There, and Back Again - Chapter 16
Aug. 5th, 2020 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schrodingers_time_ladyFandom: Doctor Who
Character(s): Rodageitmososa (OC), Others
Previous Chapter: Deus in Absentia
Next Chapter: Chapter 17
Synopsis: Growing into a Time Lady is hard enough, but growing up as the Lord President's ward is even harder. Especially when it seems as though all of Gallifrey and strangers alike want to tell you how to live your life and who you're going to become.
Cross-posts: AO3
A/N: There's some... creative formatting in this chapter. It might not work so well on Dreamwidth, but you can see it in action if you read in 'site style'.
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As soon as she was free of the Panopticon, Roda broke into a run.
She didn’t stop to let people pass, and didn’t care that people were staring. Although she paid some attention to ducking and weaving out of the way of other Time Lords in the streets, all she cared about was getting as far away from Rassilon as possible, and heading for the TARDIS docks. Whispers and thoughts hounded her as she pushed through students with arms full of books, Council members heading back to their Chapter sectors, and people that she hardly registered. None of them mattered to her, not right now. If she had her way, nobody in the Citadel would ever matter to her again.
It wasn’t a long run from the Panopticon to the docks, but it felt like a decade. The end destination seemed to be further away every time she looked up and tried to take her bearings. Her throat was burning, and she could already feel a necklace of bruises beginning to rise; a bitter reminder of what Rassilon had done. But it was his words that hurt the most. Biting down anger and regret, Roda wiped tears from her eyes and kept on moving. She willed her mind not to focus on the fact that the one stability in her entire life had turned out to be a lie after all. She did her best not to think about the fact that the man she had once, at the back of her mind, considered a second father had turned on her for speaking her mind. She tried… and she failed.
Disappointment. Always a disappointment.
Embarrassment. That had been a new one; more cutting than the rest.
Careless. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. He’d seemed to understand that, once.
Ignorant. She read, and she learned, and she needed to know the truth. And still, he lied.
Willful. Reckless. Disobedient.
Well. If he wanted a disobedient child, then he could have one.
Leaving Gallifrey had been a long time coming, and she couldn’t get off-planet fast enough. In fact, the more she thought about it the more she knew she shouldn’t even have waited for graduation. If only Peri hadn’t talked her out of it. If only she hadn’t convinced herself that being on the Council wouldn’t be as bad as she feared. If only she hadn’t thought it could get better. If only, if only, if only… Rassilon thought that she had been making mistakes all her life, but in Roda’s eyes the only mistake had been caring about his opinion and expectations for as long as she had. Now, though, she had a TARDIS and full titles as a Time Lady and no reason why she had to remain on Gallifrey. There was nobody who would miss her, no gap she would leave that could not be filled by someone else, and no reasons to stay and make herself miserable. She might return, one day… but no time soon. And nobody was going to stop her.
Roda only stopped running when the doors of the docks towered above her. Great, carved, and majestic, they had once filled her with wonder but now they only got in her way. She hesitated just long enough to catch her breath, and then tore her ceremonial robes over her head and tossed them to the ground, letting them hit the crisp, clean ground in a crumpled, sweat-soaked heap. Beneath them she wore a light tunic and trousers, the legs rolled up, and she kicked at the air until the creased fabric came undone and landed on her ankles once again. There. That’ll do.
She wasn’t exactly smartly dressed, but it wasn’t unusual for someone working on a TARDIS or taking one for a flight to travel in lighter, more flexible clothing; and she would certainly stand out less like this than she would have in Council attire. Tugging at the leather keeping her hair out of her eyes she wrestled her curls loose and did her best to use them to cover the bruises. It wasn’t perfect… but unless someone looked at her closely, it would do. She would do. Just this once, nobody deserved perfect.
She kept her head done as she walked into the docks, but people still noticed her. An engineer she had known for fifty years raised his hand and shouted a greeting, and through her teeth she forced herself to smile back. If nothing else, the clouded goggles on his head concealed the lie in her eyes, and he seemed satisfied as he turned back to whatever he had been working on. A few other people waved as she passed and Roda forced out terse pleasantries and excuses that she had been busy all day and was just a little tired, that was all, and by the time she was standing in front of her TARDIS nobody seemed thrown off by her sudden appearance at the docks at a time so out of sync with her usual schedule.
Releasing the stasis locks around her TARDIS, Roda allowed herself one small smile, resting her forehead against the cool metal of the original capsule and sighing. The TARDIS thrummed with concern, the metal becoming warm to the touch. Roda reached for the key hanging around her neck - something she carried on her, for no particular reason, but which had come in handy today - and gave an almost imperceptible groan.
«Problem?»
