Trigger warnings for this chapter: violence, character death, abuse, suicide.
"Athena," said Silas slowly, "can you please put away the Nitro-9? We don't need it yet."
Athena rolled her eyes and put the canister back in her backpack. One of the first things the girl had said to her was that her mum hadn't let her keep her pink one. She was the youngest person on the helicopter at all of seven ("and three-quarters!") years old, and Donna was faintly horrified she was there at all, but no one else was willing to argue with her when she declared ten minutes before they left that she was coming along.
Still, at least someone back here was cheerful. There were only eleven of them in the helicopter. Only, Donna thought sarcastically. It was all very well for Jo and Cliff, who had the cockpit all to themselves. Jo's laughter floated back even over the sound of the rotors and the awful clanking noise of their dilapidated engine as she jerked it all over the bloody place; she sounded like she was having the time of her life.
Back in the body of the Grant-Joneses' hunk of rattling scrap metal it was a different story. They were all bundled up like they were going to the North Pole; oh, sorry, the South Pole. Natalie Jones had informed her that most of their gear had been recycled from an Antarctic exploration mission, because apparently that was what these people did for fun. The only problem was that while their junker had been stripped down of almost everything except cabin pressurisation and the outer shell, squashing nine people together in little more than a square metre, all of them in giant fluffy pants and parkas that made them look like Abominable Snowmen was stuffy and miserable, even if they hadn't had to somehow make room for crowbars and weapons and crash helmets and explosives packs and oxygen tanks from a "recreational Everest climb" three years previous. Which they did.
Not for the first time, Donna realised how insane these people were.
"All right there, Donna?" Mickey yelled from across the cabin.
"I can't feel my feet!" she yelled back. "It's bloody freezing in here!"
Silas shuffled in a circle, awkwardly trying to turn around from where he'd been propped with his head halfway into the cockpit. "It's about to get colder!" he shouted. "ETA three minutes! Oxygen, everyone!"
The woman next to her handed her a mask. It wasn't easy getting eight people and a seven-year-old (though Athena hardly counted; she was ready before any of them) into heavy oxygen tanks with no room to maneuver, but the Grant-Joneses were worryingly good at it and, unlike Donna, Mickey, and Haresh, seemed perfectly cheerful at the prospect of what would most likely end up being a suicide mission.
None of them were actually named Grant-Jones (although there were two Jones-Broadchesters and a Jones-Green) and one of them—Sam, who was Natalie's girlfriend—wasn't related but still managed to have the surname 'Jones'. None of them were apparently related to either Martha or Harriet Jones (former Prime Minister), who were also not related to each other, and it was all in all more confusing than it ought to have been.
Mickey got one arm free with difficulty, lifting it above the heads of the multitude of Joneses and pointing in the vague direction of the barred plastic window he was squished against. He shouted something, but with his oxygen mask already in place it was difficult to get excited about "Mrm mrmmph, mrph mr mrrmmrmrph!"
The helicopter tilted wildly, sending everyone staggering to port and leaving Donna exactly enough time to swear to herself before six Joneses, a Smith and a Chandra crashed into her and smashed her up against the window.
"Ooh! Mickey!" she called when she could breathe again. "Look, it's the Valiant!"
Mickey grumbled.
It wasn't easy to see, hulking metal monolith that it was; the helicopter was teetering back and forth and shaking so hard Donna was having trouble figuring out where the ground was, let alone their target. It was a good thing they'd waited after all; the Joneses had been all for taking their little tin-pot chopper all around the world looking for the Valiant when Bannerman Road had gotten a message to the CRG with strict instructions not to let them leave until they had an actual plan. From the looks of things, anything but a still night while the Valiant was already over Britain would have shaken the thing to pieces.
"Where are you going?" Silas shouted into the cockpit. At least, that's what it looked like he was saying. "You missed it!"
"She missed it?!" Donna yelled. "How could she miss it? It's bloody massive!"
They had, in fact, missed it. The poor stripped-down former sightseeing helicopter wobbled and whined as Jo executed a turn sharp enough that the sound that came out of Mickey's mouth made Athena look at him with no small amount of concern.
"Here we go!" she called back, and Donna watched as the world outside spun, swung, and finally solidified into a mostly-normal pattern as Jo finally got the chopper to fly in a mostly-straight line.
"Everyone hold on!" Cliff shouted over the noise, and Donna wasted no time in wrapping herself around the straps and handholds that had been installed for the stage of their ingenious plan that involved intentionally crashing the remains of a tourist helicopter into a heavily-armoured military vessel.
