"Watch your head," the doctor advised. Nina ducked under a stray pipe. It was a trip wire at chin level. The architect must have been on a hallucinogen.
The brickwork ahead was flickering with firelight, a strange thing to have in a dank passage such as this. Water dripped from the roof of the tunnel; the fire was no accident.
"Look at that," the doctor breathed. He turned to Nina. "Last chance for questions, it gets tricky after this point."
Nina rolled the alien jelly beans around in her hand; she was nervous and did have a lot of questions, but she was too assassin to ask any of them. She shook her head, her lips in a firm line.
"In that case," said the doctor, "Alonse-y!"
The room with the fire had the same brickwork as the tunnel, but that was where the similarities stopped. There was fancy furniture and no water. Colors were bright and mostly orange. Nina squinted, her eyes protesting from being made to adjust from summer day to grey tunnel to firey-
"Hang on," said Nina. "There's no fire place."
The doctor scoffed. "Well you don't put a bed in an entryway, do you?"
"What?"
"This would have been a good thing to clarify a few seconds ago," the doctor said. "These people aren't just arsonists, they-"
"We are fire," a voice crackled. Bars of flame shot up around the doctor and Nina, trapping them in separate bird cages. The speaker and two other human-shaped masses of light flickered to life near the doorway opposite the tunnels.
The first arsonist snickered, clearly enjoying himself. The other two, female by their flaming silhouettes, smiled widely with their black and blonde hair dancing around them.
The doctor quickly dug a fistful of jelly bean things out of his trouser pocket and threw them at the arsonists. They sizzled on the bars of fire and dropped harmlessly to the ground. The three human torches laughed harder.
"Oh how cute," the man said. "Do you want me to teach you how to use your own weapons?"
"They won't work on fires that aren't connected to their source," purred the blonde woman.
"Then come over here and let me light your fire," the doctor said with a dry tone.
"Sorry," said the blonde, "I'm already taken." She wound her arm around the black-haired girl's waist.
The man snapped his fingers. "Jen, relieve the kind doctor of his coat."
Jen, the blonde, rolled her eyes. "Oh please," she crossed her arms. "Do you still think you're in some position of authority? Brandy, be a dear and take his coat. Her purse, too."
Brandy nodded and said something inaudible with her eyes downcast. Jen whispered something back to her, her lips brushing the other's ear. Brandy shivered and crossed the room to retrieve the articles.
"You don't have to do this, Brandy," the doctor said. "We can work something out. If they are forcing you to do anything-"
Brandt's eyes snapped up to meet him full-force. "Why would I be here if I didn't want to be?" she asked.
Nina almost choked. The hatred in Brandy's expression was so potent, it was unbelievable that it had been hiding behind her silk, black bangs and wide eyes.
The doctor emptied another pocketful of jelly beans into his hand, ready to defend himself. Brandy was not concerned in the least. Her hand darted right through the cage bars, the fire mingling with her own. She gripped the doctor's wrist, tightening her hold until all the jelly beans dropped harmlessly to the floor.
A darkened ring remained on his wrist when Brandy released him. He touched it gingerly and hissed through his teeth.
"These are my friends," Brandy smiled a little. "We have a lot in common. Like the desire to burn this entire city to ashes. It's so cold here. How do you stand it?"
"You're right," said Nina.
The doctor and his adversaries turned to her wordlessly.
"I hate this city," said Nina.
The surprise in the doctor's eyes blinked into sadness.
"It's not the cold, but the people," said Nina. "They all expect things from you. All of them. There isn't a person I've met that didn't have alter motives in talking to me. And everyone else can't be bothered. The people who pass by without a glance on the street, on the train, on campus. University was bloody awful. I'd love to see it burn."
Jen grinned. "What an interesting human."
The doctor didn't say anything. Brandy retreated behind her sweeping bangs and slid his coat off his shoulders.
"Here," said Nina, handing over her purse. "I won't need it."
"Wonderful!" said the man on fire. He clapped his hands once and the flaming bars of Nina's cage were extinguished. The doctor's burned brighter in comparison.
The human torches left smolder marks in the wake of their footfalls. The man's got lighter as he approached Nina, she realized when he took her hand that the flames surrounding his body had cooled so that they tickled instead of burned. The mark on the doctor's wrist wouldn't fade from her peripheral vision.
"Would you like to join us, darling?" he asked her. He placed his lips to her hand and looked at her seductively over his glasses. He wasn't wearing glasses, but that's what it reminded her of.
((3D glasses are the sexiest kind of glasses everyone else go home))
Nina fluttered her lashes. "Will it be dangerous?"
"Very," he assured her.
Nina smiled with pursed, red lips. "I can't wait."
There was a crisp click of heels on the floor and Nina's arms were around his neck, her face very close to his. She felt his breath hitch, his hands hovered by her sides until being hesitantly placed on her waist.
"What's your name?" Nina asked quietly. Her eyes darted to his mouth and back. Strands of brown hair fell from where they had been tucked behind her ear when she tilted her head.
