Catastrophe VIII

America was a nice place, Amy Titus had decided. Well, it had its problems, principally in the form of dry counties, but for the most part it was everything a couple of errant Timelords could want.

They'd spent two weeks with Tony all up, before and after Demons Run. He hadn't wanted to leave. Humans were fascinating and Tony was the best uncle, but River had insisted that she didn't want to disrupt his life too much and at some point they'd have to face the temporal music. Manhattan was completely out of bounds for the TARDIS from 1948 through to 2010, they had to get somewhere that the Doctor could find them after he'd done Berlin.

So they were, as River put it, Thelma and Louise-ing it across middle America in a car with wheels, their stereo blaring with an 8-track tape of the Bee Gees. It was so delightfully low tech that he wanted to do a full renovation of the entire car, make something retro chic out of it, but there was no workshop on the planet stocked with what he'd need. Not in civilian hands, anyway.

They had no destination in mind, just knowing the Doctor would find them when he was ready and hopefully not before Berlin. They stopped for fuel and coffee in Kearney, Nebraska, one of a long string of little cities they'd passed through on their road trip.

Americans were so nice. Especially when they thought he and River were British. She'd explained to him that their accent denoted origins on a certain part of Earth in this time period, and the locals always wanted them to see the country at its best.

In a tiny diner in Kearney, River sniffed her coffee and politely didn't make a face at the smell of it. Amy Titus couldn't restrain the tiniest hint of a grimace. They were definitely touring the country's worst coffee, if nothing else.

A map was spread across the table between them and she pointed. "We're here now. We'll avoid the coasts so that the Doctor can find us easily, he might lose us in the crowd if we go anywhere too important."

"Let's go to New Orleans, next. He can land there, yeah?"

"It's a bit big."

"Not that big. And everyone keeps talking about the food from there."

She sipped her coffee and coughed, taking a moment to recover. "Mm. We'll head to Louisiana but we'll stay out of the city proper."

Amy Titus tried his own coffee and it was just as bad as it smelled but at least it was caffeine. Travelling manually was exhausting. He supposed this is what the rest of them were doing when they were tracking the Silence in 1969. No wonder they'd been in almost constant bad moods.

"If we go through Alabama..." Amy Titus trailed off as he heard a faint, familiar sound.

He met River's eye. She heard it too. The brakes of the TARDIS.

Without a word they rose, River tossed some money on the table and they silently left the diner.

In the parking lot the outline of the TARDIS was just beginning to appear. He grabbed her hand and held it tight. They could only hope this was a post-Berlin Doctor, otherwise they needed to be ready to run. He didn't want to leave his car behind.

"Ready?" he asked.

"Not much choice."

He laughed and squeezed her hand. Together they held their breath.

The TARDIS fully materialised and the door opened.

Two familiar, glorious, wonderful, amazing faces poked out of the open door.

The twelfth Doctor and the second Nandy grinned broadly at them. Amy Titus let out an inarticulate noise of joy and lunged forward, pulling Nandy out into the open and into a hug. He lifted her feet off the ground and swung her in a circle.

"Oh, Nandy," he breathed into her huge cloud of hair. "Oh, I thought I wouldn't see you again."

She laughed into his chest. "Of course you were going to see me again, babu. As if I'd leave you alone with our parents."

A great weight lifted off his chest and he sighed heavily, he hadn't realised how tense he'd become until he saw her again. She was still safe. Hale and whole and with all that mad hair that he'd missed so much it hurt.

River and the Doctor were locked in a similar embrace, wound up tightly in each other. Amy Titus supposed if he had so much trouble with a young Doctor then she must have been in hell with him. Oh, it was good to have his family back.

"How long has it been?" the Doctor asked.

"This you? Post-Trenzalore? Not since I told you I was pregnant."

He groaned a little. "I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you."

"What about you, when are you?"

"Well my wife is currently too rotund to come adventuring and quite fond of throwing things at me."

River slapped his chest, affecting anger. "Again? How many do you expect me to have?"

"Spoilers." He kissed her nose. He looked at Nandy. "Is this your first time meeting..?"

River looked at Nandy like she was seeing her for the first time. She smiled a special, crooked smile reserved usually just for Amy Titus himself, one of unselfconscious happiness. Nandy looked down shyly and stepped out of Amy Titus' arms.

"Hello, mum."

