oOo

Two days later they were no closer to gaining control of the TARDIS, although they apparently passed safely through whatever the turbulence had been. "Nothing here even remotely appears to be working the way it should," Kyris announced after several hours spent lying flat on his back like a mechanic under a car. "I think it's time to concentrate our energies on locating the auxiliary control room."

"Are you sure it's not just that the Master has this thing wired to only work for him?" Ace had only the vaguest of ideas how a TARDIS worked, even after almost six years traveling with the Doctor, but she'd picked up a few things here and there. "Isn't there some isomorbid thing your father talked about, to lock out the controls?"

"Isomorphic control mode," Kyris corrected her absently as he gazed at the slow rise-and-fall of the time rotor. It hadn't stopped, no matter what he did. "I wouldn't be surprised if the Master has it rigged so only he can control it, but there's something more going on here. The console is working properly, it just isn't tied into the TARDIS the way it should be, and I'm not willing to bet on my abilities to reverse-engineer it. I need to see if it's the same in auxiliary control."

"That could be difficult," Tegan put in. The others looked at her inquisitively. "If the TARDIS decides to reconfigure itself, we could spend a day looking for auxiliary control and find ourselves right back where we started," she explained.

Ace frowned. "I haven't seen it do anything like that."

"It hasn't, not since the Master sent you here from Gallifrey, but that doesn't mean it won't start up again," Tegan replied. "There have been a lot of glitches lately, remember the lights?"

The night before they'd made their way back to the kitchen and sat down to a real meal, which Kyris insisted on cooking. They'd been living on snatched moments of sleep and whatever was most quickly prepared while they delved into the mysteries of the TARDIS console. Kyris had turned out to be quite a good cook, even if Ace teased him the entire time. But even that was nice, watching the two of them relax together, if only for a few minutes. Concern for their daughter was never far from their minds, and Tegan was beginning to be able to tell when they were thinking about Susan just by the way their eyes clouded over, their lips tightened and they unconsciously reached for each other's hands.

As they finished eating, Kyris had hesitated, then asked Tegan about checking on her again. She'd agreed, only to have the lights go out before he was able to take her hand. It had been hours before they'd come back on again, and the relaxed mood had been utterly destroyed. They'd retired to their rooms for a few hours' sleep, then reconvened in the Console Room for another fruitless day of investigation.

Nor were the lights the only strange things happening lately. Aside from that and the shaking they'd received three days ago, there were the missing items from the kitchen, Tegan's door randomly opening sometime during the night while she slept, even silly things like Kyris having to hunt up a new toothbrush every morning because his vanished almost as soon as he left the bathroom.

"Is that what happened to the coffee?" Ace asked. She'd been horrified to discover there was none to be found on the TARDIS.

"The kitchen's never been stocked to anyone's taste but the Master," Tegan reminded her. "Sorry, that doesn't fall under the 'glitch' category."

"No, it just falls under the 'makes me wake up a bitch' category," Ace shot back, and Tegan grinned in spite of herself.

"Let's concentrate on finding the auxiliary control room, then we can work on dealing with the glitches," Kyris said. But he was grinning as well, Tegan noted as he pulled Ace closer for a quick hug. "I guess I'll just have to live with the bitch," he murmured into her hair. She responded with a playful punch to his shoulder and a muffled laugh.

Tegan was still grappling with her conflicting emotions toward the Doctor's son. She assumed Ace had told him what the Master had done to her, since she also assumed that was what prompted his desire to check her over with his healing abilities, and was surprised that she didn't feel more uncomfortable with the thought.

Not that she felt comfortable with the thought of the Doctor's son in the first place. Objectively, he was intelligent, brave, level-headed and handsome; she even found it charming that he and Ace were obviously head-over-heels in love. He bore the uncertainty over his daughter's fate stoically; where Ace raged and was prone to temperamental outbursts, he kept his pain tucked just out of sight, allowing only the briefest of glimpses as much, Tegan suspected, out of a natural consideration for others as well as out of an ingrained habit of privacy. In that last, he reminded her most of his father. That, and his eyes, vividly blue and piercing.

Thus, of course, her conflict. She knew it was foolish, to harbor even the slightest resentment toward the young man solely on the basis of his parentage, but there it was: Tegan would have to admit to being foolish. It wasn't Kyris' fault that every time she looked at him she resented the fact that she wasn't his mother, that the Doctor had never allowed her flirtation with him to progress to that point, that it hadn't gotten any deeper than kindergarten tactics: name calling and hair pulling, trying to get his attention by being louder than anything or anyone around them...

Nor did it help that she heard the Master's hateful taunts over and over again, whispering in the back of her mind whenever Kyris was around: He would never dream of forging a romantic relationship with someone whose life is as brief , as ephemeral as that of a mere human.

Lost in her thoughts, she jumped a bit when Ace spoke. "We should get going. I can pick most of the locks, but if I find one I can't manage, I guarantee that'll be the one room we'll most want to get into."

They filed out the door, Ace filled with grim determination, Kyris with the burning need to do something, anything to resolve this situation, and Tegan with a sort of weary resignation. She suspected it wouldn't be as easy as they hoped, but kept that thought, along with so many others, to herself.