"A Country of Smaller Wars", 3/3

[levendis]

"A Country of Smaller Wars", 3/3 (Main page)
Gallifrey, Narvin/Romana
~23,000 words
R (violence, sexual situations, ennui)
Spoilers through the end of season four.

The Chancellor has the worst job on Gallifrey.








3.
Last Call



He overhears a Cardinal calling him Narvinektrolonum and wonders if that feeling is his hearts breaking.

He presses his thumb against the access panel to his quarters, half-hoping the computer won't recognize him. It does. The lights come up and he almost can't take it, almost turns and runs, this false life stretching ahead of him. Everything is familiar but wrong, like in a dream (except he only ever dreamt when Pandora asked him to), the rooms of the man who was him, and not-him. The man he so easily could have been. The man he just watched die.

Everything is neat and organized. Everything is where he expects it to be. He turns on the terminal at the desk and reads the first file, entitled "Resource Management", which is a list of all the many slaves he'd had killed. Him, not-him. He reads it and re-reads it and then gets up and leaves.

His office just reminds him of Braxiatel and that's not so uncomfortable he can't deal with it. The Council building is thankfully vacant, save for a few sleepy guards, and no one notices him run-walking with clenched fists through the hallway, tumbling through the door like it's an airlock, like he can finally breathe.

He's someone else. This could never be his life. He is watching this, watching himself (except it couldn't possibly be him), he is only distantly aware of the import of this. He is feeling, he thinks, a sort of undefinable sadness. He is walking into his office. His breath is catching in his throat and he doesn't know why. He is pouring himself a drink and sitting behind his desk, and he is thinking about nothing at all.

What are you doing? a voice asks. "I wish I knew," he says.

"Are you alright?" Romana - Romana - is there, somehow, really there, looking down at him with something approaching concern.

"Madame President. I - I was miles away."

"I noticed," she says, glancing pointedly at the glass in his hand.

"I didn't hear you come in." He stands up, does a strange sort of deferential bow, which embarrasses him even as he's doing it.

"You left the door unlocked. I wouldn't think I'd need to tell you, of all people, to be more careful." She frowns. Disapproving, probably. He doesn't blame her.

He gestures to the liquor cabinet. "My counterpart appears to have been an alcoholic. I'm keeping up appearances. I'm sorry, how rude of me. Would you like something to drink?"

She laughs, which comes out less like there's anything funny about this and more like a placeholder for another, more unwieldy emotion. "I would, yes, thank you. Doesn't matter what, as long as it's strong."

"I'm not sure what this is, but I can tell you it makes you drunk," he says, pouring out a measure of something clear and unlabeled. He hands it to her, and on impulse clinks his glass against hers, a gesture he wishes was empty. "To a better tomorrow," he says.

"To the new regime," she counters. "Long may we reign." She drinks, flinching a little, swallows and licks her lips. She's standing so very close to him.

He can't think of anything to say. Something is shaking inside him. He wants to kiss her, except that's not right, he wants her to kiss him, wants her to whisper in his ear that everything will be fine, wants her to let him touch her, please her, whatever she asks. Some awful, childish part of him just wants, more than anything else, to be held. She downs her drink and steps away. He keeps staring at the place where she'd been.

She's never been particularly observant, and he's grateful for that, that when she smiles and he smiles back she doesn't see the lie on his face, doesn't know how selfish and pathetic he really is. He is, of course, her Chancellor, and only that. The man in the black robes, as always.

"To us," he says, and then instantly wishes he hadn't.

"To us," she repeats, raising an eyebrow. They salute each other. To the infinite now, he thinks, and our place within it.





*

She invites him to lunch, a set of coordinates and the suggestion he come in something less formal than his Chancellor's robes (which, although he'd passed a law changing the required costumes of High Council members and switched the ridiculous, grand, flowy robes for something more practical, is as far from casual as you can get). He doesn't actually own any other clothing. He shows up feeling impossibly overdressed; she's wearing the plain grey jacket and trousers she lived in when they were Axis exiles. The attire of a Time Lord who has things like days off and weekends and vacations.

He nods at her and squeaks a chair out from the table, sitting down stiffly. "What is this place?"

"I've been reliably informed that this is the most exclusive restaurant in the capitol. Plenty of after-hours wheeling and dealing, and an extensive wine list."

He stares intently at the menu, hands clutching the edges. "I don't. I've never - Romana," he whispers, an unfortunate note of panic in his voice.

"I'll just order for you, then, shall I?"

"Please," he says, still whispering.

"You must have been eating something," she says, looking him up and down.

"There's a cafeteria. I just pick things that seem easy to manage, I don't know what any of it is. This world is barbaric, I don't know how you've been able to adapt so quickly."

"I just run with it. Confidence, that's the key."



Half a span later, the food arrives. It's...it's a fish. The whole fish, with head, eyes staring dolefully at him. What is he even doing here. He looks down at the plate, then up at Romana, then back down, and up again.

She sighs. "Fork," she says, holding hers up. "Knife. Like so." She cuts an exaggerated piece of her salad. "Now you."

"I know how to use utensils," he snaps, then promptly drops his knife on the floor.

Romana laughs and he should be angry and wounded but mostly he's just happy to see her enjoying herself, even if it's at his expense. She can smile at him if he does something wrong, he doesn't mind, this is a thing he's come to accept.

"Honestly, Narvin, you're worse than Leela." They both stop smiling.

"Have you heard from her?" He's not sure how to approach this, or if he should approach it at all. Leela is his friend mostly by proxy, but he does care, in spite of himself.

"Not yet. She'll come back, she just needs some time to herself." Romana doesn't sound particularly convinced.

"I'm sure of it." He takes a tentative sip of his wine, and pulls a face. "That's awful."

"It's lovely, you're just uncultured."

He glares at her, but there's no heat in it. "Needs must, I suppose," he says, and finishes the glass.





"I should have stopped you before you switched to hard liquor. You have no tolerance for it." She props him up against the wall and keys open the door to her quarters. "Come on, in you go."

"And you, Madame President, are far too tolerant. Wishy-washy, sentimental -" He stops and sways in the doorway. "Do you know, I've never been quite this drunk before."

"How interesting."

"I faked it a lot," he says, feeling pleased and a little chagrined. "It's a weakness, one I never had any use for." He waves his hands vaguely in the air. "Loss of control. I can't lose control. I'm a spy."

"Well, congratulations, you're becoming a true man of this brave new Gallifrey." She pulls him into the room and dumps him on the couch.

"This is horrible," he says. "But nice, also. I can't feel a thing. I suppose that's why they do it so much."

"Very probably." Is she always this attractive when she's exasperated? "I'll make your excuses to the High Council, tell them you've come down with something. Did you have anything to report?"

"Not much. I have, somewhere, I have a - " He searches through his pockets. "Here you go," he says, and drops a data pad onto the floor.

"Thank you ever so much."

