Doctor Who Fic: Burnt Toast, Chapter Two
Title: Burnt Toast, Chapter Two (series index available here.)
Author: agent_tomato (Undying Mongoose on Teaspoon and Fanfiction.Net)
Rating: T
Word Count: 2,732
Pairing: Unrequited past Ace/Seven and (in later chapters) Turlough/Five, eventual (in much later chapters) Ace/Turlough
Characters: Ace II*, Vislor Turlough, various OCs
In flashback: Ace I, Eight
*Sort of halfway between a canon character and an OC
Warnings: Some subtextual slash in later chapters. Angst. Mild violence. References to character death.
Warnings specific to this chapter: Brief, minor self-injury.
Spoilers: References to the old series (predominantly the Fifth and Seventh Doctors) and the Time War, including background that was revealed in “The End of Time.”
Summary: A girl named Ace entered the Academy. A Time Lady emerged from the fires of the war. A tale of aliens, explosions, and tea.
Chapter Summary: Ace's memories begin to return, and with them all the pain and loss of the Time War.
Alice the Alien (officially on the colony records as Alice Smith, but no one ever paid attention to those) did not speak another word for three months. The doctors called it trauma, while most of the colonists just called her a nutter.
Mira remained staunchly loyal to her alien, visiting Alice in the hospital every day after school and making sure that no one brought a piece of toast anywhere near the room. “I’m sure they mean well,” Mira said, as she did her maths homework on Alice’s bed, “but sometimes people can be very stupid.”
Alice smiled, and pointed at the second problem in Column Three, where Mira had neglected a zero. Mira examined her answer until she determined what error her friend had spotted, and quickly corrected herself. “Thanks. You’re really good at maths.”
Alice shrugged. It was her answer to most everything. She pulled her legs up to her chest to give Mira room to open up her science textbook. It was very old-fashioned, Mira had told Alice last month, to use paper textbooks, but their teacher was eccentric like that.
“We’re learning about chemicals this week,” Mira announced. “Do you know about that, too?”
Alice…started to shrug. Then, looking at An Introduction to Science for Bright Children upside-down, her eyes widened, and she seized the book.
“Hey, I need that!” Mira exclaimed. Would Mrs. Merrill accept theft-by-alien as a legitimate excuse for late homework?
Hands turning the pages so fast that she couldn’t possibly be reading, Alice ran her eyes through the entire chapter on chemistry. When she had finished, she dropped the book on the floor and sprung out of bed. “I have something important to do,” she said-her first words in ten weeks. “Thank you, Mira.”
And she ran out of the hospital room without shoes, dressed in secondhand pajamas. The doctors were so surprised to see their resident madwoman running down the hall that they forgot to stop her, until she had already reached the door. Mira followed, sprinting faster than she ever had before.
Mira finally caught up with Alice, after many wrong turns, in the secondary school science lab, where the alien was arguing with an irate teacher.
“I just need to borrow a few things,” said Alice, trying to push past the teacher, whose name Mira didn’t know. “I promise, I will put everything back just as I found it.”
“Absolutely not!” the teacher said, bracing himself against the doorframe to keep Alice from passing. “First of all, we’re having a study group in here. Second of all, I don’t know who you are, but you’re definitely not a student, which means you have no right to use our equipment!”
Alice said a few words in a melodic foreign language. Mira could tell by the expression on Alice’s face that they hadn’t been nice words. “I have a certification in temporospatial chemistry from the Prydon Academy of Gallifrey!” she shouted. At first, Mira thought Alice was still speaking in the other language-half of her words didn’t make any sense at all. “I learned more in my first month of school than you will in your entire lifetime, you stupid little man! Chemical processes of my creation have restructured entire planets and changed the course of history, but I have no right to use your equipment?”
Her face was flushed red from agitation, and Alice swayed a little. “Oh. Sorry, I think my emotional centers are still in imbalance. I’m going to need a lot more tea.”
She reached out a hand to steady herself against the door, but missed, and collapsed with a small thump to the laboratory floor.
