Chapter one – Tying up Loose Ends

The day they formally wed it dawned cold and clear. A crisp wind coming down from the North fluttered the scarlet and orange silk of her dress and billowed the red velvet of his robe. Her grandfather performed the Binding, holding the golden ribbon in his hands, while her parents stood to one side, ready to give consent.

Wilf and Donna were sitting, baffled, but happy, on the bride's side of the aisle, and the rest of the attendees were a mixture of Time Lords and humans, Torchwood, UNIT officers and soldiers, and the Tylers, who had pointedly sat on Koschei's side of the aisle, when they saw how only Darginian, of all the Time Lords, was sitting on his side.

"I consent and give," her mother asserted and no one watching would have guessed how much coaxing, shouting, and outright blackmail had been used to get her to say those words.

I consent and give," her father agreed and Susan could hear the sourness underneath, but Grandfather's stern eye was on him, so he dared say nothing more. Not that she cared. Nothing could ruin this day for her.

"Two hundred years and well worth it," Koschei whispered and then kissed her and she returned the kiss and the sentiment both.

When they broke apart, the room cheered and they both grinned at each other, feeling like children at a Winter Tide Festival.

He extended his arm and she took it, leaning against him, eyes half closed in pure happiness.

"Finally," she murmured and he grinned down at her.

"Come on, the smell of all that food is killing me," he teased and she nudged him with her elbow.

"Glutton," she laughed.

"Harridan," he murmured and the word had never sounded so seductive.

"Later," she promised and he laughed aloud.

The Doctor was sitting out the dancing tonight. Rose's pregnant belly was too large for them to dance together without comedy ensuing, so they sat instead, arms around each other, watching Susan and Koschei swaying together, seemingly oblivious to the existence of anyone else in all the world.

"Well, that was long overdue," Darginian commented, as he dropped into a chair beside them.

"Oh yes," the Doctor agreed with a sigh.

"But they'll be okay, now?" Rose asked, her brow furrowed in concern.

"Well, as long as Koschei over there doesn't do anything too stupid, should be fine," the Doctor assured them. Darginian looked at Rose and she stared back at him, both looking very nervous.

"Right, you keep on him, Dar, and I'll take her," Rose informed him and he nodded.

"Why do you have to watch Susan? She's the clever one," the Doctor protested.

"Rose's job will be to keep Susan from stabbing my friend over there, before I can hit him over the head and make him see sense," Darginian explained and the Doctor nodded.

"Well, yeah, good thinking, that!" he praised them and they grinned at each other.

Wife. Koschei rolled the word around in his mind and tried not to think of Lucy. He was so happy just then, more than he'd been in many long centuries and he wanted to enjoy it. It helped that the ceremony was very much traditional Gallifreyan, with no Earth touches to it. They were both Time Lords, which made it much easier.

The reception was something that Donna Noble and Jackie Tyler had arranged between them. He glanced over towards where the two most powerful women in the universe were conversing together, no doubt planning ways to conquer the rest of the galaxy. Donna had been hired as Jackie's personal secretary, which was a polite fiction that served to keep anyone from noticing that they were now an unstoppable force, and the combination of those two personalities was likely to prove overwhelming.

He certainly couldn't have stopped them from throwing this party, so he hadn't tried. But, it still was far too close to what Lady Cole had arranged for his wedding to Lucy and it hurt.

"I had a wedding before too, you know," Susan murmured to him and he looked into her eyes and saw the wistful melancholy that underlay her joy as well and he leaned down to capture her lips again.

"You may feel free to call me 'thick' now," he joked and she shook her head.

"It's perfectly normal to feel this way," she assured him. "After everything we've gone through, of course it doesn't feel real to us yet."

"I love you," he whispered and she melted into his arms, her hearts opening to him like flowers to the sun. This was real, this was all that mattered.

"Love you too," she whispered back and he fell apart at the fervent truth of her. Holding her against him, he moved softly to a song that he barely heard, his mind tuned to far greater music, the harmony that flowed between them.

This was good. He liked this. This could stay this way.

"Koschei!" the Doctor was yelling. "Pass me those cables!" Alarms were blaring, people were shouting and running and he was working as fast as he could, sweat pouring down his face.

"They're a bit tangled!" he shouted back and kept working feverishly.

"We've only got ten minutes before the reactor goes critical!" the Doctor retorted.

"I'm well aware of that! The bloody computer keeps counting it down!"

"Nine minutes until Main Reactor reaches Critical condition, please evacuate the area," the Computer announced, sounding far too calm and reasonable for Koschei's peace of mind.

"Nine minutes now!" the Doctor hollered and Koschei seriously considered chucking him into the reactor and just running.

"Not helping!" he shot back.

Susan stepped aside as Tony raced by her, laughing and chasing a shobogan. A small grey one with blue eyes was clinging to his shoulder, chattering in excitement, apparently urging him on to mayhem, and the five-year-old's legs were pumping madly, as he tried to catch a silvery white one with green eyes.

"No running inside, Tony!" she called after him, but her eyes were merry and her voice mild, so he just grinned, slowed down to a jog for a few steps, before speeding up again and darting off after the little cat-lemur.

She laughed and stepped into her lab with a light heart. It was a large space, airy and with huge curving windows that let in sunlight. She polarized the windows with a touch, dimming the lights, and went to the bank of artificial wombs that lined all of one wall.

Dr. Arthur Davis, who had night duty, glanced up at her and waved and she smiled back at the wiry, wizened old man with his basset hound face and warm brown eyes.

"It was a quiet night," he informed her with a yawn and a stretch. "I played a little Chopin for them at around two AM and got some wiggling from Eddy," he chuckled. "I think that one is going to be a real music lover."

