A Country of Smaller Wars (2/3)
"A Country of Smaller Wars", 2/3 ( Main page)
Gallifrey, Narvin/Romana
~23,000 words
R (violence, sexual situations, ennui)
Spoilers through the end of season four.
The Axis is where they keep all their mistakes.
2.
Choose Any Direction
Leela asks where they go now, and Braxiatel says Anywhere at all. Anywhere except home.
The Axis is anonymous and empty, filled with shiny white paneling and self-sufficient computers. There's accommodations for a possible staff but no evidence that anyone was ever actually here. Maybe it built itself. He keeps getting fingerprints everywhere, smudges and scuff marks on everything he touches. He feels unwelcome and unnecessary.
Romana keeps trying to explain it to Leela, like if she could only just translate this into a basic analogy then the overall sense of it would appear. It's like a tree, she says. It's like a river and its tributaries. It's like a forking path. It's like a quarantine.
It's like a space station with portals to alternate universes, he wants to say, but doesn't.
All the hallways look like other hallways. Possibly there's only one hallway, looping and adapting. A few square, rounded rooms with square, rounded furniture. He becomes acquainted with the subtle variations, translucent white, clear over matte white, reflective silver-white, the occasional surprise of a red indicator light. Gentle glow white, neon white, white fabric and white plastic. Nothing particularly wants to be used. There's a hush, everywhere but especially in the hallway, there's a hush that's more than a lack of noise. The silence stands in judgment of their mortal imprecisions. He talks too loudly and clods in and out of rooms, he's perversely graceless.
Each portal has a placard next to it, tiny black type on a small white label. Name, brief description, a string of numbers that mean something but he's not sure what. The wall vibrates, or the projection of the image of the wall vibrates, or his understanding of it does. Braxiatel steps through the place where the wall technically isn't, the heat wave, the material shudder, he steps through and gestures for them to follow. It really doesn't feel like much of anything at all. Take a step and suddenly you're elsewhere. Microhistories and entire universes, collected errors.
It's like a plant with dead stems that had to be cut off, Romana says. It's like the medicines you take when you're sick.
They left and they keep leaving. They try not to talk about home. He feels disembodied, he feels like an affront. He is accidentally here. They don't trust him and he doesn't trust this place, this nowhere, this deus ex machina he never asked for. Gallifrey is dying and he's wandering through a series of escape routes, the black of his robes a stain on the endless, infinite white.
It's like all the mistakes you've made but managed to forget, Romana says, glancing pointedly over at him.
*
They walk through a door identified as Point Call, which is twenty seconds of someone being shot in the head. They stayed for five microspans, first because they weren't sure what was happening and then because Romana wanted to know what it meant. A peasant girl pulling a staser from her pocket, firing with steady hands at a guard coming towards her. A neat little hole between his eyes, before the blood starts. The pause before he falls, then the fall, and she puts the gun back in her pocket, and it begins again.
"This is upsetting and pointless," Leela says. "Obviously we cannot stay here. Romana, your time is better spent finding a new home than thinking about what this means."
"It means nothing," Narvin says.
"It means something," Romana says. "I know we can't stay here, Leela, it's just - I'm curious, that's all."
Braxiatel lays an arm across her shoulder. She doesn't warm at all to that, but he doesn't seem to notice. "It's an event that never should have happened, that never did happen in the true timeline. If you like, we can look it up on the computer, that'll tell you more than watching this will. Hmm?"
Romana takes one last hard look at the tableau (the girl, the gun, the hole in his head, the thump as he crumples to the ground), then lets Braxiatel lead her back to the Axis.
*
He follows Leela through yet another portal and for the thousandth time tries to figure out how exactly he ended up here.
It's a city, which could be the Citadel, but isn't. It never is.
"The smell is familiar," Leela says, turning around slowly with her nose in the air.
"Visually, it's close. Not the right buildings but the right sort of architecture. The clothing styles are right. Everyone appears to have the correct number of limbs."
"You did not like the world with the centipedes?" She's teasing him, something he's starting to get used to.
"We never would have fit in."
She bounds off in the direction of, what, a smell? A sound? Some mystical feeling? He sighs and tries to keep up.
Later that day they come across a lake. In the outlands, where they'd ended up after being chased, where they're waiting for the portal to return. K9 is reporting distantly on its position. Leela says she feels the presence of water, and he doesn't believe her until they reach the top of the hill and he sees the lake below. Maybe the ground changed, maybe there was something in the air, maybe she could hear the reeds brushing against each other. Maybe she just remembered it from the original Gallifrey and was lying. She runs down laughing, taking off her clothes like dead skin, heading straight into the water, as if it's the most natural thing in the world to do, as if lakes are things you just run into. He follows her, measured footsteps, up to the edge, and stops.
"The water is cool and invigorating!" she yells, splashing around. "Come join me and wash the dust away. Or are you scared?"
"Time Lords don't swim," he yells back. "It's undignified. Besides, I don't want to be damp all day."
She sticks her tongue out at him and starts doing a backstroke. He stands facing the direction where the portal will be, arms folded into the sleeves of his robes.
*
Stripped of her title and ceremonial attire, Romana still looks like the president. He can't help it. It's the tilt of her jaw, how she walks quickly but unhurriedly, sense-memory guiding her legs against heavy fabric that is no longer there, neck straight for the collar's missing weight. She is, for want of a better word, imperial. She demands the room, with all the power she worked so very hard for, and she gets it, always. She's beautiful, he acknowledges, in a strange way, wiry and sunburnt, the careless old blood of Heartshaven, the sharp angle of her hips through loose trousers. Blond hair brushing against her cheekbones. Small hands, narrow shoulders. Marching on like she doesn't know and doesn't care if she's earned this, what's left of Gallifrey trailing behind her, trusting her, like she's half-convinced she's not the right woman for the job.