***
Her first fear, upon waking up, was that she had lost her memory again. Then, as her brain emerged from its fog, she realized that if she remembered losing her memory before, she probably hadn’t lost it again. But she was back in a hospital bed, which seemed to indicate that something wasn’t right with her.
“You collapsed,” said the pleasant and ever-inquisitive Dr. Peters. “Mira says you were talking before.”
“Yes, of course I’m talking.” Why hadn’t she been talking? Her memory was still a little fuzzy on that point. “And I don’t need to be here. I just need tea. It helps me metabolize the excess artron energy.”
“What in the world is artron energy?”
“Very important stuff that lets me do things you can’t. Can I get out of here now? Oh, and I need clothes.”
“We still have some more tests to run,” said Dr. Peters. “We’re still trying to figure out exactly what you are…”
“Time Lord,” she replied. “82.3% Gallifreyan, 17.7% human, but 100% Time Lord. Only you don’t know what a Time Lord is, because they don’t exist anymore and you’re not a time-aware species…”
“How can you be 82% of a species?” She watched his forehead crinkle as he tried to make the maths work.
“I never finished the conversion process. There was a war going on, you see-we were a little busy. And that’s eighty-two point three percent. But that really doesn’t matter. I know what I am, and I have important things to do.”
“You’re not going anywhere until I’m certain you’re not going to collapse again.”
“I’m not. I just need tea, I told you. And clothes. And access to chemistry equipment.” She had a feeling that the tea was the only one she was likely to receive. When the doctor’s back was turned, she once more slipped out from under the blankets and started for the door.
“Sit back down, right now!” Dr. Peters commanded. “I’m not having you running off again. What if no one had been around when you collapsed? You could hurt yourself.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I know you’re trying to help,” she said. She could feel the irritation building again, the violence of regeneration sickness, and sped up her pace, hoping to persuade the doctor before the rage got too much for her to control. “But really, I am fine. My memory’s back, you see, so I know how to take care of myself now. There won’t be any more collapsing.”
“But why did you go running off?”
He certainly wasn’t helping to speed things along, was he? She tried to remember the impressive-sounding terminology that she’d learned in Basics of Telepathic Operations. Maybe if she made it complicated enough, he would stop asking questions. “There was an imbalance in my emotional centers after the removal of the psychic block on my mnemonic functions, which led to a brief period of irrationality and the emotional imperative to find a place my subconscious defined as ‘safe.’ Now can I have tea?”
Dr. Peters acquiesced and brought her a steaming cup, on the condition that she stay for a few more tests. She absorbed the free radicals and tannins quickly, and she could feel the patterns of her body begin to fall into order.
There were wires attached to her head as she lay on a flat table, and she couldn’t help thinking about the Mind Probe. She reminded herself that this was not Gallifrey, and this species hadn’t evolved such interrogation techniques yet.
“Now, just close your eyes and relax. We’re just taking some basic scans, nothing to worry about.”
Relax. Relax in the hands of doctors who had no idea how to handle her biology. It was a miracle that they hadn’t accidentally poisoned her with acetylsalicylic acid, or mistook her binary heartbeat for symptoms of a heart attack. She called to mind the meditations that her professors had drilled into them, letting every system in her body slip into a calmer state. The mantra of her induction oath ran through her mind.
I swear to protect the ancient Law of Gallifrey with all my might and brain. I will to the end of my days with justice and with honour temper my actions and my thoughts…
It sounded so beautiful in Gallifreyan. She’d found the language lessons torturous at first, and unnecessary-wasn’t that what translation circuits were for?-but she’d eventually come to love the language of the Time Lords, even the four hopelessly complicated writing systems. She alternated between mentally reciting the oath in English-the way she’d sworn it-and her halting Gallifreyan.
Even better than the language itself was the memory of the Prydonians who’d taken it upon themselves to make sure she’d learned it. There had been a professor, of course, and a tutor, but the memories that came easiest to mind were those of Ruslan and Maro, who sat with her at every meal and taught her the fine art of Gallifreyan insults. Her instructor had frowned upon it, as it was hardly dignified for future Time Lords, but it was the only reason she could remember how to form the accusative case, or the uses of the informal vocative.