Sam had strapped herself to the wall with a view out the front of the cockpit.
"Three…" she shouted back. "Two…"
The shout of "ONE!" was lost in the jolting crash if Sam had managed to say it at all; the sound and feeling was practically all-encompassing, metal crushing agains metal and the roar of the engines and Donna couldn't think. She'd been in a car crash before, just a tiny thing that had resulted in a bit of a dent in the boot; that had been terrifying enough and had nothing at all on driving a helicopter into an aircraft carrier. She dimly recognised a joyous shriek from Athena, like this was a theme park ride and not their horrid, fiery death.
Somehow, miraculously, they survived, although it took a few seconds for that to register. Mickey helped her out of the wreckage, and she reminded herself that this was only the start, they were hardly home free yet.
The three not-Grant-Joneses were the last to get out of the wreckage, not unexpectedly, and walking on an open-to-air platform on a flying aircraft carrier thousands of metres above the ground was, suffice to say, an interesting experience, and while she'd been assured that the turrets couldn't turn more than 190º she was still expecting every second for them to spin around and shoot them down.
By the time the three of them got to the access hatch the Grant-Joneses surrounded, Athena already had her Nitro-9 out. Her older brother Wiley had a protective hand on her hood, holding her steady as the wind whipped around them, threatening to throw her off-balance as she set her charges. They couldn't talk; the wind was too loud to have heard anything anyway, even if they hadn't had awkward oxygen masks over their mouths. Still, Cliff's raised fingers were as clear a signal as Donna had ever seen, and they were quick to waddle away from the immediate blast radius as he counted down.
Six… five… four…
BOOM.
Donna was fairly certain she could hear Mickey swearing from across the platform, batting at his flaming sleeve. Athena raised a hand in half-hearted apology, but the Grant-Joneses were already surging forward into the gap, Cliff waving Donna and Mickey through urgently. There was a short hallway on the other side, and Jo was already at the second half of the airlock segment, helping Sam haul it open so the others could squeeze through. There was a spray of gunfire as they unstuck the door, and Sam yelped and slammed it shut again. Athena whistled and tossed Silas a cracked Nitro canister; Sam opened the door enough for him to toss it through, and once they heard the explosion they hurried after it.
There were four guards on the other side, stunned by the blast, and Sam and Silas quickly overtook them; they were zip-tied and unconscious before Donna was entirely sure what she was watching. She thought of Sam's Greenpeace t-shirt and wasn't sure how to reconcile that with hand-to-hand combat like something out of a spy movie. Silas waved over Donna's head, and Jo flashed him a thumbs-up from the airlock door as she sealed it.
"That's everyone," she told him, pulling off her mask and dropping the tank unceremoniously in the corner. The others were quick to follow suit, wriggling out of the thick parkas and oxygen tanks that had been extremely welcome in the freezing wind outside the Valiant but were decidedly less so in the recently-re-pressurised, climate-controlled hallways. "Sarah Jane," she said into what had at one point been a disconnected cell phone but had gone through so many modifications it looked like something out of a science-fiction novel (the fact that their lives were practically one already wasn't lost on her). "Can you hear us?"
"Loud and clear, Jo!" Luke's voice was tinny and crackly over the communicator, which was tied into a tightly-protected connection between the Joneses and the Bannerman Road supercomputer.
Supercomputer. Sentient, alien supercomputer. Donna was still not entirely sure what she'd gotten herself into, but the alien tech certainly made their Resistance Movement seem much more feasible than tripwires made out of a kettle and some string, and rebuilt helicopter wrecks held together with duct tape and prayers.
"We all remember the plan?" Cliff confirmed. "Donna, Athena, Mickey, Wiley, Jo, this is you." They were the jailbreak party; the Doctor's friends were somewhere on the Valiant, they had a general idea where, and they were the half that was going to get them out.
"Work fast," Sarah Jane told them over the communicator. "The Master will try to stop you. Don't stop to fight, just get to Martha and anyone else as quickly as you can."
They had all studied the ship's plans; Mickey had access to some UNIT files through something he'd done with the Doctor and hadn't really explained in detail, looking embarrassed. It hadn't really mattered, anyway; so long as they had accurate blueprints of the Valiant how they'd gotten them didn't matter overmuch. The corridors all looked nearly identical, but if they were where she thought they were, they shouldn't be too far away from the storerooms everyone had unanimously agreed were most likely to have been turned into cells.