He's considering telling them he'd had his future surgically removed. He imagines their faces, when he'd say do be careful, I could die at any moment: Leela would be angry and worried, Brax grudgingly concerned. K9 would give him the statistical probability of his being shot/maimed/killed by exposure. Romana's expression is variable. Does she care? Is she cold and calculated, with only a hint of sadness? Is she guilty? Self-pitying? He can't make up his mind.
It's funny, almost. He has no country, no name, no title, no purpose, and now he can't regenerate. He can't remember the last time he was in a TARDIS. If it weren't for the two hearts stubbornly beating in his chest, the language in his head, he'd wonder if he were still a Time Lord at all. Think of it like this: he woke up one morning and realized who he was. A single, solitary man, complete in himself. What he is now is all he'll ever be.
Braxiatel tries so hard to be a new person. He calls himself Irving, now. Like a human. Black tie and three-piece suit, gold watch, cufflinks. He could be play-acting, if it weren't for the sense that he is about to run, any microspan now, and leave them all behind. The Ark is a ruse, he came back for Romana, Narvin knows that. He has already begun constructing the man he will become and one day he will slip through one of those doors (maybe with Romana, maybe without) and never look back.
And Braxiatel talks to Narvin like he is a less successful version of himself. A version perpetually late to the party. The last to come to his senses, the last to get a backbone, the last to abandon home. Braxiatel says Romana as if it's a name like any other; Narvin says it and everyone can hear the echo of Madame President in his voice. He imagines what it's like to be Brax, to be that controlled and precise as Irving. A change far more complete than a spy's could ever be.
Narvin has no Plan B. He loses everything and is left only with himself, which he knows isn't much. A patriot with no country, a Coordinator with nothing to coordinate. He has the key to his TARDIS in his pocket and that is the very last piece of his old life he'll ever hold. He finds himself waiting impatiently for the next excursion, the next Gallifrey, in the vague hope that he'll discover a reason to exist this time. What a self-indulgent, decadent concept, wanting to 'find himself'. He swears he used to be better than this.
*
Braxiatel's pushing buttons in the control room, Romana's supervising him, and the robot dog is wheeling around the hallways making beeping noises. Narvin's holed up in the kitchen, trying and failing to make a cup of tea. Leela is watching, uncharacteristically quiet.
"I made the water hot. I don't think - nevermind." He puts the cup gently in the sink and stares at it. Steam rises. He leaves it there and attempts to slump down morosely in a chair designed specifically to prevent slumping. Leela is sitting ramrod-straight, of course, even though she's already getting older, hair greying, hands starting to shake. Some strange part of him hurts at that.
"We should not have left," she says. "I'm happy that we are all safe, and I am grateful to Braxiatel, but it is wrong to put ourselves above all the people on Gallifrey who do not have the luxury of time spoons."
He doesn't bother correcting her. It doesn't matter. She has the important parts right. "Every empire falls," he says. "Gallifrey has the unique distinction of being able to take along the rest of the universe when it goes. A single timeonic fusion device could erase all of Kasterborous, and Pandora had twelve. If Arkadian had his way, all that temporal ordnance is in the hands of the Monans, the Nekkistani, any two-bit military that could scrape together the credit. We provided the motive and means for a war, and any war fought with weapons like that - for all we know, the event horizon has come and gone, and the only thing left is dust."
"Thank you, Narvin. I now feel worse than I did before. I knew I could count on you." She smiles brightly, then lets it drop. "What do we do, then?"
He doesn't know what they do. He doesn't know at all what happens next, what the point of this is, why he's here on this cross-temporal waystation instead of where he belongs. He doesn't even know what he's going to say until he opens his mouth and says it. "We run. We run and run and never look back, because the things we let happen, the chaos we've wrought... I'm not sure what we could have done, if we'd stayed. Now we'll never know. All we can do is keep going, and hope we learn how to live with ourselves."
She looks at him askance. "Don't say 'we' when you mean 'I'. You should own your emotions instead of hiding them behind words."
"Psychological advice from a savage, how fascinating. Should I also be performing a rain dance, or perhaps consulting with the spirits?"
"We have no need for rain. Dance for the gods so that they may grant you peace of mind. Also ask to be given better manners." She nods solemnly.
He makes an exaggerated thoughtful face, tucks his fist under his chin. "I left my ceremonial headdress on Gallifrey, do you think the gods will mind?"
She laughs. "I'm sure they'll understand."
*
Even on the Axis, Braxiatel has an office. He'd already settled in when they'd first arrived. A desk, damask curtains, walls lined with leather-bound books that may or may not be fake. Cut-glass decanters, statuettes, a box of cigars, a decorative letter-opener. Narvin sits in an armchair placed awkwardly in the middle of the room, hands clasped in front him, deciding where and when each artifact was stolen from. Wondering what precisely the point is of him being here.
"I never told myself about this," Braxiatel says. "I think I wanted to spare him. Spending half my time in this antiseptic machine, the other half discovering the various miseries Gallifrey is capable of. It has the air of a Greek myth, all this endless leaving of home. Condemned to these facsimiles, knowing full well the real thing is gone."
"How poetic," Narvin says, just barely refraining from rolling his eyes. "It's a shame you're separated from your museum, you could have this monologue archived."
