#laila.3

He scowled slightly the comment intentionally or not hitting near one of his sore spots.  The Time Lords had been fairly clear on their opinions of his age.   “M’not an infant, and it was more like a knee jerk reaction t’having someone project at me at’all.”  The faintest hint of X’s accent slipped in.

The question threw him for a complete loop.  “Well that’s a complicated question.   Da can’t have kids normally without something special happenin’.   Circumstances for me were a bit, unique.”  He couldn’t resist a bit of a smirk.  “An’ I would hope that Dad would be a bit more careful.”   His expression sobered remembering another sibling other than  Gwen he briefly had.   “Had another one, sort of.   Didn’t end up too well.”

Laila knew about the half-brother she would never meet. There had certainly been an element of responsibility in her upbringing that had been affected by that empty space.

For now she chose not to offer further suggestions of how to reproduce on Gallifrey, curious instead about this earlier Felix’s thoughts.

“Do you blame your dad for what happened to them?” 

On hearing footsteps approaching her father’s workshop, Laila froze in panic. She hadn’t anticipated anyone entering at this time. Project Romana was on hiatus with the situation in Arcadia arising and the Lord President had recently taken one of his fighters out for a spin, providing Laila with ample opportunity to access his simulation technology.

This was not the first time she had slipped in, either. K9 was accustomed to her comings and goings now, no longer barking at her presence, although he still growled at Stitch on the occasions she brought him. Today she was alone (stealth wasn’t one of Stitch’s strong points) and she hissed out quickly: “Stop simulation!”

Whatever programme had been running instantly turned off and she moved to stand beside a workbench, a little bedraggled in her composure.

“Mistress, you have a visitor,” K9 announced in his serious ‘death knight’ voice.

“Yes, thank you, K9. Not at all a delayed response.”

“I heard you were getting reports of another rogue guard in the system. Woman who keeps disappearing and waving strange credentials. I thought I’d save you a job and turn myself in.”

Laila placed a small, round piece of metal in front of Megan. It was a Lord President’s seal, but not the one forged for Rassilon. This was an object that at this point in time had only recently been created, yet the one sitting before Guardian Samuels had aged a few hundred years. The Seal of the Doctor.

“Oh, just to be clear. That was given to me for protection. I’m not him and I’m certainly not going to be prying it from his dead hands.”

“Dad, what the hell are you doing?”

Too distracted by the pandemonium in the TARDIS’s kitchen, not to mention that she would not have expected another man with this face to be there, Laila had not yet twigged that this was not her future parent.

“Please tell me one of the animals got in before I touch a surface and have to sterilise myself.”

“.. hi.”

Taking after her fathers, Laila was much more in her element facing down a ferocious beast than approaching a family member, and one with a maternal instinct at that. She loitered awkwardly on Amy’s doorstep, clutching a hermetically sealed container of baked goods (not made by herself), and offered her non-biological aunt a nervous smile. She was currently unaware that Stitch, her pet ulgoth, was summarily eating some of the flowers on the front lawn.

“I thought I’d drop in and say hello.. if you’re not sick to death of unannounced guests.”

“You know, I’m really starting to wonder if the Doctor didn’t catch you when you burst out of the arch-recon tree. You clearly landed on your head.” Laila’s tone was teasing, though it could have done with a tad more sensitivity. She sauntered closer to Felix, wrinkling her nose at the gadget on his wrist. “I’ve always thought you were far too reliant on machines and apparently you missed the memo from Gwen’s ball. Might as well come clean but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to have a little fun. Never mind your anomaly detections - why don’t you try sensing who I might be?”

As catastrophes went, this was extremely mild. Ill-equipped as the Capitol was to deal with a freak snowstorm no one had died or regenerated. There had been several slips and a few breaks but the appropriate tools and technology has soon been distributed and life carried on. Academy children bunked off and lobbed snowballs, non-Council Gallifreyans either stayed home or helped the effort to shovel or melt the perpetual snow.

Laila had been keeping watch on the city’s inhabitants, ever prepared for a timeline to go astray. She should have expected which one was likely to cause the most trouble, but somehow the possibility had eluded her. You shouldn’t even be here. Nor should I. This is ridiculous.

So it was she had found herself scrambling after a curly-haired young man who seemed intent on stopping the storm single-handed. Whether by instinct, intellect or luck, he managed to discover what appeared to be a ripped seam in the universe through which the snow was billowing. Beyond was another world, as white, if not more so, than Gallifrey had become. 

Laila felt the bite of panic. No, don’t you do that. Don’t be an idiot.

“D- Theta!” she yelled through the blustering wind. “Get away! You shouldn’t be here!”

The administration of a Lord President of Gallifrey was a tricky business, especially when it came to one who had so many connections beyond the planet itself and a man who had a habit of luring extreme measures of danger to him. So it was that it occasionally fell to his friends, family or members of staff to take care of the important matters that got waylaid. In this, Laila was a special case. Her orders did not come from anyone in this timeline so she was bending rules. There were some with which she could interfere and those she had to leave well alone. With Sally Sparrow this happened to be one of the rare, happy instances where Laila could potentially make a difference.

She checked her wrist device to confirm the timeline: Earth calendar July 2016. Gallifrey was in shock following the illness befalling the Doctor. Confusion and distrust were rife among the councillors and citizens alike, power held by the acting Vice President and Lady Shennadraxun. Very little information had been shared for fear of making matters worse. In this time, some of the smaller but no less important people were neglected.

Laila touched the panel outside Sally’s quarters, allowing her voice to feed through.

“Hello? Ms Sparrow, my name’s Laila. I’m here on the Doctor’s behalf. Can I come in?”