"Romana-"

"Oh, oh no. I've heard that confessional tone from others, and I am not, absolutely not, doing this with you right now. You're new to this, so let me explain. You want to say as little as possible to avoid mentioning something unfortunate. Whatever you're thinking, keep it in your head." She stands with her hands on her hips, her best commanding expression in place, every inch the president. All the hope in him withers.

"Yes, milady."

"There's a good Narvin." She pats him awkwardly on the head. "Sleep it off. I'll be back in a few spans."

"If you insist."

"I do."



He wakes up before she returns, dry-mouthed and woozy, head pounding. Cut your losses and leave now, old man, before she has a chance to remember what a mess you've made of yourself. Call it damage control. He stumbles out, makes it to his quarters on autopilot, throws up, then passes out on the floor.





*

They start building a time machine. He used to be a technician, after all, and she once built a TARDIS from scratch. They've got Rassilon's plans and a requisitioned room Romana tells everyone is for data storage. They work at night, sneaking in with a respectable distance between them (like they're having an affair, Narvin thinks, an old memory of someone else's life nudging at the back of his mind), and cobble together bits of metal and circuitry.

"It's a death trap," he says. "It'll blow up the second we turn it on and we'll be scattered all across time and space."

"Oh ye of little faith," she says. They're working on the central console, which is mostly a pile of repurposed staser pieces covering a canister of the few chronon particles they were able to capture from Project Rassilon, all of it held together with solder, spit, and wishful thinking.

"This could be it, you know. This planet. Even if we somehow manage to get home, there might not be anything left. We came here looking for a place to live, maybe we should just - maybe we should do the best with what we have."

She stiffens, she's angry, of course she's angry. Never remind her of the things she feels guilty about. "I made a mistake, Narvin, and now I'm trying to undo it. We will get this thing working, and we will go home, and we will do what we should have done in the first place, which is clean up the mess we made instead of fleeing like criminals. Is that clear?"

"Yes, milady," he says. "Maybe we should put the console aside for a moment, work on something else. The change of pace could do us good." He pretends to be intensely interested in a spanner. Tools, components, an acrid burning smell. He notices the vein that twitches sporadically in her forehead.





*

Braxiatel used to enjoy this. The Academy, the students, giving speeches and cutting ribbons, all the honorary doctorates. Narvin's not entirely sure what the use of it is. Then again, this isn't a training ground for time travelers, this is, what, an exercise in self-indulgence, self-regard. They don't seem to be training for much of anything aside from war.

There's a gymnasium where the temporal mechanics wing should be. Geography classes, history classes, the rhetoric of linear space, events fixed and viewed from a distance. Engineering, comparative literature. Philosophy classes taught by people who have never been outside their own heads. Students sit in rows, not circles, take concentrations and not rounds, study Gallifreyan art and Gallifreyan biology and Gallifreyan politics. The limited universe.

Apparently they've been to the moon. Plus the three other planets in the system, and one in the Palisades via an unmanned craft. Five drifter telescopes tumbling aimlessly through space, transmitting images back to a culture that isn't all that interested. Fifty percent of the aeronautics budget goes to the military, forty percent to satellite production and deployment, five to research, and the remaining 5% seems to just disappear into the aether. Everything points inwards.

His speechwriters prepared a short address, two pages of vague encouragements, which he delivered to a room of prospective academics sitting primly in crisp new robes, staring back at him like they knew he was a fraud. It's a lie so big he can't even begin to hide it. This is all there is, now is all we have. The past is a memory and claustrophobia is the coin of the land. Don't reach out, but dig in, find smaller and smaller ways of dissecting the same body. The future will be claimed one step at a time.

They applaud, he sweats under the lights and leaves quickly. There's a back door in the auditorium that should lead to the physics department and the Tarkovendis Collider but instead opens into yet another square, empty room, just desks and screens and maps of Gallifrey, the planet's territories and the city's districts, and you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in until you reach atoms but go two steps outside Kasterborous and there's nothing but star charts labeled with numbers.

Vansell used to say that the ant hill was important to the ant. It's all a matter of perspective, he'd say, and all they know is what they see in front of them. They don't care about you, they don't even know you exist. As far as they're concerned, they have everything they need.

It was called the Mirador, the ship they sent to the Palisades. That's the farthest they've gone. There's a picture of it, up by the podium. They don't need anything more. He sits down at a desk and watches the walls close in.





*

She asks him up to her chambers. An impersonal space, despite the fact that he can see the door to her bedroom from where he's sitting. The armchair is overstuffed and scratchy, his heels hover a centimeter from the floor. He is considering the particular brown-gold color of his glass of scotch. He's considering the weariness in the woman who is sitting across from him in her own scratchy, overstuffed chair, feet not touching the floor, glass of wine matching the purple curtains. There are curtains everywhere. The air is a heavy, solid thing. He coughs discreetly.

She looks at the carpet instead of at him. "You said he would have had us killed, and you knew because it's what you would have done. Would you really?"

"Once," he says. "But I'm not as pragmatic as I used to be."

"Don't say that like it's a bad thing. Personally I much prefer the new you, and you should be happy you've evolved into a decent person." She pauses. "You know, he told me we were married."

"Pardon?"

"The real Chancellor Narvin. Not the real one, I'm not saying you're not real, oh, you know what I mean. He called my bluff by pretending he was my husband."

Oh. "Oh," he says tightly. "And?"

"And I went along with it. Stranger things have happened."

"Indeed."

"And then he said he'd sooner marry a pigrat than me. I'm paraphrasing."

"Of course." He stares into his drink. The air is a lake around him. He feels his hearts pounding, hears the pulses in his ear. He can't breathe, can't think, he might throw up. "Why are you telling me this?"

"I'm not sure." She looks at him strangely. "Are you alright?"

"Perfectly fine," he says. His voice cracks on 'perfectly' and he has a brief fantasy of the roof collapsing on him. Or a bomb going off. Or something, anything. He can't do this.

"I've never been married. Never really felt the urge. I think Brax wanted to, but he knew it was hopeless. Did you have a wife? Or a husband?"

He's shaking, he's sweating. He's miserable. Why won't she just stop talking? This would be easier if she stopped and he left and they never, ever had this conversation again. "Gallifrey was my mistress," he chokes out.

"And we're all that's left of it," she says. There's something in her voice, something - he won't read anything into it. He can't.





*

Fear governs this city. Thirty percent of the state budget went to weapons and defense before they came, and they keep the factories open, because it's expected, because there are too many jobs tied up in the industry, because they don't know how to shut them down. Grenades, stasers, sniper rifles. They keep the assassination business going. He signs off on another order of plastic explosives and wonders how much of it will end up in the hands of terrorists.

Fear governs this city and fear governs him. His fear is a palpable thing, quantifiable, a comfortable lump in his throat. He cultivates it, adds to it, grows it into a creature that stretches through his entire body. There are so many guns in this city. Coups are staged every week. The disgruntled, the disillusioned, the angry and insane. Everyone is a threat. The Panopticon has a thousand vantage points, a thousand lines of sight to the center stage below. He has guards, he has chemical detectors, random searches. He enlists spies. He practices his flying leap. Romana doesn't care, she'll say anything, she's yet to chase the recklessness from her hearts. He looks into the eyes of his fellow citizens and sees murderers.

