While the Time Lords were busy with the technical side of events, Roka had found a new fascination of sorts. For the past two days she had noticed them here and there, always uncertain if it was imagination or not. Sometimes there, sometimes gone, sometimes seemingly moving, so subtle that it was hard to distinguish from illusion.

Shadows.

Shadows in places where nothing was around to cast them. Without a specific form or pattern, unmoving, undisturbed when she touched them.

She wasn't even sure whether or not to tell anyone. It could be a trick of the lights in this house, it could be her bored mind making stuff up. Or, as Roka excitedly decided... it had to be ghosts!

Even after wandering the universe for one and a half centuries she had never found evidence for or against them, no matter how hard she had tried to find some. It was a fascinating topic to her, always had been. Scary and chilling, but exciting nonetheless.

Now she started to observe, to write everything down she saw, maybe to find a pattern behind it, or an explanation. Once she threw a paper pellet against one, another time she pressed her back against it, placed her hand over the dark spots. Later on they would have vanished, would appear in new places.

"What are you staring at?"

Cassy's voice made Roka jump and glare startled at the other woman. "Eh... wha'? I... uh..." She quickly glanced back at the corner, her eyes widening and a grin spreading on her face. "It's gone!" Roka squealed. "Ha! I knew it!"

"What's gone?" the sneering voice of the Master appeared as he entered the doorframe, probably to catch some snack. He blinked perplex at Roka, then smiled. "What got you so excited, little crow? Haven't seen you that happy in centuries. Literally."

Her face dropped a little to make place for confusion. He was right. She hadn't been like that since they had travelled together, so many years in the past. How long ago that was. For a second the memories threatened to crush her, streaming in uncontrolled until she suddenly felt enveloped in warm arms.

"Hey, I didn't want to make it sound bad," the Master whispered in her ear. "It makes me happy to see you so excited."

Roka let out a breath and snuggled into his shirt, the grin from before slowly returning, but for other reasons. "You can be such a softie." Her giggle was muffled by cloth.

The Master shoved her away instantly, poking her side to make her jump. "Careful," he growled, although his eyes glinted amused.

Grinning Roka bent out of the way. "Seems like the Doctor is rubbing off on you."

She tried to jump away before the Master could reach her, but he was too fast and trapped her between the sofa's backrest and himself. "Don't stress my benevolence, little crow."

There was an edge in his voice, a small hint of danger, but not enough to be really threatening. Roka poked out her tongue and in return the Master poked her sides again, making her jump and squeal sharply.

"You're ticklish?" he remarked surprised and did it again with the same result.

Roka tried to get free. "Took you long to notice."

There suddenly was a truly devilish grin on his lips and he left her no chance of escape. Roka tried to fight back between laughs and bending and trying to get some air into her lungs. Somehow she ended up on the sofa, laughing and gasping, the Master above her, still on his feet.

"St... stop it," she brought out laughing. "You're killing me."

"Mhm." The Master gave her a mock pout and retreated his fingers from her. "That would be a shame."

They both chuckled and Roka bent up to steal a kiss, before she stood, still holding her burning side. Her gaze met with Cassy's and the other girl, once more, wore a look as if to scream out loud how adorable she found them. Roka was absolutely certain she read romance novels, when her head wasn't buried in the studies.

However, her expression changed quickly to that of curiosity. "What did you see just now?" Cassy wanted to know, the eagerness in her voice hinting at something... more.

Roka slapped the Master's arm as he trod next to her, his finger again near her side. "Stop it!" He only poked out his tongue, but seemed curious enough himself to cease his torture. "The shadow," Roka explained and gestured to the spot of wall where it had been before. "I've seen them a lot lately."

"There is no shadow," the Master remarked dryly.

"Exactly!" Roka exclaimed. "But some moments ago there was! There is nothing at all in here that could have cast it."

"You're even more bored than I am." He chuckled and poked her side, then quickly stepped away with held up hands.

Roka wanted to slap his arm and start another ruffle, but Cassy interrupted.

