Failing to Collide (Tegan, the Brig, the Master)
Title: Failing to Collide
Author: aralias
Recipient: fardell24
Rating: PG-13
Character(s): Tegan, the Master, the Brigadier, assorted others.
Warnings (if any): (Lots of) character death. Brief mention of Big Finish character, but no spoilers.
Summary: It's the Year That Never Was, and Tegan Jovanka really misses the Doctor.
Written for fardell24. Prompt 02.Tegan Jovanka in the Year That Never Was.
miss (v). 1. fail to collide, reach, or come into contact with. 2. be too late for. 3. fail to notice, hear, or understand. 4. fail to be present. 5. avoid. 6 (miss out). omit. 7. notice or feel the loss or absence of.
e.g. “Doctor, I will miss you.” (Resurrection of the Daleks)
*
If there was one person from her travels through time and space Tegan had never expected to see again, it was the Doctor.
He’d left a card and a bunch of tulips outside her front door on the morning of her thirtieth birthday, some time before she woke up. This had been really nice: due to the slight discrepancy between how long she’d been away and when she returned, everyone else Tegan knew thought she was already thirty-one and the actual big 3-0 would have gone unnoticed but for the Doctor. The way in which he’d gone about it, though, was absolutely typical annoying-Doctor-behaviour. However long it had been for him, he was apparently still unwilling to stick around long to face the consequences of his actions, even the nice ones.
There was, also, a good chance he thought she’d shout at him for getting the wrong sort of flowers, but Tegan rather liked the tulips. They reminded her of Amsterdam, where she’d been unexpectedly reunited with the Doctor and Nyssa, and allowed back onboard. She kept the flowers in a vase on her kitchen table, until it became obvious they weren’t going to die and she was forced to move them to a less conspicuous location.
Aside from the usual perfunctory greetings in the card, ‘Dear Tegan, Happy 30th,’ etc, the Doctor had also written a short note explaining that Turlough had gone back to his own planet, which he seemed happy about, if the Doctor was any judge of these sorts of things. So Tegan wasn’t really expecting to see Turlough either. Nyssa was presumably still ministering to the sick on Terminus, and Adric was so long dead that Tegan didn’t cry about him, unless she’d had too much to drink. So it would have been pretty shocking if either of them had reappeared.
On the other hand, she’d been vaguely expecting the Master to turn up at some point. For years, she’d given bearded traffic wardens suspicious glances and had, once, actually wrenched the stuffed head off a floppy eared dog-mascot handing out leaflets on the tube to the surprise of the woman inside.
The Master had been a staple of her time aboard the TARDIS. He’d begun by murdering her aunt and then continued to reappear, no matter how often the Doctor defeated him: returning like a particularly persistent, thoroughly evil boomerang.
It’d been some time, now, since she’d left the Doctor, but Tegan knew, with a sick sort of certainty, that this wouldn’t matter. That sort of thing wouldn’t stop the Master from showing up at some point and attempting to ruin her life or kill her relatives, if he could. It would just make her easier to locate.
*
She’d been asleep during President Winters’ broadcast. Everyone in Australia was awake, but Tegan, still in England after twenty three years, had taken the opportunity to stay in bed. Mr Saxon had given everyone the day off: a extra bank holiday, on which to enjoy the historic occasion. First Alien Contact. The news stations had gone nuts, along with just about everyone Tegan knew. Tegan, on the other hand, was thoroughly bored with aliens, even the interesting ones, and flying, silver footballs with silly voices, frankly, didn’t qualify in that category. So, she slept through the alien broadcast and was woken at a quarter past eight by the sound of her next door neighbours screaming.
She’d been conditioned by her years with the Doctor to run towards people screaming, rather than away. Without bothering to pull trousers on over the boxer shorts and t-shirt she was sleeping in, Tegan was up and out of bed, out of her flat and through the large hole that had been blasted in the door of number 23.
She hadn’t ever really warmed to the flat’s residents, Tim and Penny, but Tegan wasn’t going to let them get attacked by aliens if she could help it, even if they couldn’t be bothered to separate their recycling.
There was a single giggling sphere hovering in the middle of Tim and Penny’s living room. Tim was nowhere to be seen; Penny cowered behind a leather sofa, the top of her head visible above the armrest. The sphere feinted towards her with another laugh.
Tegan picked up a small pot plant from the window sill and hurled it at the bobbing sphere. “Leave her alone!”
It had been a surprisingly good shot. But, though the plant pot shattered, spraying soil across the pale carpet, the sphere merely bumped in mid-air, as if it had been given a light shove, and span - presumably to face her.
“Miss Jovanka,” it said in its high, childish voice and laughed.
“How do you know my name?” Tegan demanded, grabbing a candlestick that looked marginally more likely to have some effect on the alien thing.
“Our Master will be so happy to hear you’re alive,” the sphere continued merrily, like it hadn’t heard her. “Sooo happy!” Then, with a surprising burst of speed, it zoomed past her and out through the hole in the doorway.
Tegan put down the candlestick. “I think it’s safe to come out now,” she said wearily to the lurking Penny.
The large television in the corner was still playing its news broadcast. A small cut-away in the corner of the screen flicked between the world’s major cities: all of which seemed to be covered in a dark cloud of laughing, bobbling alien-spheres; all of which seemed to be burning. The main screen was re-playing the first contact broadcast, the ticker tape at the bottom calmly explaining that President Winters had been assassinated by the English Prime Minister, who had subsequently declared himself master of all.
“Now then,” Harry Saxon was saying, “peoples of the Earth, please attend carefully.”
“Well, that figures,” Tegan muttered as the Doctor (he’d regenerated and done something mad to his hair, but she’d know him anywhere, even if he hadn’t been named as a terrorist on yesterday’s evening news) staggered into shot, forcibly restrained by some large men in pristine black suits.
“That alien killed Tim,” Penny said, quietly, from her side.
“Right,” Tegan said, sadly. “It looks like it’s happening everywhere.” Then, having processed the particular information, rather than just the general, she added, “I’m sorry.”
“It knew you,” Penny said.
“Yep.”
Penny waited for an elaboration, and then said, “How?” when none appeared to be forthcoming. “Tegan, it was an alien. How could an alien know you?”
“Oh,” Tegan said, “we have a history, me and aliens.” The pictures on the television vanished, replaced by the familiar grey and white snowstorm of static. Tegan stepped backwards, a shard of terracotta splintering painfully under her bare left heel. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”
“But you can’t,” Penny wailed.
“I can. I’m sorry, but I really have to go.”
The goons arrived as she was climbing out of the window, her bag already on the grassy ground two floors below, one foot already lodged in the gap between a protruding piece of guttering and the wall.
“Would you step back into the room, please, Miss Jovanka,” the front goon said, calmly, but insistently. He was, Tegan noted, one of the guys who’d held back the Doctor on TV. That meant there weren’t a lot of them, yet, which was something.
“No, thanks,” Tegan said, brightly. “See you fellows later.” Then she jumped from the ledge and down.
Though it had rained in the last week, the ground was still quite firm and as Tegan got up she considered how fortunate it was that only one of her ankles seemed irreparably damaged. She’d bought more sensible shoes since travelling with the Doctor - thinking about it now, it was a miracle she only retained mental scars. And thank God, Nigel had vetoed the penthouse. Ideally he would have stayed a bit longer to enjoy the second floor flat they had bought together, but it turned out he was right: two floors was more than high enough.
She collected her bag, and shoved some of the things that had spilled out (socks, a plastic bottle of water, two lipsticks, not really necessary, perhaps, but she’d packed in a hurry) back into it. Alien footballs swirled around her, pointing out that she shouldn’t run, that she would only be caught in the end, and it would only make their Master cross if he had to look for her.
As she had anticipated, though, they didn’t actually try to attack her as she limped away from her building, and into the shopping centre adjoining it. The men had, obviously, been deployed to pick her up and bring her into the presence of the Doctor’s nemesis. The spheres, on the other hand, could only kill her. Only being a relative term, of course. But, she’d bargained on the Master wanting a good gloat at her expense and, apparently, she’d been right. He might not have a beard this time round, but otherwise he was pathetically unchanged. He’d even used that same ‘please attend carefully’ line.