She doesn't care or doesn't remember that that's how she got killed before. He tries to impress on her the importance of biding her time. Be politic, be polite. Lie through your teeth. Don't startle them. Don't make waves. She does what she wants. He supposes he doesn't expect anything less.



He tells her about all the agents he'd had spread throughout the galaxy, throughout time. He tells her that some of them are probably still there, walking through manufactured lives. He does not describe the feeling of eavesdropping, the danger inherent. He is talking around the subject of distance.

She says that's the worst thing she's ever heard. She says it's unconscionable, a dirty trick, she never signed off on that. She's disappointed. He knows his inflection isn't enough to carry the weight of this.

He looks at strangers and wishes he could somehow reach inside. These crowds, massed bodies, a writhing thing, each individual unknowable, utterly beyond him. He invents stories for them. A rebel, a jealous husband, a resentful ex-slave. The banalities that make up an existence, the accumulations of a life. Things owned, things accomplished, things lost. A piling up of details. He calculates tipping points, graphs the space between unhappiness and violence. He imagines a gun in each of their hands, and imagines Romana falling, a thousand different ways.

On the Panopticon floor, she says whatever she feels like saying. He wouldn't have it any other way.





*

They're building a time machine. She's brushing dirt off the exhaust fan of a skimmer. She's making herself smaller like she does whenever she's unhappy and not also angry at the same time.

She's opening up a familiar conversation. "Sometimes I wonder what would happen if things went wrong. I could destroy Gallifrey again, and this is the only one we have left."

"Bow before the great Romanadvoratrelundar, destroyer of worlds."

"Don't mock. I have destroyed worlds. I tell myself I'm doing the right thing, but I'm just indulging my own personal sense of justice at the expense of entire civilizations. I'm the villain of this piece, Narvin. I've done monstrous things, and honestly, I don't know if I'll be able to stop myself from doing them again."

"I hope you're not expecting any pity from me," he says. "Sympathy, perhaps, if you ask politely. But I've been your left hand for longer than I care to remember, and I've done things for you that were far worse than what happened back there. If you want to flagellate yourself over what you did on Gallifrey, the real Gallifrey, then fine, but don't waste your time and mine by obsessing over the inconsequential half-lives of those temporal aberrations, and don't confuse your sins with the actions of others. You're smarter than that."

"That doesn't make me feel any better," she says. "Although it does make me hate you more, which I suppose is a bit of a distraction." She smiles weakly, then frowns. "My left hand? Really?"

"I do the things you need but can't ask for," he says. "I do what has to be done and allow your conscience to stay clean."

"Well, that's terrifying. Please don't mention it again."

"As you wish, Madame President."

She goes back to cleaning components. He nods once, although he knows she doesn't see it, and starts a system diagnostic.





*

She asks him to come to her chambers. It's about the Academy, she says, about how it's still making soldiers instead of scholars.

He tells her he's a figurehead, he just makes speeches and shows up at board meetings. It's an edifice too ancient and strong for him to change, even if he wanted to, even if it were right. This Gallifrey will always need soldiers, he thinks but does not say.

In the middle of a diatribe about his various responsibilities and accordingly crowded schedule, she kisses him. Just like that. Fingers rubbing the bristle of hair behind his ear, her lips hot and dry against his. He replays the scene: yes, that happened. His breath rattles out of his mouth. He can see the pores of her skin, the skull pushing through.

His hand moves to her face of its own accord, thumb finding a place in the hollow of her cheek. "This is one of those cultural variations about which I am regrettably ill-informed."

She rolls her eyes. "It's really not all that complicated. I'll show you. Just, please, can we do this now?" She kisses him again, hands digging hard into his waist. Tongue to teeth. The moaning, boneless creature he's about to become. A jellyfish pooled at her feet.

"Romana, I can't." He bites his lip and unwraps her hands, pushes her away gently but firmly.

"Narvin I swear to you I will have you vaporized if you don't stop dithering about."

He leans his forehead against hers and nudges inside. She's - well. Aroused, mainly. A simple, primal need for contact. He gets that he's there and he's available; he gets a business-like sense of working this out of her system. He gets practicality, guilt, determination that this will happen once and never be spoken of again. Beyond that is a self-made wall and he doesn't dare push further. He steps back.

"This is a bad idea, in so many ways," he says softly. "We can stop now, no harm done, but if I let this continue-"

"Are you really going to turn me down?" she asks. She knows, he knows she does, that she saw the edges of the thing he avoids in himself. The thing gathering at the back of his throat. This drifting, sinking feeling.

She raises a hand to his chest, palm against heartsbeat, and lets her other hand slide down his robes. He's gone.





*

Leela frequents a dining establishment on the edge of the city, a place brushing against the dome. Snowglobe, a foreign part of him thinks. Inlands, outlands. The world beyond the wall. He stops by at six bells and finds a table near the back, and waits.

She arrives twenty microspans later, alone. She sees him instantly. Her body tense and lithe, angling towards him with a predator's instinct. He raises a glass silently in greeting.

He remembers an afternoon by a lake on another world. A frankness, a raw vitality that his head has no room for. She is younger now, and older, but mostly younger: the wolf is still inside her. The unmistakable motion of reclaimed youth, and something darker, harsher, a smile behind the smile, rows of gleaming teeth. She steps easily around the scattered chairs.

"Narvin," she says, half disdainful, half pleased. "It has been too long. Why have you not come to see me before now?"

"The same reason you never came to see me, I suppose."

She nods. "There is no place for me in your world, and none for you in mine. We have shared much, but it is time we took our separate paths." She looks at him like she finds him wanting, but doesn't mind. "How is she?"

"The president? Making good progress. The former slaves should be released back into the work force any day now, and she's culled the worst of the cardinals. There hasn't been an assassination attempt for over a month. All things considered, she's doing very well."

"I want to know how Romana is, not the president. Is something wrong?"

He hesitates. Nothing is wrong, as such. All these ancient problems. What could he say that she hasn't already guessed? He settles for smiling and sighing and studying the wood grain of the table. Wood grain, furniture made from trees. Not antique, just willfully rustic, or nostalgic. A dead thing under his splayed hands.

"She is being herself, isn't she."

"Who else would she be?"

"People can change. Even Time Lords. Even you, Narvin, are not the man you once were. Why does Romana not see the need for a new life? The old ways do not serve her well anymore."

"You've talked to her recently?"

"I've seen the - 'vid casts'. I do not need to talk to her to know she is pushing herself too hard to do things that are not worth doing. And I know she is alone, even though she has friends. She does not want friends, I think." She gives him a long, evaluating look. He thinks about teeth and blood and bone. "You have changed again, Narvin. Something is different about you."

