The corridors had become even more serpentine, just as the Doctor had predicted, their length before the next turn becoming short enough that their entire lengths were lit by the lights that were guiding them. This gave them a relief from the feeling that the darkness around them was omnipresent but it also gave them a shorter space in which to detect and react to the maddened beings slowly dying in the labyrinth, dying but still not weak. The weak were culled out; they had seen enough evidence of that. Tegan had taken to carrying her own weapon in her hand and not the holster but with the power off. It was easy enough to activate quickly and after a bit of practice, Tegan found her Outback-learned shooting skills had returned quickly enough. She only wished she were still contemplating the deaths of milk bottles and cans. She reminded herself that death would be a mercy for the demented souls that had been stranded here with their minds corrupted, reduced to something that was less than animal. Even an animal could understand when it was being helped.
The Doctor bade them stop two hours or so into their journey, his face a mask of quiet concentration as he settled down on the floor, legs crossed, his fingers raised to his temples. Several moments passed as Nyssa knelt before him and used her own skills to somehow support what he was doing. Tegan later learned she had been screening out the mental residue of the disturbed minds around them so that the Doctor could more easily concentrate. Tegan had merely stood behind him with her back to the wall, eyes sweeping the corridor that was lit from end to end, the small lights reflecting off the dully polished gray walls. The Doctor stood up after several minutes and helped Nyssa to her feet. She took his hand politely but put very little of her weight against him as she rose. "What were you doing, Doctor?"
"We're getting close enough that I can feel the temporal disturbance. It's expanding. The good news to that is it will be less concentrated when I enter it but like anything else that will be a matter of timing."
"What do you mean, enter it?" Tegan demanded, taking her eyes off the corridor to look at him.
The Doctor looked around for a few seconds, wondering how to explain in a way that wouldn't incur the Galactic Wrath of Tegan, not that it would be directed against him but the Universe in general. "The field of unstable energy being generated by the failed departure matrix, because I'm a Time Lord I can enter into it."
"I thought you told me Time Lords themselves didn't travel in time, that was why they needed TARDISes."The Doctor sighed to himself and almost smiled. She was learning to pay attention. He would have to be more careful of that in the future. "Yes, I did, you're right; but I was speaking of vast interstellar distances. We can enter into an unstable time matrix in many cases and use our own telepathic energy to rebalance the field,"
"Even poisoned?" Tegan pressed.
"I said I could do it, not that it would be easy, but we have very little choice as I would definitely be killed if I don't." He finished off quietly, giving Tegan a look that begged her not to continue.
She didn't, more responsive to his silent beg for quiet than if he had shouted her down. "We won't let that happen. Come on then; we're not getting any closer standing here." She traded a covered glance with Nyssa as they moved to either side of the Time Lord and continued into the heart of the moon. A distant shriek echoed behind them and not for the first time, they wondered about their journey home.
Another hour passed in silence; they spoke little as they moved in order to be able to hear the fierce yet sorrowful calls of the maddened souls around them. The Doctor stopped them just a bit past an hour later, his hand rising then falling to Nyssa's shoulder. "There are three of them around the corner, waiting. And we know there are already a few behind us in the corridors now. Any sign of weakness and we'll have more of them to deal with."
Tegan flipped the safety off of the gun and the power bar glowed green it's entire length, diminished very little by the practice she had taken. "We have to keep moving forward then. I'll see if I can scare them off."
The Doctor nodded, unhappy and hoping they could avoid confrontation but if these sad creatures still had enough intellect to work together for their prey they were more dangerous. He guided the two women toward the far wall, lit dimly and curving up toward the domed ceiling, the wall opposite the sharp turn of the tunnel ahead, allowing them to see farther down the shaft angling off to their right. It was the only way they could proceed and the lights going down it would activate the moment they got close enough to trigger them, enough perhaps to run off those who lay in wait or set them to attack.
Tegan stopped just as they would have reached the edge of activating the lights and braced herself to shoot, listening to the scrabble of bare feet and ragged clothing and the Doctor's slightly ragged breathing. His back was to the wall beside her and his own weapon was out but pointed downward. Tegan stared at him sideways for a moment, her thoughts muddling. He looked utterly unnatural with the weapon in his hands, as if someone had just handed him a dead goat. She wondered not for the first time how he'd lived 900 hundred years in the Universe after having pissed a good number of its inhabitants off, and only been marginally happy with defending himself. Then again, this Doctor seemed a lot more ill-at-ease with personal violence than the first one she'd met. Before she could ruminate father, the lights came on down the corridor ahead of them.
