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lizbeeSeriously. It was 2008, and a bunch of us decided to take advantage of the Tenth Doctor's temporarily companionless state to write a virtual season where he was travelling with a not-dead Romana.
Needless to say, we didn't get the 13 fics we were aiming for, but I posted two, andvioletisblue posted two, which don't seem to be on the AO3 but they're bloody marvellous.
Then we kind of stalled.
Anyway, I wrote "The Nightmare Room", but my betas said it needed work, and I was like, "Work? PAH!" and went off to do something else. Or so I assume. Anyway, 8000 words in which the Doctor and Romana are trapped in the TARDIS and there's something else in there with them.
(violetisblue described it as a story about advanced auto-repair.)
"The Nightmare Room"
by LizBee
"Romana? Are you in there?"
No answer. The Doctor considered entering uninvited, but he couldn't quite bring himself to move. Instead, he stood outside Romana's room and let his tongue get away with him.
"I was thinking," he said, "that we should pay a visit to Arvetrin Prime. Thirty-second century, nice and peaceful, and the Matriarch's an old friend – well, not quite a friend, more of an acquaintance, which is to say I saved her great-grandmother's life once, I figure that's worth a nod, anyway. What do you say?"
Silence.
"No, scrap Arvetrin, it's boring. Let's go to Earth. Nineteen-thirties. Bit awful, but never dull. You'll love the clothes, and we can go dancing, and maybe mess about in Spain, all the best people'll be there. Except for Dorothy, but we can take her to lunch. She wrote a book about me, you know. Well, she changed a few of the details, most of them, actually, but I planted the seed."
No answer, and on the one hand he couldn't blame her, and yet – he opened her door and stepped into Romana's room.
Or rooms, actually. Obviously she'd felt that one room alone wasn't quite enough, or maybe the TARDIS had given them to her. All in dark purples and rich fabrics, an eightieth century light sculpture taking up most of one side, then reflected in the mirror that covered the wall opposite. In front of the mirror stood a sealed jar, a fragment of coral growing within. The Doctor reached out to touch it, then pulled back. It was many centuries since he'd seen a growing TARDIS.
"Romana?"
But it was obvious she wasn't there, and he'd just spent ten minutes cajoling an empty suite.
Well, fine. If she was going to be like that, he could wait. He was good at that sort of thing, or used to be. He could wait for years, decades, watching while some plan came to fruition. She had to come back eventually, unless she was camping out in the library or the gymnasium, and he couldn't quite see her leaving these dark, calm rooms forever. Of course, he'd thought that before, when she favoured pastels and chrome bookshelves, and he'd been wrong. He'd jettisoned all of it and moved on, but moving on seemed to become more difficult with age, and he seemed to miss her already.
Then there was a distant hum, as ancient engines were engaged, and the throb of the time rotor became audible even in these secluded chambers – the Doctor was on his feet, not bothering to close the door behind him in his race to reach the console room.
*
"Are we going somewhere?" the Doctor asked, racing into the console room from parts unknown. His hair was a mess, his tie was badly knotted, and had Romana been in the mood to be sympathetic, she might have regretted that her oldest friend was in such a state.
But she was in no mood to feel empathy for the Doctor, or anything at all much, and instead of dwelling on that curious absence of emotion, she concentrated on the console and didn't hear him speak until he repeated, "Are we going somewhere?"
"Arcadia," she said. She snuck a sideways glance, to see how he received this news. The speechlessness was quite gratifying.
"There's nothing there," he said when he'd found his voice.
"Then," she told him, adjusting the compensators, "we're going to the place where Arcadia used to be."
She still remembered the sinking of her hearts when she heard that Arcadia had fallen to the Daleks. They had given Time Lord technology to the Arcadians – she had given Time Lord technology to the Arcadians, in defiance of every law and tradition of Gallifrey – and yet the planet had been taken, its population massacred and enslaved, and the Doctor had been a witness to the whole disaster.
The engines slowed and came to a stop.
"Here we are," Romana said, pointlessly. She was already regretting her decision to bring them here, but it was too late, and there were no ghosts here, only dust and gas and a cold, lonely comet.
"It's dead," said the Doctor, "it's always been dead. It's an empty system with a dying sun, nothing else." He met Romana's eyes. "Were you expecting to find a few shards of a transduction generator?"
"That would be silly. I don't know, maybe." She crossed her arms. "Is there anything left of Gallifrey?"
"No," he said, then added, almost unwillingly, "there are moments – if you have the right kind of time ship and enough natural sensitivity to temporal distortions – there are pockets where you might find – oh, a rock, a bit of dust. Maybe a Dalek shell, dead but for some residual automatic defences. They exist for seconds, or less, and then they're gone. Back to oblivion."
"I want to see it."
The Doctor looked away.
"You watched Gallifrey burn," she said. "You made it happen, and I – I don't know yet if I hate you for that, but I was the President, and I feel – I have – I need to see it."
"I know." He was speaking more to the console than to her. "I knew you'd want to go," he hesitated, "home. I just hoped I could—"
"Talk me out of it?"
"Put it off." He stepped back, squared his shoulders and said, "the co-ordinates haven't changed."
He watched her as she set the course, and Romana wished she knew what he was thinking, and that she could feel anything for him, anything at all, other than this pallid resentment.
She released the helmic regulator and closed her eyes as the TARDIS entered the vortex.
*
He had forgotten it was beautiful.
He had nightmares sometimes, where Gallifrey's absence was a great, gaping wound in reality, a blood-red maw that pursued him into eternity and beyond. The dreams had become more powerful than his memories, and it was shocking to stand beside Romana and see, not red horrors, but the crystalline beauty of a series of temporal impossibilities.
The Kasterborous cluster contained only dark matter, now, a field of emptiness spanning billions of light years. But here and there – he could even see them with his naked eyes – there were flashes as another reality sprang into temporary existence, shone for a moment and evaporated.
"It's so cold," Romana said.
They were sitting in the doorway of the TARDIS, letting the extrapolator project a protective shield around them. It was warm; the TARDIS had become accustomed to catering for human tastes, and he hadn't quite remembered how to adjust the settings, but Romana was shivering. There were goosebumps on her bare arms.
"—It's an Earth term, 'goosebumps', and not even universal, some of them call it 'chicken skin', which is pretty unpleasant," he was on his feet, pulling his coat off the railing and draping it over her shoulders, "I don't think there was ever a Gallifreyan term for horripilation. Too primitive. Embarrassing. Like sex."
"You're babbling," said Romana, and her voice was as cool as her skin. He stopped. She drew her legs up to her chest. His coat covered her almost entirely, like a blanket. He always found it a bit comforting, anyway, that was a childish reflex, probably, although he couldn't remember being particularly attached to bedding as a kid, but that was a long time ago—
"I take it this is a nervous reflex," said Romana when he'd trailed off.
"Words are comfortable."
"Yes, of course, you control them." She looked slightly pleased, as if a piece of the puzzle had fallen into place – or because she'd simply had a long-standing theory confirmed. "Do you find silence uncomfortable."
"No," he said. "No, no, no, you are not going to take your triple alpha in temporal physics and xeno-sociology and minor in psychology and put me on your couch." He turned back to the console, setting co-ordinates to leave.
"Not yet," Romana said. Behind her, a moon flickered into existence, then vanished. "Please."
"It's dangerous."
"As if that ever stops you."
He opened his mouth to reply, but the TARDIS was rocked by small paradox.
"That," he said, "was just a bit of dust intruding on our dimension. Anything larger, or closer—"
"A few minutes more," Romana said, "just a few minutes."
He could have refused her, he had a long list of very good reasons why it was a bad idea to stay, but he couldn't bring himself to put them all into words. His fault their home had been replaced by dark matter and shimmering temporal shifts, and his fault that she'd caught him in a lie. That there had been a lie to catch.
"A few minutes," he told her.
Then the console exploded.
The vortex was opening around them, and the Doctor was climbing to his feet again, while Romana clung to the railings in the entrance and struggled to close the doors.
"Romana!"
She was being pulled out, and for a second he was somewhere else, she was a different woman. He threw himself across the room to help her, grabbing her around the waist to steady her, then reaching for the railing opposite. She was saying something, but he couldn't hear anything above the rushing of the vortex and the crackle and spark of the console. His hands closed around a door, just as she got a grip on the other, and it was just a matter of throwing his weight against it and letting gravity do the rest. The doors closed at the same moment, and they both fell to the floor.
There was only a moment of relief; his TARDIS was damaged, the console still sparking. The Doctor cast about for the fire extinguisher, the neon green one, use only in case of spontaneous explosions. It wasn't where he'd thought it would be, but then Romana shouted, "Doctor!" and threw it into his hands.
The last flames and sparks died quickly, leaving an acrid smell of burnt wiring and melted plastic. Silence fell, and darkness.
"What happened?" Romana asked.
"No idea," he said, circling the console. Repairable, yes, provided he could find the right materials and everything. It had suffered worse, probably. "Where are we?"
"In the vortex," Romana said. She let his coat cuffs cover her hands and gingerly moved the screen around to show him. The monitor's casing was melted, but the display itself was clear. Positively unmistakable. Anything but straightforward.
"That's impossible," he said.
"Very unlikely, perhaps, but hardly impossible."
"Can you calculate our co-ordinates manually?"
"Yes," she said, and didn't even take the opportunity to get a dig in about his mathematical failings. "Paper--?"
"Inner pocket, on the left. And a pen. I think there's a quad-dimensional calculator somewhere in there as well."
"How primitive. It'd be charming if the situation wasn't so—"
"Pass me the sonic screwdriver?"
She put it in his hand, and he ducked beneath the console.
"What's gotten into you?" he asked quietly.
"Doctor?"
"I wasn't talking to you."
For a few minutes, the only sounds were the scratch of Romana's pen, and her sighs of frustration at the limited capabilities of the calculator, and the hum of the sonic screwdriver.
Eventually Romana said, "Doctor? The scanner is quite correct, I'm afraid. We're drifting through the vortex."
"Check again."
"I have," she snapped, "and don't tell me it's impossible, I think I understand the science rather better than you."
"How?" he asked, feeling hollow.
"I don't know." She joined him beneath the console. "The TARDIS?"
"Her power's being drained away. There must be a leak in the Artron filters, but I can't maintain power long enough to run a diagnostic."
