#crossover wip

He almost wished Shawn’s dad wasn’t out of town right now. Henry Spencer would probably come up with the logical explanation that they kept missing. Well, that he kept missing, at any rate. Shawn would probably accept any explanation, logical or not. It wouldn’t be the first time.

When Shawn’s phone started ringing, Gus rather hoped it was Juliet telling them to head back to the station. When Shawn looked at the caller ID and a grin spread across his face, Gus kept this assumption. Then, Shawn answered the phone, and Gus realized he was wrong. “Lassie!” Shawn crowed. “Long time, no see, buddy. What’s up? Gus and I were just admiring—”

“Cut the crap, Spencer.” If he leaned close enough to Shawn, Gus could hear Lassiter’s voice from here. “Get back to the station. You’ve got a visitor.”

“Really? Who’s that, then?”

“Just get back here.”

“Is it D—?” Shawn frowned and looked at his phone. “He hung up.”

“So back to the station?”

“To meet our mysterious visitor,” Shawn confirmed.

The trip didn’t take very long, all things considered. Gus trailed after Shawn as he waltzed into the station. Juliet and Lassiter were at their respective desks, both sifting through piles of paperwork. Shawn sat down on Juliet’s desk, grinning at her. “Didja miss me?” he asked.

Juliet looked up at him but didn’t smile back. “Tell me about your vision again, Shawn,” she said.

Gus decided this probably wasn’t a good thing. “Weren’t we supposed to meet someone?” he asked.

“You missed him,” Juliet said. “Shawn, please. Your vision?”

Shawn shrugged. “There’s not much to tell, unless you want a description of the guy again.”

“That’s not necessary, Spencer,” Lassiter said, coming over and dropping a file on Juliet’s desk. “We have a pretty clear idea of what he looked like.”

Shawn’s grin was turned on Lassiter. “So I have excellent abilities of description?”

“Um, Shawn?” Gus said, half under his breath, though he knew the others could probably hear him. “I think I know why we never found him.”

Shawn’s eyes widened slightly as he caught on. “He was here, wasn’t he?”

“He was here,” Juliet confirmed wearily. “He introduced himself as John Smith, but from what we can gather, everyone knows him as the Doctor.”

Gus knew the look on Shawn’s face quite well. When you’re friends with someone as long as he’d been friends with Shawn, you get quite good at reading their facial expressions. Right now, Shawn was thinking. Planning. Probably plotting. And, knowing Shawn, probably only planning one step ahead.

The fingers of Shawn’s right hand went to his forehead. “The Doctor,” he repeated, screwing his eyes shut. “That’s right. He doesn’t give anyone his real name.” Gus didn’t need to ask how Shawn had arrived at that conclusion; for one, John Smith just screamed alias. For another, according to Shawn, that was something the Doctor hadn’t answered when they’d talked.

However they’d managed to talk, that is.

“He came here because he’s researching the same case we are,” Shawn continued. “He—”

“Unless you’re going to tell us something we haven’t already found out,” Lassiter interrupted, “cut it out.” Shawn opened his eyes, looking a bit disgruntled as he dropped his hand. “O’Hara’s keeping tabs on him.”

“And he was looking for you,” Juliet added. “That might be why you saw him.”

“Wait, he was looking for Shawn?” Gus repeated. “How’d he know who he was?” Of course, according to Shawn, the guy did know who he was—he’d called him by name, after all—but still. Shawn seeing him in the first place was weird. The fact that the guy was real and not just the product of Shawn’s overactive imagination was creepy. And the fact that this Doctor was obviously looking for Shawn as earnestly as Shawn had been looking for him? Getting a bit closer to disturbing.

Shawn wasn’t psychic. So how the heck could he have seen this guy and had a conversation with him when he’d clearly never been there?

“He didn’t,” Lassiter said. “We showed him a picture. He didn’t have a clue who you were. McNabb said he’d heard of your reputation.” The scowl on Lassiter’s face made it clear what he thought of Shawn’s reputation, but after this last incident, Gus really felt it had to be misplaced.

