Something cried out in the time vortex. Many things lived there and many things died there, although some were trapped somewhere in between. But this time it was different. This time it was something like her.
The TARDIS who called herself Guardian looked the other way, but for a moment a faint paradox remained, echoing through time. It ate away at her, a grandfather paradox she was not a part of. It burned at the edges of her code and attacked her youngest pilot with such furiosity that he cried.
He could not see what it was.
Guardian latched onto time, digging her heels in. She would not be swept away. Still, deep in her heart, she knew she should not exist. She knew why. Due to a ruthless alien dictatorship that subdued the planet Earth, the planet never reached spacefaring status. The colony of Ordifica was never created, and the woman known as Laura Tobin never lived. She did not join Faction Paradox. She had no hand in the Second War in Heaven. The Type 102 TARDIS never came to be. Neither did the Type 120. There was no War. The Type 120 had no reason to be built.
The ship that should not have been reached desperately for another justification for her own existence.
The master of Earth could be defeated. There was a chance. The woman named Laura Tobin, however, had lost a single ancestor during the decimation of the human race.
The likelihood decreased.
A member of the survey team deployed to the planet Mordee perished.
A boy cried.
At long last, the echo faded and time seemed to have righted its course. The pain eased and Guardian struggled to regain the once-steady rhythm of her engines. She steadied her engines and tried to ignore the distant screams of a paradox machine.
There would be many paradox machines on Gallifrey. She could ignore one more. It howled from somewhere nearby, fractured tendrils of space-time feasting upon it slowly. It would be devoured long after the heat death of the universe, but for now it spent an eternity in pain.
Guardian helped calm Angelo. He had been abandoned due to the dissonance, the simple fact that nothing was as it should be and no one but her could stand it. She was, of course, tethered to the world at the same point. Too many timelines depended on the survival of the third planet in the Sol system, and both ship and pilot had the misfortune of being points upon them.
She prayed that the renegade would do his job and fix the fragile thing upon which her entire being hinged.
She waited for her perception of space-time to delinearize and right itself, but waiting would not help. Waiting was linear.
The ship fired up the food synthesizers and served dinner. She made sure it was big enough to satisfy the girls who had grown tired from the turbulence, then sent them to bed early. She kept the boy in her console room, letting him lean on her central column below the controls where it was dark, safe, and warm. The feeling of time-travel seemed to soothe him. He would always have a traveller's heart, and that of a Gallifreyan as well.
That was something they shared.
He slept.
She did not.
No matter how hard Guardian tried to ignore it, the pain would not stop. The screams would not cease. True, she was a military model. She could bear temporal warfare, but this was not war. She was being cruel, she knew it, and the ache of paradox would not ease without intervention.
She cursed herself for her predictability.
-=0=-
The ship landed near the source of the paradox. She had made an attempt to compensate for her failing systems, but she still needed to land within the threshold of the temporal anomaly. The landing was rough, her footing unstable. The air smelled of soot and squalor. Her systems, despite the paradox machine, recognized herself as nonexistent in the primary timeline. She redirected her weaponry away from herself. She did so over and over again as she stumbled down the alleyway and toward her target. Her thoughts were overwritten by protocol. "Enemy paradox machine recognized. Rectifying timeline perspective."
"Manual override." She felt herself be blocked by a failsafe.
Her weapons aimed inward.
"Jettison all occupants."
The children gathered around her, worried and lost.
Angelo spoke first. "This isn't Earth, right?"
"Of course not," she lied.
Angelo reached for the time and place. It was no more than a decade from when he had last been there, on Solexi.
The line of ruined buildings they stood between was a part of the planet Earth.
He thought of the future. He refused to cry.
He reached for the timeship's hand. It was calloused and rough, and he found the honest detail of it all somewhat alarming.
Guardian forced a second front upon herself, a mask of certainty and strength. She held his hand as her cloister bell clanged, and together they walked.
They were an odd group. Guardian showed all her signs of damage externally, burns evident on her worn black jacket, unsightly rips in her jeans. A thin scar ran across her cheek. She was too tired to alter her appearance.