"Don't let the cheap thrills of sarcasm blind you to the lessons to be learned here. There are worlds without us, Narvin, and they get on just fine. I'd say it should be a humbling thought, but I'm not sure you're capable of that sort of emotion."
"And I'm not sure you of all people should accuse me of being self-aggrandizing."
"Don't tell me. Pots and kettles, I know. I could have been you, Narvin, very easily. I suppose you could've been me, as well. All of us could have been other people. The universe is not a chess game, it's poker. Texas Hold-'em. The hand you're dealt, and what you do with it. Personally, I've always preferred to cheat. Ace up the sleeve, hmm?"
Narvin's about to make a disparaging remark about human metaphors, and conversational metaphors in general, when the office door bangs open.
"Braxiatel," Romana says, or shouts, as she stalks across the carpet. Narvin stands automatically. "The key to the communications room, if you please. And sit down, Narvin."
Narvin sits. Braxiatel shrugs theatrically and makes a show of rummaging through his desk, opening drawers and drawers within drawers until he stops, winks, and takes the key from his coat pocket. "Madame," he drawls, and drops the key into her outstretched hand.
He realizes he's staring. He can't help it, somehow. His brain taking note of details he doesn't need, like the angle of her wrists and the way her hair falls over her shoulders. He's still watching her as she slams the door shut.
"Ah," Braxiatel says, in the voice he uses when he wants to seem all-knowing. "That is not a war you can win. Believe me, I've tried. I've given her everything, and she - well."
"She is the president." Narvin intends the unspoken second sentence to be She doesn't have time for your pathetic affections but isn't sure whether it comes across.
"She is, isn't she? Even without a country to preside over. I don't think anything could take that away from her. It's part of her charm. But then, you're aware of that, aren't you? Poor Narvin. I think you'll find a stiff drink and a stiff upper lip will get you through the worst of it."
"Not everyone has the same failings as you," Narvin says. "I am a servant of the state, which currently happens to consist entirely of Romana. That is the beginning and end of it. I don't - pine, or whatever it is you do when you lock yourself in here and sulk."
"Whatever helps you sleep at night." He smiles genially, then reaches into a drawer for a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.
Ten spans later, Braxiatel's thrown himself and an analogue of his brother into the void. Narvin supposes he should've seen it coming.
*
K9 is finding Gallifrey for them now. He interfaces with the Axis directly, chirping and whirring. The amount of trust they've put in the thing is faintly astounding. Have a question, ask the dog. Need to access a computer, get the dog to do it. It's a toy, more or less. Romana treats it like an oracle. Or look at it like this: the dog does what Braxiatel did, which is make a space between them and what they're doing, a buffer against the guilty things of home and flight and unfixable mistakes.
K9 works the system now but Braxiatel took his purpose with him when he left. The sense of a grand plan, if there ever really was one, is now utterly gone, all the spin of focus and faith swept away. And this is not about them, as such, but their orbital parts in Braxiatel's white-charger fantasy, his dream of himself as romantic savior, the final desperate thing he did before relinquishing the last of his heritage. They're what's left over. Narvin's made peace with his ego and Leela isn't the type to care, but Romana, now, Romana the great leader, the crusader, the Imperiatrix, is faced with the fact that she allowed her agency to be usurped by one man's childish impulses.
Need a decision, ask the dog.
Leela stays behind to, she says, keep K9 company. Narvin and Romana head out alone. They walk through a portal and into the dust-dry hills of eastern Gallifrey, the thorn-scrub desolation. Firebrand country, once. They head north-northwest, towards where the capitol should be.
The valleys, the salt flats, the fossilized sea floor. Everything baked and purified by the suns. They used to set up time loops here, full-scale quantum repeaters, and if it weren't for the sonic booms no one would have ever noticed. The aftereffects drifting downwind all the way to Lungbarrow, where, it was said, the loom produced offspring with chronic deja-vu, or regenerative coupling, or compulsive tardiness.
The one-meter square area he'd buried the TFD in, surrounded by insulation and gypsum dust. The catalog number and threat level, the situation report. What happens after the heroes vanquish the enemy is Narvin transmats into the desert with a shovel and digs a hole of the required depth. Cut a grave into the ground. Gallifrey held onto their failures, even if none of them did.
Romana trudges on with great determination, he has difficulty keeping up. "I'm beginning to wonder if we wouldn't be better off going somewhere else entirely. What's the point of a Gallifrey if we don't recognize it?"
"And if we do. Most likely we're already there, so what happens then? Should we disguise ourselves and hide out in a hotel? Should we have ourselves assassinated?"
"We could go to Acapulco."
"I just don't see how this is supposed to work," he says. "Acapulco?"
"All of time and space and we're hiking towards a city that may or may not be there."
"Where best-case scenario, we'll be jobless and homeless. You know what happens to people without proper documentation."
She pulls ahead, jogging to the top of the ridge. He scrabbles up after her, panting, fumbling for his canteen. She's shading her eyes against the second sunrise.
"The point may be moot," she says.
Down below, where the city should be, is a low collection of brownish-grey objects. Smaller blurs moving around.
"We couldn't have brought a pair of binoculars. I'm willing to concede the lack of transportation, but surely binoculars are a thing we could have managed."
She sits down in the sand. He crouches next to her. "Buildings, I think," she says. "Huts, more like."
"We wouldn't need identification, at least."
"All of time and space and we're wandering around the desert trying to find a tribal village."
"We'd be regarded as gods. They'd worship us and our superior technology. They'd bring us offerings, sacrifice animals in our name."
"I'd kill Brax if he weren't already dead."