What the hell was going on? Despite what Shawn said, Lassiter was good at what he did. Well, he could tell when people were lying, at any rate. Usually. He’d probably read this Doctor guy accurately, meaning he definitely hadn’t run into Shawn this morning and called him by name. Meaning that Gus still had no idea what had happened.

Of course, neither did Shawn, but that was beside the point. It was easy for everyone else to just believe that Shawn had had a psychic vision. But when that couldn’t be the explanation, what the heck was?

Shawn, who gave no sign of being plagued with similar thoughts, gave the two detectives an easy smile. “I suppose I should catch up with him, then.”

“Shawn,” Juliet began, looking hesitant, “we’re not exactly convinced he’s, well….”

“Sane,” Lassiter supplied, “so you two will probably get along just fine. He doesn’t seem to run around on much more than feelings, either.”

Shawn raised his eyebrows and looked at Juliet, who elaborated, saying, “He was convinced that something was wrong. He just said he wasn’t sure what. And I wasn’t questioning his sanity, Lassiter,” she added. “I was questioning his reliability.”

“Where did he say he was going?” Gus asked, knowing Shawn would want to follow. It was Shawn, after all. Besides, he was curious, too.

“He didn’t,” Juliet said. “But he does have my cell phone, so we can contact him if we need to.” She didn’t say it, but Gus knew it also meant they’d be able to track him if it came to that. “But while you’re here, Shawn, I want a written record of your vision. I want to look it over again. There has to be some significance to it beyond the Doctor simply turning up.”

Gus looked sideways at Shawn, who was looking thoughtful. Sort of. “Do you think he had anything to do with it?”

Shawn snorted. “Of course he didn’t have anything to do with it, Gus,” Shawn said. “Not in terms of killing Cunningham, anyway. Lassie here would’ve been able to spot that a mile off and wouldn’t have let him leave, right?”

Lassiter scowled. “We’re not ruling him out, Spencer. I don’t trust people who pretend to be someone they’re not.”

“So I’ve noticed,” Shawn muttered. But he picked up a pen and pad of paper from Juliet’s desk, saying, “Do you want it in point form or sentences?”

“I want all the details,” Juliet said. “If you don’t think you’ll forget something, just put it in point form.”

When Shawn had finished scribbling things down, he practically ushered Gus out of the police station. Gus, having received this treatment far too many times before, knew what was coming. “You saw something in there, didn’t you? Where are we going?”

“To Cunningham’s.”

“Cunningham’s?” Gus repeated. “You suddenly know where he lives, too?”

Shawn shot him a look. “Really, Gus? Really? Don’t you ever look at anything? It was in the file Lassie dropped onto Jules’s desk.”

Gus frowned. “That file was closed, Shawn.”

“But some of the papers slipped out the side; didn’t you see them? It was right in front of you.”

Gus rolled his eyes. “If you just saw an address, you don’t know if it’s Cunningham’s or not.”

“It’s not going to be anyone else’s,” Shawn pointed out. “They don’t have any witnesses to the actual crime, and if the guy was an inventor, he had to be holed up somewhere with his collection.”

“It might be the person who called it in,” Gus pointed out.

“For one, even if it was, they’d questioned him already. For another, I doubt people in that region of town call the cops very often. Keys?”

“You’re not driving, Shawn.”

Shawn huffed but mercifully didn’t argue—or try to grab the keys from him, which Gus knew he wasn’t above doing. Shawn settled into being the navigator, and Gus had to hope that they were actually going to the right address and not to, oh, the new smoothie shop that had just opened up. Not that he’d particularly mind a smoothie right now, but he was getting tired of being dragged everywhere by Shawn and having to pay for everything because someone had so conveniently ‘forgotten’ his wallet.

They’d been driving for maybe three minutes before Gus decided he should probably just ask Shawn what he thought about all the crazy things that had been happening, about seeing and conversing with someone who wasn’t there yet was real and had turned up, and about what the heck he thought might actually be going on.

Gus opened his mouth, and Shawn’s phone rang.

“Don’t tell me it’s Lassiter again,” Gus said instead, noting the surprise on Shawn’s face when he glanced over. Wouldn’t be Juliet, either, for that matter.

