"Do I need to do anything else?" Cat asked, holding down the button that he'd directed her to, as she watched him do his usual manic flitting about as he prepared the TARDIS for takeoff.

"Just hold that down," He directed, distracted by the various hundred other things he had to get in precisely the right position, such as jiggling a knob with great concentration, as though it single-handedly would determine whether or not they made it to their destination safely (which, in all reality, it did).

"Where are we off to?" She gave him a face, as he'd neglected to inform her ahead of time, again.

"Well," He started, not quite looking at her as he spoke, "I was thinking you might like to go home now."

"What?" She started; eyes wide as though she'd been slapped in the face. Was he done with her already? Was this only a short term sort of thing? It occurred to her, with such awful surprise, that he might not have meant for them to travel indefinitely. Suddenly feeling deeply silly for having thought that he might like her around for any length of time, she blinked very hard, swallowing. "Oh, I mean, if we're done, then I guess-"

He looked up at her, just as surprised to see the emotion on her face. "What?" He certainly hadn't thought that his offer of being able to see her family would cause such distress. Hadn't meant to do anything more than acknowledge that she had had a life before him, that there were those that she might miss, rocketing about the stars. "I just thought you might like to see them, but if you'd rather we didn't-"

She blinked again, realization slowly starting to dawn on her. "You meant, just for a visit? Like, we've visited everywhere else?"

He looked at her like she was an idiot. "What else would I have meant?"

Dropping down into a seat, she relaxed the muscles that had been so-suddenly tensed. "I thought you were done with me." She explained, though she felt so very silly now, for having jumped to that conclusion.

"Of course not," He protested, feeling suddenly really very awkward by the conversation. He wasn't a terribly emotionally expressive sort, not like that, particularly not when it came to companions, as they had such an awful habit of having to leave him too soon. "I mean, you're free to leave if you ever…" He let that trail off. "But I certainly would prefer- There are so many places I wanted to show you," was what he settled on, continuing to flip switches and set of the controls for lack of anything else productive to do with his hands.

"Good," was all she managed, more than a little uncomfortable with the sudden intimacy of the conversation. "A visit sounds good," She offered, then paused. "Though I have no idea how I'm going to explain you." Her twist of a smile was partly out of amusement at the situation, partly an expression of how awkward their conversation had gotten.

This ride was no less wild than any others; though she'd gotten sort of used to it, however much that it was possible to get used to being thrown about like an ant in a bottle. He didn't quite look at her as they picked themselves up and brushed themselves off, though she couldn't tell it if was from residual awkwardness from the mistaken conversation, or whether he was at all uncomfortable with the idea of meeting her parents. She wasn't sure if that was something that he usually did, if that was something that he was used to, or whether he usually just whisked them off (she knew she wasn't the first, had no illusions that she was something new, particularly not with the amount of female clothing in the wardrobe room) to the stars, never to return. That, of course, was the million-dollar question, wasn't it?

What happened to the other Companions? He'd not mentioned any of them, not by name, nothing other than a casual hint here or there that someone had been with him. She knew he was older by the order of centuries not decades, but she didn't know if he let his partners live out their years with him. Did he just plop them back down, and whoosh off on his merry way? Did he leave them in other places, other times? Or was it something that one chose to leave? That one day, rocketing aimlessly about the universe wasn't enough?

Was that what she wanted? Running about space and time in little circles, forever? But, after all this, could she go back? Could she just pop back to university when term opened back up, settle back down to books and exams, never to see the stars again? It was a sobering reality she didn't want to think about right now, especially not after her recent near escape – there had been quite a few of those, but that had been a little realer, somehow. That she might not actually come back. That he might have to explain to them why she wouldn't ever be back.

Mouth set in a pensive line, not quite her usual enthusiastic delight; she gathered up her coat, zipped up and poked her head out of the TARDIS, stepping out into the drizzle.

It was somehow worse, somehow weirder, to be standing there, walking along streets she knew like the back of her hand than it was to emerge on a planet she'd never heard of; this time, it was her that was out of place, her that didn't quite fit. Because that was the truth of it, really. It was so hard not to concentrate on the fact that she'd been places that she never should have been able to go, now that she was walking through her city, her London. She felt an awkwardness, like a slightly loose tooth she couldn't stop wiggling, standing there, looking at shops she'd spent days in and out of, the grocery where she'd worked a summer.