They’d been her first friends, and very often her only ones. Between the three of them, they were responsible for seventeen major explosions on Prydonian property, and five on Arcalian. (The Arcalians had responded in kind, of course, which just made it more fun.) And when she’d begun the painful genetic conversion from human to Gallifreyan, Ruslan held her hand during each treatment, while Maro recited poetry.
They were dead.
Her euphoria at regaining her memory and her irritation at the superfluous tests faded as if they had never entered her mind. Earth was still out there, presumably, but Gallifrey and all her friends from the Academy were gone. Erased from time, as if they had never been there. And she had done it. Traitor. Genocide. Murderer.
She dug deeper into meditation to avoid the accusations of her own mind. I swear to protect the ancient Law of Gallifrey with all my might and brain. I will to the end of my days with justice and with honour temper my actions and my thoughts… Calm. She could be calm. Like the eye of a storm, unmoved in the middle of turmoil. Everything seemed to slow, and for the first time since she’d arrived on the planet, she didn’t feel hot.
Then there was beeping, and a frantic hand seized her shoulder. “Alice? Alice!”
She dragged herself out of the trance and opened her eyes. Dr. Peters leaned over her, panic in his face. “What? Are we finished already?”
“Finished? Alice, you went into cardiac arrest! Your heart-I mean, your hearts-stopped beating!”
“Oh. Did they? I didn’t notice. Sorry, did it muck up the scan?”
“Did it muck up the scan?” the doctor repeated, incredulous. “You nearly died!”
“No, I didn’t. Really, I’m fine. My hearts can do that.” They didn’t actually stop, the Time Lords had explained, but slowed to such a rate that most medical equipment could not detect the pulse. Although she was fairly certain that it wasn’t supposed to happen unconsciously…but he didn’t need to know that. She could take care of herself.
***
The chemistry lab wasn’t an option, but she borrowed a lighter from one of the nurses on her way out of the hospital. It wasn’t the same, but it was something. She sat in the corner of a disused field, setting individual blades of grass on fire. As she watched the flames dance and die, she thought.
She thought of Manisha. Whenever she thought of absent friends, Manisha was always the first one to her mind, since that terrible day in 1983. But there was something different this time. When she remembered the sound of the sirens, and the stench of the smoke, they weren’t accompanied by the familiar surge of childish anger. All there was was a sort of dark and terrible sadness, smouldering away in the back of her brain. It was an emotion that she had never felt before.
It wasn’t human. And that scared her, more than the War, more than anything.
She had changed. She’d been changed already, of course-that was the point of the genetic conversion. But the regeneration had driven those changes deeper into her body, so deep that even though she knew they hadn’t always been there, she couldn’t imagine being without them. Was this what it meant to regenerate? Was this what the Doctor felt, every time? How had he handled it?
He’d handled it, that was all that mattered. And she would handle it. All these new emotions, new thoughts, and the new body that held them: she could handle it. She was a Time Lord.
She slammed her hand down on a burning blade of grass and gritted her teeth against the pain. It didn’t hurt as much as she’d expected, not like other burns she’d had (and she’d had plenty, in her incendiary career). Higher pain threshold, that was part of it. Two hearts, respiratory bypass system, low body temperature, increased temporal awareness, various psychic abilities, and an infinite capacity for pretension and troublemaking. That was what she was now.
“I am a Time Lord,” she said, for the second time that day. She’d grown used to the way the R’s rolled across her tongue. It was a familiar accent-not hers, but comfortable, much like her new features.
She was probably the last. After all, the whole purpose of the Moment was to eradicate everything within the time lock: every last second of the Time War, compressed into a single instant and burnt into nothingness. At best, she was one of two. That was the hope she had to cling to, that just as the force of the Moment propelled her back from the beginning of the time lock, it might have sent him beyond the end of it. If there was a chance that a single other Time Lord survived, it would be the Doctor. It had to be the Doctor. He had to be all right.
