A Country of Smaller Wars (3/3a)
"A Country of Smaller Wars", 3/3a ( 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.
Part Three B
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.
Part Three B