"What?" the man was having trouble listening to her when she was so... distracting.
"I like to know names before I kiss someone," Nina murmured. Her mouth barely moved when she spoke.
He couldn't think for the life of him. After a moment, Nina reconsidered and connected their lips anyway. She took dominance quickly, pushing her tongue and something else-
The man pushed her away. He spit an orange jelly bean to the side, but it was too late. The fire around him flickered and died.
Nina whipped her mouth with her sleeve. "Detonate," she said. Her purse, in the hands of Brandy, exploded, flinging more beans every which way. The two girls shrieked as their fires, too, went out.
The doctor's cage disappeared into whisps of smoke. He grinned and Nina ginned back.
XxX
"Glad that's through with," the doctor concluded, cuffing the last human torch to a stationary police beacon. Jen glared at him, though she was much less intimidating with her fires off. The three of them had cracked, dark skin that resembled charcoal. It smoothed out and glowed in the fire, which was presently not the case.
Nina stood awkwardly back a dozen paces. The three of them tried to kick at her if she got too close. She'd almost tripped the first time.
"Did you think I'd betrayed you, doctor?" she asked quietly.
"Oh nooo," said the doctor with too much enthusiasm. His smiled drooped when he thought she wasn't looking.
"I'll have to work on my acting, then," Nina went along with it. "Just don't get into any more trouble, I can't guarantee that I'll save you a second time."
"I'll manage."
XxX
Nina did not step foot in the TARDIS. It would have been too tempting not to go back. And she had made up her mind to stay and find the child who would kill the doctor. Whether it was to stop him or help him, she hadn't decided. She figured she had enough time to ponder it.
"I'm going to save the doctor," she told her father when she returned to their flat. "I'll make you proud."
Her father smiled, the beginnings of a tear in one eye. "I'd be proud no matter what you chose, you were always so true to yourself, Nina." He patted her head with a callused hand. She brushed it off, but couldn't help smiling. He had done the same thing when she was a kid.
"Still," she said. "It might be fifteen, twenty, thirty years in the future. I don't know how my assassin skills will hold up after all that time."
Her father got a look about him like he was about to reveal the trick behind another magician's magic. "Did you know," he said, "that your mother and I were in our fifties when we had you?"
"Fifties?" Nina was incredulous. "But you look fifty now."
"That's the family secret," her father confided. He shuffled his way to the hallway closet, the one where they stashed their suspicious-looking things from the future. He removed the secret panel and rummaged around, pulling what looked like a stapler from the mess.
"A stapler?" Nina raised an eyebrow. Her father always was a sort of prankster.
He shook his head. "It's very well disguised."
Part of the device extended, making the gap where paper usually goes wide enough to fit a grapefruit. A thin needle perched on one side of the opening.
"Okay, it's not a stapler," Nina admitted. "Do you use it to shoot drugs?"
"Kind of," her father said. "A drug that stops the aging process."
Nina gave her father a look. "If you're joking I will kill you."
"That's my girl!" her father laughed.
Nina punched in the shoulder.
"But seriously," he continued. "This is a big decision. Your mother and I only did it once for a job. We had to go undercover separately for a long time, twenty three years? We were already married but down on our money, and it was a high paying job. High paying as in own a moderately sized country. We didn't want to waste our youth apart from each other, so we did this." He gestured to the device.
"Why did you start aging again?" Nina asked. "You could have lived forever if you were careful."
"Checks and balances," he father answered. "This isn't the fountain of youth. It stops working when you kiss someone."
"That doesn't seem scientific," Nina reproached.
Her father shrugged. "It also stops working when you own seventy five percent of your economy's wealth. It's about as logical as a teapot in space."
Nina rolled up her sleeve. "I'm in."
"There's one more thing," said her father. He was stalling now, she could tell. "Be minimal with relationships. No one can know about life in the future or the age-stapler. Understand?"
Nina nodded, holding her arm up higher to be injected.
"Don't you want to think it over more?" her father shied away from the outstretched appendage. "Maybe talk to your mother?"
"No," she said with conviction. "Get it over with. I don't want to have a chance to change my mind."
XxX
London changed. Her father grew grey much faster once her mother passed. Nina buried them both.
For over ten years, Nina put her education in medicine to mark the babies born in December like her parents had. She memorized pages of birth registrations. She also took assassin jobs when she needed a thrill.
The Perfect Murderess migrated from her book shelf to her night stand every year on the anniversary of her father's death. It was full of digital notes, the content of which added up to be about the same quantity as the book itself.
She occasionally saw Sam and her brother around, picking pockets and the like. They were her favorite to she grow up. Even when the higher class Londoners looked down on them, or even spit on them, they were always laughing by the end of the day. Usually because the rude person often kept strange pictures in their billfolds that the Cracker children found easy to steal.
She talked to people as to not be suspicious. She always left before long. It was eighteen years before Nina saw the TARDIS again, and she only had a vague idea how to protect the man traveling inside.