"Once you've got the prisoners out, get to the Paradox Machine," Silas reminded them. "If there's one thing Martha made clear it's that the Paradox Machine is the key. A few Nitro-9 charges should damage it enough to make everything the Master's done worthless. The rest of us are going after him directly. We need to make sure he knows we're there, bait him out…"
Over the communicator, Clyde snickered. There was a smack and a muffled "Rani!" before Sarah Jane was back on the line.
"Good luck, Jo," she said. "Remember, you need to get the communicator to a computer terminal as soon as you can; K-9 and Mr Smith are diverting all our power into taking control of the Valiant, just in case. Sam, don't let them do anything crazy."
"Who, me?" asked Sam, cold-cocking a groaning guard with an oxygen tank.
"Watch it!" Mickey yelled suddenly. A group of guards had swung around the corner and opened fire on the group. Wiley knocked Jo and his sister out of the way as everyone with guns—which, Donna realised belatedly, included her—fired back.
She'd never killed anyone before. She'd fought, she'd nearly died herself, but she'd never killed anyone, and watching the guards fall back, she had no way of knowing if she'd hit them or not but she was involved and it made her feel sick. Sam made a face that Donna was pretty sure looked not too dissimilar from her own as she looked back on the rest of their group and her eyes went wide.
The guards weren't the only ones to have fallen. John was on the ground, and Sam leant over him to check his pulse but it was only cursory; Donna knew as well as she did that no one missing that much of their skull could be alive.
They could only spare a moment of silence. "Let's move," Mickey said quietly, and the two groups ran towards opposite ends of the hallway.
"I spy with my little eye… something—"
"A bulkhead."
"No, actually, it's not, and if you'd have let me finish—"
"Pipes."
"…I hate you."
"No you don't."
A pause. She could hear Lucy shifting on the other side of the wall, and sighed. "Martha, it's your turn."
"I spy with my little eye… something green."
"Is id your socks?" Lucy said.
Tish rested her forehead against the bars. "Is there some sort of weird mold on your wall?"
"No," said Martha. "Well, yeah, but it's not green. It's the light on the door lock over there."
"I can't see the door locks from here, Martha," Tish reminded her. Lucy sneezed miserably in agreement. It had been inevitable that one of them would get sick from the cold and the terrible ventilation down here. Trophy wives and society girls weren't exactly cut out for drafty metal boxes.
"Can we blease blay somethig else?" she asked thickly.
"You okay, Lucy?" Tish asked, trying to see around her window. "You don't sound so good." A pale hand strained into her field of vision and gave an awkward thumbs-up.
She heard Martha heave a sigh from the other side of Lucy's cell. "How long do you reckon we have until he remembers we exist?"
"Er," said Tish. "Maybe another day or two?"
"It brobably debends on if Theta asks him."
"…Or three. How mad did he look?" Lucy didn't answer, but Tish could feel the tension from the next cell. "Well," she said, trying and failing to be comforting, "at least he's not mad at you this time?" After another few moments of silence, she sighed. "What do you think he'll do to us?"
"Well, from personal experience," said Martha, "he's very fond of keeping people in cells and gloating at them."
Lucy laughed. It turned into a wet cough. "He never uses the sabe trick twice," she said once she was done hacking up a lung.
Thank God, Tish thought. She didn't know if Lucy could have survived a repeat of past 'tricks'. She didn't know if she could have survived them at all. How wrong was it, she wondered, to be grateful that so many horrific punishments had already been directed at her friend?
"Do either of you know how Jack is doing?" Martha asked.
"Who?" said Lucy.
"Yeah, he's doing fine," Tish said. "As well as can be expected, anyway."
There was a pause. Finally, Martha sighed.
"I spy…"
Whatever she spied was quickly forgotten as alarms went off, bright, flashing lights on the wall legally-mandated disability assistance and more than a bit irritating after they'd been going for more than a minute. It was still better than the awful klaxon sounds.
"What's going on?" Martha shouted.
"I don't know!" Tish called back. "Lucy?"
Lucy's voice sounded awful, but she managed to yell "The Valiant's under addack, those are the external defense turrets cobing online. Fighter blanes, I think!"
"Martha, do any of your Resistance friends have fighter planes?"
"We don't even have cars," said Martha.
"Do they have guns?" Tish said. "That was definitely gunfire!"
"The guards hab guns!" Lucy shouted.
"Think positive!"
"Some of them do!" Martha said at the same time. "Jo's kids raid military camps!"
"Kids?"
Tish could hear footfalls at the door, and a muffled, feminine voice saying something she couldn't make out. The door swung open.
