Book 6 - Of Time and Tragedy

Chapter One: The Weight of Bells

⸻

The TARDIS landed with a sigh.
Not a thud, not a groan — a gentle exhale, like even the ship itself knew to tread carefully.

Ava stepped out first.

Warm sun.
Stone streets.
Church bells in the distance — their tone bright, but somehow already mourning something yet to happen.

The air smelled of bread, ash, and lavender.

“Where are we?” she asked, brushing curls out of her eyes as she squinted upward.

The Doctor emerged behind her, squinting at a nearby tower’s inscription.

“Florence,” he said. “Italy. Earth.”

A pause.

“March, 1348.”

Cal followed next, one hand resting instinctively on his belt. “Medieval Europe,” he muttered. “Fantastic. Do you suppose they’ve invented soap yet?”

Ava elbowed him. Lightly.
A grin flickered between them — brief, instinctive.

Then Anna stepped out.

She said nothing at first. Just closed her eyes.

And listened.

“The bells aren’t in harmony,” she murmured.

The Doctor tilted his head. “What do you mean?”

“One’s ringing the hour,” she said. “The other’s ringing for the dead.”

He grew still.

“Oh,” he said softly.

⸻

The TARDIS was parked behind a bakery near the Piazza della Signoria. They slipped into the city with ease — the Doctor adjusting his coat to pass for a scholar, Ava donning a simple linen wrap, Cal keeping to the shadows with a watchman’s stance. Anna, in her quiet, composed way, looked exactly like someone’s well-bred niece.

They blended — mostly.

Until Ava found the scroll merchant.

And fell in love.

Not with a person.
Not yet.

With the language.

“Pre-Renaissance proto-humanist cursive,” she whispered, unrolling parchment after parchment like a child at a feast. “This is Gaddi-style minims. Look at this curvature, Cal, it’s—”

“You’re adorable when you’re making up words,” he replied.

“I’m not making them up, I—”

She stopped.

He was smiling.

So was she.

Neither said anything else.

⸻

Anna found a boy.

His name was Matteo, and he smelled like thyme and copper. His tunic was too big, and his hands were already stained with ink and poultice. An apprentice to a street healer, he was thirteen and clever and full of stories.

He offered Anna a dried fig without asking her name.

She took it.

And they were friends.

⸻

The Doctor, meanwhile, was already uneasy.

He examined cobblestone cracks, stray ash in gutters, the tension in merchants’ eyes.

He lifted a vial from the air and held it to the light. His lips pressed together.

Then he opened his journal and scribbled one word.

Yersinia.

⸻

Florence, on the surface, was alive.
Children laughed. Bakers shouted. Artists argued.

But under the sunlight was a tremble.

A woman collapsed near the market.

Someone muttered a prayer.

Nobody approached.

The Doctor knelt beside her, scanned discreetly. Her lips were dry. Lymph nodes swollen. He reached for her hand—
She flinched.

Too late.

⸻

That night, they gathered on a terrace overlooking the Arno.

“I don’t want to leave yet,” Ava said. “It’s beautiful. Even if it’s fading.”

The Doctor said nothing.

“You know what’s coming,” Cal said quietly.

The Doctor looked up at the sky. “The Black Death. In less than a month, this city loses sixty percent of its population. No one understands why. No one can stop it.”

Anna looked away.

Cal asked the question Ava couldn’t.

“Can you?”

The Doctor’s face hardened.

“No.”

⸻

Later, when the others slept, Ava remained.

She stood on the TARDIS threshold, arms folded, watching Cal adjust the tension on a crossbow string.

“I thought you didn’t need weapons,” she said.

“Florence disagrees.”

She sat beside him.

Quiet.

“You saw how that woman looked at him,” Ava murmured. “She was afraid of him. Afraid of being helped.”

Cal nodded.

“This isn’t our world.”

“No,” Ava said. “But it still hurts to watch it fall.”

They didn’t look at each other.

But they didn’t leave, either.

Eventually, Cal said, “You planning to keep falling for doomed cities?”

She smiled. Tired. “Only if I’m not falling alone.”

Their hands brushed.

Then lingered.

⸻

In the silent street below, a rat paused beside a sleeping dog.
The dog coughed once.

The rat moved on.

///

Chapter Two: A Plague of Silence

⸻

Matteo didn’t come to the fountain the next morning.

Anna waited.

She sat on the rim of the old stone basin, hands folded in her lap, the sketch of his face folded in her pocket. Pigeons wandered around her shoes. Church bells rang, but not the ones she’d learned to listen for.

She waited.

And waited.

⸻

The Doctor was in the street below, studying smoke.

Not thick, not wild — controlled smoke, rising in careful spirals from firepits near the Piazza. The locals believed the smoke might keep sickness away. The Doctor knew otherwise.

“They’re burning rosemary,” Ava said beside him. “And vinegar cloth. I read about it.”

He nodded. “And they’re keeping all their sick behind closed doors where the disease has better air density to concentrate.”

She sighed. “You can’t fix this one, can you?”

“No.”

“But you’re going to try.”

He didn’t answer.

⸻

Cal had followed a different trail.

A rumor: that corpses were piling in the crypt beneath Santa Croce faster than they could be consecrated.

He found the sexton in a back alley, drunk, bleeding from the gums.

“Is it God’s punishment?” the man asked, swaying.

“No,” Cal said, catching him as he collapsed. “But it’s trying like hell to look like it.”

⸻

Anna found Matteo near sunset.

He was sitting by the Arno, barefoot, a wet cloth over his mouth.

“I’m not sick,” he said before she could speak. “My master is.”

She sat beside him.

“I brought honey,” she said.

He didn’t move.

“I think I’ll stay here tonight.”

He didn’t argue.

⸻

Back in the TARDIS, Ava stared at the map projection.

Red dots bloomed.

Fast.

She turned to the Doctor. “Can’t we isolate it? Quarantine?”

He shook his head. “Wrong century. No germ theory. No containment structure. They burn clothes but hug the dying. They bleed the infected and reuse the knives.”

“Then we do it for them.”

He looked at her.

“Ava—”

“I’m not asking,” she said. “I’m telling.”

⸻

Cal returned bloodied.

Not his.