River gave a short, stunned laugh and pulled her into a hug. "Barely a year pregnant and now I have two adult children. Life is just full of surprises lately."

"A few too many," the Doctor said after a moment. "You've noticed the timelines?"

River pulled away from Nandy and nodded. "New memories."

"I'm sorry." The Doctor winced.

Amy Titus frowned. She hadn't mentioned anything to him about new memories. His own were in flux, his imprisonment had changed but he'd told her that. Nandy let out a little sound of discontent under her breath, looking at their father.

"It's fine, I was more worried about you than myself. Let's talk inside, though," River said. "It's good to see a post-Utah version of you."

"You're worried about post-Utah?" The Doctor said with a raised eyebrow.

"I'm getting older, my love. You're getting younger."

"How long?"

"Eight months."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow, grabbed her by the hand and led her into the TARDIS. "Vandy, take us into the vortex? We need to go talk about parent things."

The look on Nandy's face would have been priceless if Amy Titus didn't think he was wearing the exact same one. Their parents were gone before they could properly voice their disgust at the lack of subtlety but Nandy obediently went to the console and started to put them in flight.

Amy Titus helped her from the opposite side and watched her as they worked. She was grumpy. Well, not grumpy. Just not... Nandy. Not his personal ball of sunshine and diabetes.

"If those two could be any more embarrassing I don't know how," she grumbled.

He laughed, more out of surprise than humour. "What?"

"Do I need to spell it out?"

"No, I know what they're doing. Wish I didn't. I meant since when do you grouch about the Doctor? You're making faces at him. You never make faces at him. What happened to daddy's girl?"

She flung the final lever and sent them into the vortex, then flounced down the hallway to their lounge. He followed behind her, head cocked in curiosity. She wasn't even wearing her flouncy skirt, instead she was in a pair of jeans. Jeans. On Nandy. Their timelines really had been messed up.

"Maybe I'm just growing up," she said as she threw herself dramatically onto her favourite chaise.

He shook his head and fished for their pack of cards in the drawer under the coffee table. Their little lounge looked like it hadn't been used in a while. It was nothing special, just comfy chairs, a stocked bar and a great sound system, but it was their private space.

"I have met you when you're three thousand years old and you still think that man hung the stars," he said as he dealt the cards.

"Spoilers," she admonished.

"Are you going through a rebellious stage? Rage against the machine or something?"

"Not wanting to imagine my parents shagging is hardly rebellious."

He pushed her hand of cards toward her and she accepted them. They'd played this game so many times they didn't even need to speak, just tossing their cards on the table. She'd been four when he taught her this game. Endless hours to keep a baby girl busy while they waged war on the people trying to kidnap her.

The Silence had been completely unscrupulous. They still were. With every passing year they became more powerful and more inventive, attacking that little girl from every conceivable angle. Amy Titus had managed to head off the worst of it before they took it back in time and actually moved against her, but there had still been plenty of plans make it through.

Now his little girl was all grown up and still the threat of time being rewritten was constant. Going to prison had almost been a relief.

"Do you two have any idea what's happening to our timelines?"

Nandy shook her head. "Nothing. But we've seen evidence that we're working on it in the future as well and we're forming new memories of working on it in the past, its like whatever's happening is hitting multiple points in our history all at once."

"It started with your notebook in the TARDIS."

"That's the focal point we're working from but we can't find the rupture. Things are changing but not that much. Nana knows what's in Greystark House but the results don't change. Dad finds out about Melody in Berlin instead of Demons Run. The course of events should just realign itself but it's not. It just keeps deviating like it's trying to jump the tracks of its own accord."

Amy Titus frowned and looked at the cards in his hand. "If you're here that means quarantine must have been breached so badly that it's irretrievable. I mean worse than me being here, now. That's a massive change in our timeline."

"One of dad's new memories, he breached Elysium about two hundred years into my future." She smiled at him sadly. "Since it's already wrecked we thought you two could use a relief trip."

"No joke. Met Uncle Tony, though."

"Who?"

"Oh, you have to meet him. Mum's brother. But don't you think the quarantine breach could be what's changing?"

"No, the change is definitely centred here. I can feel it."

Amy Titus sighed. "I should lock you down. With this much flux you're going to start causing paradoxes, crossing timelines. The universe is going to end up exploding."

"There's no need to pick on me because I'm differently abled."

