"Jo!"
"Doctor!"
As soon as the cell door had opened, she was running into his arms.
"It's nice to see you alive, at least. Are you all right?"
"Oh, Doctor, I'm fine. How are you?"
"Well, unlike the TARDIS, this room is a great deal smaller on the inside than it seems from out there." He scratched his head. "But I'm fine. They're feeding me, at any rate, if you can call this food."
"Doctor, this is Ramani…Ramani… Ramani, what is your surname? Do you know I didn't even ask!"
"I'm Acting Detective Inspector Ramani De Costa," said Ramani from the doorway. She felt a bit silly to be sounding so important when what she was about to do seemed so utterly ridiculous.
"How d'you do? I'm known as the Doctor."
He extended his hand towards her, and she found herself shaking it. It felt warm, firm, and underneath it all…magical?
"I think Ramani can help us," said Jo. "But I need the TARDIS key. I said I'd show her inside, to prove we're telling the truth."
"Good idea, Jo. But the key was taken from me upon my arrest."
"Yes, I realised that." She handed him a piece of paper and a pen. "You have to sign this form before they'll hand it over."
"Well if I must," said the Doctor, and signed it with an illegible squiggle. "I must say, it'd make an agreeable change for somebody to believe our story."
"And she will, Doctor. I know she will."
"Good. Perhaps then we can resume our search for the Master."
They both spoke with such unselfconscious conviction. Ramani felt as though she was on the frontier of a strange new world. It was seductive, very. Time travel, space travel, but more than that, it was simply the lure of something completely foreign to her. She was torn between commitment to the daily grind of what she knew best, and letting herself be seduced.
Actually, she wasn't really torn - that was a lie. She was falling willingly, indulging a perpetually suppressed longing for the possible and new. But she thought she ought to feel torn. She was sure that Jack would be horrified at how easily she shrugged off years of training in the police art of pragmatic distrust. "The manual strictly forbids—" she heard him lecturing, but she wasn't interested. She turned that thought off.
And tuned into Jo saying her name.
"Will it be safe to take Ramani back to the warehouse?" Jo was asking the Doctor. "You don't suppose the Master will be lurking about waiting for us?"
"I don't know, Jo." The Doctor gave it some thought, stroking his chin with his finger. "By now he will have realised that his recursion loop generator is damaged. He could be there."
They both looked over at Ramani. "If need be," she said cautiously, "I can arrange for armed backup."
"There you are then," said the Doctor, smiling. "Your very own twenty-first century Brigadier, Jo."
They both laughed.
Ramani, despite not getting the joke, recklessly laughed along with them.
