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She has to shut her eyes against the last however-long stretch for fear it’ll disorient her further, hypnotising her with the shifting landscape until she collapses. Every part of her is bloody and hurting and confused, a mélange of sensations that she doesn’t come close to having the words for. Her gun-arm hangs uselessly from the gap in her shoulder, a dizzying void of blackness leaking out of it like blood.
She grits her teeth. Eyes shut. Feet forward.
Just a little further, repeated like a prayer. Not long now. Come on, that’s it. A mother’s words, almost. In another universe maybe.
She makes it through the doors of the Cruciform, lurching wildly into the marble reception, smearing blood and blackness all over the gleaming white. Blurred figures in neat, starched uniforms move towards her- pinafores, her mind notices distantly; pinafores means ‘40’s, maybe, ‘20’s if she’s unlucky, but not the 2080’s, not this time at least. It’s only then, sagging against the walls, that she finally gives up and lets unconsciousness take hold.
***
The Eleven Day Empire is the Faction’s stronghold; days means nothing here. Still, she’s been time-travelling in all sorts of ways for long enough, and she judges it's been at least a Shxan week by the time she starts getting antsy.
She’s not used to staying in one place for long. Not anymore.
It could be worse, though, all things considered. She’s been patched up well enough, the raw Time infecting her arm carefully removed; and the nanobots that hum incongruously in the air have taken care of all the superficial injuries, although at her request they’ve left alone the scars. She likes to have a reminder of everything that's happened, a physical record of all she’s done and all that she’s survived.
Last time, she’d been put in a hospital in the Marrita Ahn quarter, with all the gleaming sterile whiteness of the late 2080s, all glowing photo-panels and mental entertainment complexes. She’d woken up aching and confused; it hadn’t exactly been a leap to conclude that she was back in the Facility, trapped again in eternal waiting, and she’d reacted, she thought, fairly reasonably, all things considered. Apparently, there had been talk of feeding her to the Unkindness, for all the damage to the Agents- and timelines- she’d caused, but nothing had come of it while she’d been there, and she’d slipped back out as a stowaway on one of the Timeships back into normal space-time at the first opportunity. She’d always assumed Father Kreiner had had something to do with it, and her indebtedness made her deeply uneasy; but it was hardly as though she had many other allies, let alone powerful ones, and for all his title of Father, he didn’t seem to have many either.
The Cruciform is comfortingly distinct, though- the red brick walls gape with large sash-windows, and the air is suffused with the strange chemical smell of Earth hospitals, synthesised as part of some strange attempt to add a sense of verisimilitude to the whole endeavour. As though disinfectant and 50’s uniforms and sponge puddings for dessert somehow made up for the nanobots and holo-scanners and anachronistic med-tech.
A knock at the door. A formality more than anything, a gesture at privacy that she refuses to entertain; she stays silent. Under the buzzing of nanobots, she can hear muffled voices, arguing.
“Hello?” She calls warily, once it becomes apparent whoever's at the door won't enter otherwise. “You can come in-”
The door swings open, propelled by its own shadow, and the stricken orderly’s protests die down as their futility becomes obvious. She discerns- or thinks she discerns- a significant look behind the hidden eyes of their bone masks, so she gives them her best reassuring smile and a thumbs up. They look unconvinced- she hasn’t exactly had much practice- but slink away, clearly beaten.
The figure before her is familiar, in a way few things in her life are, and she almost smiles at the sight, despite herself. The longer he stands at the foot of her bed, red cloak flowing down to the linoleum floor, he becomes less impressive and more awkward; the harsh mechanism of his breathing apparatus echoes strangely in his chest, in the room.
“Father Kreiner,” she says eventually, when it's clear he isn’t going to start; “You come here often, then?”
An exhale like a punctured tire. Half-sigh, half-laugh. His left hand reaches half-way to the jaws of his skull-mask, before he evidently thinks better of it, and lets it drop.
The first thing he says to her is the first thing he always says to her, a desperate edge to his voice despite the mechanical limitations.
“Any luck?"
He means: Any luck tracking down the Doctor? Have you found any trace of him?
He asks the same question every time, and her answer is no different; the fact that she’d long ago given up revenge as lost cause is immaterial. She’s a liability that means nothing to him, except that she’s a link to the Doctor, still- it gives her some leverage, at least, and fuck knows she needs it.
“No,” she says, tone careful; and then because she can’t help herself: “Although once in a while a hello would be nice. What about you, any luck?”