"Leela could be our prophet." He picks up a rock, examines it, tosses it down the hill. "Stay or go?"
"Go, obviously. As appealing as godhood is."
"The portal comes back in?"
"Three spans, give or take. We can make it if we hurry."
"Failing that, we die of dehydration, our corpses are stripped bare by the wind and sun, and the tribe uses our bones for weapons."
"I'd like to think I'd make a nice necklace."
"And your skull the most coveted chalice. Shall we go, then?"
Romana makes it to the control room and then sort of deflates, like she's suddenly run out of something crucial. "Let's take a break," she says. "A day or two off."
He nods and says "Yes, of course," and she says "Well," and he says "No, no, we could all use some time to gather our thoughts."
She folds herself onto a chair and closes her eyes. She collapses in stages. Gravity is the predominant force here, she wilts under it, folding her body into a compact shape. Gravity and circumstances and events preceding. There's a gauntness about her, a skeletal spareness she usually keeps to herself.
"Well," he says. "I'll be in the library if you need me."
They call it a library but there's no evidence it actually is one. It could be anything. Another indeterminate room filled with indeterminate things. They call it a library. It's something Leela would do, and something they'd mock her for doing, the magic naming of things, as if the vocabulary of the familiar could summon the familiar itself.
He sits in the library on one of two white rubber armchairs and goes over his notes. The act of enterprise, like he could convince the universe of his relevancy if he just concentrated. Notes alphabetized and properly dated. Events cross-referenced, personal asides written in code. Tabulations, predictions, evaluations, the formal report.
They take time off. The word is regroup. They stand around and hope that motivation finds them. There's an interval, and Romana's in charge of deciding when it's over, there's an interval of however long where they wait for the fact of Braxiatel's absence to assert itself. There are no days here, just spans slowly ticking over. They wait an undetermined period of time for the situation to take hold. He puts his name and identification code on every entry, follows standard CIA composition style. He pretends to be what he actually is. The legerdemain of self.
Romana in the control room with her guilt and exhaustion. A pose of abdication, a physical relinquishing of command. Elbows and knees and the ten-mile stare.
He records what they'd done and then records what they're doing. He catches up on unnecessary paperwork. He becomes acutely aware of himself, the individual aches and pains, the need of a haircut, the frayed edges of his robes. The acrid taste in his mouth left by the processed air and the precisely nutritious food bars, a chemical undertone fuzzing his tongue.
The food comes shuttling out of a dispenser, wrapped in white paper and stamped with Tomato-Cheese or Breakfast or Quiche, although it all tastes the same, the chemical salt and artificial vitamin bitterness.
Leela holds extended conversations with K9. All Define 'heart-to-heart', mistress and This unit is not programmed to speculate. She sings songs to it. She tells stories. She makes confessions. The thing abides with mechanical patience.
Romana in the control room like she's just lost whatever it was that had held her together. The past tense of her presidency. He'd been a spy once, and a scientist before that. He punches in a number on the keypad and the machine beeps and rumbles and spits out a grey rectangle in white paper that says Vegetable Medley. Leela asking K9 why everyone's so quiet, and K9 responding this unit is not equipped to make psychiatric evaluations.
They play fetch, they play checkers. Narvin sits in the designated desk-work area and watches from the corner of his eye. She practices knife technique and K9 critiques her. The lunging stab, the head-lock slice, the downward plunge. She trains as if for the arena, a gladiator in sweat-sheen and leather, the Axis encompassing, dampening, making absurd the efforts of muscle and instinct and clumsy human synapses. The Axis humming and self-cleaning and regulating light cycles. Sun-white, salt-white, bone-white; the implication of violence.
*
These are worlds without him. He is dead, or unknown, or has never existed. He doesn't belong here. Leela, for all her many faults, is made for this, adventuring, running, fighting, living on instinct and courage. Braxiatel could've landed in a sewer and emerged with his suit still immaculately pressed. Romana has determination that could move mountains. He's got a battered set of CIA robes and a penchant for head trauma. He's useless and helpless and he could die, for Rassilon's sake, he could die and what would even be the point of it all.
Romana disappears and he just panics, that dry-land drowning, a greater fear than he ever thought he was capable of. He's nothing without her, he knows this now. So he follows Leela, or the wolf inside her, runs across plains that should have been apartment complexes, trying to ignore the burning in his lungs, the ache in his legs and head and hearts, how the only thing keeping him going is sheer desperation.
Then he gets himself stabbed, of all things, with a knife, by a vampire, and he's probably dying and he'd laugh if he could get his lungs to work correctly. He's dying on the cold dirt floor of a nest. Did he mention the vampires? All because he couldn't walk away. Because, after everything that's happened, he doesn't know how to leave Romana, doesn't know what he'd be without her, and she decided to save this stupid, backwards world and he had to help her whether he wanted to or not. So he's bleeding out and it hurts and he's scared, so incredibly scared, and it's ridiculous, and he's ridiculous, and he just wants, really, to live, to keep doing whatever it is they're doing, the three of them, he wants to keep this. He wants to stay.
The wolf is staring at him knowingly.
It's a few nanospans before Romana realizes he's down. She looks as panicked as he feels, and he'd be pleased, if he could spare the energy. He'd like to be brave, to die in a properly heroic way, a few meaningful last words, but he doesn't die, just lies there in agony doing his very best not to cry as she cradles him in her arms, her hand pressed against the hole in his chest.
(He remembers how she looked after she'd fought with Pandora for the final time, how small and fragile she'd seemed in the hospital bed, how he'd just then noticed there was a person underneath the presidential robes. He can't bring himself to meet her eyes.)