“It’s Dennis,” Shawn said before answering the call. “Hello?” A pause. “What? Seriously?” Another pause. “Really? You’re sure?”

Gus wasn’t sure about Dennis, but he was sure that he wouldn’t like what Shawn’s grin meant.

“Gus and I will be right over. We wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

“Miss what?” Gus asked suspiciously.

“Hang a right up here,” Shawn said instead of answering. “It’s the fastest way to get to Dennis’s.”

“Why…why do we need to go there, Shawn? I thought we were looking into this case.”

“We are. This case just might now involve aliens.”

Gus pressed his lips into a thin line. He wasn’t going to argue. Aliens might explain Shawn’s apparent psychic episode. They’d just need to be careful, make sure they didn’t accidentally get carried away like last time. “What did he find? Electric disruptions? Ground disturbance?”

“Massive energy spike.”

Massive enough that Dennis thought it significant or he wouldn’t have called them. Gus wondered what else he’d found, but if Shawn knew, he wasn’t going to say. Aliens. This time, it might really be aliens.

Aliens were a lot more sane than his non-psychic friend suddenly becoming psychic.

XXXXXX

The Psych office was closed when he arrived, and the Doctor didn’t feel like sticking around to wait again, so he turned his attention to more pressing concerns. Namely, finding the technology that was making this little pocket of time skip like a broken record every once in a while.

He still had his read on his sonic screwdriver from earlier, so the Doctor pulled it out and started off at a run. He really shouldn’t have wasted so much time earlier. True, he’d been waiting for a fourth glitch, but it hadn’t come yet. And, yes, he had extracted a promise from Juliet to help him, and now he knew he had to look into the legitimacy of this Shawn Spencer, so his time hadn’t been wasted, per se, but he’d rather get to the bottom of whatever was messing with time sooner rather than later.

He’d been lucky that everything had been stable so far in terms of after-effects, but his luck didn’t tend to hold.

He kept waiting for that fourth skip of time to correct his direction and give him a more precise reading of where he needed to go, but as it turned out, he didn’t need it. He knew he was getting close when he felt the pressure building up. Well, not pressure, exactly. More like the feeling of the charged air before a thunderstorm. It meant he was on the right track.

The house outside of which the Doctor finally found himself was in a poorer neighbourhood, he’d guess. Well, if he was to guess by the state of upkeep, or rather the lack thereof. The door wasn’t even locked, though he suspected there was another reason for that, given the quality of the lock on the door.

Skulking outside of homes always led to misunderstandings, so the Doctor lost no time in sneaking inside the house. The inside didn’t look much better than the outside, though he supposed he ought to be thankful he didn’t have a companion with him to point out comparisons between his housekeeping skills and this man’s. Still. He could hear something humming, taste the energy building in the air, feel it prickling the hairs on the back of his neck.

He found the source in the basement.

“Oh,” the Doctor said softly, “you’re causing this trouble, aren’t you?”

The machine continued to hum.

On the surface, it didn’t look like much.

Of course, neither did the TARDIS. That was the point. People underestimated things. They didn’t always take the time to look beneath the surface.

The Doctor, however, was used to looking beneath the surface and rather enjoyed doing so. Things usually turned out to be much more interesting than they appeared to be. Not that this didn’t appear to be interesting; it did, very much so. It was a beautiful piece of work, if a bit rough. He was surprised it worked.

Well, given the way it was causing time to skip, perhaps work wasn’t the best word.

But still. It had an effect. The skill to contrive any effect on the timestream alone was admirable for humans in this time period.

Near as the Doctor could tell, it was a rudimentary time machine. To the untrained eye, it might look a bit more like a pile of assorted scrap stuck together and somehow managing to generate a whining hum, meaning something was working somewhere beneath the surface, but he saw more than that. Temporal sensors. Dimensional stabilizers. Quantum resonators. Not perfect, no. Not nearly. But they were still recognizable as early attempts at key processing equipment, at things needed for time travel to occur.

Unfortunately, the imperfections added up.

It was an admirable effort, but it was also a dangerous one.

The feedback alone….