To his surprise, Romana squeezed his shoulder. "I'll deal with it," she said. "Stay here and repair the console. No point having power if we can't control it."
"There's a complete – well, mostly complete – toolkit in the storage room near the bins."
"Thanks."
"Be careful."
Romana turned back, her face unreadable. "Thank you," she said, and walked away.
*
The TARDIS was dark, but for the flicker and flash of a few damaged lights. It was silent, too, but shuddering with the uncontrolled movement through the vortex. The effect was unsettling.
Romana didn't believe in artronovores, or toclafane, or any of the horrors that small Gallifreyan children had once used to scare each other. As a girl, she had lain awake in her dormitory, listening to her classmates telling ridiculous stories about the monsters that might take up residence in an old TARDIS, and she'd smiled to herself, privately, secure in the knowledge that she would never shriek in exaggerated terror at a patently mythical creature.
In retrospect, she felt, as she made her way through a dark corridor, it might have been better had she been less secure in her own superiority. A few years of squealing at fictional monsters might have left her better prepared to face the real kind, and perhaps she wouldn't feel quite so anxious, walking alone through the lower corridors of an ancient TARDIS.
And she was beginning to wish she'd at least paused to put shoes on.
Something skittered behind her. Romana whirled around, but there was nothing there.
Over-active imagination, she told herself, heightened by anxiety and the stress of returning to the place where home had once existed, and concern about the TARDIS. And to prove it, she pulled a hyperspatial spanner out of the Doctor's not-even-nearly-complete toolkit and opened the panel by her feet.
There. Loose wires and a missing filter. Typical of the Doctor's non-existent maintenance regime, just the sort of thing that would cause problems in the wider system. And quite perfect for creating unexpected noises to scare jumpy Time Lords.
Romana pushed her hair out of her face, replaced the panel and kept going.
*
"Aaaaaaaaand the energy circuit's connected to the power cell, and the power cell's connected to the secondary helmic control, and the secondary helmic control's connected to ... well, it should be connected to something, but I can't tell what." The Doctor tapped a burnt, blackened piece of metal with his finger. "I wonder if I still have the schematics?"
Footsteps approached behind him. Without looking up, he said, "Didn't I tell you not to come back until you had the power back online? If I didn't, I definitely meant to."
Romana said nothing.
"Still, as long as you're here, what's the secondary helmic control meant to be linked to? Is it the external sensors, or the trans-temporal filters? And don't say anything snide. It's been a long time since I took elementary TARDIS care, and I'm pretty sure I failed."
Silence.
"Romana?"
"Grandfather?"
He was on his feet before he even had a chance to think—
"Susan?"
He caught a glimpse of a slim figure, a dark-haired girl with knowing eyes.
"Susan!"
She faded into the shadows and vanished. The Doctor leaned against the console, aware of nothing but the pounding of his hearts and the stirring of a very old memory.
*
The further Romana descended into the TARDIS, the darker it became, until the only light was pallid and useless. It was like being deep underwater, surrounded by unfamiliar creatures, unable to move or breathe—
Romana swore under her breath and fumbled in her toolkit for a torch. Light chased nightmares away. She'd commanded an army in war, and survived, and she was not afraid of the dark.
Still, she found herself moving ever more slowly, hesitant to take a step before she had shone the torch into every crevice and corner.
Sometimes she heard the whisper of voices, never close enough to become intelligible. The hairs on the back of her neck lifted. Of course, this was a very old TARDIS, and had carried so many people... It was simultaneously eerie and reassuring to know that some echo of past occupants lingered, here in the depths where Artron energy was gathered and purified.
Romana picked up her pace. With the silence broken, the dark was less fearsome, and she had a job to do.
In the centuries between her first occupancy and now, the TARDIS had rearranged itself: she found the cloister room directly above the Artron receptor. The receptor powered the TARDIS core, the very heart of the machine. Normally, it would be alive with power, almost singing with the energy of the vortex and the Time Lords it carried – but now it was almost silent, except for an uneven drone.
Romana put her tools down and set to work.
"When this is over," she promised the TARDIS as she wrestled the third access panel open, "I shall have a very serious discussion with the Doctor about regular maintenance checks."
The power chambers were long and narrow, so crammed with components that she had to lie flat on her back to access the energy gauges. Every tap and hiss of the damaged systems was amplified, and she felt strangely vulnerable, lying prone so close to an immense, damaged power system. She concentrated on reciting her forty-two times tables and not panicking at every distant scrape of metal against metal.
Only – the metallic scrapes were getting louder, and closer, and faster. Romana found she was anticipating each one. Realign a power coupling, scrape, replace the inversion feed, scrape, check the energy gauge, scrape—
A shrill ring broke her concentration. Romana dropped her tools and swallowed a scream. She followed the sound to her toolkit, scrabbled around, and pulled an obsolete Martian commlink from the bottom.
"Doctor!" Her voice was hoarse. "You might have warned me!"
"Sorry. Forgot it was there. Surprised it still works."
"Are you all right?" Romana leaned up on one elbow. "You sound—"
"I'm fine," he said, too quickly. "Right as rain. How are you going?"
"Not well," she admitted. "The power chambers are all full, but the energy circuits themselves are all damaged. I can fix it, but it will take time. And—" she hesitated.
"What?"
"There's something down here."
"What?"
"I thought it was just the damaged systems making noise, but it doesn't sound right. There's something in the TARDIS."
"Why are you whispering?"
"I don't—" She paused, then said in a normal tone, "I don't know. It's just instinct."
"Come up here," said the Doctor. "We should stay together."
"Doctor, you don't sound remotely fine – oh."
"What is it?"
Romana began to ease herself out of the power chamber, groping with her free hand for the tools that would make the best weapons. The laser scalpel. The little micro-drill. It was a paltry arsenal.
As far as she could, she kept her eyes on the upper level of the chamber, five hundred metres overhead. The words, I am making eye-contact with death were running through her head, as if they meant something. The tiny machine's eye-stalk followed her, but it was otherwise still.
"Romana?" the Doctor was saying urgently.
"Not now," she hissed. She reached the deck, and she had an awful image of the ground covered with the creatures, mechanical pincers waiting to catch her bare feet. She kept going, sliding herself out of the chamber until she was standing upright, her weapons in her hands. Every instinct was telling her to run, but another part of her mind said that to run would be to die.
She walked slowly out into the corridor – the whispers had fallen silent – and took one careful step after another, until the cloister room had vanished behind her. Then her courage finally gave way, and she broke into a run.
From behind her – above her? -- came the sound of scurrying metal feet. Did she dare turn around? No, that would be a mistake, but the creature was drawing her closer—
Romana stopped, swung around, took aim with the micro-drill and fired. And again, and again. The creature dropped from the ceiling, landing belly-up, legs and pincers twitching madly. Romana found the laser scalpel, a hopelessly inadequate weapon, and examined the soft under-side of the carapace. Then she took aim and half-threw, half-dropped the little knife through the thin metal casing.
The creature screamed, a horrible metallic sound, and then became still. A clear, oily fluid leaked out around the wound.
Romana knelt gingerly by the creature, searching for likely booby traps. Finding none – or at least, recognising none – she picked it up by one leg. Holding it at arms length, she continued on her way in a nervous half-jog.
Several minutes passed before she realised she was lost. And she didn't believe it at first, because this was her home, or had been, and how dare the TARDIS go shifting around without telling her?
"As self-preservation measures go," she said out loud, "this is one of the less productive."
She kept walking, using the micro-drill to mark her path. She felt like a common vandal, but making future plans to repair the damage was preferable to thinking about the bio-mechanoid creature in her other hand.
Romana entered a door that had earlier led to the swimming pool, turned to leave her mark on the door, and nearly screamed as something touched her shoulder. She swung around, brandishing the drill in one hand and the creature in the other, and froze.
"Just me," the Doctor said. In one hand, he was holding an enormous ball of string. A strand of the stuff trailed behind him, into the shadows.
"My hearts nearly stopped," Romana growled.
"Sorry. Didn't want to call out. Wasn't sure what might be around. Who's your friend?"
Romana held the creature up.
"It tried to kill me," she said.
"It looks like—"
"I know." Romana took a deep breath, and with a conscious effort, managed to slow her hearts. "I take it you know the way back to the console room?"
"Just follow the string." He took her hand as they set out, and she heard him say softly, "And to think you wanted to throw it out."
*
They dissected it on the console, an unpleasant choice, but the only option under the circumstances. Romana stepped back to let the Doctor split the carapace open, revealing the mutant inside.
"They're called Stalkers," she said, leaning in to detach the little eyestalk. "The Daleks created them to infiltrate and disable TARDISes."
"Effective." The Doctor picked up a tentacle and held it up to the lamp he had suspended over the console. "Were you going to tell me about them at any stage? My lady president?"
"I was going to," Romana snapped, "but then some idiot went and destroyed our planet, and the problem was a bit academic after that."
"This," said the Doctor, holding up a layer of mutant skin and examining the tiny, underpowered disruptor, "isn't exactly academic."
"But Gallifrey is still gone."
The Doctor rounded on her, sweeping the Stalker carapace to the ground.
"Is this your revenge?" he demanded, "are you punishing me for Gallifrey?"
"You're mad."
"You think you don't bear responsibility? You were the president--"
"The first battles were fought long before I took office."
"Of course." There was a fey light in the Doctor's eyes. "You were still at school when I met Davros for the first time. You were the youngest president in four millennia. A well-trained child, prattling away for the amusement of the grown-ups."
Romana took a step back. He followed.
"Do you know what the Master said when he found out you were commanding troops?" she asked. "He said you were just biding your time until you could run away."
"But I wasn't the one who ran," the Doctor said. "I told you not to bring him back."
"And I told you not to interfere with my decisions." Romana drew a shaky breath. "Were you satisfied, when he had Earth in his power? Did you feel vindicated? It suited you well enough to accuse him of destroying Gallifrey. Martha told me how you held him as he died." She was still backing away as she spoke. "You're mad, Doctor. You've been alone too long. Feeding off your own hubris--" She broke off as the Doctor moved, the sonic screwdriver flashing in his hand. She stopped and drew a deep, shaky breath. "It's not a weapon," she said quietly. "It's a tool, Doctor, not a weapon, you always said that."
"Things change. That's the essence of time."
"Now you're just being – portentous."