It was easy to get lost inside the shopping centre. Tegan had managed it twice, just after she’d moved here. The alien spheres were, also, as easily distracted as children, which helped. They lost track of her amongst the racks of clothing. As she crawled from one display to another, Tegan heard the sound of people screaming and things laughing and the buzz of energy weapons, and fought to breathe steadily. She’d hoped this would never happen again. This was why she’d left the Doctor, though it had broken her heart to do it. The Master would pay for this. Somehow. Hopefully, the Doctor would show him.
She left the shopping centre through the general service entrance. The world outside was already a different place than it had been yesterday. The morning streets were free of people, shop windows smashed, car alarms going off like crazy.
Taking refuge inside a Ford Escort, with its key still in the ignition and its doors hanging open, Tegan dug her mobile out of her jean pocket and scrolled quickly through her contacts till she got to M for Mark. He was a colleague, but he only lived a couple of streets away. She could get there, which was more important than a life long friendship at this stage.
The phone rang three times and then there was the click of a connection.
Trying to keep her voice loud enough to be audible over the car alarms, and quiet enough than any passing spheres would ignore her, Tegan said, “Hi, it’s-“
“Tegan Jovanka!” Harry Saxon’s voice rang out with enthusiasm down the crackling line. “How are you? I heard you climbed out of a window.”
“That’s right,” Tegan snapped, forgetting about volume control. “Anything rather than talk to you, again.”
“Oh. I’m hurt,” the Master said, in the silly baby voice he used sometimes on TV.
Tegan felt her hand clench around the phone. “You will be. What’ve you done with the Doctor?”
“Nothing,” the Master said. “Really. He’s here, safe and sound. Do you want to speak to him? I can pass you over if you two want to catch up. How long has it been for you? Thirty years? That’s a long-”
“Are you tracking this call?”
“No. I think someone else is, though. Let me see… Ah. Yes, they are. In fact, by my calculations, some nice men should be with you in about three, sorry, two minutes. You know, Tegan-”
The rest of his sentence was lost as Tegan stood and hurled her phone as far down the street as she could. The Doctor had taught her that throw, one lazy summer evening. Turlough had complained that anything they forced English school boys to play was a waste of his time, but, in the end, they’d managed a reasonable game between the three of them. The Doctor had looked so happy.
Tegan got back into the Ford and twisted the keys in the ignition. She’d been hoping to be less conspicuous than this, but never mind. Too late now. The car harrumphed into life and she accelerated away as fast as possible, down the street and away. She would go to London, she decided. She could hide there.
Spheres followed her all the way onto the motorway. There were still cars moving here, though most of them were heading the other way, out into the country. Tegan’s alien entourage spiralled away after people they could kill without getting in trouble.
Trying not to think about how it was partly her fault those people were dying, Tegan turned off down the first exit. It wasn’t her fault. It was the Master’s. She wiped away the moisture forming on her lower lids with the back of her hand.
She abandoned the borrowed Ford in an alley way next to a KFC, and picked her way through the streets to the closest underground station. There were already hundreds of people clustered around the ticket booths, looking like wide-eyed children in the semi-darkness.
She stayed with the Earl’s Court group for a couple of hours, then went with the small team who had decided to risk walking down the District line tunnel. Keep moving: that was the trick. Tegan kept moving.
*
“May the Doctor keep you.”
She’d been about to leave the warehouse: business complete, time to move on. But instead of walking away from the make-shift market before anyone could begin remembering her, Tegan found herself staring at the utterer of this bizarre expression. “What?” she said, a bit more harshly than was, perhaps, necessary.
“Sorry?” The man, who’d just given her a cold Pop Tart in exchange for some matches, was still smiling, but it was now an unnaturally wide smile: a very poor attempt at calm lacquered over his very real fear.
“What was that you just said?”
“I don’t remember saying anything.”
“Look,” Tegan said in her ‘patient’ voice, “I’m not working for the Master, I’m not going to turn you in for knowing about the Doctor. I just want to know what’s going on. Like why you just turned into Obi Wan Kenobi all of a sudden.”
“Obi Wan-?”
Tegan raised her eyebrows. “‘May the Doctor be with you’?”
There was a more real smile on the guy’s face now. “Keep you,” he corrected. “It’s something we’re saying, now, after- you really don’t know?”
When Tegan explained that no, she didn’t know, she was hustled round to the other side of the stall and told in hurried whispers about Martha Jones and Earth’s promised saviour, the Doctor. By no means perfect, the Doctor was their one hope in the battle against the Master. He’d battled alien menaces before, had battled the Master before, and he was going to save them all, again, this time. He’d even fix it so that none of this had ever happened. All they needed to do was believe in him and, at the appointed time, in just over nine months, go out into the streets and chant his name. Then all the terrible things that had been happening would go away and they could go back to their old lives, as if none of this had ever happened.
“What kind of a crazy plan is that?” Tegan demanded, when this was conveyed to her in its entirety.
“It’s-”
“It’s terrible,” Tegan said, feeling herself getting worked up. “Nine more months? Of this? The Doc’s come up with some useless plans in the past, but this-”
She’d forgotten herself. Both the man and his wife were staring. “You- know the Doctor?” It was asked with some reverence as if Tegan had just owned up to knowing Elvis.
“Oh, I know him all right,” Tegan said darkly.
“And he’ll save us? All of us?”
“Er,” Tegan said. The first time she’d met the Doctor, he’d failed to save Auntie Vanessa. Then absolutely everyone on Logopolis had been killed, then so had a third of the universe had been wiped out, including Nyssa’s entire planet. He hadn’t been able to save them either. Oh, and then the Doctor himself had fallen to his death - but, of course, he’d come back to life. No one else had, though. They all stayed dead.
After that sort of beginning, things could hardly get worse, but they’d been at a fairly consistent level of bad, almost all the time. Thinking about it now, Tegan found it hard to recall a single instance in which the Doctor had managed to save most of the people they were trying to protect, let alone all of them. But what good would it do to point that out to these people? It looked like, aside from a few packets of Pop Tarts, hope was pretty much all they had.
“Sure,” she said gently. “He’ll save us.”
*
Later that evening, she found herself telling stories about the Doctor to a group of tired and dirty refugees. Only the good stories, of course, but it became easier to remember which ones those were once she’d begun.
She told them about the Doctor, in gold rimmed glasses and wheelchair, barely able to concentrate, but sending them away from certain death at Event One. She told them about the beautiful white city of Castrovalva and its interlocking corridors, which were intended to trap the Doctor forever and which had held him for a mere day. She told them about the frog people, the robotic Aboriginal warrior and the space ship hurtling towards Earth. She told them about the tiny newt-life forms who had moved into the water ride at Dickens World and the many hours the Doctor had spent coaxing them into a stolen top hat. She told them about dancing the Charleston in the 1920s. She told them about the migration of flying antelope on Polpom Beta. She told them about prehistoric Heathrow and the people from the concords of her own time, trapped there under hypnosis and set free and sent home, in a matter of hours, by the Doctor, She told them about how the Doctor had agreed to give up his remaining regenerations to save her and Nyssa, how he’d never judged Turlough for trying to kill him, even when he should have done, and how Turlough had, as a result, become a person she mostly liked some of the time. She told them about the time the Doctor had woken an enclosed village of sleepers by smacking the cricket ball he carried with him everywhere through the glass dome, allowing the alien toxin out into the atmosphere. She told them about calm days spent in the Eye of Orion, and about the Doctor patiently teaching her to play the piano, and how he kept a record of the times it took him to bring down unjust governments (the record, when she left him, was half an hour, though Tegan had been at that one and knew it had been largely down to luck and a large megaphone.) She also told them about visiting the Doctor’s planet, though she fudged the bit about how many versions of the Doctor had been there at the same time, conflating them into the same man to save on explanations. There was a genuine laugh when she got to the bit about the Brigadier felling the Master with a single blow to the head, leaving him prostrate on the floor throughout the confrontation with the president.
