a/n-my sister RedAsARose is amazing because she helped me think of the title for this story. Enjoy!!!

Running

The only plan in life she'd ever had was to do an awful lot of running. And when one ran so much, one was bound to end up in many different places, constantly searching everywhere she went. But even with all of time and space at his disposal, she was lucky enough to eventually find the one man in the universe she'd ever put aside her own running for. Unfortunately for her, he hadn't exactly met her yet, and she'd run into him at a very inopportune time for both of them.

He had recognized her right away for what she was as she had walked through the crowded market place, and once they'd made their introductions, she recognized him as well. He was her father. And he had no earthly idea who she was, other than a fellow Gallifreyen.

She had tried to explain to him; tried to tell him that he would one day have a daughter named Jenny, a daughter he would leave behind for dead. She never got that far, however, because he'd interrupted her to say he'd rather not run the risk of destroying her future by purposefully avoiding being around for her creation. Then he'd cheerfully invited her for a cup of tea in his ship, which he called a Tardis.

She had accepted immediately and without hesitation. It was almost hard for her to believe that he was really the same man that would become her father; a man who would take so long to even grudgingly admit that she was a real person. This man before her now was so much more trusting and willing to take her word for the fact that she was his daughter, no matter how that particular fact came to be. And perhaps he was just a bit more carefree as well.

It was almost immediately after the pair had stepped into the blue box he called a Tardis that the inopportunity of the moment showed itself to them. No sooner had the door closed behind Jenny, blocking out the noise of the hustle and bustle of the busy market place, than it was replaced by the loud clanging of a bell that resonated from deep inside of his ship.

The ringing of the bell produced a sudden change in her father. A worried expression immediately creased his features, allowing her to finally catch a slight glimpse of the man he would one day become. It was only a mere glimpse, however, because no sooner had she seen the look upon his face, then his back was towards her, his form bent over the console of his ship.

A message from an old friend, he'd called it, after reading the words on the screen before him. An urgent message that should be answered with no delay, and in person. There was to be a war, and he was being summoned home to fight in it. The universe was at stake.

That was when she realized the greater transformation that was to take place. Her father was to become a soldier—the thing he so detested in the future; what he so detested her for being—and it was going to happen before her very eyes. But even as she realized this, she came to an even greater realization: she had been born a soldier. A soldier with the DNA of a Time Lord. The knowledge of how to fight was embedded directly within her genetic makeup. Running was no longer important; to stay and fight in this war with her father was what she had been born for.

Too determined was she to stay by her father's side, now that she'd found him again, that it slipped her mind what little she knew about her father and the history she had inherited from him. There had been a great war raging through time and space that their people had fought in. Her father had led the Time Lords of Gallifrey into battle and he had been the only one to escape it with his life.

So she accompanied him on his mission to 'save the universe from a genetic experiment gone horribly wrong,' as he put it.

What she hadn't counted on was what she would find when they got there, and what would happen as a result. She hadn't counted on the chance that, in the midst of a raging war, she might find the love of someone else. And that that love might result in a baby. A baby whom she quickly came to realize should not become a victim of this war whose end might never come in sight.

It had been a simple matter of resetting the coordinates that had been automatically inputted into the console of the Tardis she had been assigned. There was only one place she knew of where her daughter would most definitely be spared the grief of this terrible war; a place she would be loved as only a family can love someone.

The Gallifrey she landed on was so very different from what she had only ever known as a war-ravaged home planet. It was a much more peaceful place, still absolute in it's isolationism from the rest of the universe; a planet sworn not to interfere. It was a planet that had yet to know how very fast her father could run.

It was not hard to find the place where he lived. And it was not hard to convince him to do as she asked.

"You are the Doctor?" She asked of the dark-haired man whose hair was beginning to show more white than brown. In this quiet, in-between time, in which she was able to escape the war for only a short while, she took a brief moment to think it strange how much older her father looked when he was so many hundreds of years younger than when she had first met him.

Youth was a good thing for her father to have, for the task she so desperately required of him. Without the innocence it brought, she sincerely doubted she would have been able to so easily convince him of her identity and that of the baby girl in her arms.

"Her name is Susan, please take care of her." She said, letting go of her daughter for the last time and placing her in the loving embrace of her grandfather.

He nodded, smiling down at the little girl that he knew deep in his hearts was his family, before looking back up at her mother with a troubled expression.

"Will I ever see you again?" He wanted to know. "Will you come back?"

"You'll see me again." She replied. "The time I was born in was very different from the one we're in now."

He smiled again, this time at his daughter and looking so much sadder. She had not said why she was giving him her daughter to raise, only that it was safer this way. Indeed, she had said only enough to prove their relation to each other. But as sure as he knew that she was telling the truth that she was really his daughter, he also knew that the next time, and quite possibly the last time, he would see his daughter would be when she was born. And, as she had implied, that time was quite a long way off from now.

She left almost immediately afterwards. There was no point in her staying there any longer, and after all, the war wasn't going to wait for her so that it could continue.

And so he raised his granddaughter as best he could, showing her as much love and affection as possible, while not answering any questions she might have about her parents. Eventually, Susan merely accepted that they weren't around and her grandfather was the best family she had, and so resolved to stay with him forever.

This was how Susan ended up following him to many distant planets in a stolen Tardis, when her grandfather finally reached his breaking point with how isolated their people were from the rest of the universe and ran away from it all, to give the two of them a more interesting life. And doing this allowed for the creation of a legacy of running that her grandfather would one day pass along to her mother.