The twins' TARDIS had been left in an industrial unit, having apparently been used to attempt to track the Doctor's lost TARDIS. The twins had quite an enjoyable time describing exactly how they'd hooked up their TARDIS and then how they'd ended up in space instead of on the planet's surface, where they'd eventually found the TARDIS and the Singer.
The closer they got to the TARDIS, the more the new song took over her attention. After so long of just the Doctor's, it was odd for something so fresh. There was something distinctly tinny about it, if the Singer was pressed to determine a word for the oddness in the sound.
There was also a heartbeat, hiding beneath everything else. The tinniness was overwhelming, but the heartbeat was still there.
The chameleon circuit was clearly working, as their TARDIS looked like a shipping container.
They paused at the entrance, Nella with one hand on the door. "We should tell you now," she said. "There's no Eye of Harmony."
The Singer blinked slowly. "What did Missy do?"
"We got hijacked, once. Mamaidh didn't want that to be able to happen again. So she dropped the Eye of Harmony and replaced it with a naturally born time-shifter." Nella shrugged. "The TARDIS hasn't seemed to mind. Perfectly powered, and now the power supply can't be hijacked."
"It can just, I presume, escape." The Singer shook her head. "That would explain the slight oddity to the song."
"So you're not angry?" Rikou clarified.
"The TARDIS is not, so I am not." She reached out and squeezed his shoulder. "But thank you for telling me."
Nella opened the door. The interior was simpler than the Singer would have expected, particularly after seeing just a few of the many the Doctor had had over their long time with that ship, and knowing what quite a few of the stranger ones the ship would have come with could look like.
It was rather sparse. Small. The walls were a dark red-purple, decorated with a lace pattern. The floor almost looked like dark wood. The console was a mix of metals – that had the closest resemblance to the Doctor's current TARDIS, a mess of technology and strange machines – surrounding a pillar of white. There was just one screen, but it was on some kind of arm apparently so that it could be moved to any point around the console. There were three corridors branching off from this main room, not counting the front doors.
"Mamaidh helped us design it before she left." Nella led the way up to the console, running a hand along the edge. "Took a lot of negotiating."
"I am not surprised." The Singer smiled, both at the twins and the reminder of the spouse that she was finally confident in loving again. "Your entire family is very opinionated." She adjusted one of the knobs. "Hello, new little sorella."
The TARDIS song soared at that. Rikou laughed. "Oh, she really is happy."
That made the Singer blink. "Do you have bonds with her?"
"I can...feel her emotions. Or at least, I can know her." Rikou was smiling around at the TARDIS.
"At the moment, nothing," Nella said, sounding more than a little bit annoyed.
"Your grandmother didn't have one either, and she was born in the TARDIS farms." The Singer reached out and squeezed Nella's hand. "Some took centuries to develop their bonds. If it is there, it will come." It was odd to speak of TARDIS bonds, particularly with people named as the twins were. It brought the Singer back to Gallifrey, with her cousin Rikou and best friend Nella. Rikou had even devoted his time at the Academy to studying TARDIS bonds.
Nella used that held hand to move closer to the Singer, embracing her again. "Oh, I've missed you, mum."
The Singer squeezed her daughter. "I am so glad that I found you again."
"About that..." Rikou's voice was careful as the Singer and Nella pulled apart. "How did you survive?"
"We don't have to discuss this," Nella interrupted.
"No, it's fine." The Singer nodded. "The problem is...I don't know how I survived."
Both twins frowned. "What do you remember?" Rikou asked.
The Singer swallowed. "Missy had been shot, and then there was this explosion...and then I woke up in the Doctor's TARDIS, and I couldn't get out."
Rikou's gaze fell to the Singer's hands. "You keep doing that." She looked down as well and found she'd been fidgeting with her three rings. "Is that all you remember?"
The Singer also remembered Missy dying in her arms, but she couldn't bring herself to say it to anyone, let alone to the twins. Even though she knew her spouse was dead, saying it would make it horribly real. "Just the explosion."
"Maybe the TARDIS saved you," Nella suggested. "She wouldn't have let you die."
"Maybe. She certainly didn't let me leave."
"Can we try something?" Rikou moved around the console. "To see if there's anything else."
The Singer nodded, turning to properly face her twins. In silence, they both raised their sunglasses, and the sight of their eyes – Nella's her father's, Rikou's the Singer's – made her flinch.
But in less than a breath, the twins had blinked. "It didn't work," Nella frowned. "How did it not work?"
The Singer fought a flush, though she knew it was not her fault and that there was nothing else she could have done. "The Master never could either." It had taken until after the war for the Singer to be aware that the Master had a tendency towards hypnotism, and that he'd been developing it since their childhood. He'd told her himself, before the year that never was, as he'd been explaining his plan. He'd claimed he'd never successfully used it on her, claimed her bond with TARDISes acted as some form of protection.
"It was like there was a wall, around your entire mind. It pushed us back." Nella pulled a hand through her hair, dislodging where she'd perched her sunglasses.