A mob had turned on a Jewish family near the Oltrarno gate, blaming them for the deaths.

“I stopped it,” he said, stripping his tunic. “But it was already done.”

The Doctor ran a scanner over him.

“You’re clean,” he said.

“But not okay,” Cal answered.

⸻

That night, Anna awoke screaming.

She dreamed of Matteo’s hands reaching for her from a burning boat. The Arno was black with bodies. The sky wept ash.

The Doctor was at her side in seconds.

She didn’t say anything.

She just cried.

And he held her.

⸻

In the morning, Matteo was gone.

Not dead.

Not fled.

Gone.

A blood trail from the riverside to the street. Nothing more.

Anna didn’t eat that day.

She walked the alleys alone until Ava found her.

And held her.

⸻

Meanwhile, Concordia systems flickered deep within the TARDIS.

The Doctor had begun building something — a containment shell, just big enough for a convent, maybe. A single block.

It wouldn’t save Florence.

But it might save a few.

⸻

Cal approached Ava on the cathedral steps.

He offered a cloth-wrapped parcel.

“What is it?” she asked.

He hesitated. “Bread. For Anna.”

“And for me?”

“Just this.”

He reached out, brushed her hair behind her ear.

A brief moment.

Then gone.

But not forgotten.

⸻

By nightfall, the bells had changed again.

Now they didn’t ring for the dead.

They rang for the missing.

///

Chapter Three: Those We Cannot Save

⸻

The TARDIS glowed like a candle in a cellar.

Dim. Contained. Quiet.

Inside, the Doctor stood before a slowly forming projection — a globe of Florence, crisscrossed with red threads. Each one marked a known infection vector. The map looked like it was bleeding.

Ava entered with a wine jug and two cups.

“Dinner,” she said flatly.

He didn’t look up. “That’s not dinner. That’s penance.”

“It’s Sangiovese. You’re lucky I didn’t bring a confession booth.”

She poured two glasses. Only drank from hers.

He didn’t move.

⸻

Outside, Florence coughed itself to sleep.

⸻

Anna sat in the shadow of a ruined fountain, drawing chalk shapes on the stone. Circles inside circles, sharp edges blurring at the rim.

She had Matteo’s scarf wrapped around her wrist.

Cal approached, boots quiet.

“I checked the plague cart records,” he said gently. “There’s no Matteo on the lists.”

She kept drawing.

“I know,” she whispered.

He sat beside her.

“I hated this part of soldiering,” he said. “You come to a place to help, and all you can do is count who didn’t make it.”

Anna glanced sideways.

“You were a soldier?”

He smiled without teeth.

“I was a lot of things. Mostly angry. Then I met Ava.”

Anna looked back at her chalk.

“Is she angry too?”

“No,” he said. “But she carries it better than I ever did.”

⸻

Ava was angry.

She paced the TARDIS like a lioness in a cage. Her hands itched. Her eyes burned.

She found the Doctor rerouting the filtration circuits.

“How many people can your barrier protect?”

He hesitated.

“Fifteen. Maybe twenty. One building, tightly sealed. Full phase effort.”

“And after that?”

“Collapse. The city falls. The survivors scatter. History proceeds.”

“Then let’s start now,” she said. “Pick a convent. Or a school. Or the poorest street you can find.”

“Ava—”

“You keep talking about history. But you keep forgetting it’s made of people.”

He met her gaze.

And said, softly: “You’ll hate me when this is over.”

⸻

Cal watched her come out of the TARDIS, eyes hard, fists clenched.

He didn’t speak.

She walked to him.

He handed her a ration.

She took it.

“I want to save someone,” she said.

“So do I.”

And then she kissed him.

⸻

The kiss wasn’t desperate.

It wasn’t dramatic.

It was certain — like water finding its own level.

When it ended, they didn’t speak.

But they didn’t separate.

They just stood there.

Holding each other.

Until Anna arrived, silent and wide-eyed.

Ava smiled softly and said, “I needed that.”

Anna nodded. “So did he.”

⸻

The Doctor began assembling the barrier.

A humming ring of low-frequency field stabilizers around a women’s shelter near the edge of the slums. The building had thirty beds. He could protect twelve.

He asked no permission.

He just did it.

⸻

Ava, Cal, and Anna helped move people inside.

Children.

A nun with a cough.

A bookseller’s wife with two infants.

Matteo’s sister — found huddled in a doorway.

No one asked why.

No one refused.

⸻

That night, the bells changed again.

Not tolling.

But ringing.

Three tones.

Clear.

Intentional.

A sign: Someone still lived.

⸻

The Doctor stood on the convent’s roof, watching the stars.

Ava joined him.

“I’m not sorry,” she said.

“About what?”

“The kiss. The anger. The stubbornness.”

“I’d be disappointed if you were.”

She paused.

“Do you think we made a difference?”

He nodded.

“Small ones. But the best ones always are.”

⸻

Inside, Anna sketched Matteo’s sister sleeping.
She titled it: The Ones We Found.

Then placed it on the wall above the door.

A prayer.

///

Chapter Four: The Shape of Grief

⸻

Florence awoke to black smoke and missing names.

The morning bells rang late.

Not because of neglect—
but because the bellringer had died in his sleep.

His apprentice, a boy no older than Anna, climbed the tower on shaking legs.

The first toll came fractured.
The second, better.
By the third, the city remembered how to mourn.

⸻

In the convent shelter, twelve people breathed filtered air under an invisible barrier.
The Doctor paced the hallway, checking readings.
The barrier held.

For now.

But outside the threshold, life collapsed.

⸻

Ava sat in the stairwell, one boot off, lacing the other with slow precision.

Cal stood nearby, washing his hands at a basin. The water ran red—
not with blood, but crushed rose petals used to mask the rot.

He turned, catching Ava watching him.

“What?”

“You’re quiet.”

“I’m tired.”

“That’s not new.”

“No,” he said, “but you are.”

She blinked. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’ve never seen you stay before. You usually run.”

“I’m not running now.”

He looked down, drying his hands.

“Good.”

She stood and walked to him.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

He glanced down. “It’s nothing.”

She took his hand, wrapped it in her scarf, and kissed the back of it.

They didn’t speak for a long time.

⸻

Anna sat at the window and watched Florence fall apart one gesture at a time.