She hadn’t talked about the Doctor to anyone since her return. Because, she didn’t want to, at first and, later, because who would believe her? It was a relief, now, to frame each of real, awful, wonderful events in a narrative told to a credulous audience. Tegan talked till her voice wore out and the sky began to brighten.
*
She was shaken awake early in the morning by Paul, the man who’d given her the Pop Tart the previous day.
“He knows you’re here.”
There was no need to ask who ‘he’ was. Tegan had slept in her clothes as everyone did now, and without talking she followed Paul out of the office she’d slept in, weaving her way the sleeping forms of other refugees.
“Martha had a key that kept her hidden,” Paul murmured as they hurried down the corridor, “from the Doctor. Do you-”
“No,” Tegan said, feeling suddenly vulnerable. “Nothing like that. He gave me some tulips for my birthday once.” She tried a small laugh.
They stopped at what was obviously-
“A garbage shoot?” Tegan asked, with some of the outrage that had served her well during her travels with the Doctor.
Paul smiled and opened the cover, which gave a too-loud creak and clang. “It’s all right, it’s clean. We haven’t used it since we arrived five months ago.”
Tegan sighed, hoisted her bag on her shoulders and climbed up into the neck of the shoot, like a child about to race down a water ride.
“Once you get to the bottom of the shoot, go left,” Paul said quietly. “That should take you into a rather nasty alleyway. Go right at the end of that, and you’ll be out into the city.”
“Thanks,” Tegan said.
He touched her shoulder lightly. “May the Doctor be with you.”
“Right,” Tegan said with a faint smile. “I’m going to need all the help I can get.”
She pushed herself away from the hatch and down the shoot. It was short, covering just one floor and mostly clean, but it was cramped and dark and smelt terrible and her bare arms squeaked against the sides when they touched. She fell out the bottom and picked herself up. Left out of the shoot, right at the end of the alley way, check. There was no rubbish at the bottom, everything that could be used or eaten had been removed by now: the Master had managed to regress their fast-moving consumer age back to War-time Britain in less than half a year. Some achievement, when you thought about it.
At the end of the alley, Tegan turned right. It was late into the morning, but the street was empty. She could hear the low wail of sirens as she crept along against the wall. They seemed to be moving in the opposite direction, but, as Tegan turned the corner onto another road, she found her way blocked by three black vans.
“Nice job, Doctor,” Tegan muttered wryly, as armed men spilled from the vans to collect her
*
It was strange being inside a van that didn’t stop for anything. There was the gentle swinging motion caused by simply being on the move, but there were no stops for traffic lights or to give way at junctions or, as was common more recently, to submit to inspection. Just one long fluid movement.
Tegan sat in the back seat, hand-cuffed to some part of the seat below her body, and scowled at the two men watching her from the fold-down seats opposite. She’d refused the tea they’d offered her, and there didn’t seem to be any other need for conversation so they’d spent the trip thus far in complete silence after the initial exchange of pleasantries on their part and ‘go to hell’ on Tegan’s.
She nearly jumped, then, when a tinny version of Hanson’s MMMBop rang out in the front of the van. It stopped and there was a grumbling of half-conversation from behind the plastic screen, and then it was hauled open.
“Our Lord and Master wishes to speak to you.”
“How nice for him,” Tegan retorted. She reasoned that they couldn’t make her take the car phone, so at worst she’d have to listen to the Master monologuing, and attempted to cross her arms. This proved impossible, though, with one of them chained to the floor. She ended up simply hugging herself with one arm, looking small and lost and frightened in the back of the van. Her adventures with the Doctor had never been so drawn out. She’d only been with him for two years. This long siege in her adopted home country, was just wearing her down like the low ache of the Mara in her mind.
In the end, taking the phone wasn’t an issue. The guard opposite her stood up and switched sides so that he sat next to her. Behind him, there was a television screen set into the wall, just below the plastic screen divide. With a quick spread of colour, it switched itself on, and the Master grinned at her.
“Well, well, well, Tegan Jovanka.” He titled his head to one side, appraising her, and sighed. “I really wanted to say you looked well, but you look dreadful. Have you been sleeping? You really should get at least eight hours.”
He was perched on the edge of the long board-room table from that momentous broadcast, dressed in the same crisp black suit. There was a knife in his right hand and, as she watched, he threw it upwards so that it twisted in the air and smacked down again in his palm; threw it again.
“I heard,” he said, in quite a different tone, “you were telling stories down by the river - following in the footsteps of the great Martha Jones. Really,” he said, returning to the earlier patter, “she should be following in your footsteps: you were first, after all. But you’ll be pleased to know, Tegan, that I, at least, found your stories much more interesting. Hers were all oooh, the Doctor saved all the people on this planet, and oooh, the Doctor was so handsome in the snow. Really boring - especially after you’ve already heard the same one a couple of times. The people are still lapping it up, though. Idiots.”
“Don’t hurt them,” Tegan said.
The Master laughed suddenly, as if surprised. “Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know,” Tegan said. “You like killing people. You’re a maniac.” The words sounded feeble even to her, and so she was not surprised when the Master’s grin spread wider across his face.
“Thank you,” he said. He threw the knife again. “It’s so nice to be understood. But no, I’m not going to kill them. There’s no reason to. The people in warehouse seven represent a significant portion of my shipyard workers, to kill them would set me back at least a month.” He frowned at her, as though bemused that she could have made this elementary miscalculation. “So, you told them a few stories? Big deal. In fact,” he continued, “I approve.” He smiled again, threw and caught the knife. “I’m bringing you in for a chat, Tegan. He wont talk to me anymore,” he moved his shoulder backwards slightly, so Tegan could see past him to where an old man sat in a wheelchair, some way beyond the table, staring out of one of the windows, “and I’d love to mull over old times with you. For instance,” he held up the knife, “do you remember this?”
There was a loud crash and the truck, which had been moving smoothly for the last half an hour, jolted violently.
“What on Earth was that?” Tegan demanded of the television screen.
“You’re probably being rescued,” the Master said, sounding thoroughly bored. He flung the knife away, off screen, like a child having a tantrum. “Ugh, this isn’t fair.”
There was shouting going on outside, and two of the three guards in Tegan’s van had already evacuated to deal with whatever was happening.
“Say hello to Lethbridge-Stewart for me, would you?” the Master said. “Oh, and tell him, I have the location of his little base pinned down to within a mile, so he might want to think about moving.” The image vanished.
Apparently simultaneously, the door to the van was yanked open. The man still in the backseat with Tegan managed to fire his gun twice at the intruders before he fell. Tegan pressed herself against the closest side of the vehicle, but the man who eventually climbed up into the van was at least sixty-years-old, tall and thin, and benign-looking, despite the gun strapped to his back.
“Miss Jovanka?” he asked. “I’m Mike Yates. I hear you also know the Doctor.”
*
Tegan sipped the tea she’d been given once they’d cleared her for alien-tracking devices. Somehow the former members of UNIT had managed to make this dank little cavern beneath the Thames almost genteel. There was nothing too high-tech, which would have been picked up by the Master’s scanners, but it seemed like a place that could have existed before the Master’s reign of terror. She was drinking tea with an old friend of the Doctor’s, just as she might have done.
“We’ve been on the look out for you since day one,” Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart explained. He was much older than either of the times she’d met him before. He spoke more slowly and wore a beard, rather than a moustache. There was still the same feeling of complete un-ruffledness about him, though, and it was almost certainly this that had made this place as calm as it was. “I’m afraid you’re one of the Master’s top priorities. Probably public enemy number four, after Miss Jones, myself and Sarah Jane Smith.” He rubbed his bearded jaw line. “No, there aren’t many of us left who were close to the Doctor. Lots of people from my time in UNIT, of course, Miss Smith, Captain Yates; some ladies the Doctor knew in the sixties, but not many young people.”
“I’m hardly young,” Tegan said with a grin.
The Brigadier inclined his head, suggesting ineffably that he was unwilling to contradict her, but that he felt the issue was open to debate. “My men have been able to break into some of the Master’s systems,” he continued, “so we know roughly who he’s looking for. Nothing we could do for Doctor Holloway. She was in America, and we simply don’t have that sort of transportation anymore. Even Wales is too far away. Our own Miss Grant-“ he paused for a moment, “was too far away.”
