Chapter Text
When they land on Thura, she doesn’t give them any instruction, and, in hindsight, that’s the beginning of it all.
She thinks, in the third century or so, that maybe it was intentional. Gallifrey was burning in the back of her mind, and maybe she just wanted space?
It puts the tardis’ reluctance into perspective, anyhow.
She lands her though, throws open the doors, and grins as best she can.
And when Ryan goes to press the big red button (and she did honestly think he had learned by then that big red buttons weren’t to be pushed, but then again, she still hadn’t learned), she doesn’t yell, doesn’t warn. She just pushes him back, a second too late, and takes the blast herself.
---
She doesn’t end up in Rose’s dimension. Of course she doesn’t. The universe doesn’t work like that. Except when she doesn’t want it too – then it’s filled to the brim with serendipity.
She’s on Thura. And it’s deserted.
Okay, not really deserted. She’s in the middle of a jungle (or what passes as a jungle), and she can hear various birds (or what pass as birds) twittering (or what passes as twittering). There’s life everywhere, it’s teeming at the edges of her vision, pressing at her fingertips and the soles of her boots.
But she can feel it, in her head. A brand new kind of emptiness.
There are absolutely no people.
(And she had thought the silence after the Moment had been bad).
---
She decides early on to shoot for teleportation, rather than flight. Thura’s got better raw materials for it – it was the Deosians main method of transport back in her universe…
Her universe.
And it is, isn’t it? She used to ricochet between two poles – thinking it was hers to command or thinking that nothing she did could ever make a difference.
She’s realised, in her time here, that it’s not her actions that made it hers.
It was the people.
Obvious, obvious, of course it’s obvious once she says it out loud (in the middle of a very convoluted conversation with Frederick the sparkly-looking rock). Isn’t that what she has always said? That those people, be them humans or Silurians or temporospatial abnormalities, that they were what was important?
…It had only taken a universe of distance to realise the truth of it.
---
Interdimensional travel is rare and dangerous. Most universes that discover it rip themselves and their neighbours apart within the span of days.
The Time Lords had outlawed it. So of course, she knows the theory inside and out.
Her universe had been lucky. The Deosians are a cautious race. They test their new invention slowly, and when they rip the fabric of space-time four months in, it’s only their solar system that gets destroyed.
It’s a fixed point. Of course it is. Otherwise, she would have found a way to try to stop it.
Most wide-scale tragedies are fixed points, because if a tragedy can be averted, she gets there. Eventually. Sometimes she leaves it better. Sometimes she leaves it different.
Sometimes she leaves it so much worse.
---
Even with all the raw materials, it takes her eleven years to build a functioning long-range teleport.
She sets it to Earth first. Of course she does. She knows herself well enough to realise her own weaknesses.
And it’s the same – teeming with life and completely empty.
She wanders what would be Cardiff, sits herself down on what would be Mermaid Quay, watches the seagulls circle overhead.
There’s no Rift here, nor anywhere else on the planet. There’s no underground races, sleeping away the centuries.
---
She stays for a few months, then with a press of a button, she’s on Thura again.
She doesn’t know what happened in this universe. Everywhere she looks, it seems that life has stagnated, just on the brink of intelligent thought.
Maybe this plane lacks something vital. Maybe this is by someone’s design.
She would like to say it’s beautiful.
Mostly it just leaves her screaming until she knocks herself out.
(What? It’s not like there’s anyone here to judge her. Not even her tardis, who she’s known since she was fifty years old).
---
She sets the coordinates for Gallifrey on an impulse she can no longer fight back. She would know the star system anywhere – it’s coded into her blood. When she looked at the sky, no matter what corner of the universe she used to find herself in, she could always point her way home.
She closes her eyes and presses the button (big and red, for old time’s sake), and when she opens them, she’s in the void.
…
She shoots herself back to Thura, and she’s groaning and shaking and gagging against the memory of negative pressure.
She can’t breathe – even activating her respiratory bypass doesn’t stop the vice gripping her chest.
… She’d thought she could see the grass fields one more time.
She’d thought wrong.
---
She knows the basics of inter-dimensional coding. And she knows how to build a Cutter, but she doesn’t know how to aim it.
It takes her another seventeen years to repurpose the teleporter, get it ready for its intended use. Then it takes another five years to shrink it down until she can carry it with her. She makes it a wrist strap, for old time’s sake.
She’s domesticated the local species of bird by now, so she rigs them a feeder. It will last a hundred years, and it will slowly taper off their food, leaving them wild again. She hopes, anyway. She could stay and watch, and test it, and make sure she’s not dooming an untouched species to imminent extinction.
She doesn’t though. She takes a final glance, and she leaves.
---
She’s the next universe over, she thinks. As much as that means anything. But it feels about right – where she’d usually feel time flowing through her, she can almost touch the edges of each reality, if she stretches.
She aims for Earth, and lands in the middle of a desert. Red sand, heat rolling down her spine.
She could try teleporting again, but she’s not sure, and she doesn’t want to risk it. So she walks. And an hour and a half later she arrives in Alice Springs, Australia.
There are people walking down the main street. Real people. She feels them in that empty, cloying space in her mind and almost doubles over on the road.
She ignores the twitch, the spark of not rightness, until it’s almost too late.
A child notices her first. He’s skipping down the road, hand clasped in someone else’s. When he meets her eyes, he grins, and she feels it.
This may be an Earth, but this is not her home.
The child tugs on his parent’s hand, and now there are two people looking, grinning. Their eyes are just a touch too wide, their movements a little too smooth as they make their way towards her. They’re drawing attention – more people stop, turn, grin and glide forwards.
She opens the wristband with trembling fingers, and breaks through the next dimensional wall a moment before they reach her. She barely looks at the new coordinates. She just goes.
---
Her aim is to get to an interdimensional gateway. They’re remarkably rare (see aforementioned space-time ripping), but in a multiverse of infinite possibilities, there are infinite gates in existence. They’re just spaced out very sporadically, and all she has to go on is half a gut instinct and a quarter of a prayer.
So she winds up taking the scenic route
---
She finds a world that’s a perfect mirror image. The sky is backwards, the human sun rises in the west.
She tends to stick to Earths. She knows the place almost as well as her first home.
She does try Gallifrey a few times. In one jump, the Time Lords had evolved themselves past three dimensional space. She could almost feel them in the back of her mind, but even when she stretched and strained until her vision shook and her nose dripped red onto the sand, she couldn’t reach them.
Another time, she stands in a field of grass. It’s grey. Colours had never evolved there, or at least, not colours her eyes can reach.
And once, she lands, and feels her near instantly. The Gallifreyan president. She still goes by Koschei here. Their minds connect, and the Doctor is knocked sideways by fear and pain and grief.
She falls hard on old habits, and runs.
---
On one Earth, humans never left the waters. They’ve built beautiful cities along the sides of the Marianas Trench, lit by bubbles of glowing jellyfish. She activates her respiratory bypass and floats amongst them, watching them sign to each other amidst the pressing weight.
Their biggest city is called New York.
She tries to reach into their minds and scoop out more of their language, but she’s unfamiliar with their neural structure.
She ends up with their music instead.
---
She lands on one Earth, and her skin starts burning.
In this universe, antimatter won the war, and positrons are tearing her to shreds, inside and out.
She barely manages to type new coordinates with what remains of her fingertips, so she isn’t planning her next jump, just praying it's anywhere better than this.
---
When she opens her eyes (when she’s finished choking out the antimatter air cloying her lungs, when she’s finished moaning against the burning of her epidermis), she sees Zeppelins.