The baker across the street handed out bread with bare hands.

A noblewoman lit incense over a corpse cart.

Children played with stones in a courtyard, while their parents cried behind locked doors.

Anna sketched them all.

Not for beauty.

But for memory.

“Why are you drawing?” asked one of the sheltered girls — Lucia, eight years old, eyes too old.

“Because when we leave,” Anna said, “someone should remember the good parts, too.”

⸻

The Doctor stood on the convent roof, watching the city’s ventilation currents twist into ribbons of smoke and heat.

He held a data slate.

Projected death count: 34,911.

Margin of uncertainty: irrelevant.

He closed the file.

⸻

Ava joined him.

“He’s sleeping.”

The Doctor didn’t turn. “Good.”

“You look like you haven’t.”

“I have. Just not restfully.”

She stepped beside him.

“The barrier’s holding.”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“Another two days, if I pull power from the TARDIS ambient systems.”

She looked out at the rising fires.

“And then?”

He hesitated.

“I pull us out.”

“And the people in here?”

“They stay. Protected. But static. Untouchable.”

She nodded.

Then punched his arm.

“Ow.”

“You’re not a god, Doctor.”

He winced. “Could’ve fooled me.”

“I know what you are. And I see what this is doing to you.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re lying.”

He said nothing.

⸻

That night, Anna found Matteo’s sister whispering to someone in her sleep.

Not in Italian.

Not in any language spoken in Florence.

Anna listened.

And wrote it down.

When she showed the Doctor, he froze.

“Where did she hear this?”

“She dreamed it.”

He stared at the page.

“It’s Gallifreyan,” he said softly.

⸻

Cal and Ava lay on the floor of the convent kitchen, side by side, backs against the hearth.

“I don’t want to leave,” Ava whispered.

“You will,” he said.

“I want to stay with you.”

“You are.”

She turned her head.

“Promise?”

He reached across the space between them.

And this time, there was no hesitation.

Their fingers entwined.

⸻

The bells rang again.

Not for the dead.

But for those who refused to vanish without being known.

///

Chapter Five: The Ones Who Vanish

⸻

Matteo’s scarf was missing.

Anna noticed just after dawn, when she returned from the stairwell where she’d been tracing Gallifreyan patterns into the dust. It had been tied to her wrist the day before. Now her wrist was bare.

She searched silently. Not frantic. Not crying.

Just quiet.

Intent.

She didn’t find the scarf.

But she found footprints — barefoot, dust-streaked, smaller than hers.

Leading away from the convent door.

Beyond the field’s edge.

Beyond the Doctor’s protection.

⸻

Lucia was gone.

⸻

The TARDIS scanners showed no trace. The Doctor’s lips pressed into a line.

“She walked out,” he said. “Between shielding pulses. When the barrier shifted to cycle.”

“But why?” Ava asked.

“She’s eight,” Anna said. “And her brother never came back.”

⸻

The Doctor activated an emergency override, briefly lowering the barrier to let Cal pass. He moved like a shadow through the alleyways, sword slung across his back not for violence but for weight.

Anna followed him.

She didn’t ask permission.

⸻

They found her near the fountain.

Lucia sat with her arms around something — someone.

Matteo.

Alive.

But wrong.

His eyes were vacant. His breath shallow.

He didn’t respond when Anna called his name.

Lucia whispered, “He came home. He told me in my dream where to find him.”

⸻

The Doctor arrived seconds later.

He scanned Matteo.

And frowned.

“There’s no pathogen,” he said. “Not now. Not anymore.”

“But he’s sick,” Anna said.

“He’s… empty.”

⸻

Back at the TARDIS, the Doctor ran tests.

Matteo’s mind was intact.

But his sense of presence — his mental timestamp, his consciousness of being a person in time — was missing.

“His memory of self is erased,” the Doctor said. “Not trauma. Not amnesia. Something took it.”

Anna watched silently.

Ava turned to the Doctor. “Is it the plague?”

“No. It’s something else.”

Cal frowned. “Something using the plague as cover?”

The Doctor looked up.

“I think something came through the vortex. Something old. Something that feeds on forgetting.”

⸻

They kept Matteo under quarantine.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t sleep. Just stared.

Lucia stayed by his side.

So did Anna.

“I know you,” she whispered to him. “Even if you don’t.”

She began drawing him every day. A different version. Smiling. Playing. Laughing. Remembered.

⸻

That night, the Doctor brought the team together.

“There’s a secondary pathogen in the city,” he said. “Not biological. Temporal.”

“A parasite?” Ava asked.

“Not quite. It doesn’t kill. It erases. It takes people’s sense of self. Leaves the body alive, the mind… disconnected.”

“How do we stop it?” Cal asked.

“We isolate it,” the Doctor said. “We name it. We remember.”

Anna looked up.

“I think I already have.”

⸻

She showed them her sketches.

Each one of Matteo.

But also… not.

In some, his eyes were wrong. In others, his shadow went the wrong direction. In a few, he held objects that no longer existed.

“I drew him before I ever met him,” she said. “He told me stories I didn’t understand. Now I think—maybe I wasn’t imagining them.”

The Doctor took the sketches. Ran a pulse through them.

Temporal residue lit the page.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s a memory leech. It whispers itself into your thoughts. Rewrites history until no one remembers what was lost.”

Ava whispered, “So if we forget… it wins.”

⸻

The bell tolled again.

Once.

Twice.

Then silence.

The Doctor stood slowly.

“We need to find where it’s hiding.”

“And how?” Cal asked.

The Doctor turned to Anna.

“We follow the children.”

///

Chapter Six: Whispers in Chalk

⸻

Anna stood at the center of the cloister courtyard, chalk in one hand, Matteo’s scarf in the other.

Around her, the convent slept — or tried to. The shelter’s wards pulsed gently overhead, anchored to the TARDIS systems still humming in the cellar.

She stared at the stone tiles beneath her feet.

And began to draw.

⸻

“They came for him in the dream,” she said softly.

Ava knelt beside her, watching the shapes take form. “What did he say?”

“Nothing. But his shadow pointed the wrong way.”

A beat.

“Then he forgot my name.”

The chalk lines grew — spirals that became loops, intersecting in ways that weren’t geometrically correct.