The three maddened Ecosians cringed at the sudden light but didn't retreat. There were two males and one female, filthy as one could imagine and unable to do much more than grunt now. What they could see of their bodies was coiled, trim muscle but their malnutrition was obvious. The remains of the meals they were passing, the food being sent down to those who had survived, was plentiful, but as they devolved their bodies were likely demanding more and more resources to survive.
The Doctor put the weapon point down in front of him and took a step forward, "Can you understand me? We'd like to help you but we must reach the main chamber."
He stopped when they lurched forward, their focus now on the fact that the gun was down. Nyssa fired into the ceiling and hit two of the small lights. The explosion drove the Ecosians back but after a moment, the three of them, encouraging each other turned and charged.
Tegan's shot connected first, unsurprisingly, and the first of the males dropped, twitching and convulsing. With surprising alacrity, the Doctor's next two shots felled the remaining pair. He sighed deeply and went to his knees between the three bodies, all of which were still spasming, examining them quickly and with some relief. Nyssa did the same with the bio-scanner from the satchel over her shoulder as Tegan watched for any sign of the others who had been behind them. After several minutes, Nyssa stood and helped the Doctor to his feet, her gaze going to her Human friend.
"It seems Ecosians are more resistant to these weapons than we believed. It's left these three nearly comatose."
"Either they're more resistant," the Doctor added, "or their metabolism's been so altered that they've become so over the time they've been here. In either case, we have to see that the one's we've stunned don't fall prey to the others."
Easier said, as always. It took them half an hour to find three different sets of crew quarters and then to drag each of them into one and place them on the sofa. The work fatigued the Doctor far more quickly than it might have otherwise but they wanted to make certain the ones they had rendered helpless would not be harmed not only by the rest who were hidden but by each other. There would be enough food in the crew quarters for them for a few days and Nyssa had carefully left open the cupboards and opened a few small containers so that it would be easy to find even in their diminished state. At the Doctor's instruction they had also disconnected the heating units and dropped the knives and other sharp implements down the waste chutes to keep the Ecosians from using them to harm themselves.
Tegan smiled in relief as they sealed the last door, the room holding the female. "Well, it's good to know we won't have to kill them and there should be enough rooms to tuck them all in one if we get the chance."
"Yes, indeed," the Doctor answered, still catching his breath as they moved once again deeper into the moon and the chill. "It seems so but in a weakened enough state the charge would still be enough to kill." It still had not left him that they had not known that the Ecosians would survive when Tegan had first fired.
If it had occurred to her, Tegan's sense of relief had cancelled it out completely and she fired quickly a few hours later when they were attacked once again just as they began to seek out quarters of their own. The only one of them who had retained any sense of time was, of course, the Doctor, and even that was an almost pointless accomplishment under the circumstances of the endless twilight. Two more Ecosians, emboldened by their desperation, had attempted to attack them and been dispatched to a set of rooms; the competition for food was more intense as they neared the main chamber since they survived here in greater numbers.
An unmolested hour past that, they were once again locking themselves in for the night; beyond the doors the sounds of temporal dementia loomed louder. Nyssa tried to force herself to consider the sad sounds for what they were, a sign of their progress toward the chamber barely housing the unstable time field. They were losing a good bit of time tonight compared to the other days due to the Doctor's physical exhaustion and the drain of simple nervous energy on them all. Seated at the kitchen table, her evening meal passing her lips untasted, Nyssa studied the ground navigational plotter to check their progress against the quantity of the medication she had for the Doctor and then with the small resources she had tried to strengthen the formula. She even examined the compounds in the Ecosian food and spices in the kitchen to see what they might have to offer. Tegan found her asleep on the table, the bioscanner beeping softly in protest at a button pressed beneath her hand..
