Had we but world enough and time
This coyness, lady, were no crime
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
- Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
Tish swings her head back and forth, swaying to the loud music. It rings in her ears, the beat reverberating through her head and chest; Marie, by her side, turns to her boytoy-of-the-week and asks him to put his hand on her chest to feel the pulse.
Tish rolls her eyes good-naturedly and keeps dancing.
She raises her arms and looks under one of them, coy but mostly lost in the sensation. The overhead lights beam down. She's hot, sweaty. Her dress has ridden up unevenly, one strap falling off her shoulder. There's a bead of sweat working its way down her neck—sexy if someone else is looking, annoying when she wipes it away and grimaces at the clamminess of her palms.
She taps Josie on the shoulder and nods towards the corner of the club where the toilets are.
Josie throws her a thumbs-up and keeps grinding on... well, Tish hadn't caught her name, but it looks like Josie's having fun.
Tish laughs and maneuvers around the dance floor to make it to the back of the club.
The music is still pulsing in her ears. She shakes her head to get rid of it, but it doesn't seem to be going anywhere. That's what she gets for clubbing after work—ears tired from phones and bosses yelling at her, and now stuck with pop music that, when turned up loud enough, passes for screamo. Great.
Grinning—she wouldn't go if she didn't like it—, Tish goes to the mirror, grabs a paper towel from the dispenser, and wipes her neck.
After a few moments, her eyes focus away from her own face, on the broader reflection. They find a young woman, short hair framing an angular face. Tish slows her movements, tracing the curve of her neck. The woman's eyes widen. Perfect.
Tish takes her time. Throws the paper towel away without looking, and turns around, leaning on the sink counter, cocking out one hip in an inviting manner.
The woman comes closer. She's wearing a slinky dress, dark blue, its sparkly fabric catching the light with every step. It looks so soft. So do her lips.
Tish smiles, showing just a little of her teeth.
The woman holds out a hand.
Tish takes it.
.oOo.
In the morning, the woman kisses Tish's forehead and says, "No, don't get up on my account."
She shows herself out, tiptoeing out of the room as Tish blearily watches from her bed, gracefully walking around Tish's dress, which is still on the ground from last night. There's only a small pang in her chest, but she ignores it and turns over to burrow deeper into the covers.
She wakes up to a glass of water on the bedside table that wasn't there when she went to bed and a folded note leaning up against it.
Tish,
Thanks for last night. Good luck next weekend! I have to admit, I don't really remember what the function you're going to is, but it's very cool your boss invited you. Call me after?
Lois.
It's singed with a heart and phone number. Tish doesn't think twice before saving it, or before tucking the note into one of her diaries. They're more day planners than anything else, but Tish writes shopping lists in them, small notes to herself that she can't remember otherwise. She looks at old planners and remembers meetings that were pleasant and curses ones that were wastes of time.
Drunk coworkers aside, because they're never a fully pleasant experience—they're not close enough, no matter how they try—, it was a pleasant night. Tish gets breakfast and puts some music on in the background before curling up on the sofa, smiling as she pulls up Lois's contact information.
Did you get home alright?
It's only a minute before Lois's text comes in.
Yes. I had a great time last night.
Tish grins. Me too. She's feeling bold. Are you free before next weekend? Coffee?
Another minute. She doesn't feel like she overstepped—Lois was the one who suggested seeing each other again, and if she didn't, Tish would have anyway—but…
Sounds good.
Perfect. Tish giggles, shoulders pulling up as a grin splits her face. She texts some details and adds: I can't wait.
.oOo.
Lois, like Tish, isn't dressed for the club this time. Tish recalls Lois saying she worked in admin, which is pretty similar to her own PR gig, and they're both wearing sensible business-casual ensembles. Without too-tall heels, Tish is shorter; she has to tilt her head just a bit to peck Lois's cheek in greeting, a gesture that makes her feel surprisingly shy in light of what they did a few nights ago.
Lois takes her hand—not too awkward, then—and they walk from the street corner they agreed to meet at to the coffee shop on the other side of the street.
Tish tries to pay, but when she reaches for her purse, Lois elbows her hand aside. "You can carry the coffees," she says when Tish tries to argue.
She does that, picking a table and setting them down, sitting only after Lois has done so. "You didn't have to do that," she says, though she's blushing, pleased at the attention.
"I wanted to." Lois smiles over the top of her cup. "But you can pay next time."
.oOo.
In the mad scramble to stop Richard Lazarus—the man who tried to seduce her, her boss—Tish's phone breaks.
Martha takes her to get a new one the next day, but she acts as if she wasn't—she was travelling with an alien! She knew! She stopped him! She and her madman who was an alien—Tish's little sister—it... It shouldn't made sense, and it doesn't, and yet...
Martha doesn't carry herself the same. Tish knows her, still, but there's something natural about the way Martha explains aliens and outer space, as if she's always been meant to be there, as if she's explaining something she learned in medical school.
Tish doesn't understand it.
There's no salvaging her old contacts. The phone upgrade is nice, though. Sleek, shiny. She thumbs over the buttons as she enters in the numbers she's written down—friends, coworkers—Richard was a coworker, technically.