"I'm the Chancellor now," he says, brushing a hand over his robes. "It requires me to be more accessible, more willing to compromise. I've had to adapt."

"It is more than that. I can hear your hearts beating. They beat strangely."

He laughs, a strangled noise. "It's a strange world," he says.





*

Fight mechanics. How to say all the wrong things. How to make her shoulders shake with fury. Ask her if she's out of her mind. Ask her if she wants another war. Ask her if she knows what she's doing. Imply heavily you don't think she does. Take an opposing stance on every issue. Circle each other around your shared city, forget you're on the same side. Be dismissive. Provoke attacks, leave openings. Find all the hate left inside you and hand it to her. Giftwrap your fear and resentment. Try to slam automatic sliding doors.

The way her face screws up when she's shouting. The way he likes that. Relationship mechanics: if she's angry, she's honest. Reach inside and hold the blood you find there. It's the best she has to offer.

Alternately go with it. Alternately hide what this actually means to you.

The organization of your obscure desires. The scheduling of nameless, shameful things. She's frantically busy. She has a formal, weaponized kind of busyness. Her secretary makes color-coded daily agendas. Every microspan accounted for. Meetings, briefings, functions, soirees. Time provided for correspondence, a span once a week to catch up on journals. Leisure programming, sleep programming. A series of alarms and notifications.

Narvin finds himself drifting aimlessly from building to building. The Chancellor's job is to allocate. He allocates. The Chancellor is available to the president. She calls, he comes. He is carefully slotted into whatever space opens when something more important runs short.



The message alert starts chirping halfway through a budget meeting. A dozen bulbous, red-nosed men slumped around a table. One of those slideshows with arrows and bulletpoints and video clips. He sits in on these things every so often to, what, be with the people, show his support, his easy-access appeal. They meet every so often and agree not to make any major decisions.

The message alert occurs during the projected earnings review. He fumbles it out of his pocket, the little silver-grey communicator they all have here, functions for everything you could think of. It's the number Romana uses, not the regular number but the other one. For things like this. The note is filthy and direct, he blushes automatically, itchy heat swarming up his neck and tapping out somewhere around his ears.

"Forgive me, gentlemen," he says. "I must. Attend, to this." He holds the communicator up in the air. "Matter of security."

He's always needlessly furtive en route. He's probably making it worse, ducking around corners, inventing increasingly elaborate excuses and giving them to people who might've otherwise ignored him entirely. Walking alternatingly too fast and too slow. Inappropriate smiles to the guards at her door. He has standard sentences he uses to create the illusion of propriety, things he keeps in his pockets to use as props. Just in case they can hear, or if someone walks in.

Although if anyone walked in no amount of strategically-placed official business would persuade them away from the fact of the president fucking her chief advisor on the couch. He tries not to think about it.

She's already pulling out the things that keep her hair up. Sort of buttressing things, an inexplicable series of pins and clips.

"I read an article today about wildlife in the northwestern sector," she says. She's shucking off her robes. She's efficiently naked.

"There's wildlife in the northwestern sector?"

"Birds," she says, and hands him her underwear. "Those little crow-type things that sound like they're snapping their fingers. And, what."

"The cats."

"Some kind of fox, actually. Not cats."

"Birds and foxes in the northwestern sector. Someone wrote an article about this?"

"I paid someone to write it, apparently. The research grant, you remember."

"Actually no," he says, fumbling with the catch on his boot. She's approaching like she doesn't mind having sex with a man who has one shoe on. She's pulling him back with her onto the bed. She's digging her fingernails into the habitual places.

"There's been sightings of deer," she says.

"We pay someone to write about sightings of deer."

"Unconfirmed reports of pigbears in the sewers."

"They swim?" he asks. He's having difficulty getting into the moment. The more methodical she is, the less he cares. She approaches him like he's a bill she has to pass. Shake hands, cut ribbons, attend forums. She has somewhere to go after this. He finds himself rolling away.

"Was it the pigbears? I can talk about something else. Or not talk. Or maybe do one of those scenarios you think I'm not aware of. I could put the coronet on. Deliver edicts. I hereby decree, blah blah blah, the great rod of Rassilon, et cetera."

"You want the on/off switch?"

"I want you to want me so we can do this and I can make it through the senate address without biting everyone's head off." She props herself up on her elbows. "I could do it myself. You could, I don't know, hide in the closet and watch."

He would enjoy that, as a matter of fact, but it's such a ridiculous, pathetic cliche that he can't even admit to the quick flash of fantasy, the keyhole view of her, holding his breath in the dark. So he says, "Let me just," and rolls back over, kneels in the crook of her, hands on her thighs. She's folding her arms above her head.

"If we cultivate this oral fixation of yours, maybe you'd mouth off less in Council meetings."

"This is the part where we both stop talking," he says. "Hard as that may be to believe."

By now he knows what works. Call it a transaction. She gets her all but constitutionally-guaranteed orgasm and he gets her undone, unmade. He gets sweat and effort and choked-down noises, the raised pulses, the uncontrollable shudder. He likes knowing he can do this, likes keeping the knowledge of her small and surrendered in the twisted sheets.


She showers first. He finally gets the other boot off, gathers his things into a pile, feels suddenly vulnerable. Sitting naked on the starchy four-poster bed, one of the antiques of state, listening to her scrub off whatever remnants there are of him.

"Not so many rats," she says, emerging from the bathroom perfectly coiffed and arranged. "The rats are mostly in the east."

"We paid someone to write about fewer rats."

"Hardly any at all. Something about insufficient residential waste."

"Could we perhaps pay them instead to kill the rats. And the foxes."

"Leave the birds, though. They're charming. A city should have birds, they add to the, what would you call it."

"Ambiance."

"Ambiance, absolutely." She checks her watch, makes a shooing motion. "Perform your ablutions and leave, I have tea with Cardinal Jorgen in five microspans."

"Milady," he says. He carries his pile of clothing to the bathroom. It's overlit, white tile floor-to-ceiling, everything smooth and cold and resistant to the failures of his body. He leaves a thumbprint on the mirror. He thinks about leaving for other places.




*

The buildings around the edge of the dome are older than he remembers them being back home, crowding haphazardly against the barrier. The last bastion of an exiled world. They must have torn these down millennia ago in his city. Concrete, stone, brick. Behind him is the needle spire of the Arcalian skyscraper, ahead of him are the mountains, sweeping dark red against the grey sky. In the foreground is a precariously poised assemblage of wood and plaster. A hanging sign with a painting of a pigbear. The word for it is 'pub', which is short for 'public house', which is one of those phrases dutifully carrying a history no one remembers.

The crowd around him bustling, talking, moving in well-worn patterns. All these little people: what do they do with their lives? And no one recognizes him, there is no bright flash of chapter colors, no ceremony. Servants, factory workers, secretaries. A city beneath the city. He imagines this all existed in some part on most Gallifreys, although he'd never had cause to acknowledge it. He knows it's impossible for a society to run on rarified air alone. He knows the difference between Time Lord and Gallifreyan, although there are no Time Lords here, just politicians and landed gentry and a fully capable police force. Still.