"Oh, Tegan, you should have woken me. I can't recall if I gave the Doctor the right dosage. I was going to check to see if a stronger one might be called for tonight. I've divided the dosages up between the pressure injectors. That way if we're separated we'll have a way to administer it. I'll show you." Nyssa rubbed at her eyes and slowly stood, not protesting as Tegan helped her off with the dark sweater.
"You were exhausted. I ran the Doctor off to sleep after you shot him up and before he noticed how wiped out you were and then took a shower and ran my clothes through the fresher. Go on, the hot water works here. You can relax." She handed Nyssa back her sweater and patted her on the shoulder as she headed into the bath.
Nyssa stopped after they passed the seemingly sleeping Time Lord, turning just as she reached the doorway, "I'm glad you're back, Tegan. This would've been impossible without you."
"That's a switch," Tegan grinned, whispering a laugh. "He'd tell you most things are impossible with me."
Nyssa smiled herself at that, "Not this time. You're what's keeping us all together; you're still the coordinator. This darkness, it's making it's way inside of me like the Mara entered you but I look at you and realize I can survive this and I think the Doctor feels the same."
The ex-air hostess merely shrugged, her face coloring as she picked up her own sweater and folded it onto the bunk above the Doctor who lay unmoving beneath the green covers and the gray thermal blanket. He had removed his coat and sweater and loosened his collar. Tegan had removed his shoes after he'd fallen into the deathly still healing trance. Nyssa looked at him once then went into the bath and closed the door.
Alone, Tegan stared after the younger woman for a moment, complimented and honored by Nyssa's words she might have been but she couldn't yet find much satisfaction. If she'd been quicker knocking that tracer off the Doctor's hand they might not have been in this mess at all. "I must be crazy', she finally thought, "I came back for more, for more watching my friends in danger, more monsters, more running around in the dark', and the truth of it was she had never felt really alive before meeting the Doctor. She thought being an air hostess would fill her want for adventure, one cultivated by summers on the Outback and rock climbing. She smiled for a moment and remembered how stupid she had felt scaling the cliffs leading up to Castrovalva, only because of heels and uniform. Other than that, she'd been right at home hanging off a clump of rock in the middle of nowhere. She'd only been so abrasive to the Doctor early on because she was scared not just of the creeps and the trouble they seemed to find, but of how much she was enjoying it on the inside. She'd never been happier in her life than when the Universe had seen fit to have her join the TARDIS crew again. Only this time she wasn't complaining, this time she was out here to have an opportunity few humans ever would, to make a difference in the rest of the cosmos they didn't know existed. She only wished she had a dozen lives to spend doing it. Tegan's dark gaze dropped to the still form on the bed, remembering that the Doctor now might not as well.
Sighing, Tegan pulled her tank top free of her trousers and slowly eased into the bed next to the Doctor, snatching down one of the pillows from the more narrow top bunk. The Doctor had begun to shiver as the healing trance deepened and she moved a bit more quickly, knowing he would be even colder for a moment as she lifted the blankets. Moments later she was again beside him, wondering what her Mother would say much less the Time Lord who had never been anything but a pure gentleman. Tegan didn't fall asleep until she heard Nyssa climb into the bed against the opposite wall.
The cramping in his leg woke the Time Lord painfully, so tight it had drawn his left foot almost parallel with the bed. He sat up slowly, mindful of the woman beside him and tried to pull the muscle back straight, gasping quietly as he did and wishing he could stand and use his weight to stretch out the cramp in more direct terms. It eased a bit as he pulled against the smooth white fabric of his socks and then caught him off-guard again as he let up, his shoulders also exhausted. He hissed again, more loudly this time, and then resumed unknotting the muscles. Eyes closed, he first felt the cold of the air and heard the hiss of the injector before he opened his eyes and found Tegan leaning over him; her hands were beneath the covers, pulling down his left sock, and the cold was now lapping at both of them. The cramp in his calf was already easing when she sat back and, as only Tegan could, looked him in the eye. "Better?"
"Yes, much," the Doctor answered, not sure where to go next. He thought he'd resolved all this, but then of course, Tegan had been asleep. She did what Tegan did, however, cut through the confusion and put her own stamp on things. He wondered if he would've gotten through this particular regeneration without her suspicion counterbalancing his more altruistic thoughts. If he survived this, he was suddenly sure he'd regenerate not long after Tegan left the TARDIS.