“I’m sorry,” Tegan murmured.
The Brigadier nodded. “I’d met you personally, of course. You and Miss Nyssa. I assume she’s-”
“Safe,” Tegan said.
“You mean off-world,” the Brigadier said, with a minimal frown. He held out his tea-cup to a passing soldier and indicated that he would like it to be refilled. Tegan shook her head when he raised his eyebrows in her direction and held onto her cup like a life line. “Nowhere on this blighted planet is safe any more. We’re not safe here. Forced underground like rats- Ah, thank you.” He accepted his re-filled teacup, drank from it and regarded Tegan across the table. “Miss Jovanka, I think I’m right in saying you knew the Master before all this happened. That’s why you’re so high up his list.”
“Well, we didn’t play bridge together, if that what’s you mean,” Tegan said, “but we’d certainly met.”
“I knew him,” the Brigadier said, thoughtfully. “Had him locked up for almost three months until he managed to give us the slip. A dangerous menace, no doubt about that, but the fellow I knew would never have engineered something like this. Not really interested in the day to day business of global conquest, I’d have said. More… in the pursuit of it. This latest coup doesn’t seem his sort of thing at all. Must be why the Doctor’s insisting on his own long term strategy, though I do wish he’d hurry up about it.”
“You’ve heard his plan, then?” Tegan asked, hearing her own scepticism quite clearly in the unflattering emphasis on plan.
“I have.”
“And what do you think of it?”
“The Doctor’s always defeated the Master before,” the Brigadier answered noncommittally. “He knows what he’s doing.”
Tegan laughed. “Really?”
“Well,” the Brigadier said, raising an eyebrow. “Let’s damned well hope so.”
*
Tegan hadn’t expected to survive.
Despite the Master’s warning, they’d stayed in the safe-house for three months, because there was no where else to go. When the Toclafane had finally located it, the Doctor’s former associates had scattered. Tegan had run with the only person in the camp still under thirty: a young woman named Lucie, who had apparently shouted at the Doctor a lot, particularly when he tried to make her leave so that he could go and fight some sort of war. Tegan had liked her a lot. When Lucie was shot down in late April, she had seriously wondered what the point of going on was.
During the rest of the year, she moved constantly, but wearily, like a sleep walker. The Doctor’s name was whispered in almost every place she ended up, but Tegan told no more stories.
Reports had trickled in as the year progressed. Alistair had, apparently, been killed defending the safe-house: that had been made public. John Benton had been with him, and Liz Shaw, and four or five other members of UNIT, but their deaths were played down in favour of the Brigadier’s. Mike was dead, too, though Tegan had only heard this in passing and had been afraid to ask why. Sarah Jane Smith, who had been leading her own resistance movement, and who Tegan had once shaken hands with on Gallifrey, was alive, but had gone into hiding, at last, with her son. Twelve months of terror passed, and, of all the Doctor’s many companions, only Martha Jones still moved openly.
Of Tegan’s normal friends, the ones who’d never met the Doctor, there was no news at all, of course, and no way of contacting them. She tried not to think about what might have happened. If the Doctor did know what he was doing, everything would be all right.
Tegan, herself, was holed up in a set of converted offices in what had once been Liverpool. Time had been difficult to keep track of, with every day so similar to the one that had preceded it, but as the year circled round it became impossible to ignore the people whispering, ‘four days to go’, ‘two days to go’, ‘tomorrow, it’s tomorrow’. The Master’s launch day; the Doctor’s promised salvation. Sometimes Tegan even believed he’d manage it.
The day before the launch was marked by a rare broadcast. Tegan’s ‘household’ gathered around a widescreen television that had remained miraculously undamaged during the last twelve months. There was the Master, as unchanged as the TV, and the Doctor in his wheelchair.
“I ask you, how much hope has this man got?” the Master enquired of the watching crowd. He crouched low over the Doctor’s wheelchair, and Tegan realised, he didn’t know. Everyone else on the entire planet knew what was supposed to happen tomorrow, except the Master. He thought the Doctor was defeated. He actually thought he’d won.
Partly blocked behind someone’s head, Tegan peered into the Doctor’s eyes, which were still ever-young in his unnaturally old face and quite clear in the hi-def television screen, and for the first time, she really believed his stupid plan might actually work. Tomorrow, today might never have happened.
She felt like a fool standing in the middle of the street at eight o’clock in the morning, but it was filled with other desperate people and, after a while, it felt like a VE day party. Strangers shook her hand. People beamed, like it was the end of an adventure.
Tegan wasn’t the first to start shouting the Doctor’s name, but she shouted it loudly once the general shouting started, and hoped.
*
She’d been asleep during President Winters’ broadcast. Everyone in Australia was awake, though it was late for them, but Tegan, still in England after twenty three years, had taken the opportunity to stay in bed. Mr Saxon had given everyone the day off: a extra bank holiday, on which to enjoy the historic occasion. First Alien Contact. The news stations had gone nuts, along with just about everyone Tegan knew. Tegan, on the other hand, was thoroughly bored with aliens, even the interesting ones, and flying, silver footballs with silly voices, frankly, didn’t qualify in that category. So, she slept through the alien broadcast and was woken at a quarter past ten by the sound of her next door neighbour rapping on her window.
Without bothering to pull trousers on over the boxer shorts and t-shirt she was sleeping in, Tegan walked blearily to her front door and unlocked it.
“When someone doesn’t answer the door that means they don’t want to talk to you,” she told the woman waiting behind it. “It doesn’t mean you should hammer on their bedroom window.”
Penny, of number 23, ignored the rudeness and the observation. “This got delivered for you yesterday,” she said, handing over a thin parcel. She frowned. “Still asleep, Tegan? At this hour?”
“I was,” Tegan agreed.
“Then you missed it,” Penny practically squealed.
“Missed what?” Tegan asked. She’d opened the parcel by now and discovered a skirt she’d bought on eBay a week ago. Sadly, it had looked better in the photograph. “Oh,” she remembered, “the aliens. Right. How were they?”
Eagerly, Penny told her about the assassination of the American president and the sudden and mysterious disappearance of Harold Saxon who had, apparently, been behind the murder and the whole alien hoax.
Tegan nodded, thanked Penny for dropping off her parcel and went back inside her own flat. There, she switched the television on, re-tuned the Freeview box to BBC News 24 and listened to their version of events. On balance, it was only slightly less sensationalist than the version Penny had related. Now, Mr Saxon was, apparently, suspected of hypnotising the world through means as yet unknown, as well as murder, conspiracy and insanity. It had also been suggested by various outsider groups that he’d been abducted by the aliens he sought to introduce, but the BBC were keen to point out that it was far more likely he’d escaped in the resulting panic and that the aliens were a hoax.
Watching the clips of the assassination, which cut out almost immediately after that event, Tegan spotted what Penny hadn’t bothered to report.
Firstly, “Mr Saxon” was an alien himself: a particularly annoying alien Tegan had been expecting to meet again for some time now. He’d regenerated, but, now she heard him use his own name, it was sickeningly obvious that she’d voted for the Master in the last general election. What a waste of her citizenship.
Fortunately, the second important thing Penny had missed made Saxon’s real identity merely a curiosity. Just before the cut, the Master shouted, ‘Stop him’, and the leader of the terrorist cell they’d been warned about yesterday staggered into shot, forcibly restrained by some large men in pristine black suits. Tegan shook her head as the footage looped back to the beginning. What had he done to his hair?
Absurdly, no one seemed to have linked the Doctor’s appearance and Mr Saxon’s disappearance. There were more important things to worry about, of course, but the Doctor’s name wasn’t even mentioned in the thirty minutes Tegan stood, watching the report. He must have slipped out the back way before anyone could question him, made a call to someone in authority, perhaps, having defeated the Master yet again. No hanging around, anyway. He hadn’t changed much.
With a smile, Tegan switched off the report, moved her tulips back into the kitchen, and went to try on her new skirt.