Not really wanting to hurry to her place, not really sure now, that she was here, that she wanted to go home, not really sure whether it would be suddenly overrun with that sense of the outside, she picked up a newspaper at the nearby stand. "Wonder what I've missed," She offered by way of explanation, ducking under an awning to read the headlines.

He didn't respond, letting her do it her way. It wasn't that he owed her for that scare, or that he wanted to reconnect her with her roots after having nearly killed her, or even that he wanted to meet her family. It was more trying to avoid what had happened last time, trying to make sure that there weren't any secrets, nothing that would fester in her absence. He could see her sudden unease, could sympathize, in a way, with how out of place she looked like she found herself, had seen it enough times to know to stay quiet, to let her sort it out. What he wasn't expecting, however, was her sudden shock, the way she gasped, and then made a face at him, shaking the newspaper. "What?"

"Did you see this?" She demanded, though it was rather impossible for him to read it the way she was tossing it about so. "September," She stressed, gesturing to the date at the top of the paper.

"Rubbish weather, but hardly something to get to terribly worked up about," He began, more than a little confused, when she cut him off.

"September of this year," She continued, hand on her hip. "Before I meet you. So I'm still here. In the city. Wandering around. So now I've got to avoid myself!" Because that would be too weird, seeing herself as she'd been before, however short a time ago, so very unaware of what was out there, still a part of this world she was suddenly so awkward with.

But the look on his face, that sudden seriousness in his eyes, told another story, of something far more grim that just a little awkwardness.

"What is it?" She tried to ask, not really sure that had caused that sudden shadow in his eyes, what had dropped the darkness down his face, as she hurried to keep up with him, in his sudden rush back to where they'd come from. "Is it a paradox sort of thing?" That would be bad, at least as far as the movies went.

"Not exactly," He began, not sure how much he wanted to explain, whether more information would only scare her and make the whole situation worse. "It's the fact that whenever you're dealing with events that happen in a person's immediate timeline, there's a chance that you'll change something significant enough, create enough dissonance, that you create a tear in time itself."

"I'm assuming that would be a problem."

"You have no idea." He stopped suddenly, deciding that there was no way he could justify lying to her, not after what they'd already been through. "You tear time deeply enough and it starts to rip itself apart."

"And?" She whispered, having a feeling that this was far, far worse than she'd thought when she'd heard the word paradox, had really only thought that she oughtn't to interact with herself because it would be so decidedly unsettling.

"And it devours everything. This world, its people, everything." There was something almost frightening in how dark his eyes were, in how obvious it was that he'd seen (or done, she couldn't discount done) things that he couldn't explain to her. It was moments like this that she remembered how very old he was, and how much about him she didn't know- how many places he'd been without her, how long he'd been doing what he did.

"Then what do we do?" She looked at him, unsure. They'd run into all sorts of various dangerous situations so far, but none on that scale. And none that would be their fault. But then, that didn't seem new to him, didn't seem unusual enough-it made her wonder a little, it did. Wonder what he'd done that seemed to haunt him; what only seemed to show up in his eyes at times like this.

"We just need to get back to the TARDIS without you running into yourself, or changing anything." He was walking, not running, not yet, but with purpose, a hand on her shoulder. He knew on one level that he was overreacting a tad, as she would have to do something fairly significant to change time enough to start ripping the universe apart, but then, he'd been there, trying to keep the universe together, and he had no desire to repeat the experience. "Do you remember where you were this weekend?" Knowing how to avoid her would certainly make things easier, as he knew that a pre-Companion Cat running into herself post-Companion would be exactly the sort of thing that might start knocking things off balance.

She shook her head, lengthening her stride to keep up. "No idea. It must have been just another weekend, or else I'm sure it would have stuck." They re-traced their steps in uncomfortable silence, doing their best not to interact with anyone passing them. "But we're not all that far off, are we? I mean, how hard can it really be?" She tried for a lightness that had been missing from their day thus far.

And instantly regretted it when the hysterical woman nearly knocked Cat over as she ran from the alleyway, shrieking incoherently about someone having gone missing.