Author's notes: I got the idea for this story based on two basic things and a few others, the primary of the two being those bloody endless corridors on "Doctor Who". There were few episodes that didn't have them, whether they were metal, stone, a path through the jungle, or had Tom Baker stomping through them and shaking the walls. (This literally did happen when he didn't like the script.) Space, it seems, is full of corridors, endless, twisting, dark, mysterious, and threatening corridors (read CHEAP sets) and lunatics.
The second reason was Peter Davison's very breathy delivery under stress which my best friend Maureen told me she'd read was perhaps due to asthma. She's usually right about such things but it was a long time ago. In any case… the other minor factors were simply the wonderful balance that was struck by The Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan and how Tegan had changed when she came back. I guess Heathrow wasn't as much fun as the rest of the Universe…
The TARDIS grumbled again. This time Tegan heard it. The first time she hadn't but there were scorch marks on the Doctor's abandoned jacket to prove that something had gone wrong before, too. The unhinged roundels lay on the floor of the timeship, three in all, wires spilling out of them and bundles of translucent circuits behind them glowing. Well, at least some of them. A few strands of smoke still drifted around the ceiling to mark the passing of those that were no longer aglow. Tegan's first clue that something else had gone wrong was an unexpected "Hello" from the floor of her room - a greeting Nyssa had offered with dull resignation. The Doctor was fixing things again, things he had typically and mysteriously not shared. Without a word, the Traken girl had picked herself up, half-dressed, knowing the Doctor barely noticed such things and gone to help him. He'd told them, at last, he was going to root out the tracking device he'd detected aboard the time ship, one that had been there since he'd left Gallifrey with Nyssa. Tegan had been sorry she'd missed the Doctor's homeworld while she was busy getting sacked from her job on her own but Nyssa's story about their attempt to execute the Doctor had cured her curiosity quickly.
Tegan had half expected to wake up like this… had even thought of tying herself to the bed, but then thought the better of it. Sometimes things actually got into the TARDIS, despite the fancy gizmos that kept most things out. That had all been seventeen hours ago. After fifteen hours straight of helping the Doctor, which even for Nyssa consisted mostly of keeping track of his chattering with himself, the younger girl had gone back to bed with linkage fluid still on her hands and sleeves. It was then that they'd decided to stay with him in shifts. Nyssa'd missed the nifty explosion, and seeing how Tegan hadn't even jumped or reacted to the sparky "THUMP" that coincided with a shower of singed green chips and optical cables from the opening into which the Doctor's hands had vanished. The Doctor's only reaction to the explosion had been a squint and a breathy, "No, it's not that one," and a slow glance at Tegan that reflected his amazement that he'd not heard a second explosion from the direction of his Terran companion. She'd only wafted the smoke away from them both and handed him the next tool.
"Silence in your case is deafening." The Doctor commented, apparently wanting to invite one of her snappy replies, perhaps to vent his own frustration. This was the eighth of the roundels he'd opened and searched, trying to find the indistinct warning signal. All the TARDIS could tell him was that it had come from the Console room but he had spotted the intruder this time.
Tegan managed a half-smile. "All the arguing's ever gotten me is an explanation I didn't understand, and I'm here this time because I want to be. I know the routine. You want me to heat up that tea?" She pointed at the half-empty cup sitting on the floor of the TARDIS. One of the errant wires had drifted over the brim and into the brown liquid.
"Not necessary, thanks. That's what the wire is doing. Thermal circuit, you see."
"Clever." Tegan lapsed into silence again and refolded her legs in the opposite positions. Another half-hour of tool-handing and mumbling passed. She watched as the Doctor slowly replaced each circuit and tested it somehow by simply touching it. Out of boredom and on impulse she leaned over and reached into the opening herself, her short, bright green dress drawing further up her legs as she stretched. The Doctor looked at her with a slow turn of his head after a moment, curious to why she had reached into the opening at first and then wondering why her slender fingers now remained in contact with the delicate circuits.
"Tegan?"
She didn't hear him, or actually was ignoring him for a moment. A feeling of warmth and contentment had filled her, and a feeling she couldn't quite place but that was pleasant and joyful. After several moments it faded and her eyes focused on the falsely youthful visage of the Doctor, a sudden understanding in them. "I guess I haven't been listening that closely. I didn't know what you meant by "synaptic interface" but I do now. They're trying to force the TARDIS itself to tell them where you are. They put that tracking thing in the telepathic circuits, didn't they?"
