He leans back a little and sighs.  "Yyyye-ap, granted, there are a lot of ways it could go wrong."

"...There is a sort of - thing - you could do, though.  It's called the Catalax maneuver.  Relatively simple, hit a few buttons and pull a few levers in the right order, not too bad if you muck it up.  You'll sort of - skid, a few months backward in time, if you do it right.  Problem one is that's not enough time to get back to me, you'd have to hope Sarah Jane wound up inside the Catalax window.  And problem two is that it's not good for the TARDIS.  She'd be laid up for a few days at least before she could make another trip.  Which isn't too bad tactically speaking - assuming the repair shop is still abandoned a few months ago, you can just shoo people away, and you'd probably have to wait a little while for Sarah Jane to show up anyway if you're aiming to show up before she does.  But it's not something I like to ask of her."

"It - hurts her?"

"It does."

He sighs, leans on the console.  "Is there - anything else?  ...I bet this wouldn't work but it seems like we should be able to, like... like what if we said, okay we'll have you from the future come rescue you from the past, and the first thing you do once you're rescued is become you from the future and go rescue your past self, right?  That's - self-consistent or self-stable or whatever it's called, when a time loop isn't a paradox?"

"It'd be self-consistent if it happened but there's no way for us to cause it to happen.  I can cause you to show up from the future with my TARDIS by sending you this message, which I don't need a TARDIS to do.  The causal chain starts from a decision I make, and an action I take, outside the time loop.  If my future self came back from the future and gave me the tools I needed to go back and rescue myself, if you tried to follow the chain of causality, you'd find it going in a circle.  Nothing my past self, my rescued self, did from outside the time loop would cause it to happen.  Which means that I can't do anything to implement that plan, since my future self hasn't come back to rescue me.  If he did, it wouldn't be because of actions I took to make it happen, it'd just be once-in-a-universe blind luck."

He nods.  "I - think I get that.  Okay.  And - I don't know, there's no one else who can fly the TARDIS...?"

"No one else on Earth, in your time.  There was a - "

"No.  No one else."

"Okay.  Can I have a minute to stretch my legs and think - no, I'll just pause both recordings and start recording again in like five minutes, would that work?"

"It'd work.  Don't take too long, though."

He nods.  Hits the pause button on his phone and on the display screen.

Sets his phone down, on an empty patch of terminal, and closes his eyes.

There's two concentric circular catwalks, circumscribing the TARDIS's command console; one just up against it, for standing on while you fly it, and one separated from it by space and railings, connected by a few pathways with little three-step stairways.  He moves to the outer catwalk and - walks.  Slowly, in a circle around the console.

It's all spinning in his head, the past day.  It probably hasn't even been an hour, since he met Sarah Jane, and in that time he's run for his life and pressed her for answers and help her unlock the TARDIS, and defeated a Weeping Angel, and met another stranger and talked to him across time, crammed his head full of a new alien time-travel logic.  And everything about the mysterious blue box that's dogged his thoughts - it's a person, it's a spaceship, it's bigger on the inside, it knows him and it's been talking to him and it likes him, it's a she, should he be calling her it if she's a person?  The man who called himself the Doctor called her an it, but he also called it a her.  And it's his friend, and the only way it's safe for him to fly her back to Sarah Jane is to hurt her.

It's so much.

And yet he doesn't want to cry, not really, which is insane in itself because when doesn't he cry.  The world's gone insane around him - or maybe he's gone insane, maybe he's just huddled in that alley hallucinating all of this - and it could just be an adrenalin high, but he feels like - even as it whirls in his head, even as he lets it whirl in his head and just walks, in a circle, around the console - he feels like he's getting a grip on it.  Everything else can fall away, it doesn't matter what happens except in the next five or ten or thirty minutes.  He's focused in, on this.

He stares at the console.

All things considered he should probably talk to the TARDIS about this.

He walks up the catwalk and leans on the console and looks up.  At the pillar.  He doesn't know why, but it feels right.

"Hey."

Hey.

"I've been talking to - the Doctor.  I don't know how much of the conversation you were following.  Or if you could."

"The gist of it is - he and Sarah Jane are both stuck back in time.  Sarah Jane is hurt, so he wants to travel back and make sure she's okay; and he thinks it's dangerous for him to stick around in one place for a year, without you around."

Reasonable.

" - I keep - feeling like I'm hearing things from you.  Am I?"

<333

Yeah, you are~

Little grin.

"I hope that was a yes."

"So - he wants me to pilot you back in time, to pick him up or to pick up Sarah Jane.  But - I don't think it'd be safe for me to really fly you, and I don't think he does either - so he suggested something else, something called a Catalax maneuver, which would be easy for me but I guess hard or painful or - unpleasant - for you."

Spin up for a short journey and then hit the emergency brake and the nitro boost at the same time.  She's familiar; she's done it once before.

"Was it - okay?"