All these people, he thinks, who don't care what he does. Who are only dimly aware of the state's mechanisms, who watch the news instead of standing in the Panopticon, who orbit the High Council distantly at best.

He walks into the public house feeling supremely out of place. They don't recognize his face but they know his robes, nod politely and turn away. He wishes there was a CIA wardrobe he could have raided.

Leela bought this place when there were no slaves left for her to counsel, using the funds Narvin had quietly left in an unmarked account. It's fitting, if a little disappointing. There are no battles to fight, and she turned down both the bodyguard position Romana offered and the Chancellery Guard post he'd vaguely pushed in her general direction. So she pours drinks and wipes counters and cooks food. Creature comforts.

She's sharpening knives in the kitchen, braced against a scarred wooden table. He watches from the doorway, turning a glass around in his hand, listening to the noise of metal on metal. "I imagine you have the keenest blades of any restaurant in the city," he says.

"Dull knives are useless even for vegetables."

"I thought you would change the name," he says. He hoists himself onto a countertop.

She pauses, looks up at him. "The people know this place as Kartro's. It is familiar to them. If I changed it, they might leave."

"Give the people what they want."

"There are men and women who come here every day. I think they spend more time here than at their homes."

"A home away from home."

"Stop speaking in slogans, Narvin."

"Familiarity is a comfort," he says.

"You are an odd little man." She puts the knife down, walks around the table and lifts him roughly off the counter. "I have a message for Romana," she says. She's a few inches taller than he is, even in flat heels, taller and more confident and precise in herself. The wolf beneath her skin. He waits helplessly. She grins.

She slides an arm around him, hand on the small of his back, bends him backwards and kisses him soundly. She tastes like iron and salt. Teeth to tongue. She pulls away and squeezes his face affectionately.

"Give that to her, and tell her she is loved," she says.

"It's a generally accepted fact of Gallifreyan life that one just doesn't do things like that. You can get away with it, savage, I can't. If you want to tell her then tell her yourself."

"They are simple words, and only three of them. I have heard your speeches, they are complicated and go on forever. Surely you can manage this." She knows what he means, but she wants him to correct her. Not I can't but I won't, the difference between what he's capable of and what he's allowed.

"I'll tell her you said hello," he says. She knows what he means.





*

What to say when you meet yourself, how to interact. Different ways to cover the strangeness. False vanity; irritation; effulgent, sarcastic praise. Yourself as you are and as others know you. Things to say to draw attention away from the fact that your first impulse is to kill the man who is your mirror, not so much out of self-preservation but because you just can't stand him. Blinovitch Limitation Effect aside, it's not a good idea to have two of someone in the same room.

Narvin watches the vidcast of Romana's speech. Maybe Leela's watching this too, paused over a half-peeled potato, talking back to the monitor.

She's convincing. She's commanding. She puts strange pauses and emphases into sentences. The crowd applauds. She walks to the right, and to the left, gesturing with the staff. Big, grand motions. The defiant chin jut. The camera angle makes her look bigger than she really is, more impressive, the flatteringly dramatic light of the Panopticon.

He sees himself standing off to the side. He sees - what, exactly? A little man in robes too big for him. An impostor. He suddenly becomes aware of how ridiculous he looks. How his haircut makes his ears stick out. The shifty, darting eyes. How the ceremonial collar accentuates his round, boyish face and receding hairline. Why, again, does Romana deign to sleep with him? He watches himself watching her. He realizes suddenly that everyone else is watching him watching her. Everyone else can see.

He hears himself speak and thinks, Rassilon, do I really sound like that? The absurdity of himself on the screen. That flash of alienation, the distance between himself in his head and himself as he is. Seeing himself as others do. His awkwardness, his various physical inadequacies. He ponders the viability of never taking his clothes off again.

Poor Narvin, he thinks. You finally decided you wanted to be noticed and you don't like what she sees. Get over yourself.

"Get over it," he says to video-Narvin, still undeniably staring at Romana. "All of it. Just-" He clenches his fists, then unclenches them, and calmly turns off the screen.





*

They're building a time machine. He remains fairly certain that it'll explode, that they'll flip the last switch and suddenly see the whole of the universe, the massiveness of time, before they're split apart into dust.

"Leela sends her love," he says, apropos of not much. "She's too proud to come back, but she does miss you."

"Is she doing alright?"

"Best as can be expected. She has an awful little restaurant on the edge of town, it seems to be making her happy." He shrugs. "She's a survivor. She'll be fine."

"I hope so."

There's a pause. He'd like to say it was companionable, but she's too tense and he's too aware of her being tense and the air between them is flat and still and nothing at all like it was before. He pretends something interesting has just happened on the monitor. He waits.

She huffs out a sigh and stands up and there is a moment here, he thinks, a moment where he could say something or do something to stave off whatever is about to happen, if he just knew what it was, if he knew how to do this, any of this.

She's standing and she's leaving. "I think you can take it from here, Narvin. You know I'd like to help, but it's getting harder and harder to find the time. It's the same old story, not enough spans in the day. And with the conference coming up..."

"Of course, Madame President." He gives his best obsequious smile, which admittedly isn't all that great.

"Narvin, don't let's do this again." She looks at him like she wishes she could snap her fingers and fix whatever's making him so damn sensitive. For that matter, he wishes she could too.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," he says. He can't look at her. He swallows hard against the thing in his throat, wills his hands to stop sweating. Wonders what exactly it is that's wrong with him.

"Narvin," she says, then stops. He looks up then, and for a second is convinced she's as lost and bewildered by this as he is. Just a second. Then she turns and strides imperiously through the door, and the whine of the closing mechanism is somehow the most awful thing he's ever heard.

He'll flip the switch and they'll be split apart. Everywhere and nowhere, atoms scattering to the far corners of the universe. He's trying not to wonder what that'll be like.





*

The traditional duties of the Chancellor are: overseeing the Chancellery Guard, (symbolically) running the Academy, voting on minutiae, influencing the High Council on behalf of the president, prancing around looking important. The Chancellor's new duties include: advising the president, collating the efforts of various departments, monitoring the threat level.

The Chancellor also now runs a network of spies but that's not, strictly speaking, something he's supposed to do. Romana will never publicly admit that occasionally the best way to avoid brute force is to employ subterfuge. She'll never publicly admit, that's the key. He does what he has to do, and she lets him.

He finds someone he trusts - well, someone whom he could easily destroy, and who is aware of that, which is the same thing - to run his as-yet unnamed, unmentioned agency. Miralestrellek, ex-Chancellery Guard. She has a deadpan way of talking he appreciates. Outspoken, but not needlessly so. He gives her the title of Director.

"Director of what?" she asks.

"The agency."

"What agency?"