No matter. It wouldn’t take much to fix. Well, actually, it would take a lot to fix, but he didn’t intend to fix it. On the contrary, he needed to break it and ensure that no one else managed to fix it. It being as unstable as it was, keeping this machine functioning would not be in his best interests. The temporal pressure in this area had already given him a dull headache.

Admittedly, he rather wanted to know how the machine worked. He’d seen various attempts humans had made at time travel in the past, with varying degrees of success. They wouldn’t really be completely successful for a long while yet, hadn’t quite created a reliable machine that generated its own power and would ensure the traveller arrived completely intact, in their own body, but it never ceased to amaze him to see what the human race came up with. To be fair, though, that DeLorean had managed the ‘travel outside of one’s own lifetime’ bit, unlike the particle accelerator experiment he’d run into, and both were safer than this.

But because he didn’t immediately know how this worked, it was interesting.

Grinning a little, the Doctor set to work.

XXXXXXX

“Molly’s out with the girls,” Dennis said as he led them through the house and into what had once been the secret room in his office. “I haven’t told her yet. Didn’t want to get her hopes up until I’ve run it by you two.” He slid into his office chair and spun around to face the screen. “Look, I know it’s not much to go on, but this?” He pointed to a graph open on his computer. “Electrical discharges like that aren’t normal.”

Gus squinted. “When was that?”

“This morning,” Shawn answered.

Dennis nodded. “Early morning. I have a program running in the background. It usually just picks up on power surges ahead of blackouts, but this time—”

“What about those?” Shawn interrupted, pointing to smaller blips on the graph that seemed a mite too high to be considered usual. He was trying not to get too excited about the fact that they were looking at proof that aliens existed. Proof that they could rub in Lassie’s face. And his dad’s. And—

“Echoes, maybe. It’s not consistent with a ship I’m familiar with. We might be looking at a new alien race.”

Gus let out a low whistle.

“Can you pinpoint where that was?” Shawn pressed. They were close. He could feel it. “Check cameras or something?”

“Way ahead of you. I’ve narrowed it down to a few blocks between North Voluntario Street and Alameda Padre Serra, but—”

“By East Haley?” interrupted Shawn, remembering the address he’d read.

“Possibly. I’m checking there, but I haven’t found—”

“You will.” Shawn straightened up and looked at Gus. “Aliens got to Cunningham,” he announced.

Gus frowned. “He was stabbed, Shawn.”

“They didn’t get to him recently,” Shawn said. “They abducted him years ago. Gave him those paranoid tendencies and whatever else all the witnesses noted. Why do you think he didn’t trust anyone? Why do you think he was an inventor, cobbling together parts? Because he’d seen the future, Gus. He’d seen alien technology.”

Understanding dawned in Gus’s eyes. “And when he was getting close to it being a reality, some intergalactic hitman came and offed him. Made it look like an ordinary stabbing to cover his tracks.”

Dennis was looking between the two of them. “There’s been an alien murder?”

“There’s an alien murderer,” Shawn corrected. “You picked up on its arrival to Earth.”

Dennis swallowed. “So if there hasn’t been an equal power surge—”

“Then it’s still here.” Gus shuddered. “I do not want to meet a murderous alien.”

“I’ll cross-reference the time of the spike with my satellite data again,” Dennis said. “If there’s a chance of a split-second arrival, that could explain how I missed it earlier. I’ll keep you guys posted.”

“And we’ll let you know if we find any futuristic technology in our investigation,” Shawn promised, ignoring the glare Gus sent him. It was hardly sharing case details with an outsider when the SBPD wouldn’t even know what they were looking at. It would be more…consulting an expert. And if Shawn knew anyone who was an expert on aliens, it was Dennis Gogolack.

XXXXXX

The Doctor yelped and jerked his hand back. He sucked on his burnt fingers, eyeing the sparking machine with more wariness this time. He’d expected to get a few shocks, but he’d thought he might make it through without any sparks flying. Apparently, he’d been wrong.

It was a complicated bit of machinery, though. It had no apparent off switch that he could find, and it was, for some reason, immune to sonic blasts from his screwdriver. Actually, he figured he might know that reason. The machine was generating a fair bit of power, building up bursts of temporal energy, but it was also producing enough residual energy to act as a shield to deflect his sonic bursts.

