The Citadel was quiet.
The setting of the South Sun was a glorious time to reflect the state of the Universe on Gallifrey. Gas-clouds had been forming from the Nebulae for the past millennium and tonight's spectrum would be heavily into the golds and greens that inspired so much of the planet's finer poetry all the way back to the First Age of Contemplation. There was just enough ambient light trapped in the atmosphere to reflect shimmering silver streams upon the forest-banks, and the air cooled with the departure of the Suns, sending a low breeze to shush and sing through every leaf and blade of arrow-grass. Art-chimes depending upon the open eaves of every domicile fluttered and rang with the wind, each creating a unique note from the others'. The very pride of the city was illuminated in the soft glow. Meditation and contemplation positively vibrated from every twilit pore.
The long, lean man watching the view was only partially soothed at the vision of loveliness. At last he turned away from the walls of glass and re-settled at his desk. Inside the walls the night's selection of Gallifreyan Classics played long, trembling notes of finest perfection. It was a small luxury he permitted himself for a Time Lord must be seemly with his cultural awareness.
Other signs of Gallifrey's importance to the Galaxy rested in the giant crystal globe, grown out of its matrix right in the middle of the room and stained with native ores and radiations to represent the galaxies. Thirty feet overhead suspended the honored sigils of the Officer of Honor, and the walls were decorated with tasteful Classical art, from one to twelve dimensionals. The room was illuminated with hidden lamps carved from the red salt beds of the Okan mountains. As the light died, it cast in the last spectrum and reflected in the ancient blue-opalescent glass artefacts adorning the heavy bronze armour of the ancient Pythion Warriors—one of Gallifrey's darker chapters indeed. They and the other emblems of the past rested on this topmost floor of the Wall, reminding all who entered of the price they paid to break away from the past...and also its resulting rewards.
Peace, serenity, and power.
Celestial Intervention Agency Chair Coordinator Goth was not in a good mood, but that was to be expected of anyone burdened with the sheer mind-numbing nobility of his office. Few Gallifreyans ever became Time Lords; fewer still became real Time Lords. Trickling further up the ranks of honor and exclusive nobility were the governmental beings who ensured all operated as it should.
And then of course, there was The Doctor.
Proof that the Universe had not yet finished ironing out its quantum kinks.
Despite the constraints of the Time Bracelet, Tattoo, strict rules of behavior and a succession of hapless Parole Officers, the Doctor's skill for solving problems remained as fine as ever. Alas that his "skill" depended on not just unearthing the specific problem he was sent to fix. He also tended to dig up and toss out anything else that caught his scatterbrained attention. Discreet medics (and technicians, mechanics, lawyers, art collectors, historians, librarians, mathematicians and the occasional zoologists) were now on call to help "clean up" whatever he'd excavate, because, Rassilon Alone knew what the beggar would dig up. Better to prepare for the worst.
The last three missions had been technically successful but collaterally disastrous. Goth personally would have breathed his relief and concentrated on more re-rehabilitative Agents if the Doctor had died (after the paperwork), but it was an understatement to say everyone at the CIA was overloading with the information he was bringing to the table. In 800 years the CIA had created no more than twenty "eyes only" reports of confidence and political sensitivity. Thanks to the Doctor they were now the dubiously proud guardians of twenty-five, plus seventeen "sensitive classification" files and two reports that had required creating an entirely new category for the cataloging system. The Doctor had helpfully dubbed them the "crisis pending" listing, which Goth was certain was but one of his many small acts of revenge against his keepers.
The last series of missions, would their purpose made public, have created a firestorm of panic and not a little xenophobia. The whole bit had been buried with the Chancellor's and Council's compliance. Even the Doctor had agreed the information was more damaging than not, and Goth had learned to fear the circumstances in which they agreed on anything. He just hoped no one thought to investigate anything that involved The Terrible Zodin for a few hundred years.
And then there was that last mission...
Goth had no idea what would happen if the Doctor regained his memories from that one. Memory-tampering was tricky when made so soon after a previous memory-tampering, and the Doctor's mind had been wiped after the mission just prior—leading the Agency to realize just a little too late that there were disadvantages to erasing a brain like so much scribbling.
CIA parolees were implanted with protein-based mind-filters that blocked input of forbidden information—or, depending on the setting, retained the memory without it escaping to accessible memory. They were usually efficient and rarely developed problems, but they could only do so much. Against the weight of that last mission, it had turned all messy with the filters shutting down in shock.