"How's this. Your first task as Director is to name it."

"And my other tasks, Chancellor?"

He sighs. "Gather information. Embed operatives in sensitive areas. Intervene when necessary. Be discreet. Send me a daily report, but keep an appropriate distance. I can't be seen to be too involved."

So she goes, and so he has an organization now. Delegation, a spreading around of blame. Other people to make decisions for you. Braxiatel used to manage easily enough. He'll divert funds, give her a store front, a cover story, a seat in the general assembly. He'll acknowledge he can't fight all these battles himself.

But there's a part of him, there will always be a part of him that needs direct control. A hand on the pulses of this city, an intimate understanding of the enemy. Before the action comes the thought, and before the thought comes the emotion, and empathy is something he's yet to master.

He rebuilds the device from memory. This Gallifrey has no Chameleon Arch, or any analogue of it, but he can still listen in, can get closer than he does with his agents' reports. Circuits, lines of code, neat rows of wires. Red to black and blue to green. A small metal case. He tells himself it's a valid addition to state security protocols.

And maybe it's not voluntary now, and maybe he takes suspected terrorists in and forcibly implants the chip before retconning them half out of their minds. So it's a little reckless, and more than a little wrong. He's a spy. He doesn't do right and wrong.

And if there's a small rush of anticipation when he sees that first blinking icon on his personal computer that means it's started, that means he's about to push himself into this again, into someone else's life again, it doesn't mean anything. Similarly, the feeling that could be guilt, or self-condemnation, or something else entirely, that feeling means nothing. A primitive reaction, it'll pass.

Lie to everyone but yourself, Vansell used to say. When you can't tell yourself the truth, something is wrong. Step back and re-evaluate. An agent in denial is no use to anyone. But Vansell got himself killed, and Narvin stopped caring what he said long before he died. Nothing is wrong, even if that word meant anything to him in this context. Which it doesn't.

He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes. He is standing by a lake. The water is mirror-flat, the air warm, the sun low in the sky. He is thinking, possibly, of fear.





*

There's a mistake in his daily report. Nothing much - although he should be more careful, should not easily accept that his attention had slipped - but it's always a little thing, isn't it, that finally does a person in. He observes Romana as if from a great distance. Flushed face, clenched jaw. The hard cross of shoulders and spine. The way she grinds the words out as if they're not at all the words she really wants to use.

He does understand, if only obliquely. There are the usual pressures of the presidency, and the constant fear of discovery, and also the constant fear of assassination. There's Leela, who still hasn't visited, and Braxiatel, who even in absentia refuses to be dealt with in any convenient way (and her feelings for him, Narvin knows, are complex). There is the vast, incomprehensible horror of the war, and the guilt at abandoning her home, her people, her responsibilities. And then there's him, of course, being difficult again, dissembling and smirking and arguing again, being disappointingly himself. And maybe that look in her eyes is her remembering for the thousandth time that she doesn't like him much. Or maybe, most likely, she's just tired and lonely. He's incapable of fixing those things for her, but he's all she's got, and maybe that's what this particular fight is hinging on, their relationship like some kind of cosmic practical joke. The idea that this is it. This is it.

So she apologizes for shouting and he apologizes for the error and then they spend half a span reviewing progress reports on the Academy staff with all the professionalism and restraint they can muster. So she buries herself in her work again, and he lets her, because he doesn't know what he'd do if she didn't.





*

He is taking apart and reassembling a rifle. He knows each piece intimately. Power cell, guidance module, stabilizer, trigger. He knows the weight of it, the balance against his shoulder, the ways his body shifts to accommodate it. The correct stance to use, the muscles involved. He stares through the sights so long the crosshairs imprint on his retinas, the ghost of it trailing. The idea of living through this, living as this, himself a component as the safety latch is a component. A part of something greater. He's going to change the world.





*

The man who is trying to kill the president this week is huddled in a ventilation shaft, C2766 rifle slid through the grate. The man who is going to kill the man who is trying to kill the president is crawling up behind, quietly, slowly, sidearm first. Narvin is aware of this happening as he stands, hands clasped in front of him, on the Panopticon floor.

Romana is talking about peace and reconciliation, her vision of a kinder, gentler Gallifrey. The importance of reason. Progress, she's saying, means laying down the sword and picking up the pen. There is a choice to be made between compromise and self-destruction. There is a decision to be made about who we are as a society, who you are as a member of it. Soldier or scholar, servant or lord, dead or alive. She's saying, our potential could be limitless if we could only just stop shooting each other. She's saying, we are better than this.

Somewhere in the gallery, a trigger is pulled.





*

The familiar shape and smell of staser burns. The distinctive way brute energy punches through a ribcage. Director Mira is overseeing the autopsy. He tells the guards he's there to wrap up loose ends on his official report.

She's remarkably calm about this, he notes. She's doing well. He threw up the first time he saw a murder victim up close, though he'd never admit to it, and death still bothers him on a physical level. He keeps his eyes on her and away from the body.

Always had a weak stomach, didn't you, a voice inside him says, and he doesn't bother figuring out who it sounds like.

"If it takes three people to kill someone, who is more responsible? The person who gave the order, the person who organized the action, or the person who did the actual deed?" There's more genuine curiosity in her voice than guilt or anger. He knows precisely the thought process she's working through now. The network of fault and authority, the woman she is now that she's done this. A re-evaluation.

"Don't forget him," he says, nodding to the body on the table. "A victim who gives just cause for his death is not really a victim at all. And we live in a culture that demands we be - pragmatic."

"Of course, Chancellor."

"The president is right to say we need to change to advance as a society. But pacifism doesn't stand a chance against violence. The hearts and minds of the people will not be won overnight. We must remain vigilant, and we must be able to do what she cannot."

He is expecting her to return with necessary evil, or something like it, something to express the dichotomy she now inhabits. Instead, she says, "Someone should tell the president that progress is a type of violence. The sacrifice of the past for the sake of the future."

The phrase time traveller re-registering suddenly in his head. The artron energy now wasted and dormant in him. Time traveler, observer, interventionist, invader. His TARDIS key vibrates in his pocket, or maybe that's just his imagination.





*

He's following himself. He's watching himself through a telescope, he's taking notes. Schedules, routines, known associates. He's taking pictures, recording videos, combing through assembled footage. He's finding weaknesses, vulnerabilities. A frequently-played clip of him talking with the president, there, do you see that, his hand on her elbow, how close they're standing.

He's watching himself through the crosshairs of a rifle. There's a sudden, blinding flash of pain, and then he isn't watching anything at all.

In the black, someone's saying his name. He forces himself awake, reaches out blindly to turn off the device. His office swims into focus. There's a hand on his shoulder. A hand, and an arm, and.

"Narvin?" Romana asks, and maybe it's just side-effects, but she sounds nearly worried.

"How long have you been here?" His voice crawls out raggedly.

"Long enough." She breathes in deeply. "For a nanospan there, I thought I'd have to call a medic."