But he might not, an unpleasant thought nagged at her brain. The TARDIS’s shield could have warded the Doctor against the excess energy that had saved her life, kept him trapped inside the time lock. He might have burnt with all the others. And she might be completely alone.
Wasn’t this where she ought to be crying? She didn’t cry much, she thought, but this seemed like an occasion for it. But there were no tears. Perhaps this body was done with crying.
Another blade of grass burned. She held it in her hand and let it scorch her palm before dropping it on the ground. She stared at the reddened skin in fascination. It was as if the hand belonged to someone else, a someone who had curly hair, and a Scottish accent, and was much too short.
Beneath her, the planet turned at an unimaginable speed. It was remarkable, really, that no one fell off. Gravity was a wonderful thing. How had she never noticed how wonderful it was? The more she thought about it, the more a feeling of euphoria overwhelmed her senses. She stretched back on the grass and closed her eyes, just absorbing the wonder of gravity, until she could no longer remember what it was that she’d been thinking about.
When she opened her eyes, the sun was nearly to the horizon, staining the field a vivid red-orange. Had she really been sitting out there for that long? She reached for a new blade of grass, but her hands found instead a scraggly weed, with wilted yellow-green leaves. Something in the shape of the leaves caught her attention, dredging up memories that hadn’t quite made their way to the surface.
“The family Thandrani can be found on most planets in the central region of Mutter’s Spiral,” said Professor Shalan on the third day of Improvisational Chemistry. “While the leaves can make for excellent nourishment, it is the stem to which you should direct your attention. When broken, it releases a pale blue, viscous secretion that is highly combustible under most circumstances…”
While the voice of Professor Shalan-whose actual name was thirteen syllables, which was impressive even for a Time Lord-drawled in her ears, she uprooted several more weeds. She collected the ‘viscous secretion’ in a small puddle, on top of a flat rock. The lighter flared to life, its flame the same color as the setting sun, and Ace smiled.
Boom.
Author: agent_tomato (Undying Mongoose on Teaspoon and Fanfiction.Net)
Rating: T
Word Count: 2,732
Pairing: Unrequited past Ace/Seven and (in later chapters) Turlough/Five, eventual (in much later chapters) Ace/Turlough
Characters: Ace II*, Vislor Turlough, various OCs
In flashback: Ace I, Eight
*Sort of halfway between a canon character and an OC
Warnings: Some subtextual slash in later chapters. Angst. Mild violence. References to character death.
Warnings specific to this chapter: Brief, minor self-injury.
Spoilers: References to the old series (predominantly the Fifth and Seventh Doctors) and the Time War, including background that was revealed in “The End of Time.”
Summary: A girl named Ace entered the Academy. A Time Lady emerged from the fires of the war. A tale of aliens, explosions, and tea.
Chapter Summary: Ace's memories begin to return, and with them all the pain and loss of the Time War.
Alice the Alien (officially on the colony records as Alice Smith, but no one ever paid attention to those) did not speak another word for three months. The doctors called it trauma, while most of the colonists just called her a nutter.
Mira remained staunchly loyal to her alien, visiting Alice in the hospital every day after school and making sure that no one brought a piece of toast anywhere near the room. “I’m sure they mean well,” Mira said, as she did her maths homework on Alice’s bed, “but sometimes people can be very stupid.”
Alice smiled, and pointed at the second problem in Column Three, where Mira had neglected a zero. Mira examined her answer until she determined what error her friend had spotted, and quickly corrected herself. “Thanks. You’re really good at maths.”
Alice shrugged. It was her answer to most everything. She pulled her legs up to her chest to give Mira room to open up her science textbook. It was very old-fashioned, Mira had told Alice last month, to use paper textbooks, but their teacher was eccentric like that.
“We’re learning about chemicals this week,” Mira announced. “Do you know about that, too?”