Anything that put the Sisterhood of Karn into Gallifrey's socio-political problems was bound to be nightmarish, and an investigation on missing Karnites spelled "disaster" in every language in the Kasterborous Galaxy.
The Doctor was a renegade and a wild animal kept on a leash, but even animals were audited. They had almost lost him and Goth would have been the one to explain it all before the Advisory Committee.
And Goth still didn't know what he could say. None of them did. He was far from a fool and his tactical strategy tests were still uncontested, but...
Six months had passed without a single word from the Doctor on what he was doing, but there were no alerts from the spyplants in the TARDIS nor any warning life-system chimes coming off the machines wired to the Doctor's body. That meant he was still investigating the missing Karnites. The CIA had shrugged, for Time was Time and some Agents could spend hundreds of years with a problem—the Doctor usually solved his in record speed (sometimes even less than a Standard Year) so it was almost encouraging to see him struggling like all the other mortals.
And then the TARDIS simply vanished from all energy readings.
Three weeks later, after the CIA had completely exhausted its information network and posted a temporal alert. Their best conclusion was that someone had immobilized him and stolen his joke of a TARDIS because only a desperate degenerate race like the Daleks or Sontarans would want the decrepit old fossil.
Once or twice the Temporal Web Screens received a faint pulse inside one of the quasars on the other side of the Promethean Constellation that could have been their Agent; it was too vague of a reading to tell, like catching a pin galaxy and trying to analyze all life within it before its attosecond expired.
They found his future selves' Timelines with a little trouble, and even a whisper of his previous self (that original incarnation was truly a crafty old hibernating pigbear when it came to hiding), but nothing at all for the current Doctor whose incarnation was being used by the CIA.
Then without warning, the Doctor's TARDIS had bipped on their sensors seconds from escaping a Temporal Lesion on the other side of Prometheus, but the Rift-blasted old machine had somehow resisted their efforts to bring it back. Clearly out of control, it had shot past the Mainstream of Time at speeds that graceless old tank wasn't capable of keeping, and vanished into a rouge wormhole—The Staff Physicists were still quarreling over how that was within the levels of polite mathematical possibility even as they pilfered each other's notes in hopes of a juicy research grant. Gendellesthan, a product of a less-restricted House, kept insisting that TARDIS was developing a personality and it had behaved exactly as a being would act in a moment of panic, trying to protect a loved one from disaster.
The CIA sensors implanted all over the TARDIS had been nullified by unknown forces, but the bizarre radial energy readings might explain it. It also kept them from activating the Last Resort bomb installed in the TARDIS main console. In other words, the Doctor couldn't be collected, and he couldn't be assassinated in the line of duty because nothing was working the way it should and that included the old TARDIS' mechanisms.
Time Lords hate surprises, and they hadn't dealt well with this one. It had taken another week of frantic scrambling, searching, and yelling (even the janitors couldn't contemplate the horror of confessing to the Council that they'd lost that particular TARDIS and pilot again, when Gendellesthan found a homing gasp in the last toe-hold of the-21st century, all the way back in the techno-crippled backwater known as Mutter's Spiral. By the time they managed to trace the signal, the TARDIS was already on its way back to the Agency.
Goth remembered breathing a prayer to the Mad God in relief (the only deity that would be able to keep up with that shabby-genteel beggar), glad the Doctor had possessed the wisdom to return under his own free will, but he was soon corrected of that optimism.
The TARDIS entered the CIA's homing beams as a steaming wreck—well, even more than usual. Temporal radiation came off it like a volcano in full eruption, and no one wanted to think of what could have caused the deep claw-like scores across its front doors. The Techs had been forced to use extreme measures to make sure it landed at all, for the wretched machine had moved sluggishly against the remote responses. It was as if, Gend commented, it was deciding on the wisdom of their commands before complying with them. Goth had snarled the unprofessional remark, but it was unnerving to see how well her assessment fit what they were seeing.
It finally docked, thank the small mercies, and the door croaked open with a final puff of dirty steam, but no shabby little Renegade emerged. Goth followed standard procedures, put up a quarantine barrier, and sent in a medical team. The Doctor came out on their stretcher, aged an unbelievable sixty years outside his temporally locked guidelines, and completely, absolutely, out-of-his-tousled-head-delirious with an infection from a parasite that until this point, existed only in ancient Gallifreyan books under "Diseases and Parasitic Life-Forms Eradicated."