«Not anymore,» she replied, as honestly as she could manage. The key pressed against the locking panel, and Roda realised how much her palm still stung from trying to open the door in the Panopticon. «Don’t worry about me.»
The TARDIS made a noise that was somewhere between unease and kindness, but didn’t press the subject; even if Roda got the feeling it didn’t quite believe her. They were of one mind, had been for years. They understood one another, and understood when not to push. As she stepped into the console room it lit up around her, illuminating her in cozy scarlet hues that it had chosen itself. (Deep breaths, it seemed to say. You’re here now.) She had never figured out why red; having ruled out that it wasn’t quite a Prydonian shade, nor one that she could remember ever having seen on Gallifrey before. But now it’s warmth felt like a blanket that wrapped around her, shielding her from the outside world. Roda would have relaxed more if she hadn’t still been so wound up, but instead she briskly crossed the room and tramped up the shallow ramp that led to the console. Lights and levers came to life as she approached, and Roda stood on her tiptoes to pull down a monitor displaying a sophisticated map of the side of Gallifrey they were on.
She hadn’t decided where she was going, yet. It wasn’t their first flight together, but it would be the first one solo. All of the test and examination runs had been done with professors and engineers in tow - the model she had grown favoured three pilots - and since graduation she had been all but grounded. She had found time to visit but never, ironically, to go anywhere. But she had taken pains to make the console easier for just one person to man, and it felt more natural to be standing at the console alone. One hand ran over the globular SRC module on the console, installed especially so that no one else would need to interfere with her and her ship.
Except of course, even that had involved someone’s meddling. The stranger - who had been conspicuously absent for long enough that she was beginning to wonder if he even existed - had given her that piece of equipment, and even though it had turned out he was right that it would stop the ship from exploding… the fact that he had needed to intervene sent a new spike of anger through her.
It wasn’t that she was possessive of the TARDIS (it was it’s own being, as well as a ship) but she had always felt connected to it, ever since it was just a coral. They were independent, together. They didn’t need anybody else, and it felt the same way. And she was certain that she was a good enough pilot and a good enough engineer that she wasn’t going to run into any serious problems.
«We’re leaving,» she announced, powering the TARDIS up for flight, while her hearts still raced. Despite all her attempts to stay calm, the disaster in the Panoptican still rushed through her mind. The world spun around her. «Don’t care where to.»
«Careful?»
Roda rolled her eyes, gripping the console so hard that her knuckles turned white. ‘Not only careless…’ She’d show him careless.
“Don’t care,” she snapped. “Anywhere but here.”
The lights on the console dimmed briefly, the console powering down. Roda forced herself to let go of the console and stretch her hands, reminding herself that it wasn’t fair to take her anger at Rassilon out on the TARDIS. As feeling came back to her fingers, she chastised herself for raising her voice. All the same, she couldn’t calm down. It felt as though her hearts would beat out of her chest, and she knew that her hands were shaking as she reached out and stroked the centre column in a silent apology. The TARDIS hesitated, making an undecidedly vague noise, before bringing the systems back online - the apology apparently accepted, for now. The map in front of Roda’s face flickered to life and expanded, zooming out to display the entire Kasterboros system, and she grinned as she jumped to attention.
“Knew you’d agree. Fuck Raz, fuck the Council,” once she began, she found she couldn’t stop. Her grin grew more manic. “Fuck doing what we’re told. Let’s go somewhere just because we can. Just the two of us.”
She slipped a keyboard from a nook it was tucked into, typing in a random set of temporal-spatial coordinates. The map panned out even further until no celestial bodies could be made out, before zooming back in on a mess of temporal anomalies, gas and fragments of moon. She spun the monitor a full three hundred and sixty degrees with a laugh, showing off the display to the TARDIS interior.
“Here! Right here! The stars won’t know what hit them.”
***
For the second time in just a handful of hours, Roda found that she couldn’t breathe.
She couldn’t see the console for smoke, and she had no idea why. No idea in Omega’s name what had hit them and knocked them out of the vortex mid-flight. But the acrid smell of chemicals flooded her lungs, flashes of red and orange and gold licking the TARDIS controls, and it didn’t take a genius to know that something was very wrong.
Without any care for herself, she yanked the neck of her tunic up over her face and began to crawl. There was something wrong with the gravitational balancing matrix, and the few times she had tried to pull herself to her feet she had simply gone head over heels back to the ground. She had a vague idea which way was actually up judging by where the light and the alarms were coming from, but her head was spinning and it was all that she could do not to throw up. The console. She had to get to the console. She could feel the TARDIS reaching out for her, just as alarmed as she was and if nothing else, she had to reassure it that everything was okay. Or at least, that they were going to get out of this. If she could just get to the console she could throw them into an emergency landing on the nearest stable planet, and just hope that whatever had hit them hadn’t broken that system.