"I guess you're wondering what I'm doing here?" She said quietly, mindful of not waking Nyssa and adding to the situation.
The Doctor colored just a bit in the semi-darkness and drew some of the blankets back over his legs. "No, I discovered you with me last night. The delta wave inducer nearly put me into a coma and I pushed off its influence so strongly that I awoke and I discovered why I was warm enough to rest. The night before I thought it was the thermal cover then I thought Nyssa had given me something. Imagine my surprise…" He smiled thinly and shivered.
Tegan noticed but bided her time a bit. "It was the only way we had to keep you from shivering all night. Nyssa said that the drug is making all of your muscles so tight that it's hard for the ice-water you call blood to circulate properly, that was why you were so cold, that you were going to exhaust yourself trying to rest. She didn't have a drug that would help you, so I realized this was the only way. Sorry if it's knocked you off your game. It's a bit hard to believe it would make you this nervous."
"I'm not nervous", he shot back, very quietly and far too quickly. And to his surprise and confusion, Tegan laughed hard but silently.
"You look like a school girl in the back of a Chevy." She reached and took the blanket he was holding at his chest and he stared at her dully in the twilight. Her tactic changed from quiet teasing to reason. What she lacked in technical skill, Tegan made up for with her ability to read those about whom she cared. "Listen to me, you silly Time Lord. You were calmer on an operating table. Oh. Cripes, it's just me, just Tegan, and just another mess one of us needs getting out of, and we've faced worse than being near one another. You went into my mind, my consciousness, and pulled me out of the dark; all I want is to return the favor."
The Doctor took a moment to answer her, his eyes falling from her patient but insistent gaze, a deep sigh leaving him as his head arched back. "I do know that but knowing and accepting are sometimes different things. I thought I had worked this through but … you were asleep then and not able to talk some sense into me for a change." He managed a smile and then looked her in the eye. "Regardless of the facts, it's been a long time since I was near a woman in this manner under any circumstance. I'm sorry. Even if it's a medical necessity, it brings up certain… certain feelings I thought I had done away with long ago. It is unsettling but your help, your understanding, is far from unappreciated."
Tegan nodded and slowly placed her hand on the back of his neck. "I have wondered, you know, why you never seemed interested, or even made a remark that Nyssa or I were more than boys with squeaky voices." The Doctor turned from her with a fading half-smile still on his lips and leaned back against the warmth of her hand. He felt the warmth suddenly on his right arm also as she guided him back down to the bed. The hand on his neck slid to his shoulder, pushing him round as the hand on his arm pulled him down. He resisted for a moment, then released the tension with a short, sharp breath and followed her grip. She turned him slowly toward her as she lay down as well.
"Close your eyes. It's just me, just a few hours away from this nightmare. "
He did close them and started slightly, breath catching again, as his face met the smooth heat of her shoulder. She kept him from rising gently and after a moment he was surprised to find himself increasingly at ease. He could see her mind again; she wanted nothing.
Tegan barely breathed as she looked down at the top of the Time Lord's head and wondered how she'd suddenly known that what she was doing would be allowed. The Doctor had simply tensed for a moment then relaxed. She'd often wondered how a man who fought to save so many lives and risked his own to do it seemed uninterested in one of its most basic, if not the most basic, comforts, how he could give them lip service and run from them in practice. At first she thought it was because the constant danger would have scared off anyone who would have stayed with him, and then found that was far from true, and then she thought it was because none of the females she had seen him around were of his own species. She didn't know why she'd abandoned that theory but probably it was because he'd been so bloody open with everyone they'd met, even when she was warning him otherwise. She'd also figured that with a life-span as long as a Gallifreyan's that if some woman had stung him badly enough he should've had time to get over it and had ruled out that as a cause for his distance but apparently she might've been wrong. She drew the heavy blankets back up over them both and up to his chin. The Doctor could feel the vibration in her throat when she spoke.
"So, who was she?"
The Doctor breathed once, suddenly not as tired, but drawn to rest by the warmth that the small but strong body of his companion offered. "She was my wife," he began, surprising himself as the words fell from his mouth, almost as if someone else were speaking, as if they'd been waiting a few centuries to be released. Perhaps they had. "My wife for a very long time, as you might imagine. She bore me a son, and his wife bore my granddaughter, Susan whom I hope someday you might meet."