On the upside, that meant that the machine shouldn’t overload anytime soon and go out with a bang.

On the downside, it would also probably run for a while yet if it wasn’t in danger of burning itself out.

The Doctor circled the machine again, trying to see if he could spot something he’d missed before. He’d realized early on that this machine had been started up before it was finished. That was part of the reason it wasn’t working properly, with the other part simply being that the chances of it working in the first place were exceedingly slim, given the time period. Chances were, he couldn’t find a kill switch because that particular feature hadn’t been added in yet. At least, that’s what he was guessing. The circuit looked to have been forcibly connected further along. It would keep going until it ran out of power.

Given that the machine was regenerating its power supply as it ran, similar to the way a car battery recharged itself, he wasn’t sure he could wait that long.

Well. He knew he shouldn’t wait that long.

The Doctor tried reaching for a different set of wires this time, an inconspicuous pair near the front of the machine that nevertheless appeared to be important. He hoped they were part of a secondary system that would override the main one with a bit of help.

He was wrong.

The shock sent him stumbling backwards, stealing his breath away. His entire body ached with sudden pain, his head pounding with the rhythm of his hearts. Oh, that one had been ten, no, a hundred times worse than the last one. Ooh, he hadn’t felt this bad since he’d had lightning race through him.

The machine was, at least, running more quietly than before.

The Doctor snorted. It should be; it had let off enough energy with that particular burst. He ought to get a few pieces of equipment from the TARDIS before he tried shutting it down again. It was proving to be a rather temperamental machine that wasn’t returning his gentle touches in kind.

Speaking of the TARDIS, though….

The Doctor stiffened, alarmed, and carefully sent out a searching thought.

He came back with nothing.

He couldn’t feel her.

She wasn’t there.

He knew his connection with her hadn’t been severed. He could feel, distantly, another trace of her, somewhere, but it was the wrong one; his TARDIS, yes, but not his present TARDIS. That TARDIS, past or future, had her own Doctor. But his? He didn’t know where she was.

Scrambling to his feet, the Doctor took the stairs two at a time and bolted outside.

The sun was in the wrong position. It wasn’t even in the same spot as it had been when he’d entered the house, let alone further along in the sky as it should be. It was lower, hiding behind the buildings in the east.

The air itself attested to the sun’s absence, still faintly clinging to the cool of night.

The Doctor’s mouth twisted. At least he knew why he hadn’t been able to sense his TARDIS; she wasn’t here yet.

A quick round of investigating inside told him that the house belonged to the man he’d run into earlier—though, linearly speaking, it would be later now. Perhaps this was why the man, Jack Cunningham, had been in too much of a rush to given him better directions when he’d asked; his machine was running, and not running properly.

Granted, the front door was unlocked, even now. Perhaps Jack wasn’t yet aware that his machine wasn’t functioning correctly. He might not even know that it was on; someone else could have turned it on. They might even have wrecked it, though the Doctor somehow doubted that. The machine had been put together with competence but without a distinct plan. It was conceived from guesswork, plain and simple, and had all the flaws and glitches that befitted its status as a very early prototype.

Still. Whoever had been here was gone now, as far as he could tell, and he didn’t know whether they’d be back. He’d been given extra time here—unwittingly and rather unwillingly—so he might as well make the best of it and find out what he could. Even when the TARDIS did turn up, he couldn’t go to her immediately, and anyway, he might as well use the time he had to find out what he could.

He was unprepared for the first glitch when it came; he’d forgotten precisely when it would be coming, to be perfectly honest. He’d made it to a busier part of the city and found himself caught out in the crowd. It didn’t take him long to realize, though, that this time, things were a bit different for him. Perhaps it was the fact that he was living them twice, or perhaps that he was just a different sort of entity altogether and couldn’t be lumped in with everyone else, but he found that he had a bit of…influence.

He’d bumped into someone—all right, so he hadn’t exactly been looking where he was going—and caused the lady to drop the armful of pamphlets she’d been carrying. He’d apologized, helped her gather a few of the loose papers up, and started to move on, but then things had jumped back. It was a bit funny to see, really. In the time it took to blink—well, less, really—the original crowd was back on the sidewalk. All those steps people had taken had been drawn back, reversed. Caught, suspended, rewound, and now replayed.