"Hello?"
"Donna Noble, is that you?" said Martha.
"No, it's Mr Smith. Yes, it's Donna!"
"Is that Mickey?"
"Hey, Martha," said a grinning man with a large gun who somehow managed to look entirely non-threatening. "And… Tish, right? Mickey Smith. Chiswick Resistance."
Tish waved at him through the bars.
"And who's… what's she doing here?"
Tish couldn't see Lucy, but she knew what her face would look like; that awful glassy mask she wore when she was afraid.
"She's with us," and Tish blinked in surprise that it was Martha who said it first. "Lucy Cole, you've probably heard of her. She tried to assassinate the Master. She's a friend."
Donna raised her eyebrows but didn't say anything, and the two kids—they really were kids, that girl couldn't possibly be older than ten and looked closer to five, and the boy was maybe sixteen at most—moved forward.
"Stand back," said the teenager, holding out his hand so that the little girl could hand him a faded shaving-cream can. "I mean way back, this stuff'll take your head off."
Tish took him at his word, backing as far into the corner as she could. A pause, then the sound of a cap being pulled off. After a few seconds, there was a really extremely loud and impressive BANG and the solid iron door jumped on its hinges before tilting slowly over and falling with a slightly less impressive bang onto the floor of the cell. A second later there was another explosion next to the first, and then a third.
"Quick," Mickey told them. He gestured urgently. "Someone will've heard that."
"Was that Nitro-9? Good old Ace." Martha said warmly as they rushed out of the room and down the hall. "Where is she?"
Everyone got a sort of sort of sickly look about them.
"Oh, no," Martha breathed.
"She was in Japan," Donna said quietly. Tish blanched. She didn't know who they were talking about, but everyone knew what that meant.
"I'b sorry," Lucy told her.
"It's not your fault," said Martha. Tish put an arm around her to hold her steady; she looked a lot sicker than she'd realised. Just a cold, but she was feverish and looked like she hadn't slept properly since she'd been locked up. She needed someplace soft and warm and safe to rest up in. They all did, really.
"Is the man from Torchwood still alive?" said the little girl, sounding very serious for someone who was little more than a metre tall and had plastic beads on the ends of her braids.
"…Yes," said Martha with some difficulty; it wasn't that it was funny, not by any means, but oh dear god.
"Do you know where he's being held?" asked Mickey. "We need to get everyone out."
"Just down this hall," said Tish, grateful she had something to add. "He's got his own section, with—"
"Guards!" Lucy said sharply. She'd no sooner gotten the word out before the first shots were fired; Martha pushed the two of them around the corner on pure instinct and looked for all the world like she ought to have a gun in her hand alongside Mickey, Donna, and the teen.
The little girl was pulling something out of her pack and Tish put her arm out to stop her from getting into the line of fire, but she ducked beneath her and threw something down the corridor. A moment later there was a loud explosion. Tish looked at the girl and her proud grin and felt like she should have been shocked, but couldn't manage it.
The gunfire hadn't stopped, but there was only one person firing now, as far as she could tell. She watched Mickey and the teen round the corner, guns aloft, and there was a hail of bullets and a spray of blood.
Her heart was beating fast and it felt like she was treading ice water or stuck in slow-motion; the little girl ran out into the hall screaming "Wiley!" and she waited, helplessly, to watch her shot down, and when that didn't happen it took a moment to process it; she'd cringed away and she could have sworn she'd heard a gunshot but then there was silence and she was still alive.
Or, oh, not silence, not entirely. "Wiley," the little girl was saying, leaning over the teen. "Wiley, Wiley, Wiley, Wiley—"
Wiley made a sharp sound that wasn't entirely dissimilar from a laugh and tried to pull himself up to a sitting position, but the girl—and they must have been siblings, Tish realised belatedly, or close enough—pressed him back into the floor.
"Don't you dare," she growled (the effect wasn't entirely lost by everything else about her, and inside her head, Tish applauded). "You're wounded."
"'Thena, I'm fine," Wiley argued.
"No you're not!"
"Athena," said Mickey, firmly but not unkindly, "I need you to move, okay? Let us help Wiley. Martha?" he called.
"On it." Martha paused long enough to duck around the corner and wrestle a large gun from one of the dead guards before hurrying back. "Here, let me see…"
Lucy's fingers dug into Tish's arm. "More guards," she whispered. "They would hab had to cobe bast Harkness' chamber. Those guards'll be along in a minute iv they don't hear frob these ones."