Tegan opened her mouth to answer and suddenly didn't know what, for once, to say. She heard what was unsaid also, that he'd not mentioned meeting the others, and regeneration or not, it still felt odd that he was old enough to have a granddaughter. She also realized that it was her only chance to learn what had driven this strange, wise man to right the Universe's wrongs. "They're gone, aren't they? Your wife, your son?"
He nodded, barely, his fine hair tickling her throat. "I was about to be arrested for my heretical views that we should help those races in catastrophic danger. I had interfered for the first time, stopped a planet from being destroyed by a comet half its size. Of course, that meant nothing, and for it I was going to be dragged off to a tribunal."
Tegan huffed and rolled her eyes even though he couldn't see her, "Bloody lot of good they're doing the Universe. It's all a game to them - who lives, who dies, and they don't want anyone else to play."
The Doctor smiled; she could feel the pull of his cheek against her breast. "I believe you've summed them up in your own inescapable way, Tegan."
She knew that already and hadn't met one of them but she also hadn't forgotten her other goal and aside from settling her own curiosity, making the Doctor focus on something other than the first time he'd been at rest in the arms of a woman for what might be centuries. Tegan suddenly felt very strange, oddly privileged, almost honored, even surreal. She tightened her embrace almost to prove to herself he was there. "So what happened to them?"
The Doctor's head jerked up slightly but Tegan felt him slowly become heavier. "I had returned home in the TARDIS I had borrowed, an old one I thought they wouldn't immediately miss. I was right, of course." Tegan smiled unseen. "They didn't notice. I left, alerted the planet in time to avert the comet, and came home, foolishly thinking that my success would have changed a few minds. I should've known it hadn't. Now I wasn't only a lunatic who had abused his education but a criminal. They came armed to arrest me, all of us."
"Your family, too?" Tegan asked quietly, unaware that her hand had drifted onto the back of his neck.
"Well, what was left of them. My son's wife had left him several months before because of his crazed father. But Susan adored him, adored me, and was old enough to choose to stay." He paused, caught up in the memory he had pushed away for so long, pushed away because he hadn't felt safe enough to remember it, to remember the first pain his interference had caused, the pain of believing that the billions of lives he had saved had been worth his interfering. Tegan's hand moving hypnotically on the back of his neck gently reminded him of the present.
"Oh, I was a prize. I had started a small revolution and needed to be an example. They had bothered to send the Castellan guard from the capitol, and it had been centuries since they'd used force of any kind, so long that the weapons they'd brought with them were almost completely unfamiliar, live energy weapons in the hands of people who carried false ones only for ceremony… One of them thought he knew the power settings."
Tegan finished for him, her hand stopping for a moment. "He didn't."
"No," the Doctor agreed quietly. "I was able to save Susan and myself only because they were so stunned themselves by what they'd done. My wife, my son, had pushed us into the TARDIS before them thinking they'd really only be interested in me. They were trying to protect me when they were killed."
Tegan stared up at the bottom of the top bunk, her throat tight. She took in a breath and steadied herself. "That's why you hate guns, any of them, and why I get on your nerves."
The Doctor laughed and found himself resting against her more easily, warmed by more than her metabolism. "I have wondered, Tegan, why you so quickly developed this habit of placing yourself in harm's way."
Tegan had wondered it herself in the wake of his wobbly regeneration, their crazy time on Castrovalva, and in the middle of facing a ship full of cranky Cybermen. She didn't know if he was ready for the answer but he had asked the question. "I do it because bitchy as I might have been, when everything was all over, I could see we made a difference. I never would've had a chance so I guess I just thought the best way I could help was make sure you could. I figured the creeps might find me a more fun target..."
Now that he had the answer, the Doctor wasn't all that surprised or unamused to hear it. Nor was he surprised to find he was falling again into an actual sleep, his mind strangely far from the toxin poisoning him, blackmailing fools having a go at temporal mechanics, and the mutants outside the sealed door. The last things he was aware of were the hand still stroking his neck and Tegan's deep, quiet voice in his ear. "Just another mess. Braveheart, Doctor, you'll survive."