Getting to the Medusa Cascade had seemed easy. Even angry, she had been careful to double and triple check the coordinates that had flagged up, surprised that in randomly keying in numbers she had managed to find one of the places she had always vowed to go. For a second, she had considered landing in Peri’s laboratory - materializing around him and taking him along for the ride, whether she liked it or not - but in the end, she had decided to go alone. They would only argue, he would only push her to know why she was doing something so reckless and stupid when she should have been in the Council, schmoozing and faking her way through an empty life.
She shook her head as the TARDIS lurched once more. No. There was no time to dwell on what she should have done. She dug her fingers into the grating on the floor, ripping up access panels for something to hold onto. Her fingertips bled and her knees were scuffed, but she kept on dragging herself forward, reaching out for a familiar psychic signature even as she tried to keep her head below the smog.
The flight had started out steady. Calming. The vworp vworp of the brakes releasing soothed her nerves before they even left Gallifrey, and just taking off had been enough to remind Roda that the day’s troubles, too, would pass. For the first little while as she had hovered in neutral space over Gallifrey, running various tests and generally grounding herself with the procedure, it really felt as though things could get better. But only a few seconds after she had pulled the lever to enter the vortex - aiming for a date, she had read, where the Cascade would be especially active - something had buffeted them and thrown them off course. The first time it happened, she got the TARDIS under control muttering something about wild vortisaurs. The second time, however, they went into a spin and whatever button Roda managed to accidentally press had… not helped. That was when the alarms had started.
Another rumble of fire from the Pythia only knew where caused Roda to smack her head off the floor. As something wet dribbled down her forehead she shook herself off and held her breath. The gasp of pain had pulled a lot of the gas into her chest, and it ached, but she could run an analysis on both herself and the TARDIS later. For now, she had to get them both to safety. But as her fingertips grazed the base of the console and she swore with relief, the lights suddenly turned off and Roda’s whole world went into freefall.
“No…” she whispered, unable to believe what was happening.
The thrust lifted her off the ground and she threw herself forward, forgetting all about not breathing in the smoke and grabbing frantically for the console. Her hand wrapped around the nearest handle and she pulled herself forward, hitting her head again and throwing out her hand for the center column. It was still. Not moving. Gasping with shock and pain she lurched her whole body forward, nauseous and dizzy and horrified. There was a pulse there. The TARDIS was still working. But it was hurt. She had missed something in the vortex, and it was hurting.
“No!!”
Careless. Ignorant. Reckless. Disobedient.
She pressed every button, turned every dial and threw back every lever, putting all of her energy into just holding on. Her mental doors were thrown wide, and she talked to the TARDIS as she worked, babbling morning in particular.
She did not switch to respiratory bypass.
Still they tumbled. Roda only just managed to grip the monitor, tear-filled eyes struggling to focus on the readings and map as she tried to work out where they were. Close to the Medusa Cascade. Almost at the coordinates. But too close. Far too close for safety. That must be where the gas is coming from, she thought absently, and it was almost laughable. A loose vent, something not screwed down tight enough. She had been sure the environment shield had been intact, but the impact must have blown it. It would all be so easy to fix, but not like this.
The circular High Gallifreyan swirled like oil in front of her eyes. Roda licked her lips, blinked a couple times too many, and yanked down hard on the emergency brake. And for a second, everything was still. The alarms all melted into one continuous noise, and the world didn’t seem to spin and it seemed like maybe, just maybe, she had managed to fix things. Bruised, bartered, bleeding and not quite broken Roda smiled a small smile, and allowed herself a moment of much-needed rest as she clung to the console. One leg was braced on the chair, another all-but hooked on a tightly-woven bundle of wires, and her arms were wrapped around the all-important lever as if her life depended on it. Her vision was clouded, but the TARDIS reached out for her quietly, reassuring her as much as she did it.
Two things happened at once. The world began to move again, and the front door of her TARDIS slammed open with a thunderous clatter. With the last of her energy Roda narrowed her eyes and glared at the doorway as someone tall, lithe and wearing a gas mask stepped over the threshold. She caught a glimpse of a red shirt, messy hair and strange swatches of blue, as the figure stumbled across the grating and stretched out gloved hands in her direction. It… couldn’t be him…. surely? It had to be a hallucination. She was in the middle of time and space. No one could board a TARDIS in motion, surely, without knowing exactly where they were going to be?
It was the last thought she had as the hand the figure had taken hold of began to burn and glow like a golden flame, her lungs gave in and everything went black. She dimly heard someone calling her name, felt somebody shake her and shout orders to an unseen figure. And then her TARDIS keened and groaned as someone else took hold of the controls and pushed.
Hands put her on the ground, a hot balm rushed up her arm and gripped her hearts, and Roda lost the fight with consciousness once and for all.