Part Three
Gallifrey, Narvin/Romana
~23,000 words
R (violence, sexual situations, ennui)
Spoilers through the end of season four.
The Axis is where they keep all their mistakes.
2.
Choose Any Direction
Leela asks where they go now, and Braxiatel says Anywhere at all. Anywhere except home.
The Axis is anonymous and empty, filled with shiny white paneling and self-sufficient computers. There's accommodations for a possible staff but no evidence that anyone was ever actually here. Maybe it built itself. He keeps getting fingerprints everywhere, smudges and scuff marks on everything he touches. He feels unwelcome and unnecessary.
Romana keeps trying to explain it to Leela, like if she could only just translate this into a basic analogy then the overall sense of it would appear. It's like a tree, she says. It's like a river and its tributaries. It's like a forking path. It's like a quarantine.
It's like a space station with portals to alternate universes, he wants to say, but doesn't.
All the hallways look like other hallways. Possibly there's only one hallway, looping and adapting. A few square, rounded rooms with square, rounded furniture. He becomes acquainted with the subtle variations, translucent white, clear over matte white, reflective silver-white, the occasional surprise of a red indicator light. Gentle glow white, neon white, white fabric and white plastic. Nothing particularly wants to be used. There's a hush, everywhere but especially in the hallway, there's a hush that's more than a lack of noise. The silence stands in judgment of their mortal imprecisions. He talks too loudly and clods in and out of rooms, he's perversely graceless.
Each portal has a placard next to it, tiny black type on a small white label. Name, brief description, a string of numbers that mean something but he's not sure what. The wall vibrates, or the projection of the image of the wall vibrates, or his understanding of it does. Braxiatel steps through the place where the wall technically isn't, the heat wave, the material shudder, he steps through and gestures for them to follow. It really doesn't feel like much of anything at all. Take a step and suddenly you're elsewhere. Microhistories and entire universes, collected errors.
It's like a plant with dead stems that had to be cut off, Romana says. It's like the medicines you take when you're sick.
They left and they keep leaving. They try not to talk about home. He feels disembodied, he feels like an affront. He is accidentally here. They don't trust him and he doesn't trust this place, this nowhere, this deus ex machina he never asked for. Gallifrey is dying and he's wandering through a series of escape routes, the black of his robes a stain on the endless, infinite white.
It's like all the mistakes you've made but managed to forget, Romana says, glancing pointedly over at him.
*
They walk through a door identified as Point Call, which is twenty seconds of someone being shot in the head. They stayed for five microspans, first because they weren't sure what was happening and then because Romana wanted to know what it meant. A peasant girl pulling a staser from her pocket, firing with steady hands at a guard coming towards her. A neat little hole between his eyes, before the blood starts. The pause before he falls, then the fall, and she puts the gun back in her pocket, and it begins again.
"This is upsetting and pointless," Leela says. "Obviously we cannot stay here. Romana, your time is better spent finding a new home than thinking about what this means."
"It means nothing," Narvin says.
"It means something," Romana says. "I know we can't stay here, Leela, it's just - I'm curious, that's all."
Braxiatel lays an arm across her shoulder. She doesn't warm at all to that, but he doesn't seem to notice. "It's an event that never should have happened, that never did happen in the true timeline. If you like, we can look it up on the computer, that'll tell you more than watching this will. Hmm?"
Romana takes one last hard look at the tableau (the girl, the gun, the hole in his head, the thump as he crumples to the ground), then lets Braxiatel lead her back to the Axis.
*
He follows Leela through yet another portal and for the thousandth time tries to figure out how exactly he ended up here.
It's a city, which could be the Citadel, but isn't. It never is.
"The smell is familiar," Leela says, turning around slowly with her nose in the air.
"Visually, it's close. Not the right buildings but the right sort of architecture. The clothing styles are right. Everyone appears to have the correct number of limbs."
"You did not like the world with the centipedes?" She's teasing him, something he's starting to get used to.
"We never would have fit in."
She bounds off in the direction of, what, a smell? A sound? Some mystical feeling? He sighs and tries to keep up.
Later that day they come across a lake. In the outlands, where they'd ended up after being chased, where they're waiting for the portal to return. K9 is reporting distantly on its position. Leela says she feels the presence of water, and he doesn't believe her until they reach the top of the hill and he sees the lake below. Maybe the ground changed, maybe there was something in the air, maybe she could hear the reeds brushing against each other. Maybe she just remembered it from the original Gallifrey and was lying. She runs down laughing, taking off her clothes like dead skin, heading straight into the water, as if it's the most natural thing in the world to do, as if lakes are things you just run into. He follows her, measured footsteps, up to the edge, and stops.
"The water is cool and invigorating!" she yells, splashing around. "Come join me and wash the dust away. Or are you scared?"
"Time Lords don't swim," he yells back. "It's undignified. Besides, I don't want to be damp all day."
She sticks her tongue out at him and starts doing a backstroke. He stands facing the direction where the portal will be, arms folded into the sleeves of his robes.
*
Stripped of her title and ceremonial attire, Romana still looks like the president. He can't help it. It's the tilt of her jaw, how she walks quickly but unhurriedly, sense-memory guiding her legs against heavy fabric that is no longer there, neck straight for the collar's missing weight. She is, for want of a better word, imperial. She demands the room, with all the power she worked so very hard for, and she gets it, always. She's beautiful, he acknowledges, in a strange way, wiry and sunburnt, the careless old blood of Heartshaven, the sharp angle of her hips through loose trousers. Blond hair brushing against her cheekbones. Small hands, narrow shoulders. Marching on like she doesn't know and doesn't care if she's earned this, what's left of Gallifrey trailing behind her, trusting her, like she's half-convinced she's not the right woman for the job.
