APHELION
Prologue
When a dream takes hold of you, what can you do? You can run with it, let it run your life, or let it go and think for the rest of your life about what might have been.
Patch Adams
They'd met each other while crawling through a ventilation corridor in 39th-century France, their acquaintance starting off promisingly enough at taser- and sonic-point respectively. Thirty seconds into it, they had managed to shout their heads off at each other, get arrested for breaking and entering and nearly set fire to the greatest art collection of all time. When it was over, she kissed him, grinned, called him Space Boy and an idiot, and activated her battered Vortex Manipulator before he could get a word in edgeways.
He could still hear the TARDIS humming with laughter at the memory.
o
"Hands off that, Nina, here comes the expert!"
"Har. Har. Got more of these jokes?"
"Something funny about disarming a bomb, is there?"
"Very much, if your idea of doing that involves pointing a whirring piece of primitive machinery at it."
"Oi!"
"Oh, stop getting all offended, it's very unoriginal!"
"Fine, then. You can have a go."
"I—Really?"
"'Course. I'll just pop over to the next millenium before the whole thing detonates..."
"Oh, sod off."
o
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"Wha—I'm rescuing you!"
"For the love of the Seventh System, when did I ever ask you to rescue me?"
*inaudible muttering*
"Oh, I'll give you hormonal, you blithering loon!"
o
"As if joining an intergalactic circus wasn't bad enough..."
"No one asked you to come along! You just can't stay away."
"Are you serious? Mutated velociraptor wrecking havoc a billion years out of its time zone, Judoon dancing on ice, Cybermen in tutus..." He caught her glare. "Yes, all right, we could have done without the last bit."
o
So when a striped-haired girl materialised in the middle of the TARDIS console room, dressed in neon green and swearing in Ancient Lyskerian, it was only natural that the Doctor would have mixed feelings about it.