“But I remembered his,” Anna added.

The Doctor stood nearby, frowning.

“These patterns,” he said, “aren’t just symbolic.”

Cal crouched at the edge of the spiral.

“What are they?”

“Temporal glyphs,” the Doctor said. “Anchors. Prayers to memory.”

⸻

The TARDIS translated Anna’s drawing into waveforms.

Each loop pulsed with a different temporal frequency.

One of them matched the void signature from Matteo’s aura.

“I think she’s triangulated the breach,” the Doctor murmured.

Ava folded her arms. “From a chalk drawing?”

“Children and Time share a secret language,” he said. “One adults forget.”

⸻

That night, they followed Anna’s path into the crypt beneath Santa Croce.

The glyph on her drawing pointed to a sealed chamber deep underground — untouched for centuries.

The air was heavy. Not stale — mute. Even the torchlight flickered soundlessly.

“Something’s feeding here,” the Doctor whispered. “Not on bodies. On legacy.”

They opened the stone door.

⸻

Inside: statues.

Of children.

Each frozen in mid-gesture — laughing, crying, running.

But their faces were blank.

Not weathered. Not unfinished.

Erased.

Anna stepped forward.

“They forgot themselves.”

A shadow passed along the wall. Not cast by them — but beside them.

The Doctor reached for his sonic.

Nothing happened.

“Chrono-cancellation field,” he muttered. “It nullifies tools. Traps us in now.”

Cal drew his sword. “Then we fight with old-fashioned steel.”

The shadow whispered.

Words.

Names.

Ava staggered. “I just… forgot my sister’s name.”

“You don’t have a sister,” the Doctor said sharply.

“Then why does it hurt like I do?”

Anna walked forward.

Unafraid.

She opened her sketchbook.

Held it high.

“This is Matteo,” she said.

The whisper recoiled.

“This is Lucia.”

It hissed.

“This is me.”

The walls shook.

Then — silence.

Real silence.

⸻

The crypt cracked open.

Not physically — temporally.

Frozen light fractured in every direction.

And the thing that lived inside, the Forgetter, shrieked.

It wasn’t form.

It wasn’t voice.

It was doubt — weaponized.

The Doctor stepped in front of Anna.

“You exist,” he told her.

“You are real.”

“You matter.”

He turned to Ava, to Cal.

“You all do.”

And then to the thing:

“We remember you.”

⸻

The entity tried to flee.

But couldn’t.

Because Anna was still drawing.

Every time it moved, she sketched its new shape.

And so it could not vanish.

Because it could not hide.

From memory.

⸻

The room lit up.

The statues regained their faces.

The walls stopped humming.

The crypt became a crypt again.

Dead.

But no longer eating the living.

⸻

Later, back in the TARDIS, the Doctor sealed the artifact that held the last residue of the Forgetter.

“Where will you keep it?” Ava asked.

“In a vault made of memory,” he said. “With the stories we don’t tell, but can’t let die.”

⸻

Cal cleaned his sword.

Ava joined him, slid her hand into his.

Anna hung Matteo’s scarf above the TARDIS console.

Then took out a new piece of chalk.

And drew a smile.

///

Chapter Seven: Mercy in the Ruins

⸻

The convent barrier began to flicker.

Not violently. Not visibly.

But the Doctor felt it — like pressure behind the eyes. A temporal seam loosening.

“We’ve got hours left,” he muttered, adjusting the TARDIS interface. “At most.”

Ava appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a blood-stained cloth.

“Then we need to choose.”

The Doctor looked up.

“I hate that sentence.”

⸻

Inside the convent, the twelve survivors slept. Matteo still didn’t speak, but he followed Anna now. Not like a shadow. More like a twin flame — uncertain but warm.

Lucia smiled again. Not always. But sometimes.

Cal paced the hallway, head low, mind full.

The Doctor approached.

“I need your help.”

“Picking who lives?” Cal asked, voice like gravel.

“No,” the Doctor said. “Helping me cheat.”

⸻

They met in the cloister garden — Ava, Cal, Anna, the Doctor.

The chalk lines from Anna’s earlier drawing had faded, but left a memory trace the Doctor could map.

“I can reroute the barrier field,” he explained. “Create a mobile containment shell. Small. Selective. Enough for five, maybe six.”

“And the rest?” Ava asked.

He didn’t answer.

⸻

They argued. Quietly.

Ava wanted to stay and fight.

Cal wanted to evacuate everyone and damn the consequences.

Anna said nothing. Just watched.

Until she finally spoke.

“We don’t choose who to save,” she said.

“We choose who to ask.”

⸻

So they woke the twelve.

One by one.

And offered each the truth.

“We can take you.
But only you.
You can’t bring your family.
You can’t take your past.
You may never return.
You’ll live.
But not here.
Not now.”

Some said yes.

Some said no.

And in the end, only five chose to come.

⸻

Lucia stayed.

She kissed Anna on the cheek and whispered something no one else heard.

Anna nodded, crying quietly.

Matteo chose to come — not because he understood, but because Anna took his hand.

Ava and Cal packed quietly, taking only what they could carry.

Cal turned to Ava.

“When this is over—”

“I know,” she said. And kissed him.

⸻

As the barrier collapsed behind them, the Doctor activated the new field — tight, humming, barely visible. It hugged their group like a second skin.

Fire bloomed across the street.

Screams echoed.

The plague, now untethered, moved with wind and faithlessness.

But the group — the six survivors, Anna, Ava, Cal, the Doctor — walked untouched.

A ghostly procession.

Carrying memory.

Carrying mercy.

⸻

They reached the TARDIS as the bells fell silent.

No more ringing.

Just stillness.

The Doctor opened the door.

The survivors entered without speaking.

Matteo looked back once.

Then stepped through.

Anna lingered.

Her chalk crumbled in her hand.

She whispered, “I’ll remember them.”

The Doctor nodded.

“So will I.”

⸻

Inside, Ava stood beside the console, hands trembling.

“We should’ve saved more.”

“We did,” the Doctor said. “They just didn’t all come with us.”

⸻

Cal closed the door behind them.

The TARDIS dematerialized.

Florence burned.

But not alone.