"I've seen those too." Both turned simultaneously and the other woman seemed a little nervous. "They started a few months back and I always thought I was just... you know..." she shrugged, "imagining things."

"Oh wait!" Roka called out. "Is that why you recently asked if ghosts exist?"

Cassy nodded and smiled shyly, but also a little excited. The Master let out a groan.

"Alright. I'm going to do something useful, while you two spur each other on." He shook his head with a mocking smile. "Ghosts. Seriously, Roka, you should know better by now."

She only shrugged and poked out her tongue. "I haven't found any proof that they don't exist. So let me have this and go play with the girls."

The Master gave her a look, one that was beyond explanation, but somewhere between amused and something else entirely. He grabbed her by the waist and pulled her lower half flush against him, whilst a wicket grin split his face. "Don't forget that you're one yourself," he commented, letting his words ghost over her lips.

Roka's breath hitched and her heart rate spiked for a moment. She leaned forward and caught his lips, tugging at his tie. His grip got a little stronger, more demanding, but she quickly pushed him away, giggling. "Well, you always complain about me not looking very feminine."

"It's not complaining." He chuckled and took her chin between his fingers. "Just noticing. You humans always make such a fuss about your genders, it's fun to mess around with you."

Roka let out a laugh and got herself out of his grip. "I can very much feel like a woman without looking like the typical one. Now get lost. There's a ghost hunt I have to attempt."

.

They both observed the strange shadows now, Roka even stealing the Doctor's sonic once to let it take a look at the phenomena. But it yielded no useful readings and so she sneakily put it back into the coat pocket.

The whole afternoon passed like that, until Cassy suddenly realized she had neglected her studies. Groaning she frowned at the shadow on the wall. It had no definable shape and connected with the floor. They always looked natural, unsuspicious.

"Maybe we're really imagining things," the black haired woman remarked with a sigh. "I should go back to reading. The assignment is next week already."

Roka only hummed confirming, her eyes moving between the shadow and the screen of her laptop. She had been researching strange phenomena the whole time, without finding anything useful. There were, of course, the usual creepy pastas and urban legends, but nothing came close. Nothing was so... mundane.

The rest of the day dragged by. At one point Roka became hungry and snatched a snack from the kitchen, then moved back to the living room to find the shadow gone. In its stead there were two more, slightly to the right, on the same wall. She tried to find a source, but even stepping close and holding her hand above it, didn't do anything. The shadow just was on her hand, instead of the wall. There was nothing. No tingling, no sting, not the slightest weird feeling. But even when she cast another shadow over the spot, didn't it vanish and only became a little darker.

She pursed her lips and went back to the laptop. Cassy didn't mind that she was occupying the living room. The two women actually had gotten quite the good friends recently. Part of the reason might be that Roka had so many stories to tell and also agreed to help with all the psychology things.

"Say," Cassy now suddenly spoke up, "can you help me with something? I mean, if it's okay. It might feel bad to talk about it and all, but..."

"Huh?" Roka looked up from the screen and threw a quick glance at the shadows, before devoting her attention to the other woman. "Errr... ask away. I don't mind."

"Just... tell me if you feel bad or anything, okay?"

"Why would I?" she lifted an eyebrow.

Cassy hesitated a little. "Well... did you ever experience some kind of... mhm... PTSD? Post traumatic stress?"

"Uhh... I don't know." Roka shrugged. "I only know about from books and movies and-"

"No! No, no, no. Not that kind. They only ever ride around visual flashbacks in telly. They are important, yeah, but they can also occur in other ways. Like... no images, but maybe suddenly re-experiencing sounds, smells or just getting overwhelmed by the same emotions you had, when something traumatising happened."

By now she knew all about the glitch, Roka's life on earth before meeting the Doctor, some snippets about her years in the TARDIS, bits and pieces about the episode where she had been the Master's prisoner, and also a good bunch of stories from everything after that.

Roka thought about that for a moment and nodded. "Guess that happens here and there. It's not... bad, though. Not anymore."

"How does it... feel?"