He raised his hand, and she reached behind her – she was leaning against a railing, why had she been so foolish as to leave the laser drill on the console? -- her hand closed around something metal. She drew back, ready to strike, but the Doctor fell back in surprise.
"Susan," he breathed.
"What?" Romana opened her hand, and watched without curiosity as the scissors fell to the deck with a clatter. She'd never even seen them before. "Doctor--"
He was retreating, eyes wide, face grey. "I'm sorry," he said, "so sorry. I thought – I don't – Susan--"
"What did you see, Doctor?" Romana took a careful step forward, holding her hands out.
"She attacked Barbara with those scissors. I was a young man, I didn't know what was happening. It was a temporary madness. I was ... so afraid." His gaze was distant. "These strangers, these aliens were in my TARDIS, and I had no control. Susan was – she was growing up – and the Daleks – my life was changing so fast."
Romana turned back to look at the fallen scissors.
They were no longer there.
She wondered if her hands had always been empty.
"It's the TARDIS," the Doctor said. "She's doing this to us. She's scared, she needs help." He rushed to the console, half-adjusting, half-caressing its controls. "That wasn't us," he said, although he didn't sound like he entirely believed it. "It was her."
Romana knelt to examine the fallen Stalker, lying forgotten on the floor.
"I don't think it was the TARDIS," she said.
*
The Doctor retreated to the far corner of the console room, not taking his eyes off the Stalker. Even disabled, it exuded malevolence, and Romana looked terribly vulnerable as she knelt over it, impossibly small and pale. He could wrap one hand around her neck, he thought, and then she would die, and then he could do it again, and again, and again.
His breath caught in his throat as he realised what he was thinking. Romana looked up sharply.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"Fine," he said.
"Liar."
He swung around to face her, but the wave of anger was retreating as quickly as it had appeared, and he was just a tired old man in a tired old ship, both of them dying by inches.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"You're obviously not all right," she said, and he appreciated her attempt at sounding businesslike. "Do you need to rest?"
"No," he said quickly. "It wouldn't be safe."
"No, I suppose not."
"How many Stalkers do you think there are?"
"An infected TARDIS landed in the Citadel. The scientists found a nest of about a dozen, although they thought there could be more. We couldn't save the TARDIS." She wrapped her arms around herself. "We shut down its defences and sent it into the sun."
"That's ... not what I wanted to hear."
"What would you prefer, Doctor?" Romana snapped. "Should I lie?"
"No. Just—"
He gazed at the Stalker. Such a typical Dalek creation, with no purpose but to infiltrate and destroy the most ancient and perfect time ships the universe had ever held. And now they were going to claim the TARDIS, and the Time War would come to a pathetic end. Two lost Time Lords, alone in the dark, eternity reduced to a handful of dust. He put his hands in his pockets. "Davros would be proud," he said.
"What?"
The Doctor ignored her. "Maybe that's how we defeat them, thinking like Davros. More cunning. More dangerous." He began to pull the Stalker's carapace to pieces, setting aside any useful components.
"Doctor," said Romana, crouching by his side, speaking slowly and clearly as if addressing a child or an imbecile, "what are you doing?"
"Making a weapon."
"It looks like a tracking device."
"Right, well, I said 'weapon', but I was referring to knowledge as a powerful force, especially the kind of knowledge that involves knowing all the monsters are."
"Couldn't detach the venom sacs?"
"Stuck fast, and I didn't want to fiddle around without gloves." He fitted the final component. "Like it? I call it a Stalker-stalker."
"But does it work?"
The Doctor switched it on.
"There, " he said, feeling a smile cross his face. "What do you think?"
There was nothing as obvious as a display screen, because he hadn't had the equipment to rig one up. Instead, the readings were conveyed by shifts in electrical currents, and interpreted by – well, instinct, but it was finely honed instinct. He knew where the enemy was, now, and the enemy was more or less who it had been all along. And they were close, so close—
"Come on," he said to Romana, "let's go hunting."
Romana's answering smile didn't meet her eyes.
*
The darkness seemed deeper this time, and every noise was amplified a hundred-fold. The presence of the Doctor by Romana's side should have been reassuring, but he might as well have been a stranger.
That's just the Stalkers putting ideas in your head, she told herself, and squeezed the Doctor's hand.
"I won't let you go," he said.
Romana swallowed.
"I know," she said.
There was a low, distant scuttling. The Doctor's hand tightened around hers.
"When I say run," he said. Romana nodded. They moved onwards, listening for the tell-tale tick of Stalker legs. Closer. Closer. Romana's hearts were pounding. The Doctor's hand was damp. Closer.
There was no need to say it. They had the same thought, even as their pace increased, even as they were running.
"Where?" Romana breathed.
"The core."
She nearly stopped, but the survival instinct was too strong. She pulled her hand out of the Doctor's and ran faster—
And something chittered behind her, and sharp metal legs were on her back, closing around her throat. Romana groped wildly behind her, waiting for the fatal bite, trying to force herself to breathe.
"Romana!"
The Stalker's grip weakened as it defended itself from the Doctor's attack. Romana drew a deep breath, just as the sonic screwdriver shrieked in her ear. There was a blinding flash on the edge of her vision, a wave of heat, and the Doctor yelped with pain – but the Stalker had let go, falling to the floor in a twitching, clicking mass.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
The Doctor surveyed the remnants of his Stalker-Stalker, a rueful expression on his face. "My metaphorical weapon ended up a bit literal." He picked up the sonic screwdriver, using his left hand. The right, Romana saw, was red and blistered.
"We should keep moving," she said. "There's a first aid kit in the lower bathroom, as I recall, and—"
"The core," the Doctor said, flexing his burnt hand.
"But—"
Behind them, far off in the darkness, came an ominous clicking.
"No time," said the Doctor. He marched forward, not looking at Romana. Reluctantly, with one last, long look into the shadows, she followed.
*
The Doctor's hearts were pounding in time with the throbbing of his burnt hand. And his mind was overflowing with ideas and plans, none of which he could even begin to put into words. If he could get to the core, the psychic centre of the TARDIS, then she could tell them what she needed.
"You're making a mistake," said Romana.
"The TARDIS needs me." Get to the core. The TARDIS will know. He repeated it like a mantra, trying to slow his hearts and numb his hand.
"And what will we do when we get there?" Fear made Romana's voice crack. It was an ugly emotion, too small for such an ancient species. In the darkness, they were all children. The Doctor looked back at her. "You must consider," she said, "the Stalkers are certainly there all ready."
"She needs me," he repeated, but it was hollow. For a moment he was a child again, standing before the Untempered Schism, caught in the moment between gazing into the abyss, and turning to flee. "She – I—"
"Doctor," said Romana gently, "if the Stalkers are manipulating her psychic core—"
"They can manipulate us just as easily." He clenched his hands, welcoming the new flood of pain. "We need a better plan."
"Got anything in mind?"
He turned and wrenched a wall panel free.
"Improvise," he said.
The panel was too heavy to manage one-handed, but Romana took the weight and helped him settle it on the floor with a soft, metallic thud.
For a second, he found himself hoping that the Stalkers had overheard him. He hoped they had sufficient intelligence to feel emotion. He hoped they were afraid.
He led Romana down through the narrow tubes and vents that contained the working parts of the TARDIS. Artron conductors. Gravitic compensators. The veins and arteries of his ship, all sluggish and unresponsive, but undoubtedly alive.
"Do you know where we're going?" Romana asked.
"Like you said. First aid kit in the lower bathroom."
It was an effort to crawl and climb with his injured hand. Only slightly easier when he forgot about hiding the pain.
"At least it's shallow," said Romana, when they paused for breath in the overheated little chamber that contained the hot water system. "A third degree burn would have caused nerve damage. Is it very painful?"
"Bad enough." He found himself unable to stop speaking. "The Master – he was reduced to a husk, but he kept going. Went mad with the pain, though. Never the same."
"I've seen the records." Romana leaned back against the wall, drew her knees up to her chest and closed her eyes.
"Nothing but – but will and hate and – it was like an obsession. Living." The Doctor held his breath and flexed his hand, clenching his jaw against the pain. "You're lucky," he said, when it had passed, "that he didn't run straight to the Daleks. They would have – suited each other."
"The Matrix assigned that potentiality a low probability."
She sounded weary, rather than defensive. Morbid curiosity led the Doctor to ask, "Did the Matrix predict a possible end to the war?"
Romana opened her eyes. "Not the ending you brought about," she said. When the Doctor said nothing, she added, "the Matrix couldn't predict its own destruction."
"If it had—"
"But it didn't." Romana's hands tapped an arrhythmic pattern on her legs. "No one anticipated what you did. You were – as ever – unpredictable."
"Don't," he said. "Don't – be light about it."
She smiled. Her eyes were cold. "I thought you preferred to keep it light. All the little lies you tell to make survival bearable. Martha said—"
"Martha doesn't understand—"
"What it's like to watch one's species die? It seemed to me she had more experience than most humans."
"That," said the Doctor, "was a cheap shot."
"Yes, quite beneath the awesome majesty of our race, but—" she snatched his burnt hand in hers, and he gasped as she squeezed the damaged flesh, "I'm not the one who lied."
"I'm sorry—"
"You let me believe it was the Master." Romana's voice was cracked. "You let me think I was responsible – I brought him back and he destroyed Gallifrey. You let me live with it – you! Knowing what it was like!" She paused to draw a ragged breath. "I'll take responsibility for what he did to Earth. And you. I know – I know what he did to you, and I'm sorry. We pushed him too far. But the man you were ... you wouldn't have lied. Not about Gallifrey." She released him, and a new wave of pain flooded through the Doctor's hand. "Say something," she said.
The Doctor licked his lips.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Good."
With his good hand, the Doctor opened the access panel and eased through the hatch into the bathroom. The medical kit was under the sink; resting on top of it was some oven cleaner, and a few cans of Nitro-9. He transferred each can carefully into the hot water chamber, followed by the medkit, then he folded his body through the hatch and closed the panel again behind him.
"Are you planning to blow the Stalkers up?" Romana asked.
"A couple of fresh cans could take out a Dalek."
"Do a bit of damage to the TARDIS, too."
"I'll take my chances." He rummaged through the medkit. Surely there'd be something for burns, a salve, a skinsheet, an analgesic—
"Do you hate me?" he asked.