Her children seemed to be one of the few untouched things in the dismal, apocalyptic landscape that surrounded them. Their faces were clean, their clothes were tidy. She had made sure of that, but it didn't matter now.
Something shifted in the shadows.
She pulled her pilots closer, but did not let them inside. She did not trust the dark, but she did not trust herself any more.
A figure emerged from the shadows. It was a woman standing with eyes wide in a mixture of fright and amazement. Her gaze locked with theirs.
"Y-You have children?" she asked, although she did not seem to expect an answer.
Guardian did not reply. She only pulled them closer, hiding them in the folds of her long coat as she revived the streetlight above them.
The shadows seemed to age her. "They stole our children. They killed our children, all our little children…" she muttered, mad with grief.
A rifle cocked. "Get back."
Talitha blinked at the sudden brightness. Guardian had moved to stand between them and the distraught human, her body a shield. In the flicker of a shattered streetlight, she could see the TARDIS's current form clearly for the first time. She was dressed in the ragged clothes of a Gallifreyan renegade, foreign yet familiar.
The woman backed down.
Someone ran towards her, his hands held out in a placating gesture. "I'm sorry! Th-that's my wife." He made it to the woman's side, out of breath and exhausted. Despite his fear, he was able to look his wife in the eyes and speak to her patiently. "Emily, get inside. Emily, I told you, there's Toclafane out here. You won't find him out here…"
He sighed, defeated. "You too," he told them. "It's past curfew."
They followed him.
-=0=-
The barracks were warm, a welcome respite from the dark. The press of bodies, however, did nothing to calm Guardian's nerves. She redirected her weaponry. Fear would not serve her here.
The humans seemed interested in the strangers, showing a mix of curiosity and caution. These were hard times.
They shared a mistrust.
"I thought the Toclafane killed all the ones that were too young to work," someone whispered. "How did they escape?"
The conversation grew to a constant hum, a chorus of 'not fair's and 'where's.
They gave no answers.
She pulled them closer. "Stay with me," she said. "I'll try to get us out of here as soon as I can."
Emily hung close to them as well. The people seemed to have come to the understanding that the timeship had found the woman, but they did not know under what circumstances. It was for the best. So long as they were seen as heroes, they would not be the villains.
To maintain this persona and the husband's silence, Guardian humored the woman, listening to her idle chatter. She had come to the conclusion that the woman was delusional, and understandably so.
She had lost her only son.
Understandably, the woman was in denial. She told her about how her baby was a little further back, near the kitchen of what was once a house and was now a workers' barracks.
"Oh really?" she pressed. "What does your little boy look like?"
"Oh, he's just the sweetest thing," she told her. "His eyes are grey, but I'm sure they'll change. He'll look just like his father. Do you want to hold him?"
Guardian smiled, making sure that her facial interface could handle the strain of such a lie. She held out her arms and received a warm towel in return.
Someone whispered in her ear so that the mourning mother would not hear. "You don't have to play along," he told her. "She's been like this for nearly a month."
"Have you taken her to a psychiatrist?"
"The nearest one is in the missile fields. There's just no access. At this rate, I'm not sure if there's anything left of her."
Guardian looked down at the towel in her arms. She realized she had been rocking it.
"Let's go find Mindy. She's in charge here, so it's best you be introduced."
They went upstairs. They found that the man's name was Carter, not like Randolph Carter, but now that Angelo mentioned it, he wasn't sure.
Mindy lived in a small room on the second floor, one she shared with four others and the papers that documented a number of transactions and trade deals between their building and the others around it. The most frequently mentioned word was "firewood".
She smiled. "Thank you for coming, Miss…"
"Hayward. Elisa Hayward." She shook her hand.
"Passing through cities is always dangerous, I know. But so long as you lie low you can stay in our barracks, I promise."
Guardian thought the woman's words were kind, so long as they were sincere. She took the time before any inevitable betrayal to form a plan of action.