"I'm fine."

"You don't look it."

He laughs humorlessly, but says nothing. Peels the electrodes off. Wipes the sweat from his forehead. Swallows. Swallows again. Considers the particular boneless feeling.

She allows the silence for a moment, then breaks it. "What are you doing?"

"It's classified."

"I'm the president. I have the highest possible security clearance. Tell me, Narvin." She takes her hand off his shoulder, steps back, stares at him before sitting in the chair on the other side of the desk. The low-slung, uncomfortable chair he normally uses to intimidate his inferiors. She still manages to look presidential.

He holds his hands out, palms up, as if to gesture: here, a box with all the information in it. "I was spying."

"Narvin."

"Do you remember," he says, then pauses. "Nevermind. I, this," he gestures vaguely to his computer. "In order to keep watch on subversive elements and prevent your assassination, I re-created... That is, I, um-"

"What. Were. You doing?"

"I covertly implanted recording devices into several known terrorists. I was - reviewing the data." Not bad, all things considered. "Would you like to try it?"

She makes a face that he translates as what is wrong with you? but later, behind locked doors and under bedsheets, will mean something else entirely. Like I'm sorry, like you don't need to suffer for me. Like anything at all other than what it actually is.

Now she is clenching her jaw. Now she's doing her best to be cold and removed. "Sometimes I'm reminded of just how little I understand you."

"Only sometimes?"

"Don't be coy. And you obviously don't know me all that well either, if you thought you could get away with this." She folds her arms and tilts back in the chair. Her microscope gaze.

"I know you," he says lowly. His voice still isn't working right. Like slow-motion coughing.

"Don't tell me you've smuggled one of those chips under my skull-"

"No. No. I'd never - I couldn't. But I do know you." He twists his spine experimentally. "Would you like me to elaborate?"

"Not particularly. I doubt it'd be flattering and I'm not in the mood to hear criticism from you."

"And then again," he says, pretending not to have heard her, "sometimes you're absolutely unfathomable."

She snorts. "Aside from Leela, I'm probably the least mysterious person on this planet."

"The things you do to me," he starts, before realizing what it is he's about to say.

She doesn't even have the decency to look confused. She doesn't look like she's feeling anything at all, aside from the angry frustration she always has around him. "This has to stop."

"I know," he says. "All of it." He turns the box over in his hands, over and over. Here, all the answers you want. He sets it down on the desk, then reaches for his staser. He looks at her, he's searching for the right facial expression. Can't find it, of course. Doesn't even really know what he's looking for. He shrugs, then aims at the little grey box, blows it into fragments. The sound echoing, dust settling. "One down."

A wave of fear slips through before she's just angry again. He know he shouldn't be, but he's pleased that he can still get to her, that there's anything left in her to get. "You've lost it," she says, or shouts; she's shouting now. "You're insane. I can't believe I ever-"

He's waiting. She doesn't finish the thought. "I have a meeting," she says, voice wavering slightly. "Good day, Chancellor." She stands up, turns hard on her heels, walks in a straight line to the door, not looking back.

"Always a pleasure, Madame President," he calls after her, but she's already gone.





*

It's a lot of details. His brain is still processing them as what just happened, a localized temporal variation, five seconds that refuse to solidify into an event.

He walks into the room. Call it a tableau. A man in a chair, Chancellery Guard in formal red and whites, restraints pulled tight around his wrists and ankles. Something on his head, electrodes leading to a computer playing iterative personality code. Director Mira, standing a calculated distance away, face blued behind a protective shield, pulling the trigger on a staser. There's the squawk of rushing energy and the crackle of burning fabric and the man biting down hard on the gag in his mouth and his body arcs, one nanospan, two nanospans, then he slumps down.

She's mine, he thinks, slightly hysterically. I did that. He taps hesitantly on the wall.

She pulls the visor up over her face. "Good evening, sir."

"Why did you shoot that man?" he asks. He's aware of a note of panic in his voice. She doesn't seem to notice.

"It's how we make assassins, it stands to reason it would be an appropriate process for spies as well," she says, like it's the most natural thing in the world. They kill them, then, that's what happens.

"Yes, yes of course. Absolutely. Excellent work." He takes a deep breath. "And he'll be reconditioned."

"Yes sir, using a variation of the Bader-Kellis metric. Would you like to check the program yourself?"

He's done this before, he knows that program cold. Percentages, a man's life broken down into percentages. "No, I'm sure it's fine. Carry on."

"Was there something you wanted, sir?"

There was, but for the life of him he can't remember. It'll come to him. It can't have been all that important. "I'm just doing the rounds. Seeing how everything is going. Don't let me keep you."

"Thank you, sir. Until tomorrow, then, sir." She nods deferentially, then sits down at the computer, hands over the keyboard like she's done this before.


So they kill them, but it shouldn't be that big of a revelation, considering they kill everyone else. It's not about violence or bloodlust, just expediency. Matter-of-fact efficiency. He hasn't done his homework, is the problem here. Everything they do, everything they take for granted. This is a foreign country, he can't forget that.





*

There is only one city on Gallifrey. The city is Gallifrey. The land outside, the mountains, the sea, the endless untouched plains, are as ignored here as they were back home. The planet is the thing the city resides on, and the city is the thing that sustains the idea of Gallifrey, all that name embodies, the history, the power, the faith he once had. This is, of course, not his city. It's a near-perfect duplicate, physically speaking, all the buildings and streets he remembers, close enough that he can look up at the skyline and pretend to forget and almost, almost feel like he's where he belongs.

Gallifrey is the citadel and the citadel has fallen. He follows the ghost of it around. The dwindling artron energy he keeps trying to spark back to life, the time machine that won't start, the blood in his veins and in Romana's veins. The thing they tried and failed to find in each other.

She's barely spoken to him in weeks. What he's feeling is betrayal, not of himself or anything so petty as a relationship but of the city, their city, and her promise to it. She's stopped searching. She's making do. She's compromising, which for all her faults is not a weakness he'd ever subscribe to her, giving up, giving in, letting go.

Of all the causes of this drifting sensation, this distance from everything, the one he'll admit to is the fear he'll die in a city he doesn't believe in. That she'll die here. The last part of himself he still recognizes: Romana is his president and this place does not deserve her.





*

Heartshaven sits by the white cliffs that rise harshly over the Petraean Sea. There's a lighthouse, still standing after millennia of disuse, the mirrors at the top reflecting the twin rays of the suns out to ships that no longer come. The water foaming violently below, weeds clinging to the rocks. He's standing on the edge looking down, the wind whipping his robes, that peculiar combination of salt and granite, something decaying, and he's wondering why he's only just now realizing what his home planet smelled like.

The sea stretching out before him, waves and swells flattening out into horizon. Heartshaven at his back. They'd come here, Romana's ancestors, built a manor house and a small town of servants' quarters, huddled together against the sky and precipice. This of all places. The fear of the familiar danger that comes from inland, and the fear of what lies in the uncharted deep: the manor faces the sea. He's not all that surprised.

