Ficathon fic: Mixed Signals (Compassion, Fitz, Eight)
Title: Mixed Signals
Author: ionlylurkhere
Characters: Compassion, Fitz and Eight
Rating: PG
Word count: 3000
Summary: Compassion in the Last Great Time War.
Notes: 2009 EDA ficathon pinch hit for lcsbanana, who wanted Compassion and adventure. Thanks to nonelvis for helpful betaing. Vague spoiler warning for The Ancestor Cell and The Gallifrey Chronicles.
Compassion drifted in the Vortex, bathed in a million million signals. She remained remote from the clutter of the cosmos, but despite everything that had changed about her, she remained Remote: she still felt the expectations of her behaviour from the culture. But now, her timeship-self could detect media across the history of the universe. Time had long lost its conventional meaning for her, but even the progression of her consciousness from one state to the next seemed disjointed as she was buffeted by the implications and exhortations of a multitude of ways to be.
For a long time, she'd had strong signals to guide her, or to define herself by opposing: her mother's subtle remaking of her biodata; the Time Lords -- and their future Enemy -- and each side's expectations for her; and then, in the aftermath of the great crisis that had averted that timeline, the Doctor's memories locked away inside herself for safekeeping, in accordance with her mother's last request of Compassion as she'd stood among her ruined, inverted self.
But now there was nothing. She felt the tug of the new Eye of Harmony, but no more strongly than any other culture. She had never really been of Gallifrey, and had nothing at all to do with the remake; that had been her price, for returning the Doctor's past to him -- a guarantee of non-interference in her self-determination. There would be no link to the revitalised Matrix, no pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top missions, and certainly no breeding programme.
She had not known, when she'd made those demands, quite how little self-determination she had ever really had, quite how much the very nature of those demands was the Doctor himself influencing her from within. It was obvious enough to her now, as she sought to isolate her own wants, desires, needs in the centre of the maelstrom. Even an archenemy to define herself against would be better than nothing.
And then: something was changing, all across the Vortex, all at once. The fabric of history flexed, from Event One all the way to the uptime event horizon. The effect was slight, but entirely obvious to her subtle senses. Something had happened.
She was no longer alone, and Compassion realised that the signal she should have been paying attention to was "Be careful what you wish for".
Giant timeships had emerged, cutting off most of the connections between her particular non-location and any others.
"YOU ARE THE EN-E-MY OF THE DAL-EKS!" The timeships were broadcasting their metallic screech on all frequencies, drowning out anything and everything else.
And then the changes to the Vortex made sense: the Daleks were challenging the new Gallifrey for mastery of Time. They must have discovered her, seen her as part and parcel of the same enemy. She doubted reasoned explanation was going to work. Besides which, if they saw her as an enemy, then they saw her as a threat. And she certainly knew how to respond to that signal.
The Dalek ships were huge, the crude time baffles encrusting their outer shells taking up vast amounts of physical space, even in this realm where physical form was near-meaningless. She took the tiniest possible fraction of a second to analyse the situation, then slipped off along subtle paths, twisting through eleventh-dimensional affine connections to exploit flaws in their armour too small for the Daleks even to notice. She emerged in the core of the first enemy vessel, and unmade its taranium-powered core. It was almost quaint, and entirely susceptible to even the simplest of her methods of controlling time.
As the Dalek timeship disintegrated around her, its relationship to history dissipating into meaninglessness, she took off again, insinuating herself into the next enemy ship and then the next, until eventually all that was left around her were the tiniest possible units of meaning that had once composed such mighty vessels.
She studied each piece carefully, followed their fragmented timelines back to their point of origin. She was the dogged PI who wouldn't given up on the case even after being warned off by the bad guy's heavies, the mathematician pursuing the purity of the proof with singleminded determination, the goddess Nemesis implacably chasing after the hubristic mortals to bring them doom.
She found where they had come from, and by the very act of finding was there.