Except for him—and the lady he’d bumped into. Only, she didn’t seem to notice anything. She’d just finished straightening her papers before continuing on her way, looking completely unaware that she was now a few minutes ahead of herself. Well, ahead of everyone else, at least, since everyone else had backtracked.

Oh, this was just going to make his headache worse. There was too much pressure around here. To have time forcibly rewound, pulled back a few minutes like a yo-yo on a string, created friction in the multiverse. If he didn’t sort things out soon, there could be an echo effect.

Not much of one, admittedly. It might be felt in a parallel universe, two, maybe three, even five or six at a stretch, but only in the concentrated area—which, frankly, the Doctor doubted even extended to the boundaries of the city. But still. With things being sealed up as they were, he’d only have to hope that nothing went terribly wrong in another universe, particularly in one that he wasn’t part of. His hands were tied, after all. He couldn’t break through even if he wanted to.

They were all the more tightly sealed now that they’d been weakened once, even if that was a bit counter-intuitive.

No matter. He was catching up now, and if he was lucky, he wasn’t in loop, so he’d only have to live this through once. The smart thing, though, would be to track down this fellow who’d created the machine and, subsequently, all these problems. He ought to at least know how to turn that machine off, wouldn’t he?

Well, theoretically, but if he hadn’t turned it on, maybe he couldn’t turn it off, either.

The Doctor sighed. He could try tracing his steps back to the alley where he’d first run into Jack, he supposed. It was long past the time that he would’ve run into him, but he wasn’t having any luck finding clues elsewhere. Not that he expected his current method of searching would be particularly fruitful when he wasn’t actively searching for anything. Rather, he was just keeping his eyes peeled for anything suspect.

No matter. One more repeat, then the drawn out moment that would snap back. It’d be interesting to see how that one went. Might not be any different, of course, but he wasn’t about to make any assumptions. The technology behind this was faulty, after all, and he hadn’t ever seen anything exactly like it before, so surprises were to be expected.

He could only hope they’d be pleasant ones.

The Doctor started off in another direction and, not five minutes later, encountered his first—and hopefully not last—pleasant surprise: he found a fruit stand, and it sold bananas.

Well, all right, it wasn’t a fruit stand, exactly; more of a grocer. But it stocked bananas, among other fruits, so he could hardly ask for anything more.

Well. Yes, he could ask for something more: money. He was a bit short. A fifty pence piece, a stick of credits, two shillings, one euro, and a gold aureus of Claudius coin. The last might have come in useful if he’d been trying to sell it, but chances were the vendor here, who was hardly more than a boy, wouldn’t know the difference between the real thing and a replica from a museum and would assume the latter. Not that the Doctor could blame him for that. Wasn’t exactly everyday someone came along and tried to trade a real Roman coin for a bunch of bananas.

The Doctor looked at the handful of useless coins once more, wondered whether he’d have any better luck if he went through all the bother of looking through a different pocket, and asked, “How much for just one banana, exactly?”

“I’m not selling just one banana,” the vendor replied matter-of-factly.

“But could you make an exception? I only need the one.” He wanted at least two, one for now and one for later, but he’d settle for just one for later. They could be terribly useful.

“They’re in bunches,” the vendor said, “and that’s how I was told to sell ‘em, so that’s how I’m going to sell ‘em.”

The Doctor frowned, then said, “What if I trade you for it, then?”

The vendor shook his head. “Cough up cash or try somewhere else.”

“I haven’t found anywhere else,” the Doctor complained.

“That’s not my fault,” the vendor returned. “Look, I’m not supposed to barter, and this was the only job I could find close by, okay? I can’t afford to lose it. You’ll have to go somewhere else.”

Student, the Doctor realized. Or would-be student, if he could get enough money to go to school. He would’ve thought there would’ve been better jobs than this, though. “What do you want to study?”

The vendor blinked at him. “What?”

“What do you want to study?” the Doctor repeated.