Physically, he was as much of a wreck as his fashion sense. Before sliding into a coma he kept groaning something about an Eelthoey, but it was impossible to say if that was what he really meant; his jaw had been broken. Along with quite a few other bones. Doubtless from the percussion impact of the explosion that left its traces of vastial-dust on the TARDIS. The remnants of the cameras managed to show in spotty imaging the Doctor running hellbent into his TARDIS as if the birds of Death were on his heels. Just as he slammed the door-control to shut, the explosion hit, shot through the half-shutting doors, and tossed him into the opposite wall of the Power Room. He was lucky he'd only broken his bones. Vastial explosions were nasty, which was why Cybermen liked them so much.
Oh, the paperwork from that one. At least the parasitology ward was thrilled to have that horrible little thing in their labs. They could have it. Goth couldn't think of the thing without getting cold chills.
Oh, the cataloging, the reports, the statements, the long, long hours put in by the mechanics trying to stabilize the TARDIS, the logicians who had to break into the TARDIS and free the mechanics when it locked them inside...the computer designers who had to run forty-five diagnostics before admitting they couldn't find large chunks of data in the memory units.
The hapless Gend, who finally found a data patch from a junk shop that would at least keep the TARDIS going while they fixed it.
The poor compuvirologists, who had found the mission's objective hidden away in the Doctor's coat pockets (the contents of which were enough to traumatize the young, sensitive techs unaccustomed to the strange and dangerous things outside of Gallifrey). Glee at a successful mission had paled just a bit when the data cube was assembled into its proper 3-D form and connected to the computers. Most of the data had been damaged by alien psychic radiation and it could take centuries to straighten it all out.
Then there were the radiologists assigned to clean up the TARDIS, who called Goth up in the middle of the night asking if he was trying to ruin them.
The luckless staff in the Sickbay, faced with his broken bones and what looked like several months of healed-up injuries as well as the infection. They had been oddly quiet while they knitted his frayed neurals back together. When no improvement happened they were forced into admitting the first chore was over-whelming the Doctor's biological imperatives and renewing his body back to its original temporally fixed status. This depended on getting the Doctor's mental defenses down, and for a week they hammered at his mind with no progress at all. No one knew if he was still sentient on the other side of his mind-walls; there was just no getting past them.
It was possible the CIA would have been stuck with a brain-dead Time Lord and miles upon miles of explanatory paperwork, but Lehi called Ttoth out of retirement and from there, matters had improved dramatically. The old man's reputation for doing the impossible came through loud and clear when he walked into the Council Room and took one look at the computer imagings of the psychic walls the Doctor had erected between his brain and the infection—and also at the other screens, which included the scans of the TARDIS.
"Whatever you're doing to his TARDIS, stop doing it right now." The old man roared.
Goth had been taken aback. "It isn't HIS TARDIS!"
"It is now!" The Surgeon was still roaring with his urgency. "Send everyone away from the TARDIS! Do it before someone does something truly rash and we have an explosion on our hands!"
Hearts in throat, Goth hastily commed an immediate departure.
Exactly thirty seconds after the last tech had fled the wreck, the Doctor's psychic wall began to go down.
Goth stared at the impossible on the screen. He wasn't alone. "This...can't be." He whispered.
"Oh, but it is." The Surgeon told the Council with not a little satisfaction. "Esteemed Lords and Ladies of Time, may I introduce you to something Gallifrey hasn't seen since the Dark Days." He waved his hand at the slowly-descending bars representing the Doctor's psychic protection.
"Like it or not, collegues, that TARDIS has bonded to the Doctor and isn't going to like anyone but himself in there."
"But that—that doesn't happen any more! And it isn't HIS TARDIS! He stole it!"
"Stole it? Or saved it from decommission and destruction?" The Surgeon wanted to know. "How do we know the TARDIS didn't call him to choose her?"
Of all the thousands of unpleasant thoughts the Doctor was responsible for planting in Goth's brain, that had to be one of the worst of the lot.
"That TARDIS is a part of the Doctor, and the Doctor is a part of the TARDIS. Whatever you do from this moment on, be aware that the two are not to be separated."
The Doctor's snow-white hair darkened to grey, then deep grey, then finally black; the Time-ravages smoothed out and his brain began to respond to the deep scans—much to the dismay of the lab technicians in Necropsy, who had hoped for a new and interesting diversion.
Least anyone think the Doctor was less trouble alive and conscious as opposed to mostly-dead and medically bewildering, the man woke up with shattered, patchy memories of his assignment and all telepathic attempts to mend the gaps met with his brain wanting to shut itself off all over again.
At least the mission justified the expense of its funding.