"I hope so, he's cloned from one of our greatest musical geniuses, but even so, genetics is not an exact science." She shrugged. "You can never be one hundred percent sure what you'll get. Whatever he becomes though, he's going to get a lot of love," she sighed happily. Parents had been chosen for each of the kids and they had given them names, came to visit every day, and were busy bonding with their infants. Eddy's parents had been particularly diligent and affectionate. They'd lost their only son in the Cyber invasion and had been the first volunteers for the fostering program.

She moved over to the wall of artificial wombs and smiled. The Gallifreyans had called them 'buckets', but her human lab assistants had nicknamed them 'fishbowls' and she had to agree that their moniker was probably more apt. The babies were nearly eight months along in their development and she was very pleased with their progress.

She stopped and checked each womb, reading temperature, nutrient balance, waste disposal, making sure the sound generators, which replicated the noises they would have heard in a real womb, were functioning properly. She adjusted chemicals, added a touch of serotonin to one, a dash of testosterone to another, and a bit more estrogen to a third. Once she was satisfied that everything was at it should be, she flipped the switch that made the fish bowls transparent, so she could visually check them.

The dim light revealed twelve infants, still too small and underdeveloped to survive outside the womb, but growing perfectly. She smiled at tiny toes and fingers, murmured softly to them, and then made the wombs partially opaque again, before letting the sunlight pour back into the room.

The babies could hear them all as they puttered around the lab and she liked to think they found it soothing. It was hard to tell yet, as the babies' telepathic abilities were still quite rudimentary.

"Looks good, Dr. Davis, you're a blessing, I must say," she told him and he shook his head in amusement.

"Come on, Torchwood shows up and asks me if I want to learn advanced alien medical techniques and the only caveat is that I live on an alien world for a year? This is the blessing! With what I've learned from you in the last eight months alone, I could start synthesizing retroviruses that could cure a whole host of genetic disorders and could revolutionize gene therapy!" he chortled and she grinned at him.

"I know you'll do amazing work, Arthur. I can't wait to see how you apply the technology!" she told him, feeling his excitement herself. She had long wanted to do more than give a few drugs to a few humans, or nudge just a tiny bit, there were so many sick and dying people who could really benefit from her people's knowledge.

"Well, I'm going to have to be careful, you know, Susan, some of this stuff could be used by unscrupulous folks to do some real damage," he warned her and she nodded. Even her people, who were a million years more advanced than his, had misused some of that knowledge and the consequences had been terrible.

"I know. Look the protests over the modified drought resistant crops that we developed were a lesson to me too," she conceded. Even though her people's technology was far more advanced, the mistakes the humans had made in their own modifications had left a lot of humans deeply suspicious of anything that smacked of 'tampering with nature'. She could understand their fears, even if she was frustrated by her inability to move quickly to alleviate suffering and starvation.

"It may take a long time, Susan, but in time, the things that we develop here together will change the world, both worlds," he assured her and she nodded. She had learned patience over the centuries, but that didn't mean she liked it much.

Rose put her feet up and cursed Time Lord biology again. Eleven months! God, but this baby thing was hard on a woman's back! She looked out the window at the mountain that fell away from their home and the huge orange sky that arched above them and sighed. The Doctor was rebuilding the family home on the side of the mountain and, while it was an utterly beautiful view, the Trans Mat trip back and forth to the Capital was no fun when she was already nauseated and felt like a slow moving blimp.

Then, of course, there was the fact that half the house wasn't even built yet. The nano-assemblers were working overtime, but she still kept trying to open doors that didn't go anywhere yet. It was bloody annoying.

"How you doing?" Donna asked solicitously and set a mug of hot tea by her elbow. Rose smiled up at her gratefully and cuddled the cup against her.

"Blimey, I do really wish babies didn't take it out of you like this!" she grumbled. "I'm big as a whale, my back hurts, and if I were still human, I'd already be done with this! But, I've still got another two months of this!"

"You could have put her in a fish bowl," Donna reminded her with a saucy grin.

"Naw, I want a baby, not a science experiment," she retorted with a sigh. "She'll be worth it in the end, I know that, it's just so ruddy uncomfortable."

"Where's the Doctor?"

"Oh, Torchwood was having a problem at some nuclear reactor, something about alien parasites in the wiring or some such," she told her with a shrug.

"That sounds dangerous!" Donna exclaimed.

"Naw, knowing him, he's having loads of fun without me," she complained, arms crossed atop her belly and eyebrows drawn down in a frown.

"Aren't you worried though?" she asked with a puzzled expression.

"He took Koschei with him and a full Torchwood response team, what could possibly go wrong."

"Eight minutes until Main Reactor reaches Critical condition, please evacuate the area," the computer informed them in that same cheerful voice.

"Shay! We're running out of time!" the Doctor hollered, his voice rising on the last word.

"Why don't you try wrestling this pile of snakes over here, then!" he shouted back and then, with a sudden jerk that sent him sprawling, he was finally able to pull the cable free. He dragged it over to the Doctor, who was rewiring the main circuit board, and handed it to him.

"Seven minutes until Main Reactor reaches Critical condition, please evacuate the area," the computer cooed at them and Koschei was learning to hate the sound of that voice.

Together they wrestled the cable into place and began working at restoring the coolant levels in the reactor core. Frantically running back and forth, flipping levers and stabilizing the shutdown took another nerve wracking minute and half.

"Main reactor is now stable, all systems normal, have a nice day," the computer announced and Koschei stared at it with a foul temper and a laser screwdriver.

"You, my friend, need a little re-programming," he growled.