* * *
The factory was immense, an entire solar system ripped apart and remade, the star itself tapped for raw materials as well as power. But there was no history to it. The Daleks had chosen this place deliberately, a red dwarf star in the outer reaches of the galaxy possessed of only a few meagre planets with no native life. This place had never had strategic value, never been considered worth colonising by any of the starfaring empires of history, even their earlier selves, its scant resources not worth exploiting, its location rendering it forever strategically valueless. Nothing ever happened here, other than the star slowly husbanding its nuclear fuel into deep eternity, well beyond the limit of the Time Lords' knowledge. It was a thin frayed strand on the very edge of the Web of Time, where the Daleks thought to hide themselves from the spiders at its centre while they prepared their assault.
But that very lack of history made it absurdly easy to attack.
She flew through the factory-system, flitting in and out of real space, scrambling timelines and reversing events, until the whole thing fell apart as easily as the products of its vast industry had when she'd encountered them in the Vortex.
She almost didn't detect the lone non-Dalek figure hidden in the midst of the chaos until it was too late. The figure's armour was not the eldritch strangeness of the forms adopted by the future Time Lords, but it was unmistakeably Gallifreyan. With an inward sigh, Compassion reversed along her course, taking the soldier into herself at the last possible moment before the history it was integrated into became unstable.
The red and white uniform was topped by a mirrored helmet covering the whole head. There was something of the Chancellery Guard about it, but something of the casts too. Was this truly a Time Lord, or one of their agents?
"I suppose you're going to want me to take you back to Gallifrey," Compassion said through an internal avatar she'd instantiated out of some vague notion of propriety.
The figure removed its helmet, revealing scruffy hair and a three-day beard. The eyes were exhausted, but instantly recognisable.
"Fitz Kreiner, as I live and simulate breathing so as not to disconcert you too badly!" Compassion said, beginning to make her avatar do exactly that. Her happiness was genuine, or perhaps just a reflection of Fitz's. "But if you're here, where's the Doctor?"
"He sent me away, Compassion," Fitz said, placing his helmet on her console. "To protect me. This wasn't the front line. I'm not even a decoy to distract the Daleks' attention from some important mission. It's just somewhere ... away."
"I can take you home, if you want," Compassion said. "Or somewhere close to it."
"Close as in the twenty-second century?"
She scanned the time paths. Twenty-second century Earth was entirely navigable. "If you'd like," she said.
"Good," Fitz said with determination. "I thought you might. Take me there, please."
"What's going on?" Compassion saw the changes in Fitz: he was weary in a way she had never seen, weary of the entire universe. And more to the point, he was thinking four-dimensionally, seeing a gap of two centuries as "close". Fitz was a time warrior now.
"The Daleks have mangled the timelines in that region beyond the point where we can access them," Fitz said. Compassion noted the first person plural. "We think it might be a bolthole, where they're planning something particularly nasty. But you're not subject to the same constraints, are you?"
"No, I'm not," Compassion said quietly. "I'm sorry, I should have been paying more attention. I only noticed anything was happening when the Daleks ... did whatever they did. And then came after me."
"They've removed themselves from history, at least partially." Fitz looked at her levelly. "But, Compassion, do you really care that Gallifrey wins?"
Compassion shrugged. "I care that the Daleks lose."
She configured her console to be at least slightly friendly to Fitz's understanding of how such things should work. She even let him press a button to take them to their destination.
* * *
The signals here were confusing in the extreme; even as Compassion tried to filter them out, they changed as the timelines rippled around them.
Fitz had been right: time was thickening around twenty-second century Earth at an alarming rate. What had once been a relatively simple invasion had become a tangle of conflicting timelines; from the signals, Compassion discerned that there were Daleks from at least six different versions of their history, all proclaiming allegiance to a different Supreme Dalek, Dalek Supreme, Emperor and/or creator figure, and all attempting to use the invasion as a pivot on which to turn the timelines of the entire universe. In one of the simpler timelines, now scribbled over and over like a palimpsest, golden Daleks similar to those she'd encountered gave orders to gunmetal grey drones who'd never encountered time travel before. But in most iterations, the same tired clichés played themselves out -- as was always the way, many of the Dalek factions saw their most implacable, unforgivably un-Dalek foes in one another. Twenty-second century Earth had become host to a miniature time war all its own, a civil war between different Daleks vying for the opportunity to use this time period for their ultimate purpose. And through it all, an indomitable human resistance struggled on, their own crude time travel devices merely adding to the mess.
