The Daughter of Gallifrey

6: The Other Driver

The Doctor and Caroline stepped out of the TARDIS and back into the busy street. Taking Caroline's hand, the Doctor surveyed the buildings across the road, searching for the door. Caroline tried to peer between the bodies of grown ups around her to have a look as well.

But the door was gone. The two walked up and down the sidewalk, pushing through the throngs of shoppers, but no sign of the mysterious bookshop was found.

"How can it be gone just like that? Poof. Vanished," the Doctor muttered. They had retired from their search on a bench. He still scanned the crowd, though, as if they held the answer.

"Just like it appeared, Doctor. Out of the blue," Caroline said, quietly, "One minute it's there. The next, gone." She held her palms up and shrugged her shoulders, expressing her own lacking knowledge.

They sat, the girl and the Doctor, for an hour or so, neither uttering a sound. He was thinking, his brain whirring away faster than it had ever gone before.

Caroline Thomas was thinking as well, testing the limits of her new Time Lord mind, solving equations in her head, calculating the probability of practically impossible realities, and discovering exactly why perception filters confunded humans so easily. She had been given vast amounts of information to process, and she wasn't even really sure how she was doing it, sifting through all that genius to create a single chain of thoughts.

No wonder the Doctor was always so...what was the word? She knew it; she's just have to find it first, in the jumbled mess that was her head.

Crazy? No.

Absentminded? No.

Neurotic? Not that either.

Then she realized there was no lone word to describe what she was thinking of. It was simply the fact that he spoke out loud as he thought. All that knowledge was hard to keep straight. Verbalizing it was logical when trying to organize all that around to form a whole procession of related thoughts and come to a conclusion.

Suddenly the Doctor turned his head, a startled look on his face.

"But wait-how...I mean, you're part Time Lord! I can feel your thoughts, like you can feel mine! How are you, you know-here? You should be burning up still. Even if you've got the slightest bit of Time Lord in you, Thomas, you should burn. Not that I want you to burn, it's just-" His eyes widened more and more as he spoke. He thought of Donna and the metacrisis. His voice cracked. "-not possible. How did I not immediately notice this?" The Doctor stood up and paced in front of the bench.

"You had sort of died. That kept you a bit preoccupied." Caroline said, plainly, tugging on a lock of her hair. He squatted down to her level, his gaze diving deep into her eyes, poking around in her soul.

"You look normal. Healthy." He put his hand on her forehead, pushing aside her bangs. "No fever. Hmm." He furrowed his eyebrows, crinkling the skin above his nose, a puzzled look on his face. Caroline fidgeted under his intense stare.

"I feel fine," she assured him.

"But you shouldn't," he replied softly. There was a bout of silence between them, the only sounds being that of the passing crowds jabbering loudly to one another and simply going on with their safe, ordinary lives. Then, quite out of nowhere, Caroline burst into tears. Several passers-by turned their heads toward her small figure on the bench before continuing on their way, too busy to truly care.

"I'm so sorry, Thomas. I didn't mean to say anything to upset you, honestly-" Caroline shook her head at his words.

"No, no, Doctor. It's-I mean, I've only just remembered that I haven't-I haven't...got a mum anymore," she got out between sobs, tears splashing down her round cheeks. The Doctor wrapped an arm around Caroline, and she collapsed into his side, hiding her face in her hands. He encircled her with his other arm as well, holding her close and trying to comfort her as best he could.

Not quite having given up on the mysterious bookshop, but feeling that it could wait, the Doctor scooped up Caroline, with no protest from her, and made his way back to the TARDIS.

After catching the TARDIS door with his foot and pulling it shut, the Doctor stepped up to the controls of the TARDIS and set down a much quieter and less weepy Caroline next to him. She still clutched at his tweed jacket like a small child but soon became fully aware of her surroundings and dropped her grasp.

"Thank you, Doctor," she said, slightly ashamed of her emotional breakdown. The Doctor gave a little smile laced with a bit of concern. He couldn't help but feel responsible for Katie Thomas' terrible death. It ate away at him, all the deaths he caused, even the indirect ones. Those deaths tore at his dwindling sanity.

"You are so very welcome, Thomas." He turned to the TARDIS controls, twirling a lever with his finger absentmindedly.

"What about the bookshop?"

"Another day, I suppose." The Doctor began to dance around the control panels, pulling up this, pushing in that, spinning this while holding down that. Caroline, quite unaware of how to justify her own actions, pulled down a screen and started to tap at it rapidly while pressing four small buttons in a row and flicking a knob to the right.

The Doctor stopped dead when he noticed that she was operating the TARDIS. He approached her slowly, with one eyebrow cocked in surprise.

"Thomas?"

"Yes, Doctor." Caroline answered him without looking away from what she was doing.

"What are you doing, exactly?" He arrived at her elbow, peering at the screen.

"Locking in the coordinates you visited before you picked up my energy signature." She glanced away from the controls to catch his eye for a moment before returning to the screen and holding down a lever a little to her left. "Do you mind me asking where you were, Doctor?"

"I was, um-wait, how did you know it was your energy signature that led me to you? I could've been just passing through." Caroline shrugged.

"I guessed." The TARDIS tossed wildly, taking them both by surprise, throwing the Doctor to the floor and making Caroline grip the controls incredibly tightly in order to say upright. She tucked the hair that was in her face behind her ear and laughed a sort of bubbly giggle. The Doctor sprung up and chuckled as well.

"Always loved that bit," he said, straightening his jacket.

"And you never just pass through, Doctor. There's always a reason, whether you know it or not. She does." Caroline jabbed her thumb in the direction on the heart of the TARDIS, hidden beneath the control panels.

"Why'd you pick these coordinates? Anywhere, any time that ever happened, Caroline Thomas, anywhere in whole universe, and you pick the last place I've been?"

"Just curious." She shrugged again, leaping down the steps toward the door. Caroline pulled open the TARDIS door, her eyes still on the Doctor. "All of time and space and where did you go, Doctor?"

With a bounce in her step, she exited the TARDIS, a slightly anxious Doctor not far behind her.