"No," Romana said. "It would be like hating an incarnation of myself."
He found a skinsheet, and unwrapped it with his teeth.
"Did you think I wouldn't understand?" she asked.
"How would you forgive me?" He pulled the paper-thin glove over his burnt hand, and felt a prickle as the first damaged cells began to heal.
"It's too much to forgive," said Romana. "Too abstract to comprehend, really. I think I'd have done the same thing you did. I'm not sure." She watched him. "What did it feel like?"
One by one, the Doctor flexed his fingers.
"It was like being a god," he said. "The universe and the vortex opened before me. For a second I could see everything. Might have been an hallucination, though. It was hard to tell."
Romana snorted, and to his amazement, she started to giggle.
"'The lonely god'," she said. "What rot. Time was, you'd have put a galaxy between yourself and anyone who wanted to deify you."
"It's just a name. I've had heaps. Anyway, you spent a few decades as a goddess."
"Living incarnation of a goddess," she corrected, "and that was quite different."
"Oh yeah? How?"
"Well, I couldn't get away."
Silence descended, but for the discordant hum of the TARDIS and the occasional clang of the hot water system. Romana's gaze had turned inwards, and the Doctor knew, without aid of telepathy, what she was thinking.
"You can't," he said, although he didn't quite mean it.
"I'd rather not, but I don't see any other way." Romana pushed her hair out of her face. "Your TARDIS is infected. Even if we can remove the Stalkers, it will die without an infusion of untainted energy."
The Doctor couldn't look at her. His eagerness made him sick. "Your TARDIS will die," he said.
"Yours will live." She shrugged. "These are the choices we make. In a few years' time, when your TARDIS is stable, I'll take a cell culture and start again." She gave him a gentle smile. "I'll lose, what? A few weeks? And we'll survive, Doctor, that's what matters."
She would, he knew, lose a lot more than the time spent nurturing her embryonic TARDIS. Taken from her own capsule, the grown ship would retain a vestigial memory of the bond it had shared with its former mistress. Merged with the Doctor's TARDIS, that race-memory would be overwhelmed by the older, cruder ship.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Romana nodded. "Thank you."
She climbed to her feet and opened the overhead hatch that led into the ventilation shaft.
"Let's get it over with," she said.
*
The embryonic chamber was impossibly light in Romana's hands. Just a sealed glass gestation chamber, the size of a jam jar, containing fluids, nutrients and her future. She cupped her hands around it, meeting the Doctor's eyes in the mirror.
"The core," she said.
"The core."
They kept to maintenance shafts and little-used side corridors for the most part, but the final approach could only be made openly. The lights flickered, and the scuttling of Stalker-legs was audible, even over the pounding of Romana's hearts.
"Do you hear that?" the Doctor asked.
"They're getting closer."
"No, no – the voices, can't you hear them?"
The Doctor's face was alight with hope. Romana stopped walking, trying to find a gentle way to tell him it was another illusion. In that moment of stillness she heard them: distant voice, carried over time in the memory of the ship that carried them:
"—Grandfather--"
"Doctor!"
"Professor—"
"—Create myself—"
"You'll see me again—"
The lights guttered and died, and silence descended with the darkness.
"She's fighting," said the Doctor, "taking all her power, but she'll fight to the end, that's my girl—"
"We'd best do the same," said Romana, dropping her voice to a whisper. "Do you hear—?"
"To the left," he breathed, taking her arm and guiding her. She heard the click of a Nitro-9 can being armed. "Keep back."
He threw the can, and Romana turned away, using her body to shield the gestation chamber. The explosion left her momentarily blind, but she heard the chittering of Stalkers, and the crunches as the Doctor crushed their remnants under his feet.
"Get their weapons," she said.
"Take it," he put one in her hands, a tiny, deadly disrupter with a trigger only her smallest finger could reach. The power charge was tiny. She'd have to make it last.
"You're not—"
"I'm trying to quit."
"Weren't you talking about beating Davros at his own game?"
"Great schemer, Davros. Not much for weapons."
"No, he had Daleks for that."
"Right. Cover me, would you?"
The Doctor strode forward, kicking a few Stalker-corpses out of the way as he advanced down the corridor. He stopped outside the vast doors that marked the entrance to the core. The Seal of Rassilon was still visible, beneath the damage from the Nitro-9 blast. The doors, though, were sealed shut.
"Should I knock?" he asked, glancing speculatively at his last can of explosive, then throwing it back at Romana. "Nah, not really my style. Coming?"
Fragments of metal cut her feet as she followed him, and the whisper of ghosts heralded their entrance into the core.
*
The core was—
--alive, in a sense of the word, vast and ancient and in great pain—
--It was remembering, it remembered everything, it existed in an eternal present—
--every injury
(stripped down, changed into a perverse shadow of herself: paradox machine)
every triumph
(the Doctor's breath, ten years of his life, and it was a fair bargain)
every moment the TARDIS had ever
experienced, all existed as one here in her
psychic core. She was nonlinear and abstract
and any human who ventured this far into her
centre would either die or go mad.
The TARDIS gathered her last reserves of energy, and welcomed the Doctor.
*
The TARDIS was dying.
It was obvious to the Doctor, from the way her lights dimmed to the very taste of the air in the psychic core. "Doctor," a woman's voice whispered, but it was a dying cry.
"I'm sorry," he said.
The stalkers spread out within like a cancer, consuming her energy, transforming her cells. Every moment was now, but the eternal present had become a torture. Paradox machine. Dying. Alone. Afraid.
"I've come to save you," said the Doctor. He didn't know if she heard, or understood. TARDIS sentience had been a subject of debate on Gallifrey for many millennia. He closed his eyes, leaning against the walls, letting her hold him.
There was a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A Stalker. Before the Doctor could move, Romana had raised her weapon. The little arachnoids had no shields; they were satisfyingly vulnerable to their own disruptors.
"I'll only have a few more shots," she said, looking at the power reserves. "We can't waste time."
"Right. I need—"
She put the gestation chamber in his hands.
"Quickly," she said, and turned away.
The core was not a wide room, only a few metres across, but the ceilings was higher than a cathedral. He knelt in the centre of the room and prepared to release the seal on the honeycomb compartment that held the oldest piece of the TARDIS.
He wanted to apologise. To Romana, if nothing else, for destroying her TARDIS a second time. He met her eyes, but said nothing.
The compartment opened smoothly, as if it had been waiting for him. The central section, coral-like and sickly-grey, detached itself from the rest of the TARDIS, and he took it in his hands and pulled—
And sprang to his feet, jumping back. Half a dozen stalkers emerged from the chamber, disruptors armed.
"Romana!"
Her first shot hit its target, but at the moment, a surviving Stalker fired at him. The burst of pain brought him to his knees. The Stalker exploded before his eyes and Romana advanced, brandishing the Nitro-9.
"Get back," she said, "Doctor, take my TARDIS—"
Her voice was distant and distorted. He watched, without interest, as she lured the final Stalker out into the corridor. The TARDIS shook with the resonance of the Nitro-9 explosion. The Doctor closed his eyes.
The pain was getting worse, and his hand was beginning to throb again. He looked at Romana's TARDIS, white and healthy in its jar.
"No."
He hadn't realised he'd spoken out loud until Romana said, "What? Doctor—"
He picked up the centre of his own dying TARDIS.
"Like TARDIS, like Doctor."
"Oh no." Romana was kneeling beside him, her hands on his shoulders. "Doctor, I am not going to let you die – not another regeneration—"
His grip tightened on the centre. The telepathic circuits, he needed to be connected – there – just this tiny part of her, and the TARDIS could do the rest—
"Now," he said, and opened himself to the vortex.
*
Romana shielded her eyes, but the image was burned into her mind: the Doctor, transforming himself into a conduit for the vortex and Artron energy that powered the TARDIS. White-gold energy, blinding in its brightness, pouring through his hands into the centre of his ship, regenerating her dying cells.
Romana's cheeks were wet. She couldn't breathe. She lowered her hands, and through her tears, she saw the Doctor collapse as the last traces of energy left his body.
"Doctor," she whispered. Her hearts were racing, and it took all of her will to resist the urge to succumb to grief and panic. "Doctor!" She took his wrist in her hands and indulged in an irrational hope that might have been prayer.
There was a pulse. Slow and weak, but steady.
"Hold on," she whispered, and picked up the central piece of the TARDIS. It was warm in her hands, humming with life. She replaced it carefully in its chamber, closed the seal and turned back to the Doctor.
He was dying. The colour was fading from his skin, even as the core of the TARDIS was flooded with rejuvenated cells.
Romana held her breath and pressed her hands against his temples.
The Doctor's mind was silent. Not dead, merely peaceful, like a cathedral left empty after a service.
Come back, she told him, we're alive and safe, and we need you.
There was a flicker of life, a spark in the darkness. It was enough. Romana lingered a moment, to pay her respect to the silence. Then she left his mind. His pulse was slightly faster, closer to normal. The Doctor was breathing. Romana stood up, and stepped back.
He opened his eyes.
"Thank you," he said.
Romana retrieved her own TARDIS, safe in its container. Her throat was too tight to speak. She could only smile.
*
"Romana?" The Doctor paused outside the power chamber. "Are you in there?"
"Wait a minute," he heard her call, and he heard her slide down the access way and out of the Artron receptor. She emerged with a mass of wool in her hands.
"You," she said, advancing on him, "of all the imbecilic – immature – careless—!"
"Is that my scarf?" He held out the half-unravelled mess, beaming. "I thought I'd lost it!"
"No, you thought I'd lost it. And I've told you over and over about proper maintenance, and not using whichever bits of clothing you have at hand to make filters—"
"You never said—"
"Well, no, but I never imagined I'd need it!" She dumped the toolkit in his arms, on top of the former scarf. "The energy feeds are all clear," she said over her shoulder, "and if the plumbing still works, I'm going to have a shower." She paused. "What?"
"I don't know, what?"
"You're still smiling." She leaned against the doorframe. "For a man who used himself as an energy conduit, you're looking awfully happy."
"I feel like a new man." He shifted the load in his arms, and let her take his elbow. "New lease of life for the TARDIS – new lease of life for the Doctor. I'm seeing the world with new eyes. Metaphorically. And you know, Romana," he moved to face her, and he was, for a fleeting second, deadly serious, "I'd forgotten it was beautiful."
end
Needless to say, we didn't get the 13 fics we were aiming for, but I posted two, and
violetisblue posted two, which don't seem to be on the AO3 but they're bloody marvellous. Then we kind of stalled.