///

Chapter Eight: The Ones Who Came With Us

⸻

The TARDIS floated in the upper eddies of the Vortex, unmoving. A safe harbor between histories.

Ava sat on the floor of the library with her back against a stack of Atlantean codices, eyes closed. She wasn’t meditating. She wasn’t even resting. She was waiting—for grief to stop feeling like guilt.

Cal found her there. He didn’t speak. Just folded himself beside her, shoulder to shoulder.

A long silence.

Finally, she asked, “Do you think they hated us? The ones we didn’t take?”

He didn’t answer with words.

He just took her hand and held it until her breathing slowed.

⸻

The Doctor was at the console, but not piloting.

Just watching.

The console wasn’t moving, either.

For once, the TARDIS was perfectly still.
And it stayed still, until the Doctor whispered:

“I need time to slow.”

The TARDIS responded.
The hum deepened.
The lights dimmed.

In the corridor behind him, Anna passed silently, Matteo at her side. She walked like someone years older than when she arrived in Florence. Her eyes didn’t scan the room — they remembered it.

⸻

In the galley, the five survivors sat in silence.

Two women. One monk. A blind herbalist. Matteo.

They ate in silence.

Then, slowly, one began to hum.

A tune none of them had heard before.

But all of them knew.

Anna smiled.

“Lucia used to hum that.”

⸻

Later that evening, Ava and Cal stood on the outer deck, beneath the simulated stars of the TARDIS biosphere.

They spoke softly.

No grand confessions. No declarations.

Just truth.

“I want out,” Ava said.

He didn’t flinch. “I know.”

“I don’t mean tonight. Not tomorrow. But someday soon.”

He turned to her. “When you go… I go.”

Her voice shook. “Anna deserves peace. We all do.”

He stepped closer. “So let’s find it.”

She nodded.

Then leaned into him.

And the stars spun gently around them.

⸻

In the console room, Anna drew circles around the outer rim of the rotor with Matteo watching.

“He remembers shapes,” she told the Doctor. “But not names.”

The Doctor studied him quietly.

“Memory isn’t just data,” he said. “It’s attachment. You’re giving him context again.”

“I think he still knows me,” Anna said.

“I think you’re anchoring him,” the Doctor replied.

Anna nodded.

“Then I’ll stay.”

He looked at her.

And for the first time in hours, he smiled.

⸻

Cal sat on the TARDIS stairwell and sharpened his blade.
He no longer did it out of habit.

He did it because it helped.

Ava joined him.

This time, she kissed him first.

⸻

The next day, they dropped the survivors in a secure safehouse in 15th-century Turkey — far enough from the plague, close enough to history to matter.

The Doctor watched from a distance.

He didn’t say goodbye.

Anna did.

She hugged each of them.

Even Matteo, when he hesitated, took her hand and squeezed once.

Then they were gone.

⸻

The TARDIS lifted off, quiet as breath.

Inside, Anna sat down beside the Doctor.

“I’m not okay,” she said.

“Neither am I.”

“But we’re still here.”

“Yes.”

She reached over, took his hand.

He didn’t let go.

///

Chapter Nine: Something Beautiful Next

⸻

The TARDIS flew without destination.

No alarms. No urgent crises. No flickering warnings on the console.

Just stillness.

The kind that felt earned.

The kind that made even the stars seem quieter.

⸻

The Doctor sat alone in the arboretum.

It wasn’t a room he often visited — a greenhouse the size of a football pitch, half-lit by simulated morning, half by a memory of Gallifrey’s twin suns.

He stared at a tree that no longer existed anywhere else in the universe: the virellan bloom, translucent leaves pulsing with low harmonic warmth.

He said nothing.

Then Anna’s voice cut through the silence.

“You brought us to see something beautiful.”

He turned.

She walked through the ferns barefoot, Matteo just behind, mimicking her every step.

“I needed to remember,” the Doctor said, “that we can.”

⸻

Elsewhere, Ava found a room she hadn’t entered before.

The TARDIS gallery — walls filled with paintings not made by brush, but by memory itself.

She passed images of places they’d seen. Worlds saved. People forgotten by time.

One stopped her.

Florence.

But not the burning Florence they’d left.

This one showed a little girl and a boy sitting by the riverbank, eating figs, sketching circles in the dust.

She pressed her palm to it.

And for the first time since leaving, she cried.

⸻

Cal watched her from the doorway.

He didn’t interrupt.

When she turned, he held out a book — an old one, leather-bound, blank pages.

“I thought you might want to write it down,” he said. “The real version. Not the history books.”

She took it.

Flipped to the first page.

Wrote:

Of Time and Tragedy — by Ava Gedeon.

And beneath that:

And the people we couldn’t save.

⸻

Anna wandered into the console room later that day.

The Doctor was at the helm, but not flying.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He smiled without turning.

“Where do you want to go?”

She considered.

“Somewhere where nobody’s dying.”

The Doctor nodded.

“I think the TARDIS knows just the place.”

⸻

That evening, Ava, Cal, and Anna stood on the balcony as the Doctor opened the doors.

Outside: a beach made of violet sand. A sea that whispered lullabies. Two moons rising over a sky of fire-orange and rose.

Ava smiled. Cal took her hand. Anna took both of theirs.

And behind them, the Doctor watched quietly.

⸻

They stayed there for a while.

Days. Maybe weeks.

Time became a suggestion, not a structure.

They told stories around simulated bonfires.

They shared silences without pain.

They rested.

⸻

One night, Ava sat beside the Doctor under the stars.

“I think we’re ready,” she said.

“To leave?” he asked.

“No. To stay long enough to know when.”

He nodded.

“I’ll take you to the next place,” he said. “Then… you’ll know.”

⸻

Anna listened from the doorway.

She didn’t cry.

Not yet.

But she understood.

⸻

The beach stayed behind.

The sand held their footprints.

The sea kept their stories.

And the TARDIS carried them forward again.

Toward something real.

Toward something next.

///

Chapter Ten: The Time That Remains

⸻

The TARDIS doors opened to golden mist and the scent of thunder.

They had landed on a ridge above an ocean of cloud, where vast towers of crystalline vines rose like frozen lightning into the sky. The sun was fractured — not broken, but multiplied, reflected a thousand ways off silver leaves.