The vendor stared at him for a moment, then swallowed and said, “Horticulture, or landscape design, or something. Maybe even trying to breed a black lily or pear-shaped tomatoes with stripes. I haven’t quite decided. This was as close as I could get.”

Which wasn’t, the Doctor figured, very close at all. He picked the Roman coin out of his hand and pocketed the rest. If his timing was right….

It was. The second glitch came right when he’d expected it to.

“This,” the Doctor said, “is a genuine Roman coin, circa 41 to 54 AD. If I remember correctly, this was about 45, 46 AD.”

“I can’t trade you the bananas for that,” the vendor said in a tone that told the Doctor he didn’t believe a word that the crazy stranger was telling him.

“I want you to have it,” the Doctor said, holding it out to him.

“I can’t trade you the bananas for that,” the vendor repeated.

“I didn’t ask you to,” the Doctor replied, “though I’ll admit that I would have liked it if you would have.” He put the coin down within easy reach of the vendor. “Get it appraised,” he said. “See what you’re told. And if anyone asks how you got it, tell them altruism can still be found in this day and age despite arguments to the contrary.”

Time reset itself, and the vendor stared at the coin, unaware that the crowd around him had changed. “You’re not serious, are you?” he asked, looking up at the Doctor.

The Doctor shrugged. “Why not find out for yourself?” And, rather than let the lad find something to say to him, the Doctor turned on his heel and continued on his way.

He still didn’t have a banana, and he was less a coin, but it was all for the best.

There was a longer stretch between the second and third glitch than between the first and second ones, and he spent the time retracing his steps. He passed the street where he’d left the TARDIS and continued on to where he’d met Jack Cunningham, but there was nothing down that particular side street, either. He hadn’t had much of a lead to begin with, but now it was as good as dead.

He had to have missed something somewhere, made an incorrect assumption or overlooked something or dismissed something as unimportant when it wasn’t. Or, more likely, he was missing a very important piece to this puzzle. He needed to work things out, but even he needed something to work with.

The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver and fiddled with the settings for a moment, then took a few readings. Time, it seemed, was fairly stable between glitches, but there were still a few disturbances that he could pick up. Not much, but enough to register, and, if he was very lucky, enough to track. Not to its source, exactly; the source was probably the machine. Rather, he could find what didn’t quite fit, the reason the disturbance occurred in a particular place. The means instead of the cause.

The Doctor set off towards the nearest disturbance. The signal kept strengthening, which told him he was on the right track, and after a few more corners, he figured he was nearly there and pocketed his sonic screwdriver again. He rounded the last corner and came upon the scene that he was quite certain contained the cause of this particular disturbance. It was a crime scene, police tape and all. In all likelihood, the murder he’d heard about at the station.

Unfortunately, that crime scene included Detectives Lassiter and O’Hara and the nice Officer McNabb, none of whom were to meet him until later.

The Doctor stepped back, listening for a moment. He could hear their conversations clearly, and no one had remarked upon him. That meant he was safe. And to stay that way….

The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver and his TARDIS key. He’d have to make a perception filter; he couldn’t risk those three seeing him again. The psychic paper might do for the others, but—

The third glitch hit.

Time stalled, and the Doctor abandoned the idea of the perception filter. He didn’t need it now. In a few long strides, he was back around the corner and had ducked under the police tape. Unfortunately, it wasn’t terribly surprising to see Jack Cunningham lying dead on the ground. Getting the answers out of him would’ve been just too easy.

Still. From the sounds of it, the detectives weren’t having much luck finding anything out, either. Judging from the conversation he’d overheard between Juliet and two men with their backs to him, they hadn’t even discovered where Jack Cunningham lived.

“I can’t say I have that particular trouble,” the Doctor remarked, more to himself than anyone else. No one else would be able to properly hear him right now when he hadn’t been interacting with them before the glitch hit, after all. “Mind you, at this rate, I’d really like to know if anyone else has found what he left behind.” Or—if it hadn’t been Jack who had turned on the machine—if they were coming back.