"Phew..." She closed her eyes, trying to get herself into such a moment. "It's like... as if time freezes and just rewinds. There are memories, too many at once, but all with the same... topic of sorts. Like there's a knot in my chest and I can hardly breathe." She stopped there, feeling those emotions resurfacing. Not a thing she wanted right now.

"It's okay, you don't have to tell more," Cassy assured.

"I... I'm fine. Don't worry."

Cassy huffed, but her voice was soft and compassionate. "You're not. Don't pretend to be, all the time."

Roka scowled. "What good is it to show anything? It only hurts."

"Mhm... yeah. But people can't help if they don't know something's wrong with you."

"Worked for the last two centuries." She shrugged.

Cassy sighed, but smiled warmly. "And how did that feel?"

Roka blinked perplex at that question, unsure how to answer it. "I don't think it felt... at all," she tried. "It's just how it is. I... don't know anything else."

Those words seemed to sadden the other woman, making Roka wonder what it must be like to live such a normal life; growing up without constantly being deleted from people's memories...

A loud scratching noise tore her out of her thoughts and she glanced around to make out the direction of the source. Cassy seemed to have noticed too, confusion on her face. Both got up and wandered around for a bit until they came to a halt in front of the basement door. The black haired woman swallowed.

"How cliché, isn't it?" She smiled meekly. "Now I'm not so sure anymore if I want to know if ghosts are real."

Roka gave her a smirk and placed her hand on the door knob. "When have you been down there the last time?"

"There? Oof..." She thought for a moment, while the scratching continued to fade and reappear multiple times. Not very loud, but quite audible in the otherwise silence. "A month or so, maybe? There's just some old junk and preserving jars. Should we... get Matt or the Doctor?"

"Nah. They'd just tell us to stop believing in ghosts." Roka giggled. "Let's have a look. I read enough creepy pastas to deal with everything."

Cassy snorted, but her fear didn't seem to dim. Either way, they didn't plan on just doing nothing, so Roka turned the knob and tapped on the light switch. Against her expectation it worked, didn't even flicker.

"How disappointing." She giggled and started descending the narrow steps, one hand on the railing, the other trailing along the wall.

The scratching seemed to come from further down, a really weird pattern of shorter and longer sounds with lots of pauses in between. As if something was moving inch by inch. Roka remembered having heard it before, sometimes at night, sometimes when no one else was around. But a lot quieter and too indistinct to really make it out, so she hadn't paid any attention to it.

Cassy followed right behind, making sure not to let the distance between them grow too much. She acted brave, but Roka could sense she was all tensed up.

How weird, she though, how can I be so unfazed by this? It should be scary and threatening.

But after all those years of travelling there was not much left to really spook her. Only a vague tingling in her stomach remained, more anticipation than fear.

They reached the bottom and rounded the corner into the only room down here. It wasn't anything special, just some space filled with old boxes and a few pieces of furniture. Roka quickly made out from where the noises came and let out an amazed whistle.

The back wall had turned into a completely black mass of... she hadn't even the slightest idea what. It almost looked as if mindless ink scribbles had come to life, thin, tentacle like shapes sprawling over the wall and each other, so black they absorbed all light around them, moving slow and crawlingly over the wall. The longest of the lines clawed into the stone bricks behind them, creating the eerie sound they were hearing.

"What the..." Cassy whispered in a slightly panicky voice. "Don't tell me that was down here the whole time."

"Probably. Might have taken a while to grow." It couldn't be much older than a month, however, or Cassy would surely have noticed it. Or maybe not, depending on what size it had before. "Look there."

On the walls next to the fine scribbles were small patches of shadows creeping around, melting into each other and into new forms, or vanishing entirely.

"I don't like this," Cassy whispered in a high pitched tone and grabbed Roka's arm. "Would have preferred a ghost, honestly. What is that?"