The Doctor stopped working for the first time in hours. She'd been wondering how his arms had taken the strain. He turned toward her with a bright smile. "Indeed they are. It seems, terrible as it was, that your encounter with the Mara may have left you a very special gift, access to your latent telepathic abilities. Almost all races have them but it takes, in most cases, contact with another race that already has the talent to activate it. Extremely few of my Companions have experienced the mind of the TARDIS. Amazing, isn't it?"
Tegan was oddly silent, wanting to take hold of one of the circuits again but stopping herself, feeling as if she would have been abusing a privilege or afraid that she would become addicted to the strange contentment she'd glimpsed. "It was a lot of things, Doc," she finally said. "Amazing was one of them. Do you sense that all the time?"
"Within a certain range, yes." His elbows fell to the floor and his eyes suddenly seemed to be looking into her, himself, and the Universe all at once. "No Human has ever had that experience, only Romana, and she was a Time Lady. I wonder why you were chosen."
"I thought you said it was because of the Mara, just because I could."
The Doctor sat up, the tracing device forgotten for a moment. "I did, but telepathy is a mutual experience. The TARDIS had to choose to share herself with you. I can't help but wonder why."
Tegan smiled lopsidedly. "Well, I guess this is the one time your curiosity can't get you in trouble. Why don't you ask her?"
The Doctor gathered his legs up and pushed himself back toward the opening in the wall. "Because she'll tell me if or when she's ready or it becomes necessary. TARDISes are finicky things that way."
"I thought you said telepathy was a two-way street. She can…talk… transmit… whatever, to you but you can't ask anything of her?"
More smoke drifted out of the opening as the Doctor reconnected the improperly severed circuit and cut another one to make room for the work of detaching the tracer. "It's rather hard to explain. I am a Time Lord; I have a great knowledge of the history of many races, and a great understanding of where their choices can take them into their futures, and command of the knowledge and technology that allows travel between the alternate realities those choices create."
"In theory, at least."
The Doctor's now-blue eyes narrowed and he drew a loud breath to sigh but then caught the teasing smile on Tegan's face, perhaps a shadow of the steadiness he knew the TARDIS emanated most times. "Yes, in theory," he admitted, recalling how many times Heathrow had not shown up on the viewer. "But, as I was about to say, we do not physically in and of ourselves travel about time. We need TARDISes for that and by their very essence they are interlaced with the fabric of the Universe. That is what gives them consciousness and their ability to interface with the Time Lord who controls them, but because of that connectedness, we are very careful of our interactions with them. It's not for the use of idle curiosity. They know what needs to be shared and when to share it."
"But that was because they were built that way by you lot."
"Yes but once constructed, and with a bit of experience on their part, TARDISes, like children, become more than the sum of their parts. We respect who they then become and the more experienced ones, like my TARDIS, are partners in what we do, not simply transports. It's why I trust the old girl so much. As old as I am in your terms, the TARDIS is much older than I."
"But if they're their own life-form, why did you say "my TARDIS"?
"Oh really, Tegan, how do you refer to your mother?"
"Good point," she answered after a moment, and then she became thoughtful for several long moments. The tool that was in her hand hovered in mid-air, stopping as a sudden warm flash of understanding ended her ability to focus on much of anything else. "You mean, what I felt, what you always feel, is that sense of how the Universe really is, apart from all the creeps we seem to find."
The Doctor sat up again, glancing at the doors leading into the large, round room as if he were suddenly afraid they would open, that some intrusion would disturb this moment with his returned Companion. Or perhaps he was afraid to meet Tegan's eyes for a moment, afraid of what had been shared by the three of them, a sharing that had been so oddly out of his awareness. He hadn't even felt Tegan's presence when she had been in contact with the TARDIS, as if the entity in the Universe who knew him best had wanted to suddenly keep this secret. He became aware that Tegan was still looking at him, looking nothing like she usually came to mind, unhappy and loud or fierce and louder. "Yes," he finally breathed, still staring, still seeing her for the first time in the wake of her sharing and the TARDIS's strange silence. "It's not that bad a place, all in all. For every one of those with evil intent we confront, there are the billions of decent beings who are their victims. Sadly, we've encountered far fewer of those. I hope to fix that now that you've returned, a real holiday, no creatures, no demented beings, no…".
