Chapter 9

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After the failed telepathic experiment, Dayle became very quiet. She finished her tea and cleared away the mess.

The Doctor was concerned. "We don't always get what we deserve you know?" he called to her softly.

Dayle returned to the room and sat on the opposite end of the sofa, fiddling with her curls.

He continued, "The universe has a funny way of making its own plans for us. You don't..."

"Life isn't fair." she interrupted bitterly. "I know. No need to mansplain that one to me. It's the story of my life." The tears were back.

The Doctor smiled and waited a beat. "Life isn't just something that happens to you Dayle. You have to happen to it." When she didn't immediately reply with venom, he went on. "You're so young. The way you act, you'd think your life was over. But there's so much more."

He moved closer to her on the sofa and put his arm around her in a friendly, comforting manner. He was actually surprised he didn't get a punch in the nose for that move. He took her acceptance of his embrace as an encouraging sign. "You can't take back the past. You can't erase it from time. Moving forward is the only option." He paused and gently booped her nose. "Or you can always continue standing still."

She smiled slightly and leaned into him. "I thought you were supposed to be the Lord of Time or whatever with your fancy time machine. You're telling me you've never gotten a do over?"

The Doctor laughed at that. "Rewriting past events is almost never a good idea. Even when it seems that way at the time."

Later

They were back in his TARDIS, the Doctor poring over a pile of books he had retrieved from his library. Dayle was wandering around, taking it all in with a look of disbelief on her face.

"How is this possible?" she wanted to know. "You walk into a phone booth sized box and somehow it's bigger inside. This is incredible. And pretty damn nutso."

The Doctor was looking for something, anything in the small collection of books he'd kept from his days at the Time Lord Academy. Of all the books on quantum "theory" and parallel worlds that might exist, these textbooks from Gallifrey would be the most accurate, the most advanced.

As the Doctor skimmed the pages, he jabbered. "I understand physically what has happened. I was in the right place at the right time in the right ship at the precise moment a black hole formed. With part of her defenses down, my TARDIS couldn't resist the magnetic field and was drawn in." He threw the book he'd been looking through down in frustration, picked up another.

"So, you're saying that black holes contain entirely different dimensions?" Dayle looked interested, if skeptical.

"It's not that simple really. Strictly speaking, black holes do not actually contain anything. In fact their very nature is that they are made up of antimatter- like a negative number." he explained. "The same properties of matter, only flipped. And their power is such that almost nothing can escape their vacuum. I suppose if any old space vessel were sucked in, it would simply be destroyed. A TARDIS though is Time Lord technology, which actually harnesses the power of black holes. For a Time Lord, in the right circumstances, a black hole becomes a portal."

"Does the portal work both ways?" Dayle asked, her eyes telling him that she was indeed keeping up.

"That," he told her, discarding another book, "is what I'd like to find out more about. Theoretically, yes. Practically, it's risky."

"Risky as in, you could die?", she looked concerned.

"Risky as in, there are an infinite number of universes and the odds that I end up back in the right place are practically nonexistent." He finger-marked the page he was on, sitting down in one of the jump seats. "Unless... unless I can fix on an anchor point with precise coordinates and create a line directly to it. Like a tow rope." The irony of that analogy was not lost on him.

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