Compassion concentrated on Fitz's perceptions: he seemed entirely happy to see the whole business as a glorified spy mission: find out what the Daleks were up to, and stop it. He'd got them into the base by charming one of the human technicians not-quite-enslaved by the Daleks, and now seemed to see himself as a suave spy evading detection by the overwhelming forces of the enemy at every turn.
She even made appropriate changes to her exterior appearance, albeit mild ones -- a short skirt, swishier hair. It fit with the idiom.
They turned a corner, and found themselves face to face with a squad of elite Dalek troops, or a special weapons unit, or a scuttling spider-Dalek, or a Roboman patrol. Fitz grabbed her hand and pulled her back the way they'd come, hiding in an alcove until the danger -- whatever it was; she didn't want to ask Fitz for fear of reifying one version -- passed.
The temporal disturbances were growing stronger as they got closer to their goal. Clearly, the intelligence Fitz had obtained from the resistance had been right: whatever was going on, it was going on here. Each group of Daleks' plot would be masterminded from whatever lay down the end of the corridor.
They stood at the door, nodded at each other, and Compassion forced the door to open.
They entered the room, and this time confrontation was unavoidable. Fitz took the recovered Dalek gun arm he'd been given and fired wildly. Compassion used more subtle methods: time was too encrusted with paradox here for it to be safe to make short-range dematerialisations, but she could bring the different timelines into contact with one another. Daleks turned on each alternate selves, desperate to assert ultimate supremacy.
Compassion looked around as she tangled the timelines as much as she could. In one version, this was the control room for an attempt to turn the entire Earth into a spaceship, so that it could be piloted through conventional space, perhaps avoiding the detection of the Time Lords in the same way that her own home colony of Ordifica had once been used.
Then, everything changed, as she forced another timeline into prominence. The Daleks here were attempting to install something far more fundamental at the Earth's core: a GodEngine. She almost smiled at the audacity of it.
Time changed again, but this time it was out of her control. The room was entirely taken up with a golden sphere, a beautiful Void ship that could never have been constructed by the Daleks. Compassion saw it for what it was: an escape hatch, out of this reality entirely.
"There's nothing here," Compassion said.
"What?" Fitz said. "But the ..." He gestured around himself, pointing out all the different grand schemes flickering in and out of existence around them.
"The whole event nexus is collapsing in on itself," she explained. "Very soon it will be completely time-locked. Nothing that might happen here could affect the outcome of the War. This was never a secret base carefully contrived into existence, or whatever you thought it was. It's just the Daleks making a complete and total mess of everything." She sighed.
"Oh," Fitz said quietly.
"If we don't get out of here now, we'll be trapped," she told him. "Shall I take you home now?"
The last syllable elongated into a howl, as she opened her mouth wide for him to step into.
* * *
Compassion materialised in the War Chamber, batting aside automated defence drones with ease and slipping through transduction barriers as though they weren't even there. The room had posts for dozens of adjutants and aides, but was empty now except for one man staring at the five-dimensional map in its centre. Everyone else had gone to their stations for the final battle.
This wasn't the Doctor she remembered. There were superficial changes -- his hair was clipped short, he wore the severe robes of the Time Lord military hierarchy as though he'd been born to them -- but more importantly he'd grown old, not in years but in bitter experience.
He turned when he heard her materialise. "You!"
Compassion disgorged her occupant.
"And you!"
"I thought you were going to take me home," Fitz said.
"Well, you kept giving me mixed signals," Compassion said simply.
"You can't be here," the Doctor said. "Either of you." Her mother sat unobtrusively in the corner of the room, and the signals coming from her -- usually cryptic and elliptical to the point of incomprehensibility, even to Compassion -- were clear as a bell in their agreement.