Anyway, I wrote "The Nightmare Room", but my betas said it needed work, and I was like, "Work? PAH!" and went off to do something else. Or so I assume. Anyway, 8000 words in which the Doctor and Romana are trapped in the TARDIS and there's something else in there with them.
(
violetisblue described it as a story about advanced auto-repair.)"The Nightmare Room"
by LizBee
"Romana? Are you in there?"
No answer. The Doctor considered entering uninvited, but he couldn't quite bring himself to move. Instead, he stood outside Romana's room and let his tongue get away with him.
"I was thinking," he said, "that we should pay a visit to Arvetrin Prime. Thirty-second century, nice and peaceful, and the Matriarch's an old friend – well, not quite a friend, more of an acquaintance, which is to say I saved her great-grandmother's life once, I figure that's worth a nod, anyway. What do you say?"
Silence.
"No, scrap Arvetrin, it's boring. Let's go to Earth. Nineteen-thirties. Bit awful, but never dull. You'll love the clothes, and we can go dancing, and maybe mess about in Spain, all the best people'll be there. Except for Dorothy, but we can take her to lunch. She wrote a book about me, you know. Well, she changed a few of the details, most of them, actually, but I planted the seed."
No answer, and on the one hand he couldn't blame her, and yet – he opened her door and stepped into Romana's room.
Or rooms, actually. Obviously she'd felt that one room alone wasn't quite enough, or maybe the TARDIS had given them to her. All in dark purples and rich fabrics, an eightieth century light sculpture taking up most of one side, then reflected in the mirror that covered the wall opposite. In front of the mirror stood a sealed jar, a fragment of coral growing within. The Doctor reached out to touch it, then pulled back. It was many centuries since he'd seen a growing TARDIS.
"Romana?"
But it was obvious she wasn't there, and he'd just spent ten minutes cajoling an empty suite.
Well, fine. If she was going to be like that, he could wait. He was good at that sort of thing, or used to be. He could wait for years, decades, watching while some plan came to fruition. She had to come back eventually, unless she was camping out in the library or the gymnasium, and he couldn't quite see her leaving these dark, calm rooms forever. Of course, he'd thought that before, when she favoured pastels and chrome bookshelves, and he'd been wrong. He'd jettisoned all of it and moved on, but moving on seemed to become more difficult with age, and he seemed to miss her already.
Then there was a distant hum, as ancient engines were engaged, and the throb of the time rotor became audible even in these secluded chambers – the Doctor was on his feet, not bothering to close the door behind him in his race to reach the console room.
*
"Are we going somewhere?" the Doctor asked, racing into the console room from parts unknown. His hair was a mess, his tie was badly knotted, and had Romana been in the mood to be sympathetic, she might have regretted that her oldest friend was in such a state.
But she was in no mood to feel empathy for the Doctor, or anything at all much, and instead of dwelling on that curious absence of emotion, she concentrated on the console and didn't hear him speak until he repeated, "Are we going somewhere?"
"Arcadia," she said. She snuck a sideways glance, to see how he received this news. The speechlessness was quite gratifying.
"There's nothing there," he said when he'd found his voice.
"Then," she told him, adjusting the compensators, "we're going to the place where Arcadia used to be."
She still remembered the sinking of her hearts when she heard that Arcadia had fallen to the Daleks. They had given Time Lord technology to the Arcadians – she had given Time Lord technology to the Arcadians, in defiance of every law and tradition of Gallifrey – and yet the planet had been taken, its population massacred and enslaved, and the Doctor had been a witness to the whole disaster.
The engines slowed and came to a stop.
"Here we are," Romana said, pointlessly. She was already regretting her decision to bring them here, but it was too late, and there were no ghosts here, only dust and gas and a cold, lonely comet.
"It's dead," said the Doctor, "it's always been dead. It's an empty system with a dying sun, nothing else." He met Romana's eyes. "Were you expecting to find a few shards of a transduction generator?"
"That would be silly. I don't know, maybe." She crossed her arms. "Is there anything left of Gallifrey?"
"No," he said, then added, almost unwillingly, "there are moments – if you have the right kind of time ship and enough natural sensitivity to temporal distortions – there are pockets where you might find – oh, a rock, a bit of dust. Maybe a Dalek shell, dead but for some residual automatic defences. They exist for seconds, or less, and then they're gone. Back to oblivion."
"I want to see it."
The Doctor looked away.
"You watched Gallifrey burn," she said. "You made it happen, and I – I don't know yet if I hate you for that, but I was the President, and I feel – I have – I need to see it."
"I know." He was speaking more to the console than to her. "I knew you'd want to go," he hesitated, "home. I just hoped I could—"
"Talk me out of it?"
"Put it off." He stepped back, squared his shoulders and said, "the co-ordinates haven't changed."
He watched her as she set the course, and Romana wished she knew what he was thinking, and that she could feel anything for him, anything at all, other than this pallid resentment.
She released the helmic regulator and closed her eyes as the TARDIS entered the vortex.
*
He had forgotten it was beautiful.
He had nightmares sometimes, where Gallifrey's absence was a great, gaping wound in reality, a blood-red maw that pursued him into eternity and beyond. The dreams had become more powerful than his memories, and it was shocking to stand beside Romana and see, not red horrors, but the crystalline beauty of a series of temporal impossibilities.
The Kasterborous cluster contained only dark matter, now, a field of emptiness spanning billions of light years. But here and there – he could even see them with his naked eyes – there were flashes as another reality sprang into temporary existence, shone for a moment and evaporated.
"It's so cold," Romana said.
They were sitting in the doorway of the TARDIS, letting the extrapolator project a protective shield around them. It was warm; the TARDIS had become accustomed to catering for human tastes, and he hadn't quite remembered how to adjust the settings, but Romana was shivering. There were goosebumps on her bare arms.
"—It's an Earth term, 'goosebumps', and not even universal, some of them call it 'chicken skin', which is pretty unpleasant," he was on his feet, pulling his coat off the railing and draping it over her shoulders, "I don't think there was ever a Gallifreyan term for horripilation. Too primitive. Embarrassing. Like sex."
"You're babbling," said Romana, and her voice was as cool as her skin. He stopped. She drew her legs up to her chest. His coat covered her almost entirely, like a blanket. He always found it a bit comforting, anyway, that was a childish reflex, probably, although he couldn't remember being particularly attached to bedding as a kid, but that was a long time ago—
"I take it this is a nervous reflex," said Romana when he'd trailed off.
"Words are comfortable."
"Yes, of course, you control them." She looked slightly pleased, as if a piece of the puzzle had fallen into place – or because she'd simply had a long-standing theory confirmed. "Do you find silence uncomfortable."
"No," he said. "No, no, no, you are not going to take your triple alpha in temporal physics and xeno-sociology and minor in psychology and put me on your couch." He turned back to the console, setting co-ordinates to leave.
"Not yet," Romana said. Behind her, a moon flickered into existence, then vanished. "Please."
"It's dangerous."
"As if that ever stops you."
He opened his mouth to reply, but the TARDIS was rocked by small paradox.
"That," he said, "was just a bit of dust intruding on our dimension. Anything larger, or closer—"
"A few minutes more," Romana said, "just a few minutes."
He could have refused her, he had a long list of very good reasons why it was a bad idea to stay, but he couldn't bring himself to put them all into words. His fault their home had been replaced by dark matter and shimmering temporal shifts, and his fault that she'd caught him in a lie. That there had been a lie to catch.
"A few minutes," he told her.
Then the console exploded.
The vortex was opening around them, and the Doctor was climbing to his feet again, while Romana clung to the railings in the entrance and struggled to close the doors.
"Romana!"
She was being pulled out, and for a second he was somewhere else, she was a different woman. He threw himself across the room to help her, grabbing her around the waist to steady her, then reaching for the railing opposite. She was saying something, but he couldn't hear anything above the rushing of the vortex and the crackle and spark of the console. His hands closed around a door, just as she got a grip on the other, and it was just a matter of throwing his weight against it and letting gravity do the rest. The doors closed at the same moment, and they both fell to the floor.
There was only a moment of relief; his TARDIS was damaged, the console still sparking. The Doctor cast about for the fire extinguisher, the neon green one, use only in case of spontaneous explosions. It wasn't where he'd thought it would be, but then Romana shouted, "Doctor!" and threw it into his hands.
The last flames and sparks died quickly, leaving an acrid smell of burnt wiring and melted plastic. Silence fell, and darkness.
"What happened?" Romana asked.
"No idea," he said, circling the console. Repairable, yes, provided he could find the right materials and everything. It had suffered worse, probably. "Where are we?"
"In the vortex," Romana said. She let his coat cuffs cover her hands and gingerly moved the screen around to show him. The monitor's casing was melted, but the display itself was clear. Positively unmistakable. Anything but straightforward.
"That's impossible," he said.
"Very unlikely, perhaps, but hardly impossible."
"Can you calculate our co-ordinates manually?"
"Yes," she said, and didn't even take the opportunity to get a dig in about his mathematical failings. "Paper--?"
"Inner pocket, on the left. And a pen. I think there's a quad-dimensional calculator somewhere in there as well."
"How primitive. It'd be charming if the situation wasn't so—"
"Pass me the sonic screwdriver?"
She put it in his hand, and he ducked beneath the console.
"What's gotten into you?" he asked quietly.
"Doctor?"
"I wasn't talking to you."
For a few minutes, the only sounds were the scratch of Romana's pen, and her sighs of frustration at the limited capabilities of the calculator, and the hum of the sonic screwdriver.
Eventually Romana said, "Doctor? The scanner is quite correct, I'm afraid. We're drifting through the vortex."
"Check again."
"I have," she snapped, "and don't tell me it's impossible, I think I understand the science rather better than you."
"How?" he asked, feeling hollow.
"I don't know." She joined him beneath the console. "The TARDIS?"
"Her power's being drained away. There must be a leak in the Artron filters, but I can't maintain power long enough to run a diagnostic."
To his surprise, Romana squeezed his shoulder. "I'll deal with it," she said. "Stay here and repair the console. No point having power if we can't control it."