Cal stepped forward slowly, one hand resting near his belt as if expecting danger.

Ava touched his shoulder.

“Not everything that glows is a threat.”

He smiled, faint. “Old habits.”

The Doctor stepped past them.

“No life forms. No known species. Just a pocket world that echoes the frequency of pause.”

⸻

They walked for hours without meeting anything alive, yet everything felt watched — not in menace, but in gentle curiosity. Like the land itself was listening.

Anna traced her hand along a ridge of vine-crystal. It resonated, and a ripple of blue light followed her fingers.

Matteo imitated her.

The Doctor said nothing.

But he noted it.

⸻

Later, as they picnicked under a flowering arc of reflective ivy, Ava passed a flask to Cal.

“Do you ever think,” she said, “about what this all looks like from the outside?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Which part?”

“All of it. Us. Him.” She nodded toward the Doctor.

“I used to think we were passengers,” Cal said. “Now I think we’re ballast.”

“That’s romantic,” she smirked.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t useful.”

She leaned into him. “I think I’m in love with you.”

He paused. “Since Florence?”

“Since that convent stairwell.”

He kissed her.

There were no fireworks.

Just the sound of two people finally becoming something they’d already been.

⸻

The Doctor sat on a ledge overlooking the cloud valley.

Anna joined him.

“He’s going to ask us soon,” she said.

“Yes.”

“To choose.”

“Yes.”

She looked down. “You’ll let us go?”

“I’ll never stop you.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Yes,” he said.

She nodded.

“Okay.”

⸻

That night, in the TARDIS, the lights dimmed early.

Cal and Ava curled up on the reading room floor, a dozen half-read books scattered around them.

Anna fell asleep at the console, drawing spirals again — not of time, but of memory. Of home.

The Doctor stood in the doorway and watched them all.

He didn’t smile.

But neither did he frown.

He simply remembered.

⸻

When morning came, Ava stepped into the console room fully dressed.

Cal behind her.

Anna last.

They didn’t speak.

They just looked at the Doctor.

And waited.

He adjusted one lever. A dial.

“Earth,” he said softly. “Year 2043.”

“A good year?” Cal asked.

“No,” the Doctor said. “But the right one.”

⸻

Anna nodded once.

“Let’s go.”

⸻

The TARDIS dematerialized into the mists.

The vines folded quietly in its wake.

And the pocket world, now empty again, began to hum the song it had learned from its brief passengers.

///

Chapter Eleven: The Forgotten Year

⸻

The TARDIS landed in a thunderstorm.

Not the dramatic kind with lightning and orchestral build-up — but the quiet, saturated kind where the clouds felt too heavy to speak and the air tasted like dust and nostalgia.

Earth.
2043.
A year the Doctor had rarely visited.

The systems called it a “low-note year.”
Quiet collapses. Bureaucratic tragedies. People slipping through cracks so wide they became graves.

The kind of year that forgot itself.

⸻

Ava stood at the console, arms folded.

“So why here?”

The Doctor checked the readouts.

“Global networks are fractured. Climate refugees number in the millions. Several governments have vanished by technicality.”

“Sounds ideal,” Cal muttered.

The Doctor didn’t respond.

He looked at Anna.

“You should see this.”

⸻

They stepped out into a suburban cul-de-sac that had once been bright with children’s bicycles and chalk games. Now it was overgrown, flooded in patches, and silent.

No music.

No birds.

Just the slow drip of a leaking sky.

Anna knelt near a wall covered in children’s drawings.

Faded rainbows.

Handprints.

Dates.

Most ended in 2041.

The Doctor knelt beside her.

“They stopped drawing,” she whispered.

“They stopped being seen,” he replied.

⸻

They found the first missing child’s signal in a collapsed school ten kilometers south.

Not a body.
Not even a name.

Just a presence.

A fingerprint pressed too lightly against time.

The Doctor scanned the air.

“They’re not dead,” he said. “Just… absent.”

“Where are they?” Ava asked.

He turned slowly.

“That’s what we’re going to find out.”

⸻

Back in the TARDIS, Anna paced while Matteo stared at the blank wall that sometimes became a window.

“He feels something,” she said. “I don’t know what.”

The Doctor ran diagnostics.

“There’s residual memory tethering. That shouldn’t be possible.”

“What does it mean?”

He turned to her.

“It means he might be the first to hear them.”

⸻

Cal returned from the perimeter with three empty jackets and a face full of doubt.

“They just vanish,” he said. “No witnesses. No trace. Like Florence all over again.”

“No,” the Doctor said. “This is different.”

“How?”

“In Florence, people died because time demanded it. Here? They vanish because no one remembers to care.”

⸻

They established base in an abandoned rec center.

The walls still bore motivational posters and fading slogans:

“Be Seen. Be Strong.”
“Your Voice Matters.”
“Together We Thrive.”

Anna added one of her own, scribbled in chalk.

“Missing is not the same as gone.”

⸻

That night, Ava sat beside Cal beneath the shuddering skylights.

She reached for his hand.

“Do you think this will be the one?”

He turned to her. “The one we leave after?”

She nodded.

He kissed her knuckles.

“If it is — we’ll leave together.”

She smiled, tired.

“I wasn’t asking permission.”

“You never do.”

⸻

In the console room, the Doctor watched the storm.

Not just the weather.

The world.

A society unraveling not in fire, but in forgetting.

“Something’s feeding again,” he whispered. “Not on memory. On abandonment.”

Anna stood behind him.

“We stopped it before.”

He nodded.

“But this time,” he said, “the silence is louder.”

⸻

Outside, the wind carried voices.

Whispers of names never spoken.

Children not mourned.

Years never archived.

And somewhere just beyond perception — something listened.

And smiled.

///

Chapter Twelve: Names That Fade

⸻

The child’s shoe was still damp when Anna picked it up.

Not old. Not decayed.
Fresh.

She turned it in her hands beneath the grey sky, wiping away flecks of mud to reveal a name in faded marker ink on the insole:

Amari.

Ava crouched beside her. “Do you think it’s—”

“She was here, Ava,” Anna said. “A few hours ago at most.”

Cal scouted the alley’s exit with quiet steps. No tracks. No camera feeds. Not even cellular echoes.

The Doctor arrived last.