He's considering telling them he'd had his future surgically removed. He imagines their faces, when he'd say do be careful, I could die at any moment: Leela would be angry and worried, Brax grudgingly concerned. K9 would give him the statistical probability of his being shot/maimed/killed by exposure. Romana's expression is variable. Does she care? Is she cold and calculated, with only a hint of sadness? Is she guilty? Self-pitying? He can't make up his mind.
It's funny, almost. He has no country, no name, no title, no purpose, and now he can't regenerate. He can't remember the last time he was in a TARDIS. If it weren't for the two hearts stubbornly beating in his chest, the language in his head, he'd wonder if he were still a Time Lord at all. Think of it like this: he woke up one morning and realized who he was. A single, solitary man, complete in himself. What he is now is all he'll ever be.
Braxiatel tries so hard to be a new person. He calls himself Irving, now. Like a human. Black tie and three-piece suit, gold watch, cufflinks. He could be play-acting, if it weren't for the sense that he is about to run, any microspan now, and leave them all behind. The Ark is a ruse, he came back for Romana, Narvin knows that. He has already begun constructing the man he will become and one day he will slip through one of those doors (maybe with Romana, maybe without) and never look back.
And Braxiatel talks to Narvin like he is a less successful version of himself. A version perpetually late to the party. The last to come to his senses, the last to get a backbone, the last to abandon home. Braxiatel says Romana as if it's a name like any other; Narvin says it and everyone can hear the echo of Madame President in his voice. He imagines what it's like to be Brax, to be that controlled and precise as Irving. A change far more complete than a spy's could ever be.
Narvin has no Plan B. He loses everything and is left only with himself, which he knows isn't much. A patriot with no country, a Coordinator with nothing to coordinate. He has the key to his TARDIS in his pocket and that is the very last piece of his old life he'll ever hold. He finds himself waiting impatiently for the next excursion, the next Gallifrey, in the vague hope that he'll discover a reason to exist this time. What a self-indulgent, decadent concept, wanting to 'find himself'. He swears he used to be better than this.
*
Braxiatel's pushing buttons in the control room, Romana's supervising him, and the robot dog is wheeling around the hallways making beeping noises. Narvin's holed up in the kitchen, trying and failing to make a cup of tea. Leela is watching, uncharacteristically quiet.
"I made the water hot. I don't think - nevermind." He puts the cup gently in the sink and stares at it. Steam rises. He leaves it there and attempts to slump down morosely in a chair designed specifically to prevent slumping. Leela is sitting ramrod-straight, of course, even though she's already getting older, hair greying, hands starting to shake. Some strange part of him hurts at that.
"We should not have left," she says. "I'm happy that we are all safe, and I am grateful to Braxiatel, but it is wrong to put ourselves above all the people on Gallifrey who do not have the luxury of time spoons."
He doesn't bother correcting her. It doesn't matter. She has the important parts right. "Every empire falls," he says. "Gallifrey has the unique distinction of being able to take along the rest of the universe when it goes. A single timeonic fusion device could erase all of Kasterborous, and Pandora had twelve. If Arkadian had his way, all that temporal ordnance is in the hands of the Monans, the Nekkistani, any two-bit military that could scrape together the credit. We provided the motive and means for a war, and any war fought with weapons like that - for all we know, the event horizon has come and gone, and the only thing left is dust."
"Thank you, Narvin. I now feel worse than I did before. I knew I could count on you." She smiles brightly, then lets it drop. "What do we do, then?"
He doesn't know what they do. He doesn't know at all what happens next, what the point of this is, why he's here on this cross-temporal waystation instead of where he belongs. He doesn't even know what he's going to say until he opens his mouth and says it. "We run. We run and run and never look back, because the things we let happen, the chaos we've wrought... I'm not sure what we could have done, if we'd stayed. Now we'll never know. All we can do is keep going, and hope we learn how to live with ourselves."
She looks at him askance. "Don't say 'we' when you mean 'I'. You should own your emotions instead of hiding them behind words."
"Psychological advice from a savage, how fascinating. Should I also be performing a rain dance, or perhaps consulting with the spirits?"
"We have no need for rain. Dance for the gods so that they may grant you peace of mind. Also ask to be given better manners." She nods solemnly.
He makes an exaggerated thoughtful face, tucks his fist under his chin. "I left my ceremonial headdress on Gallifrey, do you think the gods will mind?"
She laughs. "I'm sure they'll understand."
*
Even on the Axis, Braxiatel has an office. He'd already settled in when they'd first arrived. A desk, damask curtains, walls lined with leather-bound books that may or may not be fake. Cut-glass decanters, statuettes, a box of cigars, a decorative letter-opener. Narvin sits in an armchair placed awkwardly in the middle of the room, hands clasped in front him, deciding where and when each artifact was stolen from. Wondering what precisely the point is of him being here.
"I never told myself about this," Braxiatel says. "I think I wanted to spare him. Spending half my time in this antiseptic machine, the other half discovering the various miseries Gallifrey is capable of. It has the air of a Greek myth, all this endless leaving of home. Condemned to these facsimiles, knowing full well the real thing is gone."
"How poetic," Narvin says, just barely refraining from rolling his eyes. "It's a shame you're separated from your museum, you could have this monologue archived."