"I don't remember asking for permission," Compassion said. "And to be honest I don't think Fitz here really has anywhere else to go." Fitz looked hurt for a moment, then shrugged.
"You must leave," the Doctor implored, and there was the shadow of his old self again, the man who wanted more than anything for things to turn out right.
Compassion ignored him, concentrating instead on the signals emanating from the battle computers all around her and the war-looms buried in the Citadel beneath her, churning out soldiers as finely adapted as they could manage for whatever the current battlefield conditions were, but defaulting to basic forms in desperation as tactics and strategy changed too quickly for them to keep up.
As she bathed in the signals she saw in her mind's eye how the Dalek timefleets were closing down the threads which anchored history to the Eye of Harmony through nothing more than their sheer mass. She saw war-TARDISes nearly as crude, hurriedly cryptoformed as a last line of defence, battering themselves against the Dalek ships like insects drawn to a flame as they tried to reinforce the connections. And then she saw the real point of it all, the strategy that could only have been the Doctor's. She saw what would happen if the unthinkable happened: if the Eye itself was removed. The threads would snap, and the vast release of energy would undo the existence of anything actively trying to interact with them.
The concept of the noble sacrifice had never been a factor in what passed for the culture of Gallifrey. Regeneration in extreme circumstances was the preserve of reckless renegades, and even if it was justified, you went on younger and wiser to your next life, or contributed your experience to the Matrix. The renewed culture had taken even its own restoration as part of the same idea: that the Time Lords were eternal, inviolate and invulnerable. Those signals still persisted all around her, even in the face of the evidence to the contrary.
But Compassion was not of Gallifreyan culture, and its signals were nowhere near as strong as the ones she'd had embedded in her since before she'd ever emerged from her Remembrance Tank. And noble sacrifice was hardly the only meme that applied here.
She and Fitz looked at each other. The culture that had given him birth wasn't so different to hers, in the end; she knew exactly what he was thinking.
The one in a million shot had to work one time in a million, didn't it?
Author: ionlylurkhere
Characters: Compassion, Fitz and Eight
Rating: PG
Word count: 3000
Summary: Compassion in the Last Great Time War.
Notes: 2009 EDA ficathon pinch hit for lcsbanana, who wanted Compassion and adventure. Thanks to nonelvis for helpful betaing. Vague spoiler warning for The Ancestor Cell and The Gallifrey Chronicles.
Compassion drifted in the Vortex, bathed in a million million signals. She remained remote from the clutter of the cosmos, but despite everything that had changed about her, she remained Remote: she still felt the expectations of her behaviour from the culture. But now, her timeship-self could detect media across the history of the universe. Time had long lost its conventional meaning for her, but even the progression of her consciousness from one state to the next seemed disjointed as she was buffeted by the implications and exhortations of a multitude of ways to be.
For a long time, she'd had strong signals to guide her, or to define herself by opposing: her mother's subtle remaking of her biodata; the Time Lords -- and their future Enemy -- and each side's expectations for her; and then, in the aftermath of the great crisis that had averted that timeline, the Doctor's memories locked away inside herself for safekeeping, in accordance with her mother's last request of Compassion as she'd stood among her ruined, inverted self.
But now there was nothing. She felt the tug of the new Eye of Harmony, but no more strongly than any other culture. She had never really been of Gallifrey, and had nothing at all to do with the remake; that had been her price, for returning the Doctor's past to him -- a guarantee of non-interference in her self-determination. There would be no link to the revitalised Matrix, no pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top missions, and certainly no breeding programme.
She had not known, when she'd made those demands, quite how little self-determination she had ever really had, quite how much the very nature of those demands was the Doctor himself influencing her from within. It was obvious enough to her now, as she sought to isolate her own wants, desires, needs in the centre of the maelstrom. Even an archenemy to define herself against would be better than nothing.
And then: something was changing, all across the Vortex, all at once. The fabric of history flexed, from Event One all the way to the uptime event horizon. The effect was slight, but entirely obvious to her subtle senses. Something had happened.