Tish nodded, squeezing her hand gratefully once she realised Lucy was in fact attempting to speak English. "Um… Mickey, Lucy says there's more guards waiting for these ones to come back. If you want to get Jack out you should do it now, they're using it as a staging area or something."
Donna and Mickey exchanged a look as Martha carefully tore Wiley's sleeve off to get a look at the ugly bullet wound in the young man's shoulder.
"We'll have to come back for him," Mickey said. "If we start going back…"
"We need to get to the Paradox Machine," Donna informed the group at large. She looked uncomfortable, the military-grade weapon in her hands seeming both unfamiliar and surprisingly natural. "If we can damage it… Well, I don't actually know what it does, some people never explained…"
"I was in a bit of a hurry, Donna," Martha muttered. She looked around and hissed with frustration at the lack of medical supplies to be found lying strewn about the floor of a row of cells on a military airship. "Seriously, the Master doesn't keep first-aid kits? They just grazed your side," she told Wiley gently. "The shoulder's bleeding a lot too but it's not as bad as it could be, I don't think it hit anything important. You can feel your toes, right?"
Wiley gave a terse smile and bumped her leg with his foot. "Not really concerned about toes, but..."
"Here." She shrugged out of her jacket, folded it into a rough pad-like shape and pressed it over the wound. "Keep pressure on it until we can come back for you, all right? And keep that other arm tight against your side, there you go. We can't leave him," she added in the same breath.
"Well we can't exactly bring him with us, can we?" Donna did not seem to like standing out in the open waiting for more guards to arrive.
Lucy spoke up again. "Use the cells," she said, and the others looked up in surprise at the even determination in her voice. "Sed him ub in there and close the door, they won't bother lookig for him. Iv we win we can cobe back for him."
"Mickey, get him in there. Carefully," Martha ordered. "Don't aggravate that shoulder wound."
"Careful!" Athena yelped as Mickey switched places with Martha, leaving her to cover the corridor while he slipped an arm under Wiley's good shoulder and started pulling him into one of the cells that hadn't recently had the door blasted off its hinges.
"Tish?" Martha asked from her corner. "Paradox Machine, where is it and how do we get there?"
"How should I know?" Tish hissed back. "If the Master didn't need it fed or polished…"
Lucy coughed loudly. It may or may not have been solely to get everyone's attention, as it went on for several long seconds.
"One lebel ub," she sniffled. "Dree halls on the righd, sharp lebt."
There's another rattle of gunfire, this time from Martha.
"Let's get going, then," she said. "Out of time here."
Theta had counted it a blessing that the Master hadn't made a show of executing eir past companions. Ey knew it was no more than ey deserved to see it, but they didn't deserve to be hurt, not for a simple association with em that, in many cases, they didn't even choose so much as it was forced upon them by outside forces or Theta emself.
Ey hoped Sarah Jane was still alive. Ey thought she might be, the Master was absent-minded enough in this incarnation and Lucy said she'd cut off the transmission, so there was a chance.
The Master held Theta to his side and ey looked at the assembled group in front of em, surrounded by guards with their guns raised, and ey wished for the third time in as many days that ey had tear ducts with which to weep. There were too many of them and at the same time too few; Jo and Cliff and two of their children, grown now and they'd been armed, hard-faced, defiant, one of them covered in blood, and what was Sam even doing here? The thought of any one of them dying like this was too much but all of them together… they were only a handful, what could they possibly have been thinking, the greatest mistake ey had ever made was in convincing them that courage and audacity were all that was needed to triumph against impossible odds, this was suicide.
"Theta, look!" the Master said brightly, caressing eir frills and it felt uncomfortable to be on display like this now and ey didn't know why. "It's your human friends! Why, Josephine's grown up, hasn't she? I have to say, it's a bit strange to see one of your companions live long enough to get wrinkles."
Theta winced; ey wanted to pull away from him but he was holding onto em too tightly and all ey could manage was to raise eir chin, almost haughtily.
"And that's the one you designed, isn't it? The one who killed herself for you? What is she called again…"
"Sam," ey said, looking at her desperately. She caught eir gaze and gave a tiny nod.
"Oh, right. Samantha, the perfect companion. Blonde, young, human, utterly smitten with you, and moralising," said the Master with disdain. "You know, I question your taste, Theta. Still," he sighed, "I suppose anything's better than the one you dragged into the Time War with you. At least he died quickly enough."
"You'll die quicker!" It was one of the many Grant-Joneses that Theta had never met, but couldn't possibly have mistaken for anyone else. There were weapons strewn around their feet where they'd been forced to set them once they were surrounded, but he didn't try to grab one; the words were defiant and rallying but not an immediate threat. His parents had raised him well.