"Don't let the cheap thrills of sarcasm blind you to the lessons to be learned here. There are worlds without us, Narvin, and they get on just fine. I'd say it should be a humbling thought, but I'm not sure you're capable of that sort of emotion."
"And I'm not sure you of all people should accuse me of being self-aggrandizing."
"Don't tell me. Pots and kettles, I know. I could have been you, Narvin, very easily. I suppose you could've been me, as well. All of us could have been other people. The universe is not a chess game, it's poker. Texas Hold-'em. The hand you're dealt, and what you do with it. Personally, I've always preferred to cheat. Ace up the sleeve, hmm?"
Narvin's about to make a disparaging remark about human metaphors, and conversational metaphors in general, when the office door bangs open.
"Braxiatel," Romana says, or shouts, as she stalks across the carpet. Narvin stands automatically. "The key to the communications room, if you please. And sit down, Narvin."
Narvin sits. Braxiatel shrugs theatrically and makes a show of rummaging through his desk, opening drawers and drawers within drawers until he stops, winks, and takes the key from his coat pocket. "Madame," he drawls, and drops the key into her outstretched hand.
He realizes he's staring. He can't help it, somehow. His brain taking note of details he doesn't need, like the angle of her wrists and the way her hair falls over her shoulders. He's still watching her as she slams the door shut.
"Ah," Braxiatel says, in the voice he uses when he wants to seem all-knowing. "That is not a war you can win. Believe me, I've tried. I've given her everything, and she - well."
"She is the president." Narvin intends the unspoken second sentence to be She doesn't have time for your pathetic affections but isn't sure whether it comes across.
"She is, isn't she? Even without a country to preside over. I don't think anything could take that away from her. It's part of her charm. But then, you're aware of that, aren't you? Poor Narvin. I think you'll find a stiff drink and a stiff upper lip will get you through the worst of it."
"Not everyone has the same failings as you," Narvin says. "I am a servant of the state, which currently happens to consist entirely of Romana. That is the beginning and end of it. I don't - pine, or whatever it is you do when you lock yourself in here and sulk."
"Whatever helps you sleep at night." He smiles genially, then reaches into a drawer for a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.
Ten spans later, Braxiatel's thrown himself and an analogue of his brother into the void. Narvin supposes he should've seen it coming.
*
K9 is finding Gallifrey for them now. He interfaces with the Axis directly, chirping and whirring. The amount of trust they've put in the thing is faintly astounding. Have a question, ask the dog. Need to access a computer, get the dog to do it. It's a toy, more or less. Romana treats it like an oracle. Or look at it like this: the dog does what Braxiatel did, which is make a space between them and what they're doing, a buffer against the guilty things of home and flight and unfixable mistakes.
K9 works the system now but Braxiatel took his purpose with him when he left. The sense of a grand plan, if there ever really was one, is now utterly gone, all the spin of focus and faith swept away. And this is not about them, as such, but their orbital parts in Braxiatel's white-charger fantasy, his dream of himself as romantic savior, the final desperate thing he did before relinquishing the last of his heritage. They're what's left over. Narvin's made peace with his ego and Leela isn't the type to care, but Romana, now, Romana the great leader, the crusader, the Imperiatrix, is faced with the fact that she allowed her agency to be usurped by one man's childish impulses.
Need a decision, ask the dog.
Leela stays behind to, she says, keep K9 company. Narvin and Romana head out alone. They walk through a portal and into the dust-dry hills of eastern Gallifrey, the thorn-scrub desolation. Firebrand country, once. They head north-northwest, towards where the capitol should be.
The valleys, the salt flats, the fossilized sea floor. Everything baked and purified by the suns. They used to set up time loops here, full-scale quantum repeaters, and if it weren't for the sonic booms no one would have ever noticed. The aftereffects drifting downwind all the way to Lungbarrow, where, it was said, the loom produced offspring with chronic deja-vu, or regenerative coupling, or compulsive tardiness.
The one-meter square area he'd buried the TFD in, surrounded by insulation and gypsum dust. The catalog number and threat level, the situation report. What happens after the heroes vanquish the enemy is Narvin transmats into the desert with a shovel and digs a hole of the required depth. Cut a grave into the ground. Gallifrey held onto their failures, even if none of them did.
Romana trudges on with great determination, he has difficulty keeping up. "I'm beginning to wonder if we wouldn't be better off going somewhere else entirely. What's the point of a Gallifrey if we don't recognize it?"
"And if we do. Most likely we're already there, so what happens then? Should we disguise ourselves and hide out in a hotel? Should we have ourselves assassinated?"
"We could go to Acapulco."
"I just don't see how this is supposed to work," he says. "Acapulco?"
"All of time and space and we're hiking towards a city that may or may not be there."
"Where best-case scenario, we'll be jobless and homeless. You know what happens to people without proper documentation."
She pulls ahead, jogging to the top of the ridge. He scrabbles up after her, panting, fumbling for his canteen. She's shading her eyes against the second sunrise.
"The point may be moot," she says.
Down below, where the city should be, is a low collection of brownish-grey objects. Smaller blurs moving around.
"We couldn't have brought a pair of binoculars. I'm willing to concede the lack of transportation, but surely binoculars are a thing we could have managed."
She sits down in the sand. He crouches next to her. "Buildings, I think," she says. "Huts, more like."
"We wouldn't need identification, at least."
"All of time and space and we're wandering around the desert trying to find a tribal village."
"We'd be regarded as gods. They'd worship us and our superior technology. They'd bring us offerings, sacrifice animals in our name."
"I'd kill Brax if he weren't already dead."
"Leela could be our prophet." He picks up a rock, examines it, tosses it down the hill. "Stay or go?"