Oh, she loved to play that card. He grinned to himself. The little brat. "Not being temporally locked is dangerous on a good day. I'll whip up a few things for you. I'll even make them pretty."

"I hate being time-blind."

"You won't be. I promise."

She sighed a long-suffering sigh. "Fine."

"You know what they call you in the future?"

"No, and you shouldn't tell me."

"The Curator," he smiled. "Head of all operations, even above mum. Quantum physics, astronomical engineering, biological engineering, sociology. The Curator of New Gallifrey."

A smile crept across her face even as she tried to stifle it. "What's your point?"

"That you probably shouldn't be such a brat about needing a temporal lock." He grinned at her, predicting her sour look and the cushion thrown at his head. He dodged with a laugh.

"Make the stupid things, then, but I'm not putting them on until after I've given birth."

Amy Titus looked down at her belly in surprise. Barely rounded, she couldn't be more than two years in. "What number is this, then? Three?"

"Two. No spoilers!"

"How old is Cora?"

"Three hundred and change. We must all do our part for Timelord society!" She said the last as if she was mockingly quoting some patriotic poster. "When are you going to get around to making some little Timelords?"

"What are you, my mother? You'll get your grandkids when I'm good and ready and preferably not incarcerated."

"Oh, but they'd be so cute," she teased. "Tiny, gangly babies. I can hear their demands for cake right now."

"Unlike yours, who I'm sure have all inherited your crazy eyes."

"Crazy eyes?" she challenged.

"You heard me."

She lost interest in her mock anger. "They're all mutts until we get a decent biological engineer, anyway. I pity the poor kid who has to wade through the gene pool we're giving him to work with. Mine have been conceived on the TARDIS but I don't even know how Ula is getting hers. Did you give her something?"

Amy Titus grinned to himself. Abraxis – their biological engineer – wouldn't be born for another hundred and fifty years in her timeline. He'd only met the man once but he was one of the most put-upon, long-suffering souls he'd ever met and was definitely paying the price for Ula and Sherry's 'mutts'.

He shrugged. "I haven't yet, but I might. I'm working on a vortex exposure module to help... well, spoilers."

Nandy frowned, sad. "We won't always have to say that. We'll fix the quarantine breach, somehow."

"Hey, of course we will. If mum and the Doctor could fix up their god awful mess then ours has to be fixable, right?"

Their cards lay on the table, forgotten. When had his little Nandy started thinking so hard? She'd always been brilliant, but never pensive. Something big was on her mind and for some reason she wasn't talking to the Doctor about it.

"I don't like seeing them so young," she said. "Dad always said that life is a pile of good things and bad things, and I believe him. I just thought with their marriage that those good things were... well... I thought we just hadn't seen them. I thought they were now, so to speak."

"I'm pretty sure they're enjoying themselves right now," Amy Titus deadpanned, just to see the wince of disgust on her face.

"You know what I mean. I thought before the quarantine that their mixed up timelines would be sort of romantic. Not you and mum running like blazes from dad in backwater America."

"That's because of whatever's happening. It didn't happen this way originally."

"It's not the only thing I've seen."

He rolled his eyes. "Come on, baby girl. Dad thinks that if he speaks his name the Timelords are going to come back."

"We do."

"But he doesn't know it's us. He thinks it's the old Timelords. He's terrified. After you're born you know things get better, and you know we don't see most of it. They're private people."

"So private we barely ever see them in the same room together?"

"You know they see each other. She manages to get pregnant often enough."

Nandy gave a very unladylike snort of laughter, a grin spreading across her face at the absurdity of it all. Her laughter continued until she was red in the face and wheezing. "Please stop reminding me that our parents have sex."

"I'll remind you every five minutes if it makes you laugh. I bet Cora thinks the same about you. When you told her you were pregnant she probably went out and drank absinthe until she felt clean again."

Her laughter had clearly overtaken her and she lay back against the chaise, shaking with it. "Stop it."

"Then stop moping. Now come on, we've got a game of cards to finish."

When she recovered herself enough she sat up, tears of laughter tracing tracks down her face, and they resumed their game of cards.

They didn't say anything else about her worries, but Amy Titus felt like he might have begun to pinpoint what had gone wrong in their timelines. They'd been beyond diligent in protecting her from the Silence, but maybe it hadn't been enough.

Nandy had changed.