One of the humans ruffled Angelo's hair.
They descended the stairs.
The building was warm, but uncomfortably so. It was filled to the brim with people, the psychic clutter nearly overwhelming.
Bernadette looked around. Guardian was holding a woman's hand, wiping her tears, telling her that it was okay to cry.
Still, she was not the only source of pain. The people were hungry, tired, and hopeless, but something in Bernadette told her that they were more than that. Still, they clung to what little they had. Still, they had the slightest bit of firewood that could ignite into true hope for something better, so long as they found the proper spark.
They were strong, they were unbeatable, and above all they were resilient.
It was warm in the overcrowded building, uncomfortably so, but at least they were still alive.
As the last working clock in the house approached five, three young strangers slept on a woman's rolled-up coat. She kept watch, listening for movement on the streets below. While they slept, the soldiers came.
It started with the usual patrols, then reinforcements arrived. Boots thudded on weathered asphalt. Shouts came from down the street, muted by walls and worry.
The people checked that the windows were boarded, which they were. They checked that the doors were locked, which they were. The lookout waited at the mail slot, a makeshift weapon in hand. Guardian went to his side, her rifle at the ready.
A voice rang out. "Martha? Martha Jo-ones!" it sang. "I can see you! Out you come, little girl. Come and meet your Master."
Someone gasped. Outside, no one replied. It had only been moments, but the man was restless. He ordered his soldiers to take aim. The Toclafane whirred, ready to slice through human flesh.
The children were awake now, still huddled together. They clung to one another as if their lives depended on it.
Angelo was shivering.
The Master's voice was clear and direct. He spoke with the confidence of a killer. "I'll give the order, unless you surrender. Ask yourself: What would the Doctor do?"
"The Doctor," Talitha whispered. "He's after the Doctor."
Angelo thought of a man with floppy brown hair and a red balloon. He didn't seem worth the effort of sending out a small squadron of soldiers. Then again, the world was crueler now, and colder too.
The paradox machine sent out the slightest warning. It was him. Guardian knew that whoever stood outside was responsible for putting one of her own through the unimaginable. He was out there, dressed like Death's right hand, taunting, cruel.
The thought made her sick, but she was already injured. She was bleeding, artron energy leaking from her engines as they primed to combust the second her focus slipped.
She leaned heavily against the wall.
"Hayward, give me your gun."
Carter was beside her, something dangerous in his eyes. "I'm going to shoot those metal bastards out of the sky."
She looked at him, realizing what he planned to do. "Your wife needs you. You can't leave her like that."
"And let those monsters live?"
"Vengeance will not serve you, and neither will bullets," she told him. "They're metal."
Carter laughed, a bitter thing. His eyes were sad, but still he smiled. "Don't argue with me, girl. You're dying. That's why you came here, isn't it? Isn't it?"
She finally recognized his expression as one of pity.
"No one in the right of mind would bring a child into a world like this one. You were looking for desperate people, people who would care for them in exchange for the slightest bit of hope." He held out a hand. "Let me finish this. There's no saving me, Elisa. Let's all take comfort in one last horrid thing."
She shouldered her rifle and sighed. "Sometimes I wish I could, but there's just no time."
The door opened. The Toclafane entered first, creatures of nightmare. Then came their Master, the one and only. He eyed the one who called herself Hayward, seeing her for what she was, seeing her every weakness.
Fear gripped her like a vice. She aimed her rifle, careful and true, so that a single bullet could pierce through both of his hearts. But the Time Lord had more monsters at his command, and he ordered them to advance with glee.
She screamed. Paradox and anachronism never hurt her as much as it did now. Earth should not harbor weapons of such caliber at this point in time. Nothing should have been able to breach her hull.
But they had.
Her form had appeared fragile, but it wasn't. She had used reinforced steel in addition to her usual shielding. She had been impenetrable, and yet the Toclafane had cut through her like butter, searing her skin and slicing her metal to reveal the wiring beneath.