"Go, obviously. As appealing as godhood is."
"The portal comes back in?"
"Three spans, give or take. We can make it if we hurry."
"Failing that, we die of dehydration, our corpses are stripped bare by the wind and sun, and the tribe uses our bones for weapons."
"I'd like to think I'd make a nice necklace."
"And your skull the most coveted chalice. Shall we go, then?"
Romana makes it to the control room and then sort of deflates, like she's suddenly run out of something crucial. "Let's take a break," she says. "A day or two off."
He nods and says "Yes, of course," and she says "Well," and he says "No, no, we could all use some time to gather our thoughts."
She folds herself onto a chair and closes her eyes. She collapses in stages. Gravity is the predominant force here, she wilts under it, folding her body into a compact shape. Gravity and circumstances and events preceding. There's a gauntness about her, a skeletal spareness she usually keeps to herself.
"Well," he says. "I'll be in the library if you need me."
They call it a library but there's no evidence it actually is one. It could be anything. Another indeterminate room filled with indeterminate things. They call it a library. It's something Leela would do, and something they'd mock her for doing, the magic naming of things, as if the vocabulary of the familiar could summon the familiar itself.
He sits in the library on one of two white rubber armchairs and goes over his notes. The act of enterprise, like he could convince the universe of his relevancy if he just concentrated. Notes alphabetized and properly dated. Events cross-referenced, personal asides written in code. Tabulations, predictions, evaluations, the formal report.
They take time off. The word is regroup. They stand around and hope that motivation finds them. There's an interval, and Romana's in charge of deciding when it's over, there's an interval of however long where they wait for the fact of Braxiatel's absence to assert itself. There are no days here, just spans slowly ticking over. They wait an undetermined period of time for the situation to take hold. He puts his name and identification code on every entry, follows standard CIA composition style. He pretends to be what he actually is. The legerdemain of self.
Romana in the control room with her guilt and exhaustion. A pose of abdication, a physical relinquishing of command. Elbows and knees and the ten-mile stare.
He records what they'd done and then records what they're doing. He catches up on unnecessary paperwork. He becomes acutely aware of himself, the individual aches and pains, the need of a haircut, the frayed edges of his robes. The acrid taste in his mouth left by the processed air and the precisely nutritious food bars, a chemical undertone fuzzing his tongue.
The food comes shuttling out of a dispenser, wrapped in white paper and stamped with Tomato-Cheese or Breakfast or Quiche, although it all tastes the same, the chemical salt and artificial vitamin bitterness.
Leela holds extended conversations with K9. All Define 'heart-to-heart', mistress and This unit is not programmed to speculate. She sings songs to it. She tells stories. She makes confessions. The thing abides with mechanical patience.
Romana in the control room like she's just lost whatever it was that had held her together. The past tense of her presidency. He'd been a spy once, and a scientist before that. He punches in a number on the keypad and the machine beeps and rumbles and spits out a grey rectangle in white paper that says Vegetable Medley. Leela asking K9 why everyone's so quiet, and K9 responding this unit is not equipped to make psychiatric evaluations.
They play fetch, they play checkers. Narvin sits in the designated desk-work area and watches from the corner of his eye. She practices knife technique and K9 critiques her. The lunging stab, the head-lock slice, the downward plunge. She trains as if for the arena, a gladiator in sweat-sheen and leather, the Axis encompassing, dampening, making absurd the efforts of muscle and instinct and clumsy human synapses. The Axis humming and self-cleaning and regulating light cycles. Sun-white, salt-white, bone-white; the implication of violence.
*
These are worlds without him. He is dead, or unknown, or has never existed. He doesn't belong here. Leela, for all her many faults, is made for this, adventuring, running, fighting, living on instinct and courage. Braxiatel could've landed in a sewer and emerged with his suit still immaculately pressed. Romana has determination that could move mountains. He's got a battered set of CIA robes and a penchant for head trauma. He's useless and helpless and he could die, for Rassilon's sake, he could die and what would even be the point of it all.
Romana disappears and he just panics, that dry-land drowning, a greater fear than he ever thought he was capable of. He's nothing without her, he knows this now. So he follows Leela, or the wolf inside her, runs across plains that should have been apartment complexes, trying to ignore the burning in his lungs, the ache in his legs and head and hearts, how the only thing keeping him going is sheer desperation.
Then he gets himself stabbed, of all things, with a knife, by a vampire, and he's probably dying and he'd laugh if he could get his lungs to work correctly. He's dying on the cold dirt floor of a nest. Did he mention the vampires? All because he couldn't walk away. Because, after everything that's happened, he doesn't know how to leave Romana, doesn't know what he'd be without her, and she decided to save this stupid, backwards world and he had to help her whether he wanted to or not. So he's bleeding out and it hurts and he's scared, so incredibly scared, and it's ridiculous, and he's ridiculous, and he just wants, really, to live, to keep doing whatever it is they're doing, the three of them, he wants to keep this. He wants to stay.
The wolf is staring at him knowingly.
It's a few nanospans before Romana realizes he's down. She looks as panicked as he feels, and he'd be pleased, if he could spare the energy. He'd like to be brave, to die in a properly heroic way, a few meaningful last words, but he doesn't die, just lies there in agony doing his very best not to cry as she cradles him in her arms, her hand pressed against the hole in his chest.
(He remembers how she looked after she'd fought with Pandora for the final time, how small and fragile she'd seemed in the hospital bed, how he'd just then noticed there was a person underneath the presidential robes. He can't bring himself to meet her eyes.)
Part Three