And said the thing they’d all hoped wouldn’t be true.

“We’re dealing with another forgetter.”

⸻

But it wasn’t the same as Florence.

This one didn’t feed on trauma.

It fed on neglect.

Entire blocks of housing had simply been reclassified, their residents’ digital records erased in cost-saving sweeps. Children lost in bureaucratic twilight.

And now — something had come to feast on the forgotten.

⸻

The Doctor returned to the TARDIS and hooked Matteo up to a low-range resonance map.

Anna sat beside him, holding his hand.

The screen flashed.

Dozens of names.

Spoken from no source.

Children’s names.

Keisha. Dev. Arun. Lani. Cassia. Juno. Amari.

Anna blinked. “They’re calling out.”

The Doctor confirmed: each vocal imprint was identical — not recorded or played back, but actively manifesting in real time.

“Residual consciousness signatures,” he said. “They don’t know where they are — but they know they’ve been lost.”

⸻

That night, Ava worked alone in the rec center.

She wrote names in chalk. Every name that came through the Doctor’s map. She covered the walls. The windows. The floor.

When she ran out of space, she wrote on her hands.

Cal found her hours later.

“You can’t carry them all.”

“I have to,” she said.

“No, Ava. We have to.”

She looked up, tears streaking her face.

“Then help me remember.”

⸻

The next morning, the names had vanished from the wall.

Not washed away.

Not erased.

Gone.

Even the dust was undisturbed.

Anna’s voice cracked.

“They’re being taken the second we acknowledge them.”

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed.

“Then we write louder.”

⸻

He rerouted the TARDIS memory core into a temporary consciousness amplifier — creating a psychic broadcast field from Anna’s drawings, Ava’s names, Matteo’s fragmented voice.

“Instead of fighting it,” he said, “we’ll force it to digest what it doesn’t want: attention.”

⸻

The field pulsed at dawn.

A shockwave of memory exploded from the TARDIS like a tidal wave of thought.

And in the city, doors began to open.

Shut-off buildings lit up.

Empty houses had toys by the windows again.

Voices echoed in playgrounds long thought deserted.

The forgetter — bloated, spectral, unseen — writhed against it.

Anna stood in the epicenter, shouting names into the wind.

“AMARI! LANI! DEV!”

Each one like a strike of lightning.

Each one drawing the creature closer.

⸻

And then it arrived.

Not a shape.

A hole in shape.

A piece of existence where remembering failed.

The Doctor stood before it.

“You can’t have them,” he said.

“I will not forget.”

⸻

The forgetter surged.

The Doctor fell.

But behind him, Matteo screamed.

A real, full scream.

The first word he’d spoken since Florence.

“ANNA!”

The word rang like a chime struck against the bones of the universe.

It was small. Fragile.

But it cut through the forgetter like fire through shadow.

Anna turned, eyes wide.

Matteo stood at the edge of the memory field, hands clenched, voice breaking.
“Anna! I remember your name!”

The forgetter recoiled.

Because in that moment, someone chose presence.

Chose attachment.

Chose remembrance.

⸻

The Doctor struggled to his feet.

“Keep going!” he shouted. “Every name, every memory — feed it certainty!”

Ava stepped forward, yelling names into the wind.

Cal threw a piece of broken fencing like a spear at the howling hole of absence — it didn’t hit, but the action mattered. It declared: We see you.

And Anna, steady as a lighthouse in a tidal dark, stepped forward.

She reached into her sketchbook.

And pulled out her oldest drawing — Matteo, drawn the day they met.

She held it high.

“This is who he is,” she said.

“And I remember all of him.”

⸻

The forgetter screamed.

It didn’t speak. It couldn’t.
Because names gave it shape, and shape gave it limits.

And now it had one.

⸻

The Doctor raised the last amplifier node. It shimmered with words from a hundred whispered voices.

“I name you finished,” he said.

“I name you known.”

“I name you done.”

And with that, the forgetter collapsed.

Not exploded.
Not destroyed.

Just… undone.

As if it had never mattered in the first place.

But they remembered.

And so it couldn’t come back.

⸻

The air cleared.

Sunlight returned.

Somewhere nearby, a child’s laughter echoed.

⸻

They walked home slowly.

The TARDIS doors waited open.

Cal and Ava held hands — tightly now, no longer in silence, but with a rhythm of shared breath.

Anna walked ahead, Matteo beside her. He didn’t speak again. But he smiled.

That was enough.

⸻

The Doctor paused in the threshold and looked back.

He didn’t expect to see a monument.

But he did.

A wall of names — chalk-written, weatherproof, real.

And the words beneath them:

“We Were Never Lost.”
— Remembered by the Ones Who Stayed

///

Chapter Thirteen: Tethers

⸻

The TARDIS hovered above Earth for longer than usual.

Not because it was unsafe to land again—
but because no one spoke the command to move.

Inside, the console room hummed with the steady rhythm of exhaustion.

Not physical.
Emotional.

The kind that comes after holding back the dark and winning — but only just.

⸻

Anna sat with Matteo in the observation bay, watching the curvature of the Earth below. He’d taken to sketching now too, mimicking her motions in clumsy pencil strokes that said far more than any words could.

“He remembers my name,” she said.

The Doctor smiled gently. “And you remember his.”

“That makes it real?”

“More than anything else ever could.”

⸻

Elsewhere, Ava rested her head on Cal’s chest in the reading room. He was tracing the shape of a spiral on her back without realizing it.

“Florence feels further away,” she said.

“It’s not,” he answered. “It’s under our skin now.”

She turned, looked up at him.

“I think we’re almost done.”

He nodded.

They didn’t say what “done” meant.

They didn’t have to.

⸻

In the console room, the Doctor reviewed the timeline readouts.

Florence — stabilized.
2043 — corrected.
The memory leeches — silenced.

But he looked tired.

More than tired.

He looked aware. Of the ones who wouldn’t be with him much longer.

Anna joined him at the console. She held out her hand.

“I drew this for you.”

A folded sheet. Inside — not a spiral, not a shadow.

But a portrait. Of him. Not heroic. Not godlike. Just… present. Watching stars from the console.

“You always see more than I want you to,” he said.

“I always will,” she said.

⸻

Later that night, they gathered for dinner in the arboretum.