She held onto her inner dimensions. She did not break, although her body had been split neatly in two, just above the waist.
Startled humans covered their mouths, covered their faces, and covered other people's eyes. They covered as if they could hide the damage with their hands, as if they could make it nothing more than a nightmare when they mustered the courage to look again.
Blood painted the floor.
It was alright. She had expected pain. She pulled herself together, forcing herself up onto her knees. She knew that she should not exist, but she forced herself to go on.
The Master clapped. "Impressive, don't you think?" He turned to the frightened masses, expectant. Slowly, they clapped. They clapped out of fear. Not only were they afraid of him, but they were afraid of her. They knew that both of them were near-immortal, inhuman, and that nothing was more frightening than something that could not be killed.
Her children stood at the top of the stairs, watching her struggle to solder herself back together in a pool of her own blood.
The air smelled of iron and tears.
She wished she hadn't loved them so much. She wished that Talitha would not cling to the banister so tightly, that she could not sense the damage sustained.
"You are braver than you know," the timeship told them.
"You are stronger than you think," Talitha finished.
To all others it would seem like one last meaningful look, but between the four of them, it was a message, unspoken. Still, it was intercepted.
He locked eyes with the three.
For an odd moment, Emily realized that the Master's smile was just as it had seemed on the television nearly a year ago. Still, she did not let him pass. She did not let him go up the stairs.
He reached into a pocket of his dark jacket and removed a small, slender object.
That was when she knew she was dead. That was when the wounded weapon screamed, losing her grip on what little self-control she had left. She screamed for the mortal woman to run as the Master swung round and fired his laser screwdriver.
Talithayevestrandaveri covered her eyes.
-=0=-
The systems of Type 120 Model Number 347 rebooted. She retrieved her backup data and remembered what pain was.
The man before her did not care.
"Honestly, who put you up to this?" the Master inquired. He was impatient as always. "Was it Romana, with her bleeding hearts? Who else would protect a savage so ferociously?"
"Someone with a heart," she replied. Her voice seemed strained, unfamiliar to her.
He pouted, taunting. "You know you are meant for something more. Or are you a slave to what they put in your head?"
She said nothing.
"Oh, that's it, the drums of war." He smiled at her conspiratorially. "I could take them away, for a price."
"You cannot buy me," she hissed.
"You can't run from them, you know," he told her. "Someday it will overpower you, and you'll be reduced to no more than a weapon. It'd be a waste, I think, to slaughter something so spirited. Just look at yourself. You thought you taught yourself how to love, but you still sacrifice as readily as a soldier. Admit it, you'll always be at Gallifrey's beck and call. Can't you feel the pull?"
It was too hard to ignore. Her engines wheezed, fighting against her brakes and better judgement. Her sisters needed her on the battlefield, to tear at time and remake it in Gallifrey's design. She needed to fight the urge to fight.
The Master knelt beside her, his voice no more than a whisper. "You see, I too am trapped here, but you can set us free. I can modify your systems better than anyone, and we can travel beyond the grasp of Gallifrey, to the frontiers of time. Just promise me one thing."
"What?"
"Promise me you won't look back."
She looked him in the eyes, undaunted. She could see the surface of his thoughts, how they spoke of a face that was somewhat familiar. "She's not yours, Lord Master," she told him. "You can't have her. You can't have any of my pilots."
He looked almost offended. "Bernadette is my granddaughter. It's my right to take custody of her."
"She's not yours."
"If you don't believe me, you can ask her."
She scowled at him. "You know what I meant."
He ignored her, nodding encouragingly towards the doorway. "Go on. Ask."
Guardian knew that there was truth in what he said, but she still called out, if only to hear a reply.
"Bernadette?"
"Yes?" The girl walked cautiously to the timeship's side.
"Bernadette…" Her voice showed more desperation than she wished it to, so she asked in a different way. The telepathic bond between them as ship and pilot was weak, but workable.
"Yes," the girl replied. Something else came with the word, the slightest glimpse of a memory.
"We are not our families," Bernadette's mother had said. This was the so-called family she had been referring to.