Alice…started to shrug. Then, looking at An Introduction to Science for Bright Children upside-down, her eyes widened, and she seized the book.
“Hey, I need that!” Mira exclaimed. Would Mrs. Merrill accept theft-by-alien as a legitimate excuse for late homework?
Hands turning the pages so fast that she couldn’t possibly be reading, Alice ran her eyes through the entire chapter on chemistry. When she had finished, she dropped the book on the floor and sprung out of bed. “I have something important to do,” she said-her first words in ten weeks. “Thank you, Mira.”
And she ran out of the hospital room without shoes, dressed in secondhand pajamas. The doctors were so surprised to see their resident madwoman running down the hall that they forgot to stop her, until she had already reached the door. Mira followed, sprinting faster than she ever had before.
Mira finally caught up with Alice, after many wrong turns, in the secondary school science lab, where the alien was arguing with an irate teacher.
“I just need to borrow a few things,” said Alice, trying to push past the teacher, whose name Mira didn’t know. “I promise, I will put everything back just as I found it.”
“Absolutely not!” the teacher said, bracing himself against the doorframe to keep Alice from passing. “First of all, we’re having a study group in here. Second of all, I don’t know who you are, but you’re definitely not a student, which means you have no right to use our equipment!”
Alice said a few words in a melodic foreign language. Mira could tell by the expression on Alice’s face that they hadn’t been nice words. “I have a certification in temporospatial chemistry from the Prydon Academy of Gallifrey!” she shouted. At first, Mira thought Alice was still speaking in the other language-half of her words didn’t make any sense at all. “I learned more in my first month of school than you will in your entire lifetime, you stupid little man! Chemical processes of my creation have restructured entire planets and changed the course of history, but I have no right to use your equipment?”
Her face was flushed red from agitation, and Alice swayed a little. “Oh. Sorry, I think my emotional centers are still in imbalance. I’m going to need a lot more tea.”
She reached out a hand to steady herself against the door, but missed, and collapsed with a small thump to the laboratory floor.
***
Her first fear, upon waking up, was that she had lost her memory again. Then, as her brain emerged from its fog, she realized that if she remembered losing her memory before, she probably hadn’t lost it again. But she was back in a hospital bed, which seemed to indicate that something wasn’t right with her.
“You collapsed,” said the pleasant and ever-inquisitive Dr. Peters. “Mira says you were talking before.”
“Yes, of course I’m talking.” Why hadn’t she been talking? Her memory was still a little fuzzy on that point. “And I don’t need to be here. I just need tea. It helps me metabolize the excess artron energy.”
“What in the world is artron energy?”
“Very important stuff that lets me do things you can’t. Can I get out of here now? Oh, and I need clothes.”
“We still have some more tests to run,” said Dr. Peters. “We’re still trying to figure out exactly what you are…”
“Time Lord,” she replied. “82.3% Gallifreyan, 17.7% human, but 100% Time Lord. Only you don’t know what a Time Lord is, because they don’t exist anymore and you’re not a time-aware species…”
“How can you be 82% of a species?” She watched his forehead crinkle as he tried to make the maths work.
“I never finished the conversion process. There was a war going on, you see-we were a little busy. And that’s eighty-two point three percent. But that really doesn’t matter. I know what I am, and I have important things to do.”
“You’re not going anywhere until I’m certain you’re not going to collapse again.”
“I’m not. I just need tea, I told you. And clothes. And access to chemistry equipment.” She had a feeling that the tea was the only one she was likely to receive. When the doctor’s back was turned, she once more slipped out from under the blankets and started for the door.
“Sit back down, right now!” Dr. Peters commanded. “I’m not having you running off again. What if no one had been around when you collapsed? You could hurt yourself.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I know you’re trying to help,” she said. She could feel the irritation building again, the violence of regeneration sickness, and sped up her pace, hoping to persuade the doctor before the rage got too much for her to control. “But really, I am fine. My memory’s back, you see, so I know how to take care of myself now. There won’t be any more collapsing.”
“But why did you go running off?”