Ava brought a bottle of wine she’d saved since Carnival of Glass.

Cal cooked something with spice and too much garlic.

Anna made a cake that defied physics.

Matteo laughed. Out loud. Once.

It was enough.

⸻

The Doctor raised a toast.

“To tethers,” he said. “The things that keep us from drifting too far.”

“To Florence,” Ava said.

“To Lucia,” Anna added.

“To staying,” Cal said.

They touched their glasses together.

The sound was soft.

But final.

⸻

That evening, Ava walked the upper decks alone.

The Doctor found her at the threshold of the TARDIS balcony, overlooking the stars.

She didn’t turn.

“You know where we’re going next, don’t you?” she asked.

“I do.”

“And after that…”

“I know.”

She turned to him now.

“It’s not goodbye yet.”

“No,” he said. “But it’s coming.”

She smiled. “I won’t let you sulk when we go.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

⸻

Anna stood beside Cal in the library as they packed notebooks.

“We’re not done traveling,” she said.

“No,” he agreed. “We’re just… doing it slower.”

“With one of us in the middle seat?”

He smiled.

⸻

Back at the console, the Doctor set a new course.

One final journey for the four of them.

One more place where time was broken.

One more story to close before letting go.

///

Chapter Fourteen: The Final Thread

⸻

The TARDIS landed in silence.

No flash.

No hum.

Just a soft click — like the closing of a storybook you didn’t know you’d reached the end of.

They were in a glade. Grasses up to the knees. A sky like melted gold. The air carried no scent, but the feeling of spring lived in every breath.

The Doctor stood at the door, one hand on the frame.

“This isn’t on any map,” he said.

“It doesn’t need to be,” Ava replied behind him. “It’s ours.”

⸻

Anna ran ahead, laughing — really laughing for the first time since Florence. Matteo chased behind, his steps uneven but joyous.

Cal stood still, soaking in the calm.

“I didn’t know I needed this,” he muttered.

“You did,” Ava said, slipping her hand into his.

⸻

They stayed in that moment for a long time.

Hours. Maybe days.

The Doctor allowed it.

Because he knew.

⸻

At night, they built a fire.

Not from necessity, but tradition.

The four of them — no, five — sat in a circle, the flames painting flickering stories across their faces.

Ava passed around a bottle. Anna roasted something vaguely sweet. Matteo fell asleep with his head in the Doctor’s lap.

Cal spoke first.

“We’re ready.”

No ceremony.

Just truth.

⸻

The Doctor nodded.

“I know.”

Ava leaned forward. “Not tonight.”

“No.”

Anna looked up. “Tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

⸻

They slept beneath the stars.

⸻

In the morning, the Doctor prepared a departure kit — modest, timeless, full of what mattered: a temporal compass, a communicator, a book half-written and waiting for their ending.

Ava held it. Cal slung the satchel.

Anna stood beside the Doctor, holding Matteo’s hand.

“We’ll build something,” she said.

“I know you will.”

⸻

He hugged Cal — a firm, unspoken thanks.

He kissed Ava’s forehead — a silent apology for everything he couldn’t fix.

He knelt to Matteo and pressed a finger to his heart.

“Remember who you are.”

Finally, he faced Anna.

Neither spoke.

She threw her arms around him.

And whispered:

“You gave me time.”

He whispered back:

“You gave me memory.”

⸻

The TARDIS doors closed.

He didn’t watch them go.

He just stood there, hands in his pockets.

And breathed.

⸻

Inside, the TARDIS shifted.

Not grieving.

But settling.

A new equilibrium.

A new beginning.

The Doctor turned to the console, alone again.

And smiled.

///

Chapter Fifteen: The Leaving

⸻

The TARDIS materialized in a field of broken satellites.

Orbital debris littered the horizon like forgotten thoughts, and pale light filtered down from an artificial moon whose purpose had long been lost.

But inside the TARDIS — peace.

Not silence.
Not grief.

Just peace.

⸻

The Doctor sat at the console with a mug of tea. Steam curled around his fingers as he looked over the railings of the central chamber.

The space was still.

But not empty.

On the railing hung a scarf.

Matteo’s. Anna must have left it there. Folded once. Placed with intention.

On the wall, a chalk line remained. A spiral that had never fully faded.

On the bench: Ava’s book. Untitled.

Waiting.

⸻

He walked the halls, now echoing with the ghosts of laughter and argument and compassion.

In the arboretum, a drawing fluttered: Cal, swordless, lying on the grass. Ava’s handwriting below it.

“Still here.”

In the kitchen, three mugs remained washed and waiting.

One small, chipped. One angular. One matte black — Cal’s.

⸻

In the memory core, the Doctor placed a single page from Anna’s sketchbook.
It showed all four of them, standing outside the TARDIS beneath stars that didn’t belong to any system.

He slid the page into a vault.

Locked it.

Spoke aloud:

“These are my children.
Let time remember them.”

⸻

Later, he found a new room the TARDIS had built.

It wasn’t extravagant.
Just a study.

One desk. One chair. A window that showed nothing but the Vortex turning in quiet spirals.

On the desk sat a single post-it.

“You’re allowed to rest too.”
— Ava

He didn’t cry.

He just sat.

And stayed.

⸻

When the TARDIS next moved, it did so gently.

As if it missed them too.

The Doctor placed his hand on the console.

“Take me somewhere kind.”

The engines purred.

And the light above the rotor turned warm.

⸻

Back on Earth, in the year 2043, a small community was forming in the ruins of a city that had almost forgotten itself.

A greenhouse was being built.

Children were learning to say their names with pride.

Anna taught them to draw spirals in the dirt — not for art, but for memory.

Matteo laughed often now.

Ava and Cal walked hand in hand down long roads and built houses with their names etched in the frame.

They never forgot the man who brought them through fire.

But they never called him back.

Because they knew he wouldn’t want them to.

⸻

In the farthest corner of the universe, the Doctor stood on a cliff made of starlight.

The wind pulled at his coat.

He placed a stone on the ground.

Just one.

And whispered:

“For the time we had.”

⸻

And with that…

He turned.

And walked back into the blue box.

The door closed.

A sound like a heartbeat, like memory, like breath…

And the TARDIS vanished.