Bernadette had nowhere to run. She knew this, so she took it in stride.
She was not alone. She still had her two best friends, Talitha and Angelo. She still had them, even if the Master only kept them near to keep her from doing anything reckless.
He still had another hold over her.
The Master had offered her something as well. He had offered her power. He could teach her to use her telepathic abilities to their full potential, to never feel helpless again. He said he could teach her to be strong, so long as she listened.
She thought of how Talitha had fallen when the TARDIS had been hit. She thought of how easily her companion had been taken from her.
She thought of how she was being used.
"Can you hear it?" he had asked. "The drumming?"
They were close, only inches away in his office.
His nails clicked against the side of the chair, a steady 1234, 1234, 1234, a maddening pulse that would not cease.
"Stop it!"
She covered her ears, but it did not stop. It was in her head.
Bernadette thought of how she was being used, and she felt helpless.
-0-
She broke free after a few hours of mental struggle. Her thoughts were her own once more. In the end, it had been Talitha who had saved her, pulling her back, helping her through. Despite this, she no longer felt helpless. Even when the friendly presence shrank away, she stood her ground.
She was not alone.
Someone was at the door of the dead man's room she had found herself in, one that appeared to have once belonged to a government employee.
"Why don't you join us for breakfast?" the Master called. "It's going to be an eventful day."
She went, not out of fear, but out of hope. Perhaps she could find a weakness in him, if given a little more time.
-0-
In the emptiness of the dining room, Bernadette felt her courage waver.
The servants were all slaves. She could tell from their tired eyes and the disdain upon their faces. Bernadette tried to hide her fear, the fear that the man who sat across from her could do the same to her friends. Her friends were all she had, but now she was alone.
"So, how does the old House Oakdown fair these days?" the Master inquired.
"Poorly," Bernadette replied. "You dragged our name through the mud."
He smirked. "So, I suppose that means my blood runs through your veins."
For a moment, she wished she could will her own pulse to stop, to stop the spread of the infection. But she could not fight the truth. "There have been no new Cousins since you killed your first wife."
The Master laughed. "Killed? No, that was only once, maybe three times? But it certainly wasn't twelve. Little Vatusia was always one for exaggeration."
"My mother did not exaggerate," Bernadette could feel her blood boil.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I nearly forgot that I drowned her the fourth time. She never seemed to please me."
Lucy Saxon did not cry, but there seemed to be something in her black eye.
Bernadette could not help but notice how much they looked alike.
The Master had always viewed family as no more than a name to make use of, for better or for worse. He did not deserve to be a husband, a father, or a grandfather.
Bernadette would not forget that, and she would not forgive.
Vatusia had always said the words "We are not our families" as if they would banish her past to where it belonged, to somewhere so dark and hidden that she would never need see it again. Yet there it was, plain as day before the eyes of the one person her mother wanted to spare from it.
Her grandfather smiled at her from across the table, a smile so cruel that she wished she could disappear.
Seeing that she could provide him no more entertainment, he sent the girl to her room.
He kept his demeanor cheerful despite her frown, revelling in the pointless pain he was causing.
"Get ready!" he told her. "There's only half an hour before I execute a little human. Consider it a present, won't you? You'll finally have the chance to see our House at its best."
The door locked.
Bernadette tried her best to distract herself from her tears. She ran an idle hand across the desk that sat beside the window. To her surprise, it didn't have a single speck of dust on it. The world below was in shambles, but this insignificant slab of wood had been spared. Inside the drawers, documents lay undisturbed. They spoke of simple things. They discussed the maintenance of peace and of borders, the protection of allies and nations, and of how to speak to strangers.
She started to cry.
Sometimes, people were just cruel for cruelty's sake.
-=0=-
Angelo tried to humor the Toclafane. He had heard stories of them in the past, but knew that they were nothing but stories. Whatever was before him was of the Master's creation, but it was not him.
It could be reasoned with.
