can have all kinds of different timestreams going at once?"

"Because he's a Time Lord,"  Jack put in.  "Anybody else and it would have fractured off and started a whole new timeline. Only a Time Lord could hold it in balance enough to keep them all going at once."

"Very good, Jack," the Doctor congratulated.

"I try.  What I don't understand is how could something like that get started in the first place?  Quantum physics wouldn't allow it.  Once a decision is made it's fixed."

"Because of the Master,"  the Doctor said.

"Who's that?"  Jack asked.

"Old enemy of mine.  Another Time Lord."  He saw the questioning look in Rose's eye.

"Just after my seventh regeneration I was captured by the Master.  He had used up all his regenerations and tried to steal mine.  He opened the Eye of Harmony, fractured my incarnations and tried to incorporate them into himself.  Problem was, I was still in the first 15 hours of my regeneration cycle, or just about. After we stopped him, my incarnations stayed fractured.  I couldn't settle completely into one timestream.  What Rose and Charley did was shake all those different timestreams and settle them out into one stable timestream.  All three incarnations of myself coalesced into one."

"But how is that possible?  We saw the other two of you from those other timestreams."  Jack waved a hand outside, indicating their recent goodbyes.

"Elementary thinking, Jack."

Jack shrugged.  "I'm only a Time Agent, you're the Time Lord."

The Doctor nodded, satisfied.  Jack and Rose shared a little grin.  "After the timestreams settled, the others simply became different points on the same timeline.  For instance, I know I met Sam and Charley at about the same time, not long after I regenerated.  But my memories say that I met them at different times, one after the other."  

"So which came first?" Rose asked.

"The chicken or the egg?  Doesn't matter.  What matters is that my timestream stabilized."

"But how?"  Rose held up her hand and looked at it.  "All we did was clasp hands."

"Ah, well, that was a bit of a coincidence.  Who would ever think I'd have two companions who both had such a special relationship with time?  You, Rose, you looked into the Vortex, you were possessed, infused with all the raw power of Time."

"Good thing too," Jack said. "I was never so relieved as when I saw those three Daleks turn into dust.  I thought I was a goner."

"And Charley," the Doctor interrupted, "doesn't exist in time.  I rescued her when she was supposed to have died.  If anything, she became the opposite of time, the gateway to anti-time if you will.  That's why she could walk through the walls, even easier than I could.  If she didn't want to acknowledge them they just weren't there to her."

"You walked through walls?"  Jack said.  "Wish I'd seen that."

"It was really creepy," Rose assured him.

"Anyway.  That's how Charley was able to stick her hand up through the floor, while I had to walk around them," the Doctor said.

He laughed. "We had to climb up on the desk in the room below and Charley had to stand on my knee to reach the ceiling.  I was strapped to her by one arm and using the other to show her what signs to make.  It's a wonder we both didn't fall and break our necks."

Jack laughed at the image.

"So what did our holding hands do?"  Rose asked.

Jack answered.  "Come on, matter and antimatter, time and anti-time?  Temporal annihilation!"  He clapped his hands together with a bang.  He turned to the Doctor.  "But shouldn't that have blown you all to hell and gone?  Time Lords, on a Zhaleen ship?"

"That's exactly why it didn't.  The atmosphere aboard the Zhaleen ships is transtemporal.  Timelines on timelines on timelines.  It wouldn't have worked anywhere else.  And what the pulse did was consolidate all the timelines.  It fixed my problems and froze the rest of the Zhaleen in the one timeline until we could reset the subsystems and get away."

"I thought you said timelines and timestreams weren't the same thing?"  Rose pointed out.

"Neither are watermelons and watermelon seeds," he said peevishly.  "Who's the Time Lord here?"

Rose pulled a face and looked away from him.  Jack glowered at him.

"Zhaleen temporal physics. Okay?"  the Doctor said, in as much of an apology as she was going to get.

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye.  He knew what she was thinking, what that same Zhaleen technology caused by her needing to be anchored to him in that cell.  He blushed and turned away.

The cloister bell rang.

"What the hell?"  Jack said.

The light went red and three Zhaleen appeared in the console room.

"Don't let the red one touch him!"  Rose yelled, as all three Zhaleen converged on the Doctor.

"They all look red!"  Jack protested, as he leaped forward in the emergency lights, ignoring the bone rattling tolling of the bell and pulled the nearest Zhaleen away from the Doctor.

The Doctor dodged and threw the emergency brake off, the time rotor started pumping.

The Zhaleen froze.

"You'd think they'd learn," the Doctor said, as he gingerly ducked under the outstretched arm of the Zhaleen closest to him.

Rose climb down off the back of the frozen Zhaleen behind the console as the blue of the time rotor shone out and the lights returned to normal.  The cloister bell stopped.

All three Zhaleen were silver under normal light.

"Well that's a mercy anyway," Rose said, dusting her hands off.  "So what are we gonna do with them?"

"Must have been a rush job.  I set those controls to take them home.  They must have overridden something."  He was busy at the monitor.  "Oh, that's clever!  They transported down through the center of their own tractor beam.  That's why they didn't need to take us aboard first."

"That's nice to know, Doctor," Jack said snarkily.  "But what are we gonna do with them?"

The Doctor stood up from the monitor and shoved his glasses back in his pocket.  "We're going to send them back."


"This isn't exactly what I had in mind when you said, 'send them back,'  Doctor."  Jack helped load the last of the Zhaleen onto the last of the three refrigerator dollies the Doctor had unearthed from somewhere in the Tardis.

"I thought you'd fancy them, Jack," Rose said from where she leaned against another Zhaleen, already loaded onto another dolly.  "They are beautiful,"  she said, admiring the metal-encased-in-glass figure before her. It looked a bit like an American movie award dipped in Lucite. "You can call him Oscar."

"Nah, too cold for me."  He "tinged" a fingernail off of the glass shoulder of the Zhaleen nearest him.

"So how are we going to get them back on their ship?" Jack asked. "Dematerialize around them?"  They wheeled the Zhaleen over onto the door ramp, three in a row.

"Nah. The transtemporal field would just screw it up," the Doctor said. "I hate transtemporal geometry."

"Well, I'm not going back on that ship again," Rose protested. "One dose of 'laminated time' was more than enough for me."

"No need," the Doctor said, back at the console, flicking switches. "There's one place on the Zhaleen ship that doesn't have the transtemporal field."

"What?  Where?" she asked.

He hit one last switch and the time rotor stopped with a "ding."

"The Ogron quarters."

He grinned evilly, clattered down the ramp and threw open the door. The Tardis was parked several feet above the floor.

"After you, Jack," he said grandly, waving a hand.

Jack grinned and tipped the first Zhaleen out into the surprised, but waiting hands of their Ogron employees.

Rose and the Doctor followed with theirs.

The crowd of Ogron's stood and stared at them stupidly, their hands filled with the unmoving statues of their masters.

The Doctor peeked out and wiggled his fingers at them.

"Bye!"

The Tardis faded away.