Now, the Doctor was used to surprises. Well, as used to surprises as anyone could be, seeing as they were still surprises. But when one of the men spun around to face him, staring at him and asking who he was, the Doctor was well and truly surprised. He could recognize Shawn Spencer easily from the photograph Lassiter had shown him. He hadn’t thought anyone would notice this, this stretching of time, but perhaps the man truly was psychic. Mind you, this was a different sort of glitch, more a stretch and a stall than a repeat, so perhaps that explained it.

But still.

He hadn’t expected any human to notice something like this.

Neglecting to answer the Shawn’s question, the Doctor countered it, instead asking, “Who am I? That’s not the question you ought to be asking, Shawn Spencer.”

Shawn was holding a string, a very familiar sort of string. Well, as familiar as something could be when he’d never seen it before. Still. It was a piece of string, ordinary string, and it was knotted. Twice. And it was in an evidence bag, meaning they’d nicked it from Jack. “What you should be asking is, ‘what was he up to’?”

Shawn was too stunned to answer, so the Doctor took the evidence bag for a closer look, taking the string out. Yes, he’d been right. Two knots. One short. Well, that wouldn’t do, now would it, if its purpose was what he thought it was?

“What do you think you’re doing?” Shawn finally asked.

“We need a third knot in this string,” the Doctor explained as he tied it in, precisely half an inch from the last one. The first two were evenly spaced, after all. “Might as well be consistent,” he added, looking over the spacing one last time before shoving the string back into the bag. He tossed it back to Shawn, who was still doing a rather good fish impression. “You might want to hold onto this. It’ll help you keep track.” When this elicited no response, unless you counted more of the same blank look that he was already receiving, the Doctor pulled out the string he’d been tying knots into for himself and showed it to the man, trying to convey his point. “See? I’ve got one already.”

“What?”

That wasn’t what he sounded like, was it? He knew he asked ‘what?’ a lot himself, but surely not in such a flabbergasted tone. Did he? Hopefully not. The Doctor opened his mouth to explain himself properly, since clearly trying to be succinct was getting him nowhere, but before he could, time snapped back into place. And, this time, things were a bit different. He got moved, instead of everyone else. He got snapped back to where he’d been when the glitch hit, back around the corner and safely out of sight.

The Doctor turned heel immediately and started off before he was spotted. He’d go back, of course, but not yet. He needed to think a bit first, and he couldn’t afford to run into anyone from the police department until after they’d met him. He’d been through three glitches. Six, if you didn’t count the fact that the second set of three were the same ones as the first.

He also didn’t know when the fourth would hit, although it shouldn’t be until after he’d been sent back. Still. That meant he couldn’t find a pattern, not yet. Not with just three glitches. He couldn’t tell whether whoever had turned on the machine—likely wasn’t Jack, not if he was dead—had counted on the glitches or not.

It was annoyingly unclear. If the glitches were intentional, they might have been meant as a diversion. If they weren’t, then whoever had intended to use the machine now had to scramble to fix things up. Or perhaps the glitches weren’t an unpleasant surprise, even if they had been unexpected. For all he knew, this was working in favour of someone’s plan. He was quite sure whoever it was had a plan. They always had plans. If they didn’t, he would’ve had a much harder time foiling them.

Mind you, if he had to foil people, he did appreciate a bit of help, and who better than the one person who’d noticed that something wasn’t right and his two currently-favourite American detectives?

Donna had been right. He needed someone, especially at times like these when he got too caught up in the problems humans didn’t understand to appreciate they ones they could. Humans grounded him. Besides, he liked working with people. He always seemed to learn so much from them. And, well, if he was going to be honest, other people often caught what he didn’t. Someone else could very easily see what he’d missed. And he had a feeling that he might need that, now, because he had a terrible suspicion that he’d already missed something, and quite possibly missed it twice.

No matter. He could worry about that later. He’d head back to the TARDIS for now and find something that would counteract the temporal backlash the machine gave off so that this didn’t happen again. Being forced to cross his own timeline once in such a short period of time was quite enough, thank you.

He’d return to poor Cunningham’s place once his previous self had been shunted back into the past. And once he’d safely disabled the machine, he could dismantle it, and then he could find Shawn Spencer and the others and figure the rest of this out.

Not that things would be that easy.