From the other side of the bars of the Valiant's brig, two Toclafane hovered restlessly. They swooped back and forth, blades spinning, only to sink back into their sheathes.
Finally, the boy snapped. "What do you want?"
The Toclafane paused their flight. "The mister master said that we can't kill you yet. When can we kill you?"
"Why would you want to kill me?" Angelo asked.
"Because it's fun!" one said.
"Because we're bored," answered the other. "The mister master said he'd help us build our empire!"
"One hundred trillion years! He'll help us escape the darkness, the cold."
Despite his better judgement, Angelo found himself leaning closer. He found that he was curious. "The darkness? What darkness?"
"The end of everything," they told him. "We must run."
"One hundred trillion years," he mused. "You're from the future, the end of time itself. What are you?"
"What are you?" one repeated.
Angelo's face went red. It was only taunting him, he knew, but he couldn't hide the embarrassment that came with not truly knowing.
The other saw that it caused him pain, so it joined in. "What are you?" it asked, over and over. It seemed to delight in the newfound notion that it could cause hurt without touch, that it could maim without blades.
It was a game to them.
Talitha pulled the boy back. "Don't let them get to you," she told him. "They're just bullies."
It was true, but Angelo still wished he could fight back.
-0-
Talitha had lost Bernadette. She could only ever seem to find her if she wanted to be found, and now she was hiding. She wished she knew what exactly she was hiding from.
Outside the small barred window, the dawn sun rose. It painted the skies red, then pink, then faded slowly into blue. It looked almost pretty, except for the slowly assembling horde of Toclafane.
"It's time!" their guards said, whirring with glee. Talitha could tell that they were eager to join the others. Soon they hovered away down the hall, leaving the two children to whatever chance had in store for them.
"We will fly and blaze and slice!" they chanted, voices fading as they grew distant, and growing as more joined the group outside.
Bernadette was hiding from Talitha. She thought it was for the best that her friend did not know what horrors she was facing. They were out of time, each and every one of them.
It was time for the execution. A clock was counting down, one that could mean the end of everything for all Bernadette knew. She didn't know the extent of Earth's armaments, but it must have been vast. She could see it on the monster's face.
The Master was filled with glee, more animated than anyone at any Otherstide. True, he may have killed millions, but to him this opportunity was the greatest gift of all. There was nothing the man wanted more than to witness death up close, that, and to be the center of all attention.
Unfortunately for him, his victim had stolen the spotlight. The woman before them spoke of guns and rebellion, of the power of stories and silly lies. They were told with a confidence that seemed to suit a battle won, a confidence that no one should have. Bernadette watched in wonder as Martha Jones made the Master afraid.
On the floor below, something far more mundane began to happen.
A guard watched the proceedings carefully from her station beside the door. It was an interesting scene, one that had commanded enough of the Master's attention to allow her to escape his watchful eye.
Sometimes she wondered if the man loved excitement more than his own freedom. He seemed to be walking into a trap without a care in the world.
She would have called him cruel, but that would mark her as a hypocrite. She had roughed Jack Harkness up a bit, just for show. She had no reasons, just a mild disdain for Torchwood and the time agency. But the Master had always been a liar, a trickster, a man who would twist wishes just for fun.
Guardian could see right through him, but he could not see through her disguise.
Now he wasn't even looking. There were far more pressing matters to be dealt with, such as the world below wishing a bit too hard. It wished for an angel.
The figure before him was radiant, inhuman. It was angelic and filled with the illusion of infinite patience. It had glimpsed infinity, so the charade was simple. It knew what it looked like.
"I forgive you," the Doctor said.
The Master could barely speak, but Bernadette wanted to scream.
"You can't!"
The Master's disloyal aides held her back and covered her mouth. Even now, they feared his rage. They also feared the unknown horror before their eyes that demanded mercy.
Bernadette wasn't quite sure who was right, but it didn't feel fair. It wasn't fair.
The Master uncovered his face. His eyes were wild. "My children," he said. He was speaking of the Toclafane.