"There's a complete – well, mostly complete – toolkit in the storage room near the bins."
"Thanks."
"Be careful."
Romana turned back, her face unreadable. "Thank you," she said, and walked away.
*
The TARDIS was dark, but for the flicker and flash of a few damaged lights. It was silent, too, but shuddering with the uncontrolled movement through the vortex. The effect was unsettling.
Romana didn't believe in artronovores, or toclafane, or any of the horrors that small Gallifreyan children had once used to scare each other. As a girl, she had lain awake in her dormitory, listening to her classmates telling ridiculous stories about the monsters that might take up residence in an old TARDIS, and she'd smiled to herself, privately, secure in the knowledge that she would never shriek in exaggerated terror at a patently mythical creature.
In retrospect, she felt, as she made her way through a dark corridor, it might have been better had she been less secure in her own superiority. A few years of squealing at fictional monsters might have left her better prepared to face the real kind, and perhaps she wouldn't feel quite so anxious, walking alone through the lower corridors of an ancient TARDIS.
And she was beginning to wish she'd at least paused to put shoes on.
Something skittered behind her. Romana whirled around, but there was nothing there.
Over-active imagination, she told herself, heightened by anxiety and the stress of returning to the place where home had once existed, and concern about the TARDIS. And to prove it, she pulled a hyperspatial spanner out of the Doctor's not-even-nearly-complete toolkit and opened the panel by her feet.
There. Loose wires and a missing filter. Typical of the Doctor's non-existent maintenance regime, just the sort of thing that would cause problems in the wider system. And quite perfect for creating unexpected noises to scare jumpy Time Lords.
Romana pushed her hair out of her face, replaced the panel and kept going.
*
"Aaaaaaaaand the energy circuit's connected to the power cell, and the power cell's connected to the secondary helmic control, and the secondary helmic control's connected to ... well, it should be connected to something, but I can't tell what." The Doctor tapped a burnt, blackened piece of metal with his finger. "I wonder if I still have the schematics?"
Footsteps approached behind him. Without looking up, he said, "Didn't I tell you not to come back until you had the power back online? If I didn't, I definitely meant to."
Romana said nothing.
"Still, as long as you're here, what's the secondary helmic control meant to be linked to? Is it the external sensors, or the trans-temporal filters? And don't say anything snide. It's been a long time since I took elementary TARDIS care, and I'm pretty sure I failed."
Silence.
"Romana?"
"Grandfather?"
He was on his feet before he even had a chance to think—
"Susan?"
He caught a glimpse of a slim figure, a dark-haired girl with knowing eyes.
"Susan!"
She faded into the shadows and vanished. The Doctor leaned against the console, aware of nothing but the pounding of his hearts and the stirring of a very old memory.
*
The further Romana descended into the TARDIS, the darker it became, until the only light was pallid and useless. It was like being deep underwater, surrounded by unfamiliar creatures, unable to move or breathe—
Romana swore under her breath and fumbled in her toolkit for a torch. Light chased nightmares away. She'd commanded an army in war, and survived, and she was not afraid of the dark.
Still, she found herself moving ever more slowly, hesitant to take a step before she had shone the torch into every crevice and corner.
Sometimes she heard the whisper of voices, never close enough to become intelligible. The hairs on the back of her neck lifted. Of course, this was a very old TARDIS, and had carried so many people... It was simultaneously eerie and reassuring to know that some echo of past occupants lingered, here in the depths where Artron energy was gathered and purified.
Romana picked up her pace. With the silence broken, the dark was less fearsome, and she had a job to do.
In the centuries between her first occupancy and now, the TARDIS had rearranged itself: she found the cloister room directly above the Artron receptor. The receptor powered the TARDIS core, the very heart of the machine. Normally, it would be alive with power, almost singing with the energy of the vortex and the Time Lords it carried – but now it was almost silent, except for an uneven drone.
Romana put her tools down and set to work.
"When this is over," she promised the TARDIS as she wrestled the third access panel open, "I shall have a very serious discussion with the Doctor about regular maintenance checks."
The power chambers were long and narrow, so crammed with components that she had to lie flat on her back to access the energy gauges. Every tap and hiss of the damaged systems was amplified, and she felt strangely vulnerable, lying prone so close to an immense, damaged power system. She concentrated on reciting her forty-two times tables and not panicking at every distant scrape of metal against metal.
Only – the metallic scrapes were getting louder, and closer, and faster. Romana found she was anticipating each one. Realign a power coupling, scrape, replace the inversion feed, scrape, check the energy gauge, scrape—
A shrill ring broke her concentration. Romana dropped her tools and swallowed a scream. She followed the sound to her toolkit, scrabbled around, and pulled an obsolete Martian commlink from the bottom.
"Doctor!" Her voice was hoarse. "You might have warned me!"
"Sorry. Forgot it was there. Surprised it still works."
"Are you all right?" Romana leaned up on one elbow. "You sound—"
"I'm fine," he said, too quickly. "Right as rain. How are you going?"
"Not well," she admitted. "The power chambers are all full, but the energy circuits themselves are all damaged. I can fix it, but it will take time. And—" she hesitated.
"What?"
"There's something down here."
"What?"
"I thought it was just the damaged systems making noise, but it doesn't sound right. There's something in the TARDIS."
"Why are you whispering?"
"I don't—" She paused, then said in a normal tone, "I don't know. It's just instinct."
"Come up here," said the Doctor. "We should stay together."
"Doctor, you don't sound remotely fine – oh."
"What is it?"
Romana began to ease herself out of the power chamber, groping with her free hand for the tools that would make the best weapons. The laser scalpel. The little micro-drill. It was a paltry arsenal.
As far as she could, she kept her eyes on the upper level of the chamber, five hundred metres overhead. The words, I am making eye-contact with death were running through her head, as if they meant something. The tiny machine's eye-stalk followed her, but it was otherwise still.
"Romana?" the Doctor was saying urgently.
"Not now," she hissed. She reached the deck, and she had an awful image of the ground covered with the creatures, mechanical pincers waiting to catch her bare feet. She kept going, sliding herself out of the chamber until she was standing upright, her weapons in her hands. Every instinct was telling her to run, but another part of her mind said that to run would be to die.
She walked slowly out into the corridor – the whispers had fallen silent – and took one careful step after another, until the cloister room had vanished behind her. Then her courage finally gave way, and she broke into a run.
From behind her – above her? -- came the sound of scurrying metal feet. Did she dare turn around? No, that would be a mistake, but the creature was drawing her closer—
Romana stopped, swung around, took aim with the micro-drill and fired. And again, and again. The creature dropped from the ceiling, landing belly-up, legs and pincers twitching madly. Romana found the laser scalpel, a hopelessly inadequate weapon, and examined the soft under-side of the carapace. Then she took aim and half-threw, half-dropped the little knife through the thin metal casing.
The creature screamed, a horrible metallic sound, and then became still. A clear, oily fluid leaked out around the wound.
Romana knelt gingerly by the creature, searching for likely booby traps. Finding none – or at least, recognising none – she picked it up by one leg. Holding it at arms length, she continued on her way in a nervous half-jog.
Several minutes passed before she realised she was lost. And she didn't believe it at first, because this was her home, or had been, and how dare the TARDIS go shifting around without telling her?
"As self-preservation measures go," she said out loud, "this is one of the less productive."
She kept walking, using the micro-drill to mark her path. She felt like a common vandal, but making future plans to repair the damage was preferable to thinking about the bio-mechanoid creature in her other hand.
Romana entered a door that had earlier led to the swimming pool, turned to leave her mark on the door, and nearly screamed as something touched her shoulder. She swung around, brandishing the drill in one hand and the creature in the other, and froze.
"Just me," the Doctor said. In one hand, he was holding an enormous ball of string. A strand of the stuff trailed behind him, into the shadows.
"My hearts nearly stopped," Romana growled.
"Sorry. Didn't want to call out. Wasn't sure what might be around. Who's your friend?"
Romana held the creature up.
"It tried to kill me," she said.
"It looks like—"
"I know." Romana took a deep breath, and with a conscious effort, managed to slow her hearts. "I take it you know the way back to the console room?"
"Just follow the string." He took her hand as they set out, and she heard him say softly, "And to think you wanted to throw it out."
*
They dissected it on the console, an unpleasant choice, but the only option under the circumstances. Romana stepped back to let the Doctor split the carapace open, revealing the mutant inside.
"They're called Stalkers," she said, leaning in to detach the little eyestalk. "The Daleks created them to infiltrate and disable TARDISes."
"Effective." The Doctor picked up a tentacle and held it up to the lamp he had suspended over the console. "Were you going to tell me about them at any stage? My lady president?"
"I was going to," Romana snapped, "but then some idiot went and destroyed our planet, and the problem was a bit academic after that."
"This," said the Doctor, holding up a layer of mutant skin and examining the tiny, underpowered disruptor, "isn't exactly academic."
"But Gallifrey is still gone."
The Doctor rounded on her, sweeping the Stalker carapace to the ground.
"Is this your revenge?" he demanded, "are you punishing me for Gallifrey?"
"You're mad."
"You think you don't bear responsibility? You were the president--"
"The first battles were fought long before I took office."
"Of course." There was a fey light in the Doctor's eyes. "You were still at school when I met Davros for the first time. You were the youngest president in four millennia. A well-trained child, prattling away for the amusement of the grown-ups."
Romana took a step back. He followed.
"Do you know what the Master said when he found out you were commanding troops?" she asked. "He said you were just biding your time until you could run away."
"But I wasn't the one who ran," the Doctor said. "I told you not to bring him back."
"And I told you not to interfere with my decisions." Romana drew a shaky breath. "Were you satisfied, when he had Earth in his power? Did you feel vindicated? It suited you well enough to accuse him of destroying Gallifrey. Martha told me how you held him as he died." She was still backing away as she spoke. "You're mad, Doctor. You've been alone too long. Feeding off your own hubris--" She broke off as the Doctor moved, the sonic screwdriver flashing in his hand. She stopped and drew a deep, shaky breath. "It's not a weapon," she said quietly. "It's a tool, Doctor, not a weapon, you always said that."
"Things change. That's the essence of time."
"Now you're just being – portentous."
He raised his hand, and she reached behind her – she was leaning against a railing, why had she been so foolish as to leave the laser drill on the console? -- her hand closed around something metal. She drew back, ready to strike, but the Doctor fell back in surprise.