"Good question, really..." Roka got out her smartphone and let the camera move over the strange substance. One of the first things she had done was to hack into the device to make it able to scan things. A little like her Vortex Manipulator, but, sadly, a lot more restrictive. In theory it should at least spit out the periodic elements of which the thing consisted, but... "Nothing." Perplex she checked the readings. The mass was clearly visible on the camera, but there was simply zero output. "No thermal image, no perceivable frequencies, It's as if that thing isn't even here. "

Cassy tugged at her arm to get her away from the stuff. "Let's get the others," she enquired. "Please."

"Okay, okay, just let me..."

"Please!" Cassy's scared voice echoed eerily through the entire room, bounced from wall to wall.

The scribbled black lines at the outer borders suddenly stood still for a moment, then quickly morphed into new shapes, grew. Strange, twisted things started to appear, drew themselves as if a hand was weaving them into images, almost like faces, but too long and with wide black eyes and gaping mouths.

"Oh, I think this might react to fear," Roka pondered, too fascinated by the phenomena to pay the other girl much attention.

"Roka, get away!" Cassy exclaimed and took some steps back.

The black scribbles instantly started to vibrate violently, some of them shot from the black centre and spread across the walls, growing in size and length so rapidly it was hard to follow. Not even a second passed and the whole room, including the ceiling was covered by the lines, the scratching getting louder and louder, almost deafening. Even Roka backed away now, carefully leading Cassy back to the stairs.

Her eyes never left the weird, entangled mass, followed the spreading, crawling tentacles as they crept over the ceiling and floor, way too fast for any human reaction. The whole room turned black, the light only of use to make out themselves, standing in the waving, thick shadows. It felt like nothing. No touch, no tingling, not the slightest sensation as Roka's hand brushed against one of the tentacles. She still twitched away, glared at her fingers.

Nothing.

The stuff was behind them now, completely engulfing the stairs and swallowing every cardboard box, every old picture frame, the old broken chair, the old fashioned cabinet.

All that remained was the scratching. As if thousands of pens were dragging over paper, frantically scribbling terrified faces into the stones. Once again Roka held up her phone, tried to get any sort of readings from it, but the device couldn't even pick up the horrible sounds they were hearing. Cassy whimpered, clawed to her arm.

"Shit," Roka mumbled towards her and dialled the Master's number. "Sorry. Didn't think it would come to that."

"Get us out, please," she sobbed and closed her eyes.

There was something else. Roka noticed it through the static of the phone on her ear. It was as if it came from inside the device. A small, frightened voice. She pressed the phone closer to her ear, trying to make out anything, trying to ignore how the black scribbles started to climb up their legs, clawing into the fabric of their clothes.

Static. Not even a ringing sound.

And still... there it was.

"Sorry", it whispered through the speaker. "I don't want to do that. I'm sorry."

It clicked. A familiar voice tore through the darkness.

"What's up?" the Master asked. "Can't hear you clearly. Where the heck are you?"

Right then Cassy screamed and Roka turned around just in time to see how the lines rushed up her body, drew themselves all over her skin, burned into her flesh and bone, tore their way into her opened mouth and her fear spread eyes.

A loud burst echoed through the scratching. Everything was suddenly drowned in darkness as the last sparks of the dying lamp rained down. The Master shouted something through the phone Roka couldn't understand, drowned out by the sounds around.

It was so loud it hurt. The phone fell out of Roka's hands as she pressed them over her ears, teeth gritted. She sunk down to her haunches and pressed her eyes shut, a sudden pain erupting inside her head as if a lightning bolt had hit her.

And then... silence.

From one moment to the next the scratching was gone. No, not gone, only returned to what it had been before. Roka opened her eyes, blinked perplex into the pitch black room. Frantically her heart hammered against her ribcage, her breath coming rapidly. Where was the phone? There. She reached for it, picked it up and saw that the connection was cut.

"What the hell is happening?!" the Master's voice screamed from behind her as light flooded the room. "Are you okay? What was that weird noise?"

He came rushing down the stairs, followed by the Doctor. Roka rose to her feet, feeling shaken and dizzy, her eyes desperately searching for Cassy.

She was gone.

.

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