She was no longer alone, and Compassion realised that the signal she should have been paying attention to was "Be careful what you wish for".
Giant timeships had emerged, cutting off most of the connections between her particular non-location and any others.
"YOU ARE THE EN-E-MY OF THE DAL-EKS!" The timeships were broadcasting their metallic screech on all frequencies, drowning out anything and everything else.
And then the changes to the Vortex made sense: the Daleks were challenging the new Gallifrey for mastery of Time. They must have discovered her, seen her as part and parcel of the same enemy. She doubted reasoned explanation was going to work. Besides which, if they saw her as an enemy, then they saw her as a threat. And she certainly knew how to respond to that signal.
The Dalek ships were huge, the crude time baffles encrusting their outer shells taking up vast amounts of physical space, even in this realm where physical form was near-meaningless. She took the tiniest possible fraction of a second to analyse the situation, then slipped off along subtle paths, twisting through eleventh-dimensional affine connections to exploit flaws in their armour too small for the Daleks even to notice. She emerged in the core of the first enemy vessel, and unmade its taranium-powered core. It was almost quaint, and entirely susceptible to even the simplest of her methods of controlling time.
As the Dalek timeship disintegrated around her, its relationship to history dissipating into meaninglessness, she took off again, insinuating herself into the next enemy ship and then the next, until eventually all that was left around her were the tiniest possible units of meaning that had once composed such mighty vessels.
She studied each piece carefully, followed their fragmented timelines back to their point of origin. She was the dogged PI who wouldn't given up on the case even after being warned off by the bad guy's heavies, the mathematician pursuing the purity of the proof with singleminded determination, the goddess Nemesis implacably chasing after the hubristic mortals to bring them doom.
She found where they had come from, and by the very act of finding was there.
* * *
The factory was immense, an entire solar system ripped apart and remade, the star itself tapped for raw materials as well as power. But there was no history to it. The Daleks had chosen this place deliberately, a red dwarf star in the outer reaches of the galaxy possessed of only a few meagre planets with no native life. This place had never had strategic value, never been considered worth colonising by any of the starfaring empires of history, even their earlier selves, its scant resources not worth exploiting, its location rendering it forever strategically valueless. Nothing ever happened here, other than the star slowly husbanding its nuclear fuel into deep eternity, well beyond the limit of the Time Lords' knowledge. It was a thin frayed strand on the very edge of the Web of Time, where the Daleks thought to hide themselves from the spiders at its centre while they prepared their assault.
But that very lack of history made it absurdly easy to attack.
She flew through the factory-system, flitting in and out of real space, scrambling timelines and reversing events, until the whole thing fell apart as easily as the products of its vast industry had when she'd encountered them in the Vortex.
She almost didn't detect the lone non-Dalek figure hidden in the midst of the chaos until it was too late. The figure's armour was not the eldritch strangeness of the forms adopted by the future Time Lords, but it was unmistakeably Gallifreyan. With an inward sigh, Compassion reversed along her course, taking the soldier into herself at the last possible moment before the history it was integrated into became unstable.
The red and white uniform was topped by a mirrored helmet covering the whole head. There was something of the Chancellery Guard about it, but something of the casts too. Was this truly a Time Lord, or one of their agents?
"I suppose you're going to want me to take you back to Gallifrey," Compassion said through an internal avatar she'd instantiated out of some vague notion of propriety.
The figure removed its helmet, revealing scruffy hair and a three-day beard. The eyes were exhausted, but instantly recognisable.
"Fitz Kreiner, as I live and simulate breathing so as not to disconcert you too badly!" Compassion said, beginning to make her avatar do exactly that. Her happiness was genuine, or perhaps just a reflection of Fitz's. "But if you're here, where's the Doctor?"
"He sent me away, Compassion," Fitz said, placing his helmet on her console. "To protect me. This wasn't the front line. I'm not even a decoy to distract the Daleks' attention from some important mission. It's just somewhere ... away."