He certainly wasn’t helping to speed things along, was he? She tried to remember the impressive-sounding terminology that she’d learned in Basics of Telepathic Operations. Maybe if she made it complicated enough, he would stop asking questions. “There was an imbalance in my emotional centers after the removal of the psychic block on my mnemonic functions, which led to a brief period of irrationality and the emotional imperative to find a place my subconscious defined as ‘safe.’ Now can I have tea?”
Dr. Peters acquiesced and brought her a steaming cup, on the condition that she stay for a few more tests. She absorbed the free radicals and tannins quickly, and she could feel the patterns of her body begin to fall into order.
There were wires attached to her head as she lay on a flat table, and she couldn’t help thinking about the Mind Probe. She reminded herself that this was not Gallifrey, and this species hadn’t evolved such interrogation techniques yet.
“Now, just close your eyes and relax. We’re just taking some basic scans, nothing to worry about.”
Relax. Relax in the hands of doctors who had no idea how to handle her biology. It was a miracle that they hadn’t accidentally poisoned her with acetylsalicylic acid, or mistook her binary heartbeat for symptoms of a heart attack. She called to mind the meditations that her professors had drilled into them, letting every system in her body slip into a calmer state. The mantra of her induction oath ran through her mind.
I swear to protect the ancient Law of Gallifrey with all my might and brain. I will to the end of my days with justice and with honour temper my actions and my thoughts…
It sounded so beautiful in Gallifreyan. She’d found the language lessons torturous at first, and unnecessary-wasn’t that what translation circuits were for?-but she’d eventually come to love the language of the Time Lords, even the four hopelessly complicated writing systems. She alternated between mentally reciting the oath in English-the way she’d sworn it-and her halting Gallifreyan.
Even better than the language itself was the memory of the Prydonians who’d taken it upon themselves to make sure she’d learned it. There had been a professor, of course, and a tutor, but the memories that came easiest to mind were those of Ruslan and Maro, who sat with her at every meal and taught her the fine art of Gallifreyan insults. Her instructor had frowned upon it, as it was hardly dignified for future Time Lords, but it was the only reason she could remember how to form the accusative case, or the uses of the informal vocative.
They’d been her first friends, and very often her only ones. Between the three of them, they were responsible for seventeen major explosions on Prydonian property, and five on Arcalian. (The Arcalians had responded in kind, of course, which just made it more fun.) And when she’d begun the painful genetic conversion from human to Gallifreyan, Ruslan held her hand during each treatment, while Maro recited poetry.
They were dead.
Her euphoria at regaining her memory and her irritation at the superfluous tests faded as if they had never entered her mind. Earth was still out there, presumably, but Gallifrey and all her friends from the Academy were gone. Erased from time, as if they had never been there. And she had done it. Traitor. Genocide. Murderer.
She dug deeper into meditation to avoid the accusations of her own mind. I swear to protect the ancient Law of Gallifrey with all my might and brain. I will to the end of my days with justice and with honour temper my actions and my thoughts… Calm. She could be calm. Like the eye of a storm, unmoved in the middle of turmoil. Everything seemed to slow, and for the first time since she’d arrived on the planet, she didn’t feel hot.
Then there was beeping, and a frantic hand seized her shoulder. “Alice? Alice!”
She dragged herself out of the trance and opened her eyes. Dr. Peters leaned over her, panic in his face. “What? Are we finished already?”
“Finished? Alice, you went into cardiac arrest! Your heart-I mean, your hearts-stopped beating!”
“Oh. Did they? I didn’t notice. Sorry, did it muck up the scan?”
“Did it muck up the scan?” the doctor repeated, incredulous. “You nearly died!”
“No, I didn’t. Really, I’m fine. My hearts can do that.” They didn’t actually stop, the Time Lords had explained, but slowed to such a rate that most medical equipment could not detect the pulse. Although she was fairly certain that it wasn’t supposed to happen unconsciously…but he didn’t need to know that. She could take care of herself.