Author: aralias
Recipient: fardell24
Rating: PG-13
Character(s): Tegan, the Master, the Brigadier, assorted others.
Warnings (if any): (Lots of) character death. Brief mention of Big Finish character, but no spoilers.
Summary: It's the Year That Never Was, and Tegan Jovanka really misses the Doctor.
Written for fardell24. Prompt 02.Tegan Jovanka in the Year That Never Was.
miss (v). 1. fail to collide, reach, or come into contact with. 2. be too late for. 3. fail to notice, hear, or understand. 4. fail to be present. 5. avoid. 6 (miss out). omit. 7. notice or feel the loss or absence of.
e.g. “Doctor, I will miss you.” (Resurrection of the Daleks)
*
If there was one person from her travels through time and space Tegan had never expected to see again, it was the Doctor.
He’d left a card and a bunch of tulips outside her front door on the morning of her thirtieth birthday, some time before she woke up. This had been really nice: due to the slight discrepancy between how long she’d been away and when she returned, everyone else Tegan knew thought she was already thirty-one and the actual big 3-0 would have gone unnoticed but for the Doctor. The way in which he’d gone about it, though, was absolutely typical annoying-Doctor-behaviour. However long it had been for him, he was apparently still unwilling to stick around long to face the consequences of his actions, even the nice ones.
There was, also, a good chance he thought she’d shout at him for getting the wrong sort of flowers, but Tegan rather liked the tulips. They reminded her of Amsterdam, where she’d been unexpectedly reunited with the Doctor and Nyssa, and allowed back onboard. She kept the flowers in a vase on her kitchen table, until it became obvious they weren’t going to die and she was forced to move them to a less conspicuous location.
Aside from the usual perfunctory greetings in the card, ‘Dear Tegan, Happy 30th,’ etc, the Doctor had also written a short note explaining that Turlough had gone back to his own planet, which he seemed happy about, if the Doctor was any judge of these sorts of things. So Tegan wasn’t really expecting to see Turlough either. Nyssa was presumably still ministering to the sick on Terminus, and Adric was so long dead that Tegan didn’t cry about him, unless she’d had too much to drink. So it would have been pretty shocking if either of them had reappeared.
On the other hand, she’d been vaguely expecting the Master to turn up at some point. For years, she’d given bearded traffic wardens suspicious glances and had, once, actually wrenched the stuffed head off a floppy eared dog-mascot handing out leaflets on the tube to the surprise of the woman inside.
The Master had been a staple of her time aboard the TARDIS. He’d begun by murdering her aunt and then continued to reappear, no matter how often the Doctor defeated him: returning like a particularly persistent, thoroughly evil boomerang.
It’d been some time, now, since she’d left the Doctor, but Tegan knew, with a sick sort of certainty, that this wouldn’t matter. That sort of thing wouldn’t stop the Master from showing up at some point and attempting to ruin her life or kill her relatives, if he could. It would just make her easier to locate.
*
She’d been asleep during President Winters’ broadcast. Everyone in Australia was awake, but Tegan, still in England after twenty three years, had taken the opportunity to stay in bed. Mr Saxon had given everyone the day off: a extra bank holiday, on which to enjoy the historic occasion. First Alien Contact. The news stations had gone nuts, along with just about everyone Tegan knew. Tegan, on the other hand, was thoroughly bored with aliens, even the interesting ones, and flying, silver footballs with silly voices, frankly, didn’t qualify in that category. So, she slept through the alien broadcast and was woken at a quarter past eight by the sound of her next door neighbours screaming.
She’d been conditioned by her years with the Doctor to run towards people screaming, rather than away. Without bothering to pull trousers on over the boxer shorts and t-shirt she was sleeping in, Tegan was up and out of bed, out of her flat and through the large hole that had been blasted in the door of number 23.
She hadn’t ever really warmed to the flat’s residents, Tim and Penny, but Tegan wasn’t going to let them get attacked by aliens if she could help it, even if they couldn’t be bothered to separate their recycling.
There was a single giggling sphere hovering in the middle of Tim and Penny’s living room. Tim was nowhere to be seen; Penny cowered behind a leather sofa, the top of her head visible above the armrest. The sphere feinted towards her with another laugh.
Tegan picked up a small pot plant from the window sill and hurled it at the bobbing sphere. “Leave her alone!”
It had been a surprisingly good shot. But, though the plant pot shattered, spraying soil across the pale carpet, the sphere merely bumped in mid-air, as if it had been given a light shove, and span - presumably to face her.
“Miss Jovanka,” it said in its high, childish voice and laughed.
“How do you know my name?” Tegan demanded, grabbing a candlestick that looked marginally more likely to have some effect on the alien thing.
“Our Master will be so happy to hear you’re alive,” the sphere continued merrily, like it hadn’t heard her. “Sooo happy!” Then, with a surprising burst of speed, it zoomed past her and out through the hole in the doorway.
Tegan put down the candlestick. “I think it’s safe to come out now,” she said wearily to the lurking Penny.
The large television in the corner was still playing its news broadcast. A small cut-away in the corner of the screen flicked between the world’s major cities: all of which seemed to be covered in a dark cloud of laughing, bobbling alien-spheres; all of which seemed to be burning. The main screen was re-playing the first contact broadcast, the ticker tape at the bottom calmly explaining that President Winters had been assassinated by the English Prime Minister, who had subsequently declared himself master of all.
“Now then,” Harry Saxon was saying, “peoples of the Earth, please attend carefully.”
“Well, that figures,” Tegan muttered as the Doctor (he’d regenerated and done something mad to his hair, but she’d know him anywhere, even if he hadn’t been named as a terrorist on yesterday’s evening news) staggered into shot, forcibly restrained by some large men in pristine black suits.
“That alien killed Tim,” Penny said, quietly, from her side.
“Right,” Tegan said, sadly. “It looks like it’s happening everywhere.” Then, having processed the particular information, rather than just the general, she added, “I’m sorry.”
“It knew you,” Penny said.
“Yep.”
Penny waited for an elaboration, and then said, “How?” when none appeared to be forthcoming. “Tegan, it was an alien. How could an alien know you?”
“Oh,” Tegan said, “we have a history, me and aliens.” The pictures on the television vanished, replaced by the familiar grey and white snowstorm of static. Tegan stepped backwards, a shard of terracotta splintering painfully under her bare left heel. “I’m sorry, I have to go.”
“But you can’t,” Penny wailed.
“I can. I’m sorry, but I really have to go.”
The goons arrived as she was climbing out of the window, her bag already on the grassy ground two floors below, one foot already lodged in the gap between a protruding piece of guttering and the wall.
“Would you step back into the room, please, Miss Jovanka,” the front goon said, calmly, but insistently. He was, Tegan noted, one of the guys who’d held back the Doctor on TV. That meant there weren’t a lot of them, yet, which was something.
“No, thanks,” Tegan said, brightly. “See you fellows later.” Then she jumped from the ledge and down.
Though it had rained in the last week, the ground was still quite firm and as Tegan got up she considered how fortunate it was that only one of her ankles seemed irreparably damaged. She’d bought more sensible shoes since travelling with the Doctor - thinking about it now, it was a miracle she only retained mental scars. And thank God, Nigel had vetoed the penthouse. Ideally he would have stayed a bit longer to enjoy the second floor flat they had bought together, but it turned out he was right: two floors was more than high enough.
She collected her bag, and shoved some of the things that had spilled out (socks, a plastic bottle of water, two lipsticks, not really necessary, perhaps, but she’d packed in a hurry) back into it. Alien footballs swirled around her, pointing out that she shouldn’t run, that she would only be caught in the end, and it would only make their Master cross if he had to look for her.
As she had anticipated, though, they didn’t actually try to attack her as she limped away from her building, and into the shopping centre adjoining it. The men had, obviously, been deployed to pick her up and bring her into the presence of the Doctor’s nemesis. The spheres, on the other hand, could only kill her. Only being a relative term, of course. But, she’d bargained on the Master wanting a good gloat at her expense and, apparently, she’d been right. He might not have a beard this time round, but otherwise he was pathetically unchanged. He’d even used that same ‘please attend carefully’ line.