"Susan," he breathed.
"What?" Romana opened her hand, and watched without curiosity as the scissors fell to the deck with a clatter. She'd never even seen them before. "Doctor--"
He was retreating, eyes wide, face grey. "I'm sorry," he said, "so sorry. I thought – I don't – Susan--"
"What did you see, Doctor?" Romana took a careful step forward, holding her hands out.
"She attacked Barbara with those scissors. I was a young man, I didn't know what was happening. It was a temporary madness. I was ... so afraid." His gaze was distant. "These strangers, these aliens were in my TARDIS, and I had no control. Susan was – she was growing up – and the Daleks – my life was changing so fast."
Romana turned back to look at the fallen scissors.
They were no longer there.
She wondered if her hands had always been empty.
"It's the TARDIS," the Doctor said. "She's doing this to us. She's scared, she needs help." He rushed to the console, half-adjusting, half-caressing its controls. "That wasn't us," he said, although he didn't sound like he entirely believed it. "It was her."
Romana knelt to examine the fallen Stalker, lying forgotten on the floor.
"I don't think it was the TARDIS," she said.
*
The Doctor retreated to the far corner of the console room, not taking his eyes off the Stalker. Even disabled, it exuded malevolence, and Romana looked terribly vulnerable as she knelt over it, impossibly small and pale. He could wrap one hand around her neck, he thought, and then she would die, and then he could do it again, and again, and again.
His breath caught in his throat as he realised what he was thinking. Romana looked up sharply.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"Fine," he said.
"Liar."
He swung around to face her, but the wave of anger was retreating as quickly as it had appeared, and he was just a tired old man in a tired old ship, both of them dying by inches.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"You're obviously not all right," she said, and he appreciated her attempt at sounding businesslike. "Do you need to rest?"
"No," he said quickly. "It wouldn't be safe."
"No, I suppose not."
"How many Stalkers do you think there are?"
"An infected TARDIS landed in the Citadel. The scientists found a nest of about a dozen, although they thought there could be more. We couldn't save the TARDIS." She wrapped her arms around herself. "We shut down its defences and sent it into the sun."
"That's ... not what I wanted to hear."
"What would you prefer, Doctor?" Romana snapped. "Should I lie?"
"No. Just—"
He gazed at the Stalker. Such a typical Dalek creation, with no purpose but to infiltrate and destroy the most ancient and perfect time ships the universe had ever held. And now they were going to claim the TARDIS, and the Time War would come to a pathetic end. Two lost Time Lords, alone in the dark, eternity reduced to a handful of dust. He put his hands in his pockets. "Davros would be proud," he said.
"What?"
The Doctor ignored her. "Maybe that's how we defeat them, thinking like Davros. More cunning. More dangerous." He began to pull the Stalker's carapace to pieces, setting aside any useful components.
"Doctor," said Romana, crouching by his side, speaking slowly and clearly as if addressing a child or an imbecile, "what are you doing?"
"Making a weapon."
"It looks like a tracking device."
"Right, well, I said 'weapon', but I was referring to knowledge as a powerful force, especially the kind of knowledge that involves knowing all the monsters are."
"Couldn't detach the venom sacs?"
"Stuck fast, and I didn't want to fiddle around without gloves." He fitted the final component. "Like it? I call it a Stalker-stalker."
"But does it work?"
The Doctor switched it on.
"There, " he said, feeling a smile cross his face. "What do you think?"
There was nothing as obvious as a display screen, because he hadn't had the equipment to rig one up. Instead, the readings were conveyed by shifts in electrical currents, and interpreted by – well, instinct, but it was finely honed instinct. He knew where the enemy was, now, and the enemy was more or less who it had been all along. And they were close, so close—
"Come on," he said to Romana, "let's go hunting."
Romana's answering smile didn't meet her eyes.
*
The darkness seemed deeper this time, and every noise was amplified a hundred-fold. The presence of the Doctor by Romana's side should have been reassuring, but he might as well have been a stranger.
That's just the Stalkers putting ideas in your head, she told herself, and squeezed the Doctor's hand.
"I won't let you go," he said.
Romana swallowed.
"I know," she said.
There was a low, distant scuttling. The Doctor's hand tightened around hers.
"When I say run," he said. Romana nodded. They moved onwards, listening for the tell-tale tick of Stalker legs. Closer. Closer. Romana's hearts were pounding. The Doctor's hand was damp. Closer.
There was no need to say it. They had the same thought, even as their pace increased, even as they were running.
"Where?" Romana breathed.
"The core."
She nearly stopped, but the survival instinct was too strong. She pulled her hand out of the Doctor's and ran faster—
And something chittered behind her, and sharp metal legs were on her back, closing around her throat. Romana groped wildly behind her, waiting for the fatal bite, trying to force herself to breathe.
"Romana!"
The Stalker's grip weakened as it defended itself from the Doctor's attack. Romana drew a deep breath, just as the sonic screwdriver shrieked in her ear. There was a blinding flash on the edge of her vision, a wave of heat, and the Doctor yelped with pain – but the Stalker had let go, falling to the floor in a twitching, clicking mass.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
The Doctor surveyed the remnants of his Stalker-Stalker, a rueful expression on his face. "My metaphorical weapon ended up a bit literal." He picked up the sonic screwdriver, using his left hand. The right, Romana saw, was red and blistered.
"We should keep moving," she said. "There's a first aid kit in the lower bathroom, as I recall, and—"
"The core," the Doctor said, flexing his burnt hand.
"But—"
Behind them, far off in the darkness, came an ominous clicking.
"No time," said the Doctor. He marched forward, not looking at Romana. Reluctantly, with one last, long look into the shadows, she followed.
*
The Doctor's hearts were pounding in time with the throbbing of his burnt hand. And his mind was overflowing with ideas and plans, none of which he could even begin to put into words. If he could get to the core, the psychic centre of the TARDIS, then she could tell them what she needed.
"You're making a mistake," said Romana.
"The TARDIS needs me." Get to the core. The TARDIS will know. He repeated it like a mantra, trying to slow his hearts and numb his hand.
"And what will we do when we get there?" Fear made Romana's voice crack. It was an ugly emotion, too small for such an ancient species. In the darkness, they were all children. The Doctor looked back at her. "You must consider," she said, "the Stalkers are certainly there all ready."
"She needs me," he repeated, but it was hollow. For a moment he was a child again, standing before the Untempered Schism, caught in the moment between gazing into the abyss, and turning to flee. "She – I—"
"Doctor," said Romana gently, "if the Stalkers are manipulating her psychic core—"
"They can manipulate us just as easily." He clenched his hands, welcoming the new flood of pain. "We need a better plan."
"Got anything in mind?"
He turned and wrenched a wall panel free.
"Improvise," he said.
The panel was too heavy to manage one-handed, but Romana took the weight and helped him settle it on the floor with a soft, metallic thud.
For a second, he found himself hoping that the Stalkers had overheard him. He hoped they had sufficient intelligence to feel emotion. He hoped they were afraid.
He led Romana down through the narrow tubes and vents that contained the working parts of the TARDIS. Artron conductors. Gravitic compensators. The veins and arteries of his ship, all sluggish and unresponsive, but undoubtedly alive.
"Do you know where we're going?" Romana asked.
"Like you said. First aid kit in the lower bathroom."
It was an effort to crawl and climb with his injured hand. Only slightly easier when he forgot about hiding the pain.
"At least it's shallow," said Romana, when they paused for breath in the overheated little chamber that contained the hot water system. "A third degree burn would have caused nerve damage. Is it very painful?"
"Bad enough." He found himself unable to stop speaking. "The Master – he was reduced to a husk, but he kept going. Went mad with the pain, though. Never the same."
"I've seen the records." Romana leaned back against the wall, drew her knees up to her chest and closed her eyes.
"Nothing but – but will and hate and – it was like an obsession. Living." The Doctor held his breath and flexed his hand, clenching his jaw against the pain. "You're lucky," he said, when it had passed, "that he didn't run straight to the Daleks. They would have – suited each other."
"The Matrix assigned that potentiality a low probability."
She sounded weary, rather than defensive. Morbid curiosity led the Doctor to ask, "Did the Matrix predict a possible end to the war?"
Romana opened her eyes. "Not the ending you brought about," she said. When the Doctor said nothing, she added, "the Matrix couldn't predict its own destruction."
"If it had—"
"But it didn't." Romana's hands tapped an arrhythmic pattern on her legs. "No one anticipated what you did. You were – as ever – unpredictable."
"Don't," he said. "Don't – be light about it."
She smiled. Her eyes were cold. "I thought you preferred to keep it light. All the little lies you tell to make survival bearable. Martha said—"
"Martha doesn't understand—"
"What it's like to watch one's species die? It seemed to me she had more experience than most humans."
"That," said the Doctor, "was a cheap shot."
"Yes, quite beneath the awesome majesty of our race, but—" she snatched his burnt hand in hers, and he gasped as she squeezed the damaged flesh, "I'm not the one who lied."
"I'm sorry—"
"You let me believe it was the Master." Romana's voice was cracked. "You let me think I was responsible – I brought him back and he destroyed Gallifrey. You let me live with it – you! Knowing what it was like!" She paused to draw a ragged breath. "I'll take responsibility for what he did to Earth. And you. I know – I know what he did to you, and I'm sorry. We pushed him too far. But the man you were ... you wouldn't have lied. Not about Gallifrey." She released him, and a new wave of pain flooded through the Doctor's hand. "Say something," she said.
The Doctor licked his lips.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Good."
With his good hand, the Doctor opened the access panel and eased through the hatch into the bathroom. The medical kit was under the sink; resting on top of it was some oven cleaner, and a few cans of Nitro-9. He transferred each can carefully into the hot water chamber, followed by the medkit, then he folded his body through the hatch and closed the panel again behind him.
"Are you planning to blow the Stalkers up?" Romana asked.
"A couple of fresh cans could take out a Dalek."
"Do a bit of damage to the TARDIS, too."
"I'll take my chances." He rummaged through the medkit. Surely there'd be something for burns, a salve, a skinsheet, an analgesic—
"Do you hate me?" he asked.
"No," Romana said. "It would be like hating an incarnation of myself."
He found a skinsheet, and unwrapped it with his teeth.