The Singer shook her head. "I don't know what it is, or why it's there. I'm sorry."
The twins had odd expressions that the Singer couldn't decipher. Like they'd seen something that they refused to tell the Singer about. "You're back," Nella nodded. "That's all that matters."
The fact that the Singer had a wall around her mind was slightly distressing, though she tried to keep telling herself it was something to do with the TARDISes...even though her bond with TARDISes meant she could hear them, not that they offered her any immediate protection. And she could still feel her bond with the Doctor, faint as it was ever since they kept it blocked off at almost all time, which meant her mind was not completely blocked off. Just blocked off from what the twins could do.
The Master had never explained exactly what her mind was like to him when he'd tried – Missy had later admitted they'd done it once, on Gallifrey, in the Singer's second regeneration after a fight with the Doctor. Just that it hadn't worked and that the Master had never tried again.
It made her hearts hurt to remember her spouse, to think of questions that she wished she could still ask them. The Singer had barely two years even knowing Missy was in the vault, and the time they actually were able to bond with a repaired relationship was even less. Besides, Missy had spent all that time asking about the Singer's life, trying to make up for all that time the Singer had been abandoned on Gallifrey.
Missy had been very good at avoiding questions about herself. Of course, not that the Singer would have even thought to ask this of Missy.
She wanted to ask Missy about what the twins had been like as children, how they'd been when they'd looked into the vortex. What fights they'd had, what nightmares Missy had held them through. She wanted to know how Missy found being a mother.
How much it had hurt Missy to sit with the Singer and know that she couldn't tell the Singer anything, know that the reason Missy had ever been able to raise the twins at all had been because something would happen to the Singer that Missy couldn't stop.
How hard it had been for Missy to see the twins, so young, while knowing exactly who they would grow to be.
The Singer knew she would forever be missing Missy. But that didn't make the missing any easier.
The twins gave her a tour of their TARDIS then, as though attempting to diffuse the tension from their attempt to discover if the Singer was actually missing time. She hadn't thought anything was odd, though she was surprised she hadn't regenerated in an explosion after having done so many times before. But now, even as she smiled as the twins brought her through the various sitting rooms that Missy had apparently required they maintain, her mind kept drifting back to that time.
To how she could have survived.
However, she focused again once they reached the natural time-shifter that Missy had imprisoned as the new power source. The creature looked almost humanoid, but its entire body was continually shifting, both in time and appearance. There was a containment field around it, likely built by Missy herself, but the creature was continually fighting it, trying to break free.
The Singer was surprised Rikou could tolerate it, but when she turned to look at him, he'd stopped in the entranceway, his hands pressed to his eyes, chest heaving.
Nella touched the Singer's arm. "If he's not within sight of it, he's fine. It's just when he gets this close."
"There aren't many things left in the universe strong enough to power a TARDIS, particularly ones that can't be hijacked." The Singer looked back to the time-shifter. "I think I can build something stronger that should help him." It may not have been connected to the TARDIS matrix, but the Singer had long ago been able to build other things with quite a bit of success – a complete opposite from her time on Gallifrey.
She would figure this out for her son's sake.
-X-
Apparently, the twins were very aware of the scrapyard planets throughout the universe. They had to work together to make a plan for finishing the containment field, combining the Singer's knowledge of TARDISes with the twins' general knowledge of technology, as taught by Missy.
And once they had a plan, they still had to find the material. Which was where the scrapyard planets were useful. When you could not easily return to Gallifrey and the TARDIS farms to repair TARDISes, you had to get inventive. The Singer was quite familiar with this necessity when she was working on the Doctor's TARDIS, but her sibling had a large collection of random bits of machinery they'd collected over the centuries, so the Singer had barely needed to look elsewhere.
The Singer and the twins picked their way through the piles of machinery, a device in Nella's hand to try and help them find anything useful. It would take far too much effort for Nella to use her ability to find them, so they were relying on machinery.
"It's close," Nella said, frowning down at the blinking device in her hand. "At least, I think it is."
"Do you want me to look?" Rikou asked.
"It's fine." Nella held up the device, as though changing the light would help her see the alerts better. "A few more steps..." the device let out a very loud beep. "Found it."
The three of them circled the spot Nella had stopped before the girl bent down to begin to dig through the rest of the scrap on top. But she froze as she uncovered something with red flashing lights.
The Singer didn't recognize it immediately, but she could tell in the way the twins' bodies shifted that this was bad.
"Sonic mine. It was camouflaged," Nella said, running her hands over the device. "Ash..."
Rikou grabbed the Singer's arm and began to pull her back. "How long do we have?"
Nella stood and started to back away. "Three, two..."
Their entire world went white.
A/N: The twins' TARDIS! More heartbreak over the Master. What fun ;)
Notes on reviews:
Purplestan: There will be some original stuff, but honestly I got really excited about season 12 and couldn't stop myself from rushing there...though there are some things coming which will be very interesting...
lautaro94: Yeah, these two need to work on a lot of stuff if they're going to be together permanently