God.
She still can't believe it.
She enters in Marie's contact information, and Josie's. Tim's—his desk is across from hers. Samantha's, Eloise's... Everyone's. She thumbs over the tiny buttons, brushing back and forth against them. There's something she's forgetting—no; Tish looks over to her dresser, where her planner is open, and she can see the small note, not quite evenly tucked into it, that Lois left her a week ago.
Lois's contact information—
"How did it go?" Lois will ask, knowing how excited Tish was for her night out.
And Tish won't be able to answer. It's on the news, she knows, but the information was altered somehow. It always is—Martha says aliens are always doing strange things, but Tish hasn't ever heard of it.
"Uneventful."
"Good."
Tish can't say any of those things, and she can't get the energy to lie. She doesn't want to lie to Lois, but she can't tell the truth, and so she sits farther back on her bed. A nap will set her straight. Tish tucks the covers around herself, brings them over her head, and falls asleep.
She wakes up, and Lois's number never makes it into the new phone.
.oOo.
She thinks of Lois, once, when she realizes there's no way off the Valiant.
Thinks about her whenever she looked at Jack, who, in his weaker moments, tells her about his friends, down on Earth. He speaks in broken sentences, words mashed together with no real sense to them, but they hurt, because Tish knows what he feels. Martha's down there, her Martha, her little sister. Her friends, her—she never really got over Lois, not even when she ghosted her, feeling endlessly guilty but so scared of lying.
She tells Jack about Lois, about the way they danced when they met, how perfectly they fit together, how sweetly Lois whispered in her ear. She tells him how soft and sweet Lois was, how she left water on the bedside table and tiptoed out of the room to let Tish sleep in. How kind and funny she was on their only date, holding open the door for Tish when they exited the coffee shop, promising to text her later—how she did text her, how they talked and talked... How Tish promised to tell her about her evening before turning her phone off for the night. How her phone broke. How she never contacted Lois again.
She thinks of Lois now, when time is resetting, when the flames that engulfed England are just a memory—is it a memory if it never happened?—and she doesn't have to live with the knowledge that Lois died.
She died, Tish knows.
Martha tells her, speaking in hushed tones aboard the Doctor's ship, all of them together in a room, recounting memories of a time that never existed, people that will never come to be. She tells them of brave leaders and selfless fighters, of Jack's friends—here, where he will never hear and have to live with knowledge of their fates, when he gets the chance to watch them live—and the random people she met. Of the young woman she worked with in London and never saw again, who laughed when she mentioned Tish and told her about a single coffee date.
"You stood her up," Martha says.
Don't let the second chance go to waste, she doesn't say, but Tish hears it anyway.
They get dropped off in London and she means to, she really does, and a week passes, then two, then three, and then she just... doesn't. She never wakes up screaming—none of them do, terrified out of their wits, frozen alone in their own bedrooms, not saying anything when they congregate in the living room in the middle of the night, each holding a warm drinking, and talking about anything other than what they lived through—but she's not the same person she was before: the Tish that met Lois is not the Tish that stood her up and is not the Tish that's trying to find a job as far away from the government as possible.
.oOo.
Tish doesn't want anything to do with the government.
Jack contacts her out of the blue in early autumn. Just her, not the rest of the family, separate from their weekly video calls. Tish tucks the phone between her ear and shoulder and keeps putting on her shoes; she's meeting her parents at the park and letting them take her out for coffee.
"How would you like a job?" Jack says.
Tish stands straight, one shoe on, and shifts the phone to her hand. "What?"
"I'm in London."
So much for family lunch.
"Torchwood." Jack pauses, dramatic as always. "How would you like a job?"
.oOo.
The government was prepared to sacrifice children to save their own necks. Tish doesn't need more evidence to distrust them, and yet here it is.
She says yes immediately and finds herself in Cardiff by the end of the week.
Martha, also recruited—"This place is overrun by Joneses!" Gwen Cooper cried out when she walked in, laughing, just before taking Tish on the tour—, pulls Tish aside when her time with Gwen is done.
"Not on purpose," she says before stepping aside.
Tish stares. She wants to ask, but a voice sounds from the corridor Martha just came out of.
Seconds later, the voice's owner comes out.
Tish stares; somehow, she's not surprised to see Lois.
She's less surprised when Lois, after a moment, shrugs and says, "I committed treason."
Tish falls in love all over again. Of course Lois couldn't stand by and do nothing; it's what doomed her then, and it didn't doom her now, and if there's any proof that the universe gives second chances it's this.
It's not this, because Lois talks to her and turns away, and Tish hurts, but she gets it.
"I'm sorry," she blurts, and runs after Lois, stopping just short of grabbing her arm. "It's not an excuse, but I saw this world, and I didn't know what to do, I didn't know how to act, and I just... I'm sorry... I—"
Lois—hair no longer short, now framing her face in small braids—smiles, not widely but softly, and her eyes meet Tish's, and it's a conscious battle not to get lost in them. "I get it now."
Tish nods.
"You never got back to me about a second date." She's teasing, there's something in the uptick of her lips that sets Tish at ease. "When we get done here—you're buying."