"I can take you home, if you want," Compassion said. "Or somewhere close to it."
"Close as in the twenty-second century?"
She scanned the time paths. Twenty-second century Earth was entirely navigable. "If you'd like," she said.
"Good," Fitz said with determination. "I thought you might. Take me there, please."
"What's going on?" Compassion saw the changes in Fitz: he was weary in a way she had never seen, weary of the entire universe. And more to the point, he was thinking four-dimensionally, seeing a gap of two centuries as "close". Fitz was a time warrior now.
"The Daleks have mangled the timelines in that region beyond the point where we can access them," Fitz said. Compassion noted the first person plural. "We think it might be a bolthole, where they're planning something particularly nasty. But you're not subject to the same constraints, are you?"
"No, I'm not," Compassion said quietly. "I'm sorry, I should have been paying more attention. I only noticed anything was happening when the Daleks ... did whatever they did. And then came after me."
"They've removed themselves from history, at least partially." Fitz looked at her levelly. "But, Compassion, do you really care that Gallifrey wins?"
Compassion shrugged. "I care that the Daleks lose."
She configured her console to be at least slightly friendly to Fitz's understanding of how such things should work. She even let him press a button to take them to their destination.
* * *
The signals here were confusing in the extreme; even as Compassion tried to filter them out, they changed as the timelines rippled around them.
Fitz had been right: time was thickening around twenty-second century Earth at an alarming rate. What had once been a relatively simple invasion had become a tangle of conflicting timelines; from the signals, Compassion discerned that there were Daleks from at least six different versions of their history, all proclaiming allegiance to a different Supreme Dalek, Dalek Supreme, Emperor and/or creator figure, and all attempting to use the invasion as a pivot on which to turn the timelines of the entire universe. In one of the simpler timelines, now scribbled over and over like a palimpsest, golden Daleks similar to those she'd encountered gave orders to gunmetal grey drones who'd never encountered time travel before. But in most iterations, the same tired clichés played themselves out -- as was always the way, many of the Dalek factions saw their most implacable, unforgivably un-Dalek foes in one another. Twenty-second century Earth had become host to a miniature time war all its own, a civil war between different Daleks vying for the opportunity to use this time period for their ultimate purpose. And through it all, an indomitable human resistance struggled on, their own crude time travel devices merely adding to the mess.
Compassion concentrated on Fitz's perceptions: he seemed entirely happy to see the whole business as a glorified spy mission: find out what the Daleks were up to, and stop it. He'd got them into the base by charming one of the human technicians not-quite-enslaved by the Daleks, and now seemed to see himself as a suave spy evading detection by the overwhelming forces of the enemy at every turn.
She even made appropriate changes to her exterior appearance, albeit mild ones -- a short skirt, swishier hair. It fit with the idiom.
They turned a corner, and found themselves face to face with a squad of elite Dalek troops, or a special weapons unit, or a scuttling spider-Dalek, or a Roboman patrol. Fitz grabbed her hand and pulled her back the way they'd come, hiding in an alcove until the danger -- whatever it was; she didn't want to ask Fitz for fear of reifying one version -- passed.
The temporal disturbances were growing stronger as they got closer to their goal. Clearly, the intelligence Fitz had obtained from the resistance had been right: whatever was going on, it was going on here. Each group of Daleks' plot would be masterminded from whatever lay down the end of the corridor.
They stood at the door, nodded at each other, and Compassion forced the door to open.
They entered the room, and this time confrontation was unavoidable. Fitz took the recovered Dalek gun arm he'd been given and fired wildly. Compassion used more subtle methods: time was too encrusted with paradox here for it to be safe to make short-range dematerialisations, but she could bring the different timelines into contact with one another. Daleks turned on each alternate selves, desperate to assert ultimate supremacy.
Compassion looked around as she tangled the timelines as much as she could. In one version, this was the control room for an attempt to turn the entire Earth into a spaceship, so that it could be piloted through conventional space, perhaps avoiding the detection of the Time Lords in the same way that her own home colony of Ordifica had once been used.
