Warning: Mild violence

Series summary: The TARDIS doesn't always take the Doctor where he wants to go, but it always takes him where he needs to go; Time Lords hold a secret behind their backs, and they have a duty to follow.

Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who (or Pokémon, referenced in this chapter)

Chapter 1 – A Time Lord's Reflection

They had been running through the hall of mirrors for fifteen minutes now, and it was beginning to give her a headache. All she would see for what felt like an eternity was her own reflection, from all angles; occasionally, she would see the corner of the Doctor's jacket, or the wing of the Waybuh – but it was only ever a reflection of the true thing, and never the thing itself.

It had been a few weeks since they had blown up 10 Downing Street, and, after visiting several planets and having more than a few adventures – some that she would be telling her mother about, and some that she definitely wouldn't – Rose had asked the Doctor if she could visit home for a few hours again. He had obliged, but only on the condition that he was going to stay inside the TARDIS for the duration of her visit, and if Jackie Tyler even thought about trying to get inside the blue box to yell at him again, he was off to the moon without a moment's notice until she calmed down.

The Doctor had landed the TARDIS on the Powell Estate exactly one week – and forty five minutes – after 10 Downing Street had been destroyed, and Rose had burst through the door, shutting it behind her as she went…

Only to burst back through a moment later and demand of the Time Lord exactly where they were – at which point he, too, had left the TARDIS, half-suspecting that this was a trap and that Jackie was awaiting him on the other side of the door with a frying pan or an iron or an anvil and that in a few moments he was going to be in an incredible amount of pain, only to find that they emerged in a quaint, semi-rural town in, what he guessed, was Hertfordshire.

"Ah," he had said, rather unhelpfully, going up to the window of a nearby café and looking through it to the calendar that was hung on the wall behind the counter. "But it is a week after Downing Street," he offered, turning back to Rose, who was standing with her hands on her hips and her head cocked to one side in a pose that reminded him so much of her mother that he took a half-step backwards.

"My mum does not live in Hertfordshire!" she snapped, taking a step closer to the Doctor.

"Alright, alright! I'll fix this," the Doctor conceded, going to turn to back to the TARDIS – when he got distracted by a sandwich board propped up in front of a newsagents. Frustrated by the man's infernally short attention span, Rose followed him as he approached the board, transfixed, and read the headline that had been written in capital letters and held in place with wire mesh:

THIRD ATTACK IN SEVEN DAYS – POLICE FEAR ESCAPED ANIMAL

"An escaped animal?" Rose asked, now admittedly intrigued herself.

"Unlikely," the Doctor mumbled, looking all around the small town square lined with shops in which the TARDIS had materialised. "Nowhere round here for an animal to escape from." He turned back to Rose, wearing that expression that pretended to ask permission for him to do something that he was going to do anyway.

"You think it's alien?" she asked.

He nodded, his face breaking out into a wide beam. Rose tried to stand her ground on a matter of principle, but found that, in the light of another – possibly dangerous – alien incursion on her home planet, it was rather difficult to pretend that she would rather be screamed at by her mother for not coming back within the promised ten seconds.

But she wasn't going to let the Doctor know that.

She sighed. "I'm not going home, am I?" she asked.

"Not yet," he grinned, taking her hand in his and running off in the direction of their latest adventure.

They investigated for two hours, finding out the nature of the attacks and that – mercifully – those involved had only been injured, not killed. They took a trip to the nearest hospital in the TARDIS – and the fact that they made it to the right place this time rather than ending up on stage in the Sydney Opera House made Rose very suspicious indeed – to talk to one of the victims, who described the 'monster', as they called it, as a bat about the size of a pigeon, but with arms, legs, claws, and perfect vision in its bright yellow eyes.

"Sounds a bit like a Zubat, but with arms," the Doctor had remarked once they got back to the control room.