Bernadette understood now. She understood the look on Lucy's face. It was not a stare of horror, but of disgust. She was now free to say, however she wished, that she had always known that any man who called himself "master" was worth less than the dirt beneath her feet.
She did not deserve to be downtrodden.
Bernadette now knew the face of righteous hatred. It looked a bit too much like her own.
The Doctor turned to a man with a thousand bullet holes in his shirt. "Captain!" he called, "The paradox machine!"
The man motioned for the guards to follow. Guardian went. Finally, she a chance to fight. She let the sound of alarms crash over her as she ran through the halls of the ship, gun in hand. Finally, she felt alive.
The Toclafane painted the sky black. Bullets and blades flew through the air.
She let the captain die over and over as he made his way towards the TARDIS. She gave cover fire, but she had already gotten what she wanted. She knew where her target was. She overrode the TARDIS doors' lock and let Harkness run in with guns blazing. Bullets would fix nothing, but they would stop the machine from sustaining the paradox.
They could turn back time.
Despite what had been coded as her better judgement, she couldn't resist the opportunity. She would cover every mistake of the past few hours and leave the nightmare where it belonged.
She pulled herself from the ground where she had fallen, downed by a flurry of steel, then moved down the hall undaunted. Bernadette had already escaped in the confusion and was attacking a cell door with a length of pipe.
Guardian wasted no time shooting off the lock for her. She would do anything for her pilots. She gathered them up into her arms and fled.
All around them, time flew by in reverse as the timeship plunged headlong into the storm.
All was quiet. It was two minutes past eight in the morning, but the children were still asleep, tucked away safely in their beds. The central column of the TARDIS rose and fell slowly, sending a gentle hum through the halls.
It was two minutes past eight in the morning. A single guard stood beside the entrance to the room, her face not her own. She was a man now, soft but self-assured. she had borrowed his face when he fell to the ground beside her, his compatriots too preoccupied to take note of his death.
Now the guard stood at a dead man's post, waiting to see who would make the first move.
The first person to take a stand was Francine Jones. A year of anguish threatened to bubble to the surface, but she let it simmer down. The effort of it all made her hands shudder and the gun in her hand shake until she put it down at the Doctor's insistence.
Francine Jones once had anger, but she had buried it. One too many had tried to tell her and her kin that it was unjustified, despite the insults added to age-old injury. Her anger had been smothered by the repetition of the undying platitude "hate breeds hate", an old home remedy for righteous anger. Mrs. Jones had been taught that injustice was dead and if she dared feel it, she should be happy with what she had, even if it was a frilly maid's outfit. The Doctor forced her to put her weapon down.
The warship was surprised. In her time the old general had not aligned himself against violence, especially if it meant the endangerment of peace. She would have expected him to call for the killing blow.
She supposed that now it was her duty to do the job for him.
#347 raised her gun, then thought better of it. She motioned to Lucy Saxon.
Lucy had not been raised with the same qualms as Mrs. Jones. Lucy remembered power, and she would not hesitate to take it back.
There was no debate, no thought, and nothing behind her eyes. Lucy Saxon took the gun from the floor and fired.
One guard turned away and slipped out of view.
-0-
The timeship's passengers were fast asleep when the shot rang out. All that had tormented them was dead and gone, so they could sleep well without any memory of it.
Guardian could not deny her jealousy. She had done something terrible, but there was no one left to forgive her.
It wasn't the killing that bothered her. No, she could rest easy with that. She could rest easy even if she had the blood of an entire planet on her hands. Killing was what she was made to do.
But caring was something that she had been taught, and something she had so terribly failed to do.
She would never abandon her pilots, not until the day she died. But she had died. She had died on the Valiant, she had died in the barracks. She would have died a thousand times if not for the fact that she was near-indestructible. She was so accustomed to laying down her life that it had not occurred to her just how close she had come to death at the hands of her own systems.
She wouldn't leave them. She would never leave them. She wanted to tell them this, but now it felt like a lie, a promise she couldn't keep.
So Guardian made no promises, not even to herself.