There was enough on the damaged data cube to prove conclusively that the Trated Collective was partnered with the Players, and both were stealing, buying and trading intelligent species, all the better to experiment on them for their usefulness in the Information Market. The proof was slender and nauseating, but it was there. So many planets were incompatible to the inorganic species; the purchase demand for organic calculators was on the rise.
Cybermen weren't the only species interested in organic brains. Krotons needed them for power; Dominators wanted them to improve their slave castes; slavery existed in some shape or form in every Galaxy and it all hinged on filling a need and unlike many crops, intelligent brains simply couldn't be grown in a tank or formed in a tank of slurry.
Needs, it would seem, were growing.
The Collective had made much lucrative business with other like-minded beasts such as the late and not-lamented War Lord and some of the races they were interested in "harvesting" were Gallifreyan in origin. The Karn were on the top of the list; the Minyans, Rassilon pity them, were also high on their priorities. In fact, anyone from the Colony Worlds could be seen as vulnerable to the sickening black market. Making matters worse, no one yet discerned the faces behind the ugly crimes, nor the ultimate motives. It was, a darkly musing Sardon had commented on one of his last days in office, as if the CIA was supposed to assemble a report with every third piece of their notes missing. How could they pattern out the root cause of this mess if they couldn't find all the data?
Goth felt some of the suspected clients, such as the Sontarans and their like, weren't that much of a threat, but it was the principle of the thing: The Players were as annoying as only up-and-coming High Evolutionaries with a taste for violence could be, and they were difficult indeed to pin down because unlike the Time Lords, they could set up creches throughout the known Galaxies and simply abandon their physical bodies when pressed for capture. Non-corporeal enemies were annoying that way.
The Trated had been sniffing about the fringes of Time Lord interests for three thousand years. It was time they were dealt with but how to do it when no one knew all of the mess? Karn especially saw nothing in the warning but further proof that the rift between the peoples was well justified. They demanded the return of their missing people posthaste, and until then, Gallifrey could consider the planet well and truly estranged. This was upsetting. The High Council was still dependent on the precious Elixir of Life from the Keepers of the Flame.
The Doctor was (mostly) back to (what passed for) his normal, and Ttoth had been keeping him out of trouble. But the Doctor hated his confinement and Goth hated the sight of him, so they all looked forward to his next assignment.
Settling his resolve, the dignified man pressed a button, summoning his assistant from the outside doors.
"Send him in."
Lehi'o nodded and she tapped a code on her wrist-bracelet. Goth ignored her. Her deep brown skin marked her as one of the Old Guard, and even if he improbably turned into a Rigellian Tadpole she would still follow his orders without verbal complaint.
Ten minutes later, Goth's composure was cracking at the seams.
"What is his excuse is this time?" He asked with narrowed eyes.
"Yes, sir. He may be delayed. Chiurgeon Ttoth-"
"You mean he's still over in the Hospital Ward?" Goth was rude enough to interrupt, but he was so eager and willing to get this unpleasantness over with. He easily blamed the absent guest as the reason for his rudeness.
"Chiurgeon Ttoth's orders, sir. His quartering in the medical wing until final release."
"Very well." Goth pretended it didn't bother him.
Stress averted. The door opened and the Doctor came in.
Stress returned.
He was not, Goth noted again, in his uniform nor was he conforming to dress code.
Goth stifled the urge to take a deep sigh. There was no sense in giving the little criminal the satisfaction.
But if he refused the uniform, why couldn't he wear something respectable and decent? An everyday clothberd, or a simple gisventiar, a kiliand, or even the ordinary civilian dress? He could at least wear the colors of Prydori, or honor the rough mountain peasant's garb of his home.
But, oh, no. Goth kept his gorge from rising at the too-familiar sight. "Did we lose our Uniform again, Doctor?" He asked tightly.
The Doctor's face had been almost static upon his entrance. With the opening salvo, expressions erupted like a chain of volcanoes and too late, Goth realized his mistake in the plural pronoun.
"Oh, dear." He asked with a voice bright with false sorrow. "I'm sure it's all just a simple problem and the Sanitation Workers will find them. Or is that Laundry?" He frowned. "Bother. There are too many titles around here."
"I'm aware it's only been a week since you last acted the fool in my presence," Goth said icily, "But I am getting a little tired of reminding you that you are expected to comport yourself with the dignity and import befitting an Agent of the CIA."