"A Zubat?" Rose had enquired, wanting to know where in the universe that alien hailed from – only to be faced with a confused look from her companion, as though she should have known exactly what he was talking about. "What?" She wondered if he had spoken of Zubatland once while he was under the grating, fixing things, and she had either not heard him or simply not been listening.

"Didn't you ever watch Pokémon?" he asked.

"No."

The Doctor had scoffed at this. "You humans, you go on and on about TV, but you never seem to watch anything good."

In the end, the Doctor had managed to identify the alien as a Waybuh, a small creature with bat-like wings and four limbs equipped with sharp claws – that came from a planet that, after ten minutes of trying, Rose couldn't pronounce, but that in its natural habitat, it was a rather timid creature.

"I've no idea how it ended up on earth, but it must be terrified. If we can find it and take it home, the attacks will stop."

They eventually tracked it down to a large antiques shop on the edge of the town – which Rose thought looked more like a warehouse full of old junk than a shop – and had gone in to find the owner and the staff cowering under the desk, and the ringing sounds of smashing antiques echoing from deeper within the shop.

The Doctor had blagged their way in with the psychic paper, claiming that they were pest control experts, and sent all of the terrified shop workers home.

"How do we catch it?" Rose asked.

"Simple: we knock it out. Good blow to the head should do it," the Doctor explained, pulling two golf clubs out of a golf bag next to a glass cabinet filled with jewellery and tossing one over to Rose, who caught it deftly and swirled it round in her hand.

And so they set off in pursuit of the Waybuh, following the sounds of destruction all through the shop, until they tracked it down to a room that was set out like a maze, where all of the walls were made of mirrors.

It was the most disorientating room that Rose had ever been in. Everywhere she looked, she saw an infinite number of herself and the other mirrors in the room, as all the mirrors faced each other and reflected the reflections back and forth so that each one seemed to lead down a long tunnel of the same image repeated over and over.

She wasn't sure when she and the Doctor had got separated, and she saw him in the mirrors so often that she found herself not entirely sure that they had been separated at all. She merely wandered around the room, taking each step carefully and cautiously in case she was not walking towards a legitimate space but a reflection and she would soon collide with a mirror. From the sound of the thundering footsteps somewhere else in the room, she guessed that the Doctor was not being as cautious. She hoped that she wouldn't have to pull glass shards out of his face when they got back to the TARDIS.

It was when she turned a corner – or, rather, she thought that she was turning a corner, but was in actuality just turning towards a mirror – that she saw it.

It wasn't the Doctor, of that she was certain. Nor did she even think that it was his reflection; it may have been a reflection of a reflection, but it wasn't his physical form.

For, although the person who flashed passed in the mirror had the appearance of the Doctor – the same short hair, the same leather jacket, the same grey jumper – there was something very different about that person to the Doctor she knew.

It was gone in a second, however, and she was left in doubt as to whether she had seen it at all.

Then she saw something suspended in the air behind her: a bat-like creature about the size of a pigeon, but with arms and legs and bright purple skin.

The Waybuh.

Not entirely sure if it was worth it, or if she was going to hear an almighty crash and be covered with shards of glass once she had done so, Rose turned on her heel and swung the golf club up and over her head. The head of the club hit something that was caught with the motion and thudded into the ground. The Waybuh lay there twitching its wings for a while before it stilled, unconscious and ready to be returned to its home planet.

Rose called for the Doctor, declaring that she had caught the Wayhuh and that they could leave. It took a whole ten minutes – during which Rose had to sing 'Ten Green Bottles' through twice so that he could follow her voice – for the Doctor to find her, and another fifteen before they found their way out of the hall of mirrors, both disorientated and feeling the internal pressure of imminent headaches.

They made their way back to the TARDIS with the Waybuh, ready to take it home, but Rose was still thinking of what she had seen in the hall of mirrors. For it may not have been a reflection, but a mere reflection of a reflection, but whatever it was and however many mirrors may have been reflecting the same image, she was sure that it had been the Doctor's reflection, and she was sure that, in his reflection, he had wings.