It was easy to get lost inside the shopping centre. Tegan had managed it twice, just after she’d moved here. The alien spheres were, also, as easily distracted as children, which helped. They lost track of her amongst the racks of clothing. As she crawled from one display to another, Tegan heard the sound of people screaming and things laughing and the buzz of energy weapons, and fought to breathe steadily. She’d hoped this would never happen again. This was why she’d left the Doctor, though it had broken her heart to do it. The Master would pay for this. Somehow. Hopefully, the Doctor would show him.
She left the shopping centre through the general service entrance. The world outside was already a different place than it had been yesterday. The morning streets were free of people, shop windows smashed, car alarms going off like crazy.
Taking refuge inside a Ford Escort, with its key still in the ignition and its doors hanging open, Tegan dug her mobile out of her jean pocket and scrolled quickly through her contacts till she got to M for Mark. He was a colleague, but he only lived a couple of streets away. She could get there, which was more important than a life long friendship at this stage.
The phone rang three times and then there was the click of a connection.
Trying to keep her voice loud enough to be audible over the car alarms, and quiet enough than any passing spheres would ignore her, Tegan said, “Hi, it’s-“
“Tegan Jovanka!” Harry Saxon’s voice rang out with enthusiasm down the crackling line. “How are you? I heard you climbed out of a window.”
“That’s right,” Tegan snapped, forgetting about volume control. “Anything rather than talk to you, again.”
“Oh. I’m hurt,” the Master said, in the silly baby voice he used sometimes on TV.
Tegan felt her hand clench around the phone. “You will be. What’ve you done with the Doctor?”
“Nothing,” the Master said. “Really. He’s here, safe and sound. Do you want to speak to him? I can pass you over if you two want to catch up. How long has it been for you? Thirty years? That’s a long-”
“Are you tracking this call?”
“No. I think someone else is, though. Let me see… Ah. Yes, they are. In fact, by my calculations, some nice men should be with you in about three, sorry, two minutes. You know, Tegan-”
The rest of his sentence was lost as Tegan stood and hurled her phone as far down the street as she could. The Doctor had taught her that throw, one lazy summer evening. Turlough had complained that anything they forced English school boys to play was a waste of his time, but, in the end, they’d managed a reasonable game between the three of them. The Doctor had looked so happy.
Tegan got back into the Ford and twisted the keys in the ignition. She’d been hoping to be less conspicuous than this, but never mind. Too late now. The car harrumphed into life and she accelerated away as fast as possible, down the street and away. She would go to London, she decided. She could hide there.
Spheres followed her all the way onto the motorway. There were still cars moving here, though most of them were heading the other way, out into the country. Tegan’s alien entourage spiralled away after people they could kill without getting in trouble.
Trying not to think about how it was partly her fault those people were dying, Tegan turned off down the first exit. It wasn’t her fault. It was the Master’s. She wiped away the moisture forming on her lower lids with the back of her hand.
She abandoned the borrowed Ford in an alley way next to a KFC, and picked her way through the streets to the closest underground station. There were already hundreds of people clustered around the ticket booths, looking like wide-eyed children in the semi-darkness.
She stayed with the Earl’s Court group for a couple of hours, then went with the small team who had decided to risk walking down the District line tunnel. Keep moving: that was the trick. Tegan kept moving.
*
“May the Doctor keep you.”
She’d been about to leave the warehouse: business complete, time to move on. But instead of walking away from the make-shift market before anyone could begin remembering her, Tegan found herself staring at the utterer of this bizarre expression. “What?” she said, a bit more harshly than was, perhaps, necessary.
“Sorry?” The man, who’d just given her a cold Pop Tart in exchange for some matches, was still smiling, but it was now an unnaturally wide smile: a very poor attempt at calm lacquered over his very real fear.
“What was that you just said?”
“I don’t remember saying anything.”
“Look,” Tegan said in her ‘patient’ voice, “I’m not working for the Master, I’m not going to turn you in for knowing about the Doctor. I just want to know what’s going on. Like why you just turned into Obi Wan Kenobi all of a sudden.”
“Obi Wan-?”
Tegan raised her eyebrows. “‘May the Doctor be with you’?”
There was a more real smile on the guy’s face now. “Keep you,” he corrected. “It’s something we’re saying, now, after- you really don’t know?”
When Tegan explained that no, she didn’t know, she was hustled round to the other side of the stall and told in hurried whispers about Martha Jones and Earth’s promised saviour, the Doctor. By no means perfect, the Doctor was their one hope in the battle against the Master. He’d battled alien menaces before, had battled the Master before, and he was going to save them all, again, this time. He’d even fix it so that none of this had ever happened. All they needed to do was believe in him and, at the appointed time, in just over nine months, go out into the streets and chant his name. Then all the terrible things that had been happening would go away and they could go back to their old lives, as if none of this had ever happened.
“What kind of a crazy plan is that?” Tegan demanded, when this was conveyed to her in its entirety.
“It’s-”
“It’s terrible,” Tegan said, feeling herself getting worked up. “Nine more months? Of this? The Doc’s come up with some useless plans in the past, but this-”
She’d forgotten herself. Both the man and his wife were staring. “You- know the Doctor?” It was asked with some reverence as if Tegan had just owned up to knowing Elvis.
“Oh, I know him all right,” Tegan said darkly.
“And he’ll save us? All of us?”
“Er,” Tegan said. The first time she’d met the Doctor, he’d failed to save Auntie Vanessa. Then absolutely everyone on Logopolis had been killed, then so had a third of the universe had been wiped out, including Nyssa’s entire planet. He hadn’t been able to save them either. Oh, and then the Doctor himself had fallen to his death - but, of course, he’d come back to life. No one else had, though. They all stayed dead.
After that sort of beginning, things could hardly get worse, but they’d been at a fairly consistent level of bad, almost all the time. Thinking about it now, Tegan found it hard to recall a single instance in which the Doctor had managed to save most of the people they were trying to protect, let alone all of them. But what good would it do to point that out to these people? It looked like, aside from a few packets of Pop Tarts, hope was pretty much all they had.
“Sure,” she said gently. “He’ll save us.”
*
Later that evening, she found herself telling stories about the Doctor to a group of tired and dirty refugees. Only the good stories, of course, but it became easier to remember which ones those were once she’d begun.
She told them about the Doctor, in gold rimmed glasses and wheelchair, barely able to concentrate, but sending them away from certain death at Event One. She told them about the beautiful white city of Castrovalva and its interlocking corridors, which were intended to trap the Doctor forever and which had held him for a mere day. She told them about the frog people, the robotic Aboriginal warrior and the space ship hurtling towards Earth. She told them about the tiny newt-life forms who had moved into the water ride at Dickens World and the many hours the Doctor had spent coaxing them into a stolen top hat. She told them about dancing the Charleston in the 1920s. She told them about the migration of flying antelope on Polpom Beta. She told them about prehistoric Heathrow and the people from the concords of her own time, trapped there under hypnosis and set free and sent home, in a matter of hours, by the Doctor, She told them about how the Doctor had agreed to give up his remaining regenerations to save her and Nyssa, how he’d never judged Turlough for trying to kill him, even when he should have done, and how Turlough had, as a result, become a person she mostly liked some of the time. She told them about the time the Doctor had woken an enclosed village of sleepers by smacking the cricket ball he carried with him everywhere through the glass dome, allowing the alien toxin out into the atmosphere. She told them about calm days spent in the Eye of Orion, and about the Doctor patiently teaching her to play the piano, and how he kept a record of the times it took him to bring down unjust governments (the record, when she left him, was half an hour, though Tegan had been at that one and knew it had been largely down to luck and a large megaphone.) She also told them about visiting the Doctor’s planet, though she fudged the bit about how many versions of the Doctor had been there at the same time, conflating them into the same man to save on explanations. There was a genuine laugh when she got to the bit about the Brigadier felling the Master with a single blow to the head, leaving him prostrate on the floor throughout the confrontation with the president.