Instead of rising to the old CIA bait (parolees were jaded to say the least about the misuse of "dignity" and the CIA in the same breath), the Doctor glanced down at himself, taking in the dark checked trousers, which were too long; the once-black half-boots of rudimentary animal hide, which were badly scuffed, with primitive laces somehow managing to go in more than two directions; further up to his shirt, which fit him as well as his trousers; a spotted throat-ornament called a "bow tie" that was probably not meant to hang quite like that (Goth knew it was prejudicial, but it went against logic to think the Doctor could wear even one thing properly, and besides, most species shunned asymmetrical designs), and that didn't even cover the coat, which bothered Goth more than anything.
That coat was probably out of fashion years before the Doctor had plucked the wretched thing out of its natural Time-stream. It hung on his small frame with all the grace of the drunken cousin that inevitably draped themselves tastelessly over you at a family party, and half the time one of the lapels popped up at an odd angle. The material was spun out of some misbegotten beast's hairs and collected stray atmospheric energy at the slightest provocation (all of the guards had learned early on to just grab him and get the shock over with whenever Goth lost his temper and ordered him marched to confinement. Again.).
Proving himself not immune to the coat's charms, the static quality of the fibre was responsible for the fact that the Doctor's own hair couldn't behave. It was always ruffled and shaggy and a stray hair here and there would float in the air, made buoyant by the gradual buildup of power from the coat. Goth hadn't seen static electricity since primary school, and it had taken him some time to realize giving the Doctor a comb and barking to make himself presentable was just aiding and abetting a fashion atrocity.
Schism, how Goth hated that coat.
And that was without the pockets.
As if telepathically prompted, the ragged little man reached into one of those pockets, pulled out a small bag, and started eating whatever fell out of it. Goth still wasn't sure if that was bravery or insanity. How could anyone eat something from another planet? How could you know where it had been? His stomaches clenched even as his livers hastily produced copious bile in a desperate attempt to counterbalance the trauma.
"As you said, an Agent, Goth." The Doctor's face was grim and tired, his frivolity gone for the moment. Goth hated his persona of the fool, but when he wasn't playing the fool he was actually worse. He tended to be horrifically outspoken. "And I'm not exactly a Free Agent, am I?" His green eyes glittered. "One might argue that I'm dressed with all propriety as befits an Agent of my status."
Goth's lips tightened, but this was a point the Doctor kept winning. Legally, the Doctor was a convict permitted occasional field trips. One of the drier codes of the CIA gave low-status Agents the freedom to avoid uniform and dress compliance. Originally the code had been drafted to spare the poorer Agents the embarrassment of going bankrupt for the expensive clothing (And the Agency the unwanted cost of clothing agents that would in all likelihood, die in the field very quickly).
Trust the Doctor to not just find a convenient loophole for his will, but he'd grab and swing from it like one of his pet shaved primates.
"Excuse me, gentleman."
Chiurgeon Ttoth's voice slid like oil into the room, followed by a polite cough and the man himself. Goth mentally counted backwards from 3.14(56). Ttoth was an utter professional and best not crossed as his rank was not only equal to Goth's, it was also separate. They didn't even drink in the same establishments.
"I do beg interrupting your meeting, and won't take any of your valuable time." Ttoth said that as though he actually meant it, which impressed Goth down to his Awards Badge. "But I felt I should leave a few items out of the report written for the Doctor's Health."
"Go on, Surgeon." Goth used his best Bureaucratic Voice, while the Doctor fidgeted with getting something small and orange out of the bottom of his goody-sack despite the hindrance of his too-long sleeves.
"My patient has physically recovered on the primary level. A longer period of rest and recovery is recommended, but according to the psychiatric profiling, it would be advised to find to a more appropriate environment." Ttoth cleared his throat again, as the other two men did their best not to look at each other. "I intend to recommend the Doctor as a continuing Agent, but suggest the next assignment be less...demanding."
"Hence the subject of this meeting." Goth answered formally. "Thank you, Chiurgeon."
Ttoth bowed from the neck down. "And be certain to remember tomorrow's appointment, Doctor. Lehi, if he forgets do remind him."
As if Goth needed reminding that Lehi and Ttoth were cousins.
"Tomorrow." The Doctor agreed, and he smiled slightly at the Chiurgeon, who was making himself at home with one of the padded guest-chairs, with a poise that would impress the Lord President.
Goth stifled his annoyance. Ttoth was a medical legend and it would be unwise to forget that. He was just one of the many people drafted from all directions to deal with the constant uproars shivering the Agency since the Doctor's...recruitment.
"The Odeon, Doctor." Goth got down to business. "What do you know about it?"