"Did you think I wouldn't understand?" she asked.
"How would you forgive me?" He pulled the paper-thin glove over his burnt hand, and felt a prickle as the first damaged cells began to heal.
"It's too much to forgive," said Romana. "Too abstract to comprehend, really. I think I'd have done the same thing you did. I'm not sure." She watched him. "What did it feel like?"
One by one, the Doctor flexed his fingers.
"It was like being a god," he said. "The universe and the vortex opened before me. For a second I could see everything. Might have been an hallucination, though. It was hard to tell."
Romana snorted, and to his amazement, she started to giggle.
"'The lonely god'," she said. "What rot. Time was, you'd have put a galaxy between yourself and anyone who wanted to deify you."
"It's just a name. I've had heaps. Anyway, you spent a few decades as a goddess."
"Living incarnation of a goddess," she corrected, "and that was quite different."
"Oh yeah? How?"
"Well, I couldn't get away."
Silence descended, but for the discordant hum of the TARDIS and the occasional clang of the hot water system. Romana's gaze had turned inwards, and the Doctor knew, without aid of telepathy, what she was thinking.
"You can't," he said, although he didn't quite mean it.
"I'd rather not, but I don't see any other way." Romana pushed her hair out of her face. "Your TARDIS is infected. Even if we can remove the Stalkers, it will die without an infusion of untainted energy."
The Doctor couldn't look at her. His eagerness made him sick. "Your TARDIS will die," he said.
"Yours will live." She shrugged. "These are the choices we make. In a few years' time, when your TARDIS is stable, I'll take a cell culture and start again." She gave him a gentle smile. "I'll lose, what? A few weeks? And we'll survive, Doctor, that's what matters."
She would, he knew, lose a lot more than the time spent nurturing her embryonic TARDIS. Taken from her own capsule, the grown ship would retain a vestigial memory of the bond it had shared with its former mistress. Merged with the Doctor's TARDIS, that race-memory would be overwhelmed by the older, cruder ship.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Romana nodded. "Thank you."
She climbed to her feet and opened the overhead hatch that led into the ventilation shaft.
"Let's get it over with," she said.
*
The embryonic chamber was impossibly light in Romana's hands. Just a sealed glass gestation chamber, the size of a jam jar, containing fluids, nutrients and her future. She cupped her hands around it, meeting the Doctor's eyes in the mirror.
"The core," she said.
"The core."
They kept to maintenance shafts and little-used side corridors for the most part, but the final approach could only be made openly. The lights flickered, and the scuttling of Stalker-legs was audible, even over the pounding of Romana's hearts.
"Do you hear that?" the Doctor asked.
"They're getting closer."
"No, no – the voices, can't you hear them?"
The Doctor's face was alight with hope. Romana stopped walking, trying to find a gentle way to tell him it was another illusion. In that moment of stillness she heard them: distant voice, carried over time in the memory of the ship that carried them:
"—Grandfather--"
"Doctor!"
"Professor—"
"—Create myself—"
"You'll see me again—"
The lights guttered and died, and silence descended with the darkness.
"She's fighting," said the Doctor, "taking all her power, but she'll fight to the end, that's my girl—"
"We'd best do the same," said Romana, dropping her voice to a whisper. "Do you hear—?"
"To the left," he breathed, taking her arm and guiding her. She heard the click of a Nitro-9 can being armed. "Keep back."
He threw the can, and Romana turned away, using her body to shield the gestation chamber. The explosion left her momentarily blind, but she heard the chittering of Stalkers, and the crunches as the Doctor crushed their remnants under his feet.
"Get their weapons," she said.
"Take it," he put one in her hands, a tiny, deadly disrupter with a trigger only her smallest finger could reach. The power charge was tiny. She'd have to make it last.
"You're not—"
"I'm trying to quit."
"Weren't you talking about beating Davros at his own game?"
"Great schemer, Davros. Not much for weapons."
"No, he had Daleks for that."
"Right. Cover me, would you?"
The Doctor strode forward, kicking a few Stalker-corpses out of the way as he advanced down the corridor. He stopped outside the vast doors that marked the entrance to the core. The Seal of Rassilon was still visible, beneath the damage from the Nitro-9 blast. The doors, though, were sealed shut.
"Should I knock?" he asked, glancing speculatively at his last can of explosive, then throwing it back at Romana. "Nah, not really my style. Coming?"
Fragments of metal cut her feet as she followed him, and the whisper of ghosts heralded their entrance into the core.
*
The core was—
--alive, in a sense of the word, vast and ancient and in great pain—
--It was remembering, it remembered everything, it existed in an eternal present—
--every injury
(stripped down, changed into a perverse shadow of herself: paradox machine)
every triumph
(the Doctor's breath, ten years of his life, and it was a fair bargain)
every moment the TARDIS had ever
experienced, all existed as one here in her
psychic core. She was nonlinear and abstract
and any human who ventured this far into her
centre would either die or go mad.
The TARDIS gathered her last reserves of energy, and welcomed the Doctor.
*
The TARDIS was dying.
It was obvious to the Doctor, from the way her lights dimmed to the very taste of the air in the psychic core. "Doctor," a woman's voice whispered, but it was a dying cry.
"I'm sorry," he said.
The stalkers spread out within like a cancer, consuming her energy, transforming her cells. Every moment was now, but the eternal present had become a torture. Paradox machine. Dying. Alone. Afraid.
"I've come to save you," said the Doctor. He didn't know if she heard, or understood. TARDIS sentience had been a subject of debate on Gallifrey for many millennia. He closed his eyes, leaning against the walls, letting her hold him.
There was a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. A Stalker. Before the Doctor could move, Romana had raised her weapon. The little arachnoids had no shields; they were satisfyingly vulnerable to their own disruptors.
"I'll only have a few more shots," she said, looking at the power reserves. "We can't waste time."
"Right. I need—"
She put the gestation chamber in his hands.
"Quickly," she said, and turned away.
The core was not a wide room, only a few metres across, but the ceilings was higher than a cathedral. He knelt in the centre of the room and prepared to release the seal on the honeycomb compartment that held the oldest piece of the TARDIS.
He wanted to apologise. To Romana, if nothing else, for destroying her TARDIS a second time. He met her eyes, but said nothing.
The compartment opened smoothly, as if it had been waiting for him. The central section, coral-like and sickly-grey, detached itself from the rest of the TARDIS, and he took it in his hands and pulled—
And sprang to his feet, jumping back. Half a dozen stalkers emerged from the chamber, disruptors armed.
"Romana!"
Her first shot hit its target, but at the moment, a surviving Stalker fired at him. The burst of pain brought him to his knees. The Stalker exploded before his eyes and Romana advanced, brandishing the Nitro-9.
"Get back," she said, "Doctor, take my TARDIS—"
Her voice was distant and distorted. He watched, without interest, as she lured the final Stalker out into the corridor. The TARDIS shook with the resonance of the Nitro-9 explosion. The Doctor closed his eyes.
The pain was getting worse, and his hand was beginning to throb again. He looked at Romana's TARDIS, white and healthy in its jar.
"No."
He hadn't realised he'd spoken out loud until Romana said, "What? Doctor—"
He picked up the centre of his own dying TARDIS.
"Like TARDIS, like Doctor."
"Oh no." Romana was kneeling beside him, her hands on his shoulders. "Doctor, I am not going to let you die – not another regeneration—"
His grip tightened on the centre. The telepathic circuits, he needed to be connected – there – just this tiny part of her, and the TARDIS could do the rest—
"Now," he said, and opened himself to the vortex.
*
Romana shielded her eyes, but the image was burned into her mind: the Doctor, transforming himself into a conduit for the vortex and Artron energy that powered the TARDIS. White-gold energy, blinding in its brightness, pouring through his hands into the centre of his ship, regenerating her dying cells.
Romana's cheeks were wet. She couldn't breathe. She lowered her hands, and through her tears, she saw the Doctor collapse as the last traces of energy left his body.
"Doctor," she whispered. Her hearts were racing, and it took all of her will to resist the urge to succumb to grief and panic. "Doctor!" She took his wrist in her hands and indulged in an irrational hope that might have been prayer.
There was a pulse. Slow and weak, but steady.
"Hold on," she whispered, and picked up the central piece of the TARDIS. It was warm in her hands, humming with life. She replaced it carefully in its chamber, closed the seal and turned back to the Doctor.
He was dying. The colour was fading from his skin, even as the core of the TARDIS was flooded with rejuvenated cells.
Romana held her breath and pressed her hands against his temples.
The Doctor's mind was silent. Not dead, merely peaceful, like a cathedral left empty after a service.
Come back, she told him, we're alive and safe, and we need you.
There was a flicker of life, a spark in the darkness. It was enough. Romana lingered a moment, to pay her respect to the silence. Then she left his mind. His pulse was slightly faster, closer to normal. The Doctor was breathing. Romana stood up, and stepped back.
He opened his eyes.
"Thank you," he said.
Romana retrieved her own TARDIS, safe in its container. Her throat was too tight to speak. She could only smile.
*
"Romana?" The Doctor paused outside the power chamber. "Are you in there?"
"Wait a minute," he heard her call, and he heard her slide down the access way and out of the Artron receptor. She emerged with a mass of wool in her hands.
"You," she said, advancing on him, "of all the imbecilic – immature – careless—!"
"Is that my scarf?" He held out the half-unravelled mess, beaming. "I thought I'd lost it!"
"No, you thought I'd lost it. And I've told you over and over about proper maintenance, and not using whichever bits of clothing you have at hand to make filters—"
"You never said—"
"Well, no, but I never imagined I'd need it!" She dumped the toolkit in his arms, on top of the former scarf. "The energy feeds are all clear," she said over her shoulder, "and if the plumbing still works, I'm going to have a shower." She paused. "What?"
"I don't know, what?"
"You're still smiling." She leaned against the doorframe. "For a man who used himself as an energy conduit, you're looking awfully happy."
"I feel like a new man." He shifted the load in his arms, and let her take his elbow. "New lease of life for the TARDIS – new lease of life for the Doctor. I'm seeing the world with new eyes. Metaphorically. And you know, Romana," he moved to face her, and he was, for a fleeting second, deadly serious, "I'd forgotten it was beautiful."
end
no subject
Date: 2013-04-25 06:10 pm (UTC)