She hadn’t talked about the Doctor to anyone since her return. Because, she didn’t want to, at first and, later, because who would believe her? It was a relief, now, to frame each of real, awful, wonderful events in a narrative told to a credulous audience. Tegan talked till her voice wore out and the sky began to brighten.
*
She was shaken awake early in the morning by Paul, the man who’d given her the Pop Tart the previous day.
“He knows you’re here.”
There was no need to ask who ‘he’ was. Tegan had slept in her clothes as everyone did now, and without talking she followed Paul out of the office she’d slept in, weaving her way the sleeping forms of other refugees.
“Martha had a key that kept her hidden,” Paul murmured as they hurried down the corridor, “from the Doctor. Do you-”
“No,” Tegan said, feeling suddenly vulnerable. “Nothing like that. He gave me some tulips for my birthday once.” She tried a small laugh.
They stopped at what was obviously-
“A garbage shoot?” Tegan asked, with some of the outrage that had served her well during her travels with the Doctor.
Paul smiled and opened the cover, which gave a too-loud creak and clang. “It’s all right, it’s clean. We haven’t used it since we arrived five months ago.”
Tegan sighed, hoisted her bag on her shoulders and climbed up into the neck of the shoot, like a child about to race down a water ride.
“Once you get to the bottom of the shoot, go left,” Paul said quietly. “That should take you into a rather nasty alleyway. Go right at the end of that, and you’ll be out into the city.”
“Thanks,” Tegan said.
He touched her shoulder lightly. “May the Doctor be with you.”
“Right,” Tegan said with a faint smile. “I’m going to need all the help I can get.”
She pushed herself away from the hatch and down the shoot. It was short, covering just one floor and mostly clean, but it was cramped and dark and smelt terrible and her bare arms squeaked against the sides when they touched. She fell out the bottom and picked herself up. Left out of the shoot, right at the end of the alley way, check. There was no rubbish at the bottom, everything that could be used or eaten had been removed by now: the Master had managed to regress their fast-moving consumer age back to War-time Britain in less than half a year. Some achievement, when you thought about it.
At the end of the alley, Tegan turned right. It was late into the morning, but the street was empty. She could hear the low wail of sirens as she crept along against the wall. They seemed to be moving in the opposite direction, but, as Tegan turned the corner onto another road, she found her way blocked by three black vans.
“Nice job, Doctor,” Tegan muttered wryly, as armed men spilled from the vans to collect her
*
It was strange being inside a van that didn’t stop for anything. There was the gentle swinging motion caused by simply being on the move, but there were no stops for traffic lights or to give way at junctions or, as was common more recently, to submit to inspection. Just one long fluid movement.
Tegan sat in the back seat, hand-cuffed to some part of the seat below her body, and scowled at the two men watching her from the fold-down seats opposite. She’d refused the tea they’d offered her, and there didn’t seem to be any other need for conversation so they’d spent the trip thus far in complete silence after the initial exchange of pleasantries on their part and ‘go to hell’ on Tegan’s.
She nearly jumped, then, when a tinny version of Hanson’s MMMBop rang out in the front of the van. It stopped and there was a grumbling of half-conversation from behind the plastic screen, and then it was hauled open.
“Our Lord and Master wishes to speak to you.”
“How nice for him,” Tegan retorted. She reasoned that they couldn’t make her take the car phone, so at worst she’d have to listen to the Master monologuing, and attempted to cross her arms. This proved impossible, though, with one of them chained to the floor. She ended up simply hugging herself with one arm, looking small and lost and frightened in the back of the van. Her adventures with the Doctor had never been so drawn out. She’d only been with him for two years. This long siege in her adopted home country, was just wearing her down like the low ache of the Mara in her mind.
In the end, taking the phone wasn’t an issue. The guard opposite her stood up and switched sides so that he sat next to her. Behind him, there was a television screen set into the wall, just below the plastic screen divide. With a quick spread of colour, it switched itself on, and the Master grinned at her.
“Well, well, well, Tegan Jovanka.” He titled his head to one side, appraising her, and sighed. “I really wanted to say you looked well, but you look dreadful. Have you been sleeping? You really should get at least eight hours.”
He was perched on the edge of the long board-room table from that momentous broadcast, dressed in the same crisp black suit. There was a knife in his right hand and, as she watched, he threw it upwards so that it twisted in the air and smacked down again in his palm; threw it again.
“I heard,” he said, in quite a different tone, “you were telling stories down by the river - following in the footsteps of the great Martha Jones. Really,” he said, returning to the earlier patter, “she should be following in your footsteps: you were first, after all. But you’ll be pleased to know, Tegan, that I, at least, found your stories much more interesting. Hers were all oooh, the Doctor saved all the people on this planet, and oooh, the Doctor was so handsome in the snow. Really boring - especially after you’ve already heard the same one a couple of times. The people are still lapping it up, though. Idiots.”
“Don’t hurt them,” Tegan said.
The Master laughed suddenly, as if surprised. “Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know,” Tegan said. “You like killing people. You’re a maniac.” The words sounded feeble even to her, and so she was not surprised when the Master’s grin spread wider across his face.
“Thank you,” he said. He threw the knife again. “It’s so nice to be understood. But no, I’m not going to kill them. There’s no reason to. The people in warehouse seven represent a significant portion of my shipyard workers, to kill them would set me back at least a month.” He frowned at her, as though bemused that she could have made this elementary miscalculation. “So, you told them a few stories? Big deal. In fact,” he continued, “I approve.” He smiled again, threw and caught the knife. “I’m bringing you in for a chat, Tegan. He wont talk to me anymore,” he moved his shoulder backwards slightly, so Tegan could see past him to where an old man sat in a wheelchair, some way beyond the table, staring out of one of the windows, “and I’d love to mull over old times with you. For instance,” he held up the knife, “do you remember this?”
There was a loud crash and the truck, which had been moving smoothly for the last half an hour, jolted violently.
“What on Earth was that?” Tegan demanded of the television screen.
“You’re probably being rescued,” the Master said, sounding thoroughly bored. He flung the knife away, off screen, like a child having a tantrum. “Ugh, this isn’t fair.”
There was shouting going on outside, and two of the three guards in Tegan’s van had already evacuated to deal with whatever was happening.
“Say hello to Lethbridge-Stewart for me, would you?” the Master said. “Oh, and tell him, I have the location of his little base pinned down to within a mile, so he might want to think about moving.” The image vanished.
Apparently simultaneously, the door to the van was yanked open. The man still in the backseat with Tegan managed to fire his gun twice at the intruders before he fell. Tegan pressed herself against the closest side of the vehicle, but the man who eventually climbed up into the van was at least sixty-years-old, tall and thin, and benign-looking, despite the gun strapped to his back.
“Miss Jovanka?” he asked. “I’m Mike Yates. I hear you also know the Doctor.”
*
Tegan sipped the tea she’d been given once they’d cleared her for alien-tracking devices. Somehow the former members of UNIT had managed to make this dank little cavern beneath the Thames almost genteel. There was nothing too high-tech, which would have been picked up by the Master’s scanners, but it seemed like a place that could have existed before the Master’s reign of terror. She was drinking tea with an old friend of the Doctor’s, just as she might have done.
“We’ve been on the look out for you since day one,” Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart explained. He was much older than either of the times she’d met him before. He spoke more slowly and wore a beard, rather than a moustache. There was still the same feeling of complete un-ruffledness about him, though, and it was almost certainly this that had made this place as calm as it was. “I’m afraid you’re one of the Master’s top priorities. Probably public enemy number four, after Miss Jones, myself and Sarah Jane Smith.” He rubbed his bearded jaw line. “No, there aren’t many of us left who were close to the Doctor. Lots of people from my time in UNIT, of course, Miss Smith, Captain Yates; some ladies the Doctor knew in the sixties, but not many young people.”
“I’m hardly young,” Tegan said with a grin.
The Brigadier inclined his head, suggesting ineffably that he was unwilling to contradict her, but that he felt the issue was open to debate. “My men have been able to break into some of the Master’s systems,” he continued, “so we know roughly who he’s looking for. Nothing we could do for Doctor Holloway. She was in America, and we simply don’t have that sort of transportation anymore. Even Wales is too far away. Our own Miss Grant-“ he paused for a moment, “was too far away.”