***
The chemistry lab wasn’t an option, but she borrowed a lighter from one of the nurses on her way out of the hospital. It wasn’t the same, but it was something. She sat in the corner of a disused field, setting individual blades of grass on fire. As she watched the flames dance and die, she thought.
She thought of Manisha. Whenever she thought of absent friends, Manisha was always the first one to her mind, since that terrible day in 1983. But there was something different this time. When she remembered the sound of the sirens, and the stench of the smoke, they weren’t accompanied by the familiar surge of childish anger. All there was was a sort of dark and terrible sadness, smouldering away in the back of her brain. It was an emotion that she had never felt before.
It wasn’t human. And that scared her, more than the War, more than anything.
She had changed. She’d been changed already, of course-that was the point of the genetic conversion. But the regeneration had driven those changes deeper into her body, so deep that even though she knew they hadn’t always been there, she couldn’t imagine being without them. Was this what it meant to regenerate? Was this what the Doctor felt, every time? How had he handled it?
He’d handled it, that was all that mattered. And she would handle it. All these new emotions, new thoughts, and the new body that held them: she could handle it. She was a Time Lord.
She slammed her hand down on a burning blade of grass and gritted her teeth against the pain. It didn’t hurt as much as she’d expected, not like other burns she’d had (and she’d had plenty, in her incendiary career). Higher pain threshold, that was part of it. Two hearts, respiratory bypass system, low body temperature, increased temporal awareness, various psychic abilities, and an infinite capacity for pretension and troublemaking. That was what she was now.
“I am a Time Lord,” she said, for the second time that day. She’d grown used to the way the R’s rolled across her tongue. It was a familiar accent-not hers, but comfortable, much like her new features.
She was probably the last. After all, the whole purpose of the Moment was to eradicate everything within the time lock: every last second of the Time War, compressed into a single instant and burnt into nothingness. At best, she was one of two. That was the hope she had to cling to, that just as the force of the Moment propelled her back from the beginning of the time lock, it might have sent him beyond the end of it. If there was a chance that a single other Time Lord survived, it would be the Doctor. It had to be the Doctor. He had to be all right.
But he might not, an unpleasant thought nagged at her brain. The TARDIS’s shield could have warded the Doctor against the excess energy that had saved her life, kept him trapped inside the time lock. He might have burnt with all the others. And she might be completely alone.
Wasn’t this where she ought to be crying? She didn’t cry much, she thought, but this seemed like an occasion for it. But there were no tears. Perhaps this body was done with crying.
Another blade of grass burned. She held it in her hand and let it scorch her palm before dropping it on the ground. She stared at the reddened skin in fascination. It was as if the hand belonged to someone else, a someone who had curly hair, and a Scottish accent, and was much too short.
Beneath her, the planet turned at an unimaginable speed. It was remarkable, really, that no one fell off. Gravity was a wonderful thing. How had she never noticed how wonderful it was? The more she thought about it, the more a feeling of euphoria overwhelmed her senses. She stretched back on the grass and closed her eyes, just absorbing the wonder of gravity, until she could no longer remember what it was that she’d been thinking about.
When she opened her eyes, the sun was nearly to the horizon, staining the field a vivid red-orange. Had she really been sitting out there for that long? She reached for a new blade of grass, but her hands found instead a scraggly weed, with wilted yellow-green leaves. Something in the shape of the leaves caught her attention, dredging up memories that hadn’t quite made their way to the surface.
“The family Thandrani can be found on most planets in the central region of Mutter’s Spiral,” said Professor Shalan on the third day of Improvisational Chemistry. “While the leaves can make for excellent nourishment, it is the stem to which you should direct your attention. When broken, it releases a pale blue, viscous secretion that is highly combustible under most circumstances…”
While the voice of Professor Shalan-whose actual name was thirteen syllables, which was impressive even for a Time Lord-drawled in her ears, she uprooted several more weeds. She collected the ‘viscous secretion’ in a small puddle, on top of a flat rock. The lighter flared to life, its flame the same color as the setting sun, and Ace smiled.
Boom.