"Master…," Tegan filled in, some of that ferocity returning. The mention of him made her refocus on more negative things and she finished handing the Doctor the oscillating scanner. "Why doesn't the Master's TARDIS have the same effect or can he resist it?"
The Doctor let the oscillator begin its work, telling him what energy pathways had been rerouted properly and which needed fine-tuning, and considered Tegan's question. "Because, I think, he must have certainly corrupted her connection to what is decent in the Universe and now that he's done that, his own every thought is influenced by the darkness he's created. For their incredible power, their synaptic interface makes them vulnerable. That's why Rassilon was so careful when he created the curriculum and training it takes to become a Time Lord, at least one of the reasons." He looked up at the tracer as the oscillator beeped its completion, and flashed a scowl Tegan would've been proud to call her own. "It's also why the High Council was so angry when I left with a TARDIS, and this wasn't even a current model then."
Tegan shifted her weight and studied the Doctor as he focused on following the corrections the alien tool had told him to make. There had been so many times when she had seen the Doctor use that knowledge to save so many and to save her and Nyssa. She finally folded her arms and leaned forward on her crossed knees, mouth twisting into its usual expression of disapproval. "Seems awfully selfish of them to bother learning how half the Universe works and then stand around and let people suffer if they could help it."
"Yes, my thoughts exactly. Well, most of the time. Occasionally it's best to leave things alone," the Doctor answered then sat up, a victorious smile on his seemingly young face, in his hand was a small rectangle of gray metal and a dark blue crystal. "Well, that ends their finding me, whoever they are."
"What do you mean 'whoever'? I thought that was some silly try of the Time Lords to keep tabs on you."
"So would I have, but that technology doesn't seem to be Gallifreyan. In fact, I can't say where---."
"Doctor!" Tegan's shout reverberated around the Console room as the two prongs extended out from the end of the rectangle facing away from him, out of his line of sight. He gasped as they impaled his palm and again when Tegan's hand closed like lightening over the tracer and snatched it away to clatter against the wall. She turned back to find the Doctor clutching his bleeding hand and a small but considerable amount of orange-red blood coating his fingers. A few drops had made it to the floor. She snapped up the napkin that had been sitting on the floor near the cup of forgotten tea. "Here. Let me see."
"No, get Nyssa. Hurry."
Tegan seized his hand and pulled it toward her, finding him surprisingly unresistant. "Come on, don't be silly. You don't need a biochemist for this." She pressed the napkin against the wounds and clamped her fingers down on his wrist to slow the bleeding. She looked up in surprise as the Doctor sagged toward her and caught him with the hand not holding the napkin. "What's wrong? It can't be a little blood."
The Doctor took hold of her tensed shoulder, pulling himself up slightly. "No, of course, not. The tracer, it's not from Gallifrey, … but it seems… the poison is."
Tegan went from shock to anger in seconds, and anger moved her. She stood up, keeping hold of the Doctor as she did and snagging his jacket with her foot, dragging it toward them and lowering the Doctor's head onto its rolled up bulk. She glanced around for several more seconds for a rope, a strap, anything long and flexible enough and found the only thing in reach was the Doctor's braces. Her grip still crushing his wrist, she undid the one nearest his injured hand and wrestled it out from beneath him with roughness she regretted but couldn't help. Fighting the elasticity, she wrapped it around his wrist several times before she slid her own fingers out and braced his hand up against the wall by resting it on the tool box. Satisfied she had done what she could, she breathed again and looked down at the Doctor, using her blood-streaked hand to touch his face. Where his skin was cool normally, it now felt cold and he was watching her through eyes that were struggling to focus. "You're a better nurse than I might have expected, Tegan. You've gained me some time; perhaps enough, though I don't know what the result of this is supposed to be." He paused, a look of curiosity on his face that Tegan could have strangled him for. "How very odd. I think one of my hearts has stopped."
Tegan kept surprisingly calm and pitched her voice low and soft. "How many snakebites do you think we get to see in the Outback, Doc?" Even in his fog, the Doctor suddenly knew a few of them had not turned out well. She ran her clean hand through his hair, "Hang on. I'll have Nyssa here in a second. No regenerating while I'm gone."
"I believe you've prevented that," the Doctor answered, but his eyes suddenly closed and his head fell to the side. Tegan was gone before he began his next shallow breath.