“I’m sorry,” Tegan murmured.
The Brigadier nodded. “I’d met you personally, of course. You and Miss Nyssa. I assume she’s-”
“Safe,” Tegan said.
“You mean off-world,” the Brigadier said, with a minimal frown. He held out his tea-cup to a passing soldier and indicated that he would like it to be refilled. Tegan shook her head when he raised his eyebrows in her direction and held onto her cup like a life line. “Nowhere on this blighted planet is safe any more. We’re not safe here. Forced underground like rats- Ah, thank you.” He accepted his re-filled teacup, drank from it and regarded Tegan across the table. “Miss Jovanka, I think I’m right in saying you knew the Master before all this happened. That’s why you’re so high up his list.”
“Well, we didn’t play bridge together, if that what’s you mean,” Tegan said, “but we’d certainly met.”
“I knew him,” the Brigadier said, thoughtfully. “Had him locked up for almost three months until he managed to give us the slip. A dangerous menace, no doubt about that, but the fellow I knew would never have engineered something like this. Not really interested in the day to day business of global conquest, I’d have said. More… in the pursuit of it. This latest coup doesn’t seem his sort of thing at all. Must be why the Doctor’s insisting on his own long term strategy, though I do wish he’d hurry up about it.”
“You’ve heard his plan, then?” Tegan asked, hearing her own scepticism quite clearly in the unflattering emphasis on plan.
“I have.”
“And what do you think of it?”
“The Doctor’s always defeated the Master before,” the Brigadier answered noncommittally. “He knows what he’s doing.”
Tegan laughed. “Really?”
“Well,” the Brigadier said, raising an eyebrow. “Let’s damned well hope so.”
*
Tegan hadn’t expected to survive.
Despite the Master’s warning, they’d stayed in the safe-house for three months, because there was no where else to go. When the Toclafane had finally located it, the Doctor’s former associates had scattered. Tegan had run with the only person in the camp still under thirty: a young woman named Lucie, who had apparently shouted at the Doctor a lot, particularly when he tried to make her leave so that he could go and fight some sort of war. Tegan had liked her a lot. When Lucie was shot down in late April, she had seriously wondered what the point of going on was.
During the rest of the year, she moved constantly, but wearily, like a sleep walker. The Doctor’s name was whispered in almost every place she ended up, but Tegan told no more stories.
Reports had trickled in as the year progressed. Alistair had, apparently, been killed defending the safe-house: that had been made public. John Benton had been with him, and Liz Shaw, and four or five other members of UNIT, but their deaths were played down in favour of the Brigadier’s. Mike was dead, too, though Tegan had only heard this in passing and had been afraid to ask why. Sarah Jane Smith, who had been leading her own resistance movement, and who Tegan had once shaken hands with on Gallifrey, was alive, but had gone into hiding, at last, with her son. Twelve months of terror passed, and, of all the Doctor’s many companions, only Martha Jones still moved openly.
Of Tegan’s normal friends, the ones who’d never met the Doctor, there was no news at all, of course, and no way of contacting them. She tried not to think about what might have happened. If the Doctor did know what he was doing, everything would be all right.
Tegan, herself, was holed up in a set of converted offices in what had once been Liverpool. Time had been difficult to keep track of, with every day so similar to the one that had preceded it, but as the year circled round it became impossible to ignore the people whispering, ‘four days to go’, ‘two days to go’, ‘tomorrow, it’s tomorrow’. The Master’s launch day; the Doctor’s promised salvation. Sometimes Tegan even believed he’d manage it.
The day before the launch was marked by a rare broadcast. Tegan’s ‘household’ gathered around a widescreen television that had remained miraculously undamaged during the last twelve months. There was the Master, as unchanged as the TV, and the Doctor in his wheelchair.
“I ask you, how much hope has this man got?” the Master enquired of the watching crowd. He crouched low over the Doctor’s wheelchair, and Tegan realised, he didn’t know. Everyone else on the entire planet knew what was supposed to happen tomorrow, except the Master. He thought the Doctor was defeated. He actually thought he’d won.
Partly blocked behind someone’s head, Tegan peered into the Doctor’s eyes, which were still ever-young in his unnaturally old face and quite clear in the hi-def television screen, and for the first time, she really believed his stupid plan might actually work. Tomorrow, today might never have happened.
She felt like a fool standing in the middle of the street at eight o’clock in the morning, but it was filled with other desperate people and, after a while, it felt like a VE day party. Strangers shook her hand. People beamed, like it was the end of an adventure.
Tegan wasn’t the first to start shouting the Doctor’s name, but she shouted it loudly once the general shouting started, and hoped.
*
She’d been asleep during President Winters’ broadcast. Everyone in Australia was awake, though it was late for them, but Tegan, still in England after twenty three years, had taken the opportunity to stay in bed. Mr Saxon had given everyone the day off: a extra bank holiday, on which to enjoy the historic occasion. First Alien Contact. The news stations had gone nuts, along with just about everyone Tegan knew. Tegan, on the other hand, was thoroughly bored with aliens, even the interesting ones, and flying, silver footballs with silly voices, frankly, didn’t qualify in that category. So, she slept through the alien broadcast and was woken at a quarter past ten by the sound of her next door neighbour rapping on her window.
Without bothering to pull trousers on over the boxer shorts and t-shirt she was sleeping in, Tegan walked blearily to her front door and unlocked it.
“When someone doesn’t answer the door that means they don’t want to talk to you,” she told the woman waiting behind it. “It doesn’t mean you should hammer on their bedroom window.”
Penny, of number 23, ignored the rudeness and the observation. “This got delivered for you yesterday,” she said, handing over a thin parcel. She frowned. “Still asleep, Tegan? At this hour?”
“I was,” Tegan agreed.
“Then you missed it,” Penny practically squealed.
“Missed what?” Tegan asked. She’d opened the parcel by now and discovered a skirt she’d bought on eBay a week ago. Sadly, it had looked better in the photograph. “Oh,” she remembered, “the aliens. Right. How were they?”
Eagerly, Penny told her about the assassination of the American president and the sudden and mysterious disappearance of Harold Saxon who had, apparently, been behind the murder and the whole alien hoax.
Tegan nodded, thanked Penny for dropping off her parcel and went back inside her own flat. There, she switched the television on, re-tuned the Freeview box to BBC News 24 and listened to their version of events. On balance, it was only slightly less sensationalist than the version Penny had related. Now, Mr Saxon was, apparently, suspected of hypnotising the world through means as yet unknown, as well as murder, conspiracy and insanity. It had also been suggested by various outsider groups that he’d been abducted by the aliens he sought to introduce, but the BBC were keen to point out that it was far more likely he’d escaped in the resulting panic and that the aliens were a hoax.
Watching the clips of the assassination, which cut out almost immediately after that event, Tegan spotted what Penny hadn’t bothered to report.
Firstly, “Mr Saxon” was an alien himself: a particularly annoying alien Tegan had been expecting to meet again for some time now. He’d regenerated, but, now she heard him use his own name, it was sickeningly obvious that she’d voted for the Master in the last general election. What a waste of her citizenship.
Fortunately, the second important thing Penny had missed made Saxon’s real identity merely a curiosity. Just before the cut, the Master shouted, ‘Stop him’, and the leader of the terrorist cell they’d been warned about yesterday staggered into shot, forcibly restrained by some large men in pristine black suits. Tegan shook her head as the footage looped back to the beginning. What had he done to his hair?
Absurdly, no one seemed to have linked the Doctor’s appearance and Mr Saxon’s disappearance. There were more important things to worry about, of course, but the Doctor’s name wasn’t even mentioned in the thirty minutes Tegan stood, watching the report. He must have slipped out the back way before anyone could question him, made a call to someone in authority, perhaps, having defeated the Master yet again. No hanging around, anyway. He hadn’t changed much.
With a smile, Tegan switched off the report, moved her tulips back into the kitchen, and went to try on her new skirt.