The Cape of Good Faith, the northernmost turn of the continent. The island he used, in another life, to process CIA operatives newly in from the cold lies two miles out. Black Rock, the white cliffs, there's a metaphor in there somewhere but he's not the person to find it. He wonders if she ever knew, if she stood here watching for the tell-tale spark of the transmat arcing into the air.

"There's a fence," she says. "Back home, on the real Gallifrey. So no one falls off."

"Or jumps," he says, still leaning into the wind. "Though I suppose one could simply climb the fence. Was there a lighthouse?"

"Pardon?"

"Back home," he says, feeling the weight of the phrase. "Was there a lighthouse?"

"No. Not in my time, anyway." She steps forward, toes on the edge, shoulder just brushing his. "We should get back to the reception. Our absence will be noted."

"I hate parties. I've put in my time, you don't need me there." He turns to face her, trying to catch her gaze. "You go." He takes his collar off, something he's been wanting to do all night, wincing a little as the brocade slides roughly over his skin. He sets it down on the ground, looks at it with suspicion, wonders for the thousandth time what master torturer designed it, and whether he can get their contact information.

"Narvin..." Hesitating, oh, that little shred of regret she likes to air out. She could say I want you there, but she doesn't. Maybe she's thinking it. She reaches out tentatively, puts a hand on the back of his neck, thumb against the soft spot behind his ear. "Well. I'll be going, then."

He nods, and looks away. The tide is coming in; the water, the wind, the rocks, the thing crowding his chest. The faint sound of the guards snapping to attention as Romana reenters her ancestral home.

The thing building up and up inside him, and he doesn't know what to do with it, and so, without really thinking about it, he kicks the collar, hard as he can. It tumbles off the edge undramatically. Doesn't even make a noise when it hits, or a splash, just sinks, sinks down until he can't see it anymore and he is aware, obviously, of what a stupid thing that was to do, and that he'll have to come up with a cover story for why he doesn't have his custom-built, one-of-a-kind official Chancellor's collar, because I kicked it into the sea in a fit of pique will never fly, not with the Council's tailor and certainly not with Romana.

All these big grand gestures, emotional compulsions, but if he's honest he left the rational world behind a long time ago. Call it blending in, acclimatizing. Every action here tends inward.




*

The Crown and Castle closes at two past final bell, Kartro's at three. He's not sure when he started memorizing operating hours. There's a block and a half between them, a pause he spends working up the nerve to do this. He's never argued when people called him a coward. But this, this he needs to do. There are hinge points, remember.

Leela can see through him. Leela has always been able to see through him. Instinct, when did that become a thing he put faith in? And it was easier when the only thing there to find was the fact that he was a bastard. This would be easier if she still hated him. Now she looks at him and she's concerned. He's had enough of everyone's concern.

"Savage," he says, half-heartedly.

"Liar," she replies, with entirely too much warmth. "Come, sit at my best table, I made a soup today I would like you to try."

He doesn't have a chance to decline. Two microspans later he's looking down at his usual drink and a large steaming bowl of whatever-it-is. "Delicious, I'm sure," he mumbles, then pushes it away, picks up the glass and takes a preparatory sip. "Leela, I want you to go see Romana."

She stiffens. This is still a delicate topic. "She has not made any attempt to contact me. She may be the president but she has free will, and can do as she pleases. She does not want to see me."

"Of course she wants to. She just - she can't. She'll never make the first step. She's too proud. It has to be you. Apologize, or don't, it doesn't matter. Just go see her, or you'll spend the rest of your life wondering why she never called."

"Narvin."

"Hmm?" He's stirring the soup, spoon rotating at an average rate of six centimeters per second. All the bits whirling around. Root vegetables, herbs, chunks of an unidentifiable meat.

"What happened?"

He stops stirring. The soup keeps spinning. "Nothing. Nothing happened. Leela, swallow your pride and do this. For her sake, for yours. For mine, if that has any currency with you."

"Last call," she yells abruptly. "Everyone has to leave now. You don't have to go home, but you cannot stay here."

"I commend you on your improved grasp of idioms, but 'last call' means last chance, last - they can all get another drink."

She's got that concentration face on, like she's storing the information away in a mental box labeled Things People Say Without Knowing Why They Say Them. "You can order one more item and then leave. No...'loitering'."

"Same as before," he says. "Twice."


Half a span later, the place is empty save for the two of them. She's sealing bottles and stacking glasses, wiping tables, turning off lights. He's dropping the first drink's garnish into the second. He likes this part, where basic motor skills require so much attention that he doesn't have the time to worry about anything else. There's no details here, like everything's disappearing, like he's slipping out of himself.

"You'll talk to Romana," he says, enunciating carefully.

"I will. And I'll tell her that our mutual friend Narvin is a drunk. I thought spies couldn't lose control?"

"Ah, yes, but I'm not a spy anymore. I'm a politician, and politicians are supposed to drink. How else would we sleep at night?"

"By not doing things that keep you awake," she says. "Go home, Narvin."


He goes, eventually. Or, not home, since that's a thing he can't do anymore, go home, but he follows the streets he almost knows, winds up in a place calling itself his apartment. They tell him he lives here, and the lock always recognizes his fingerprints, even when he just sort of slams his palm against the scanner. He stumbles in and collapses where the bed used to be, not where it actually is, and there's a brief moment where he's afraid he might cry, but he gets up and tries again, manages to land crosswise on the mattress, and falls asleep with his boots still on.





*

There's one piece missing. Otherwise it's finished, the thing that's ostensibly a time machine. He thinks it might work. All it needs to do is find the Axis, just reach one set of coordinates, one epoch. He figures the chances are good, good enough to risk it. Any chance is good enough to risk it.

All that's left is the thing that actually makes it start. The one piece of code he doesn't know how to write. Maybe Romana would know, but he can't ask her, not now. This is something he does on his own.

He spends a quarter of a span staring blankly at the wall, before his hand moves, almost of its own accord, to the lower reaches of his pocket. The TARDIS key. He rubs a thumb over the raised metal, the faint energy buzz of his name below the Warpsmith insignia. Inside is a tiny sliver of circuit paper, the imprimatur. It'll do. He pries the key apart, gently takes the paper out and tapes it in place underneath the console. The machine hums approvingly.

This is a situation where he should leave a note. If you're reading this, then. Then I'm dead, then I'm sorry, then unfortunately you're stuck on this planet forever. He tries, seven times, to write something, but none of it is right, and none of it says what he means, or it says too much, and eventually he just gives up.

He drops the key into an envelope, seals it, writes her name on the front, and leaves it in the middle of the floor outside.

There's a console, and a metal box around it that's just barely tall enough to stand in, and a rotor powered by the very last pieces of Project Rassilon and about two pints of his own blood. There's a monitor and keyboard, but the instructions have been set for weeks. The decision's been made. This is what happens.

He breathes in, and flips the switch.