The Master was considerably less impressed. Looking almost bored, he flicked his laser screwdriver out of an inside pocket. There was a high-pitched whirr and a flash of red light, and Theta silent screaming protest was matched by Jo's cry of "Silas!" as the man twitched and crumpled. His sister started forward to catch his body, but Sam—moving faster than Theta would have expected of anyone else—grabbed her first, locking an arm around her waist and a hand over her mouth and pinning her in place. It was almost cruel. It almost certainly saved her life.
"You know," the Master drawled, "I somehow doubt that. Your little… what is this, your idea of a strike force? Earth's deadliest assassins: two-washed up tree-huggers and their brood? And a schoolteacher," he amended. "What is it with those, Theta? Though you seem to have lost that one rather quickly. And rudely. Blood all over the hall."
"You didn't have to do that," Theta whispered. Ey knew ey should be quiet, knew there was nothing ey could do anymore for them, they'd come here to kill the Master, to foil his plans. (And oh, well done Jo, Sam, to have made it this far!) Ey was so proud of them, of their courage and nerve to have tried but now ey had to watch them die pointlessly and ey didn't want that to happen.
"Theta," said the Master lowly, and there was no mistaking the warning in his voice despite the otherwise light tone. "It's nice to see you again, Ms Grant!"
Jo's face was twisted up in pain, her grip white on Cliff's hand, but her voice was hard and clear. "I'm afraid I can't say likewise," she said.
Theta couldn't see the Master's face, his tight grip on eir frills forcing eir gaze forward (and how ey'd love to have the same range of motion in eir retinas as humans had, as ey'd once had with eir adapted shimmer), but ey could well imagine the caricature of a scowl that had formed on it, like a cartoon character's frown. "Well that's hardly polite of you, Ms Grant," he said.
"It's Mrs Jones now," she replied shortly, and it hurt to see her like this, to see her angry. She never ought to have been.
"Oh, how convenient! See, I've already got one of those."
"Have a collection going, have you?" said Sam, so conversationally Theta couldn't tell if it was intended to be biting or sincere.
"Of a sort, Samantha, of a sort. Anyway, I don't need two Mrs Joneses around. Or Mr Joneses, for that matter," he added, nodding to Cliff. "That would only be confusing. So that makes the question of what to do with you all rather easier. Theta," he said, fingers carding through eir frills. "Say goodbye."
Theta didn't respond. Ey was listening to something else entirely.
There was a roaring in eir ears, growing louder and louder every moment like a flash flood. And something behind it, chasing it, a shockwave after the sound of an explosion, something huge and perfect and intensely powerful that ey could just barely begin to sense and it was coming and ey laughed with the fierce, contagious joy of it.
"Theta," the Master snapped, and then he froze, and Theta knew he'd finally sensed it too.
His face transformed into the kind of rage Theta hadn't seen even after the ibuprofen. "No," he hissed, and then "No! That's not possible! What did you do?" and nobody had to answer him because that was when the shockwave caught up.
The TARDIS snapped her chains like a caged eagle breaking free, shrieking with rage and pain and triumph, spreading wings of flame and fury that were hot and vicious and gold again in eir mind and it hurt but it was the pain of a bone being put back in place, the pain of a long-withheld truth finally told. For a moment she revelled in being free, stretching her wings and lifting her head to feel the sky again, and Theta fancied ey could almost taste the Vortex on eir tongue.
And then the moment was over, and she opened her claws.
The Toclafane were the first to fall, sparking as they swarmed around the Valiant and disintegrating before eir eyes, dragged away to where their pain had never happened. Wind, temporal and physical, began to pick up around them, swirling in a swiftly-intensifying spiral around the TARDIS at the heart of the Valiant and the echoing groan of shifting Time came up, loud as the roar of engines and the most beautiful sound Theta had ever heard.
Timelines had been ripped out of their rightful places in failed, long forgotten realities and melded into an abomination, the reflection of the Web of Time as shown in a carnival mirror, to support the paradox. Now that it had been broken, they began to disentangle themselves. Some of them unravelled entirely, having nothing to latch onto now; those had only formed after the Not-Web had been created, a natural progression that now couldn't possibly be maintained, and the TARDIS and Theta alike felt an incorporeal weight lifted, the Web of Time made intact once more for the first time in a span/never/forever and they laughed together with mingling, desperate, ethereal voices in the higher dimensions.