Then, everything changed, as she forced another timeline into prominence. The Daleks here were attempting to install something far more fundamental at the Earth's core: a GodEngine. She almost smiled at the audacity of it.
Time changed again, but this time it was out of her control. The room was entirely taken up with a golden sphere, a beautiful Void ship that could never have been constructed by the Daleks. Compassion saw it for what it was: an escape hatch, out of this reality entirely.
"There's nothing here," Compassion said.
"What?" Fitz said. "But the ..." He gestured around himself, pointing out all the different grand schemes flickering in and out of existence around them.
"The whole event nexus is collapsing in on itself," she explained. "Very soon it will be completely time-locked. Nothing that might happen here could affect the outcome of the War. This was never a secret base carefully contrived into existence, or whatever you thought it was. It's just the Daleks making a complete and total mess of everything." She sighed.
"Oh," Fitz said quietly.
"If we don't get out of here now, we'll be trapped," she told him. "Shall I take you home now?"
The last syllable elongated into a howl, as she opened her mouth wide for him to step into.
* * *
Compassion materialised in the War Chamber, batting aside automated defence drones with ease and slipping through transduction barriers as though they weren't even there. The room had posts for dozens of adjutants and aides, but was empty now except for one man staring at the five-dimensional map in its centre. Everyone else had gone to their stations for the final battle.
This wasn't the Doctor she remembered. There were superficial changes -- his hair was clipped short, he wore the severe robes of the Time Lord military hierarchy as though he'd been born to them -- but more importantly he'd grown old, not in years but in bitter experience.
He turned when he heard her materialise. "You!"
Compassion disgorged her occupant.
"And you!"
"I thought you were going to take me home," Fitz said.
"Well, you kept giving me mixed signals," Compassion said simply.
"You can't be here," the Doctor said. "Either of you." Her mother sat unobtrusively in the corner of the room, and the signals coming from her -- usually cryptic and elliptical to the point of incomprehensibility, even to Compassion -- were clear as a bell in their agreement.
"I don't remember asking for permission," Compassion said. "And to be honest I don't think Fitz here really has anywhere else to go." Fitz looked hurt for a moment, then shrugged.
"You must leave," the Doctor implored, and there was the shadow of his old self again, the man who wanted more than anything for things to turn out right.
Compassion ignored him, concentrating instead on the signals emanating from the battle computers all around her and the war-looms buried in the Citadel beneath her, churning out soldiers as finely adapted as they could manage for whatever the current battlefield conditions were, but defaulting to basic forms in desperation as tactics and strategy changed too quickly for them to keep up.
As she bathed in the signals she saw in her mind's eye how the Dalek timefleets were closing down the threads which anchored history to the Eye of Harmony through nothing more than their sheer mass. She saw war-TARDISes nearly as crude, hurriedly cryptoformed as a last line of defence, battering themselves against the Dalek ships like insects drawn to a flame as they tried to reinforce the connections. And then she saw the real point of it all, the strategy that could only have been the Doctor's. She saw what would happen if the unthinkable happened: if the Eye itself was removed. The threads would snap, and the vast release of energy would undo the existence of anything actively trying to interact with them.
The concept of the noble sacrifice had never been a factor in what passed for the culture of Gallifrey. Regeneration in extreme circumstances was the preserve of reckless renegades, and even if it was justified, you went on younger and wiser to your next life, or contributed your experience to the Matrix. The renewed culture had taken even its own restoration as part of the same idea: that the Time Lords were eternal, inviolate and invulnerable. Those signals still persisted all around her, even in the face of the evidence to the contrary.
But Compassion was not of Gallifreyan culture, and its signals were nowhere near as strong as the ones she'd had embedded in her since before she'd ever emerged from her Remembrance Tank. And noble sacrifice was hardly the only meme that applied here.
She and Fitz looked at each other. The culture that had given him birth wasn't so different to hers, in the end; she knew exactly what he was thinking.
The one in a million shot had to work one time in a million, didn't it?