As a question, it's completely pointless, and she knows it, and so does he. “Would I be here if I had.”; is his only response, mild, and he turns to fumble in the pockets of his robe. She tenses beneath the thin bedcovers, and waits.
Eventually, he speaks.
“I believe when visiting hospitals, flowers are traditional?” he says, deep embarrassment evident in both his voice and his gesture. And then, in a move that she can only describe as unexpected, he brandishes an untidy bouquet towards her.
They’re crocuses, only half in-bloom, lilac and fragrant, bound tightly with string. Their stems leave a sticky residue on her fingers from where they’ve been clumsily severed.
“Oh,” is all she can say, surprised; “I, um. Thank you.”
He bows his head slightly in acknowledgment; she reaches over, stiffly, and deposits the flowers in a glass of water, awkwardly faffing around with them for a few moments as though arranging them nicely.
Crocuses. Living things don’t grow in the Eleven Day Empire, in this strange pocket of stolen, frozen time. He must’ve gone specially to find them; and to Earth, too. The purple is almost obscenely garish against the red-brown of the brick walls; this world is full of browns and reds, white bones and deep black shadows. There are no purple flowers here. And yet-
The unknown quantity makes her uncomfortable. Things that she knows: Father Kriener travelled with the Doctor, but not her Doctor; Father Kriener is a relatively high-ranking member of the Faction; Father Kreiner seems to find her useful enough, at present, to meet her whenever she ends up here, whilst tolerating her lack of commitment to the Faction’s cause; Father Kreiner seems to enjoy her company, to the extent that she can divine any positive emotion from his mechanised, bitter voice; Father Kreiner wants to kill the Doctor, and once he does that he may as well be just shadow-and-bones left.
What she does not know includes many, many things, but right now, top of the list are:
What does Father Kreiner want?
What does he hope to achieve by giving her these Earth flowers, deliberately and obviously sacrilegious. Is it a sign? A threat? Is he trying to frame her as part of some plot? Is he trying to make a stand?
How much does he know about what happened to her? And, equally important: how much is she willing to let him know?
She voices none of this, but says carefully, once he’s settled down in a wooden chair, robes pooling awkwardly around him like blood; “Earth flowers?”
Whirr, click. A noise she can’t make out. A collision of organic and mechanic. She’s grown used to his voice, more or less, but it still unnerves her; she’s tried, but she can never properly recreate its sound in her head.
“From Earth?” she prompts. As lightly as she can, she adds: “I haven’t been back there for a long time.” Her voice does not waver, and the quiet melancholy she feels is so deeply subdued as to barely be there at all. “I can barely remember what it was like. But I remember these. Crocuses. Bursting out of the ground at the beginning of every spring. By the duck pond, without any ducks.” She allows herself a small, secret smile.
“Yes.” he says eventually, looking out of the window. Whirr, click. “From Earth.”
Talkative, she thinks sarcastically. Why bother coming to see me if you don’t want to talk. But she keeps quiet; she needs information, yes, but as always, she’s intimately, painfully aware of the precariousity of her position should she make a wrong move. In the Faction's heartland, taking advantage of their care; and yet, she’s not Faction, and has never quite committed to being so. She aligns herself with them when it suits her, and works against them when that does too, and she suspects that it's not only her usefulness to their cause that keeps them tolerating her.
So she bites her tongue, with hard-earned patience, and follows his gaze, peering out the window herself. Everything about the Faction’s stronghold is a living, shifting paradox; the view is new every time.
Against the burning red sky, the cut-glass skyscrapers of the 2000s threaten to pierce the clockwork bulk of Neo-Victorian airships, which hover placidly above the architecture like bees. Imposing itself on the horizon, she sees the Battersea Power Station, an electric cathedral of brick and steel flanked by a burnt orange facsimile of the Kensington Gardens. And behind it all, as always, rising impossibly high in the distance, looms the Tower of London, ever watchful. At dawn, and dusk, when the shadows are longest, and at high noon when there are none to be seen at all, you can see elongated wisps of shadow, the silhouettes of the Unkindness, as they flit between realities, and feast on the flesh of the to-be-born and to-be-dead.
Time and space, ever-shifting, ever-blurring, folded in on itself, self-consuming like a temporal-spacial ouroboros. Geography means about as little to the Faction as Time; even as she watches, the mortared-stone outline of a Roman watchtower begins its steady encroachment on the skyline.
She looks away sharply, disguising the movement in a cough. Looking at its bad enough; it makes her head spin and throb, gives her a dizzying sense of vertigo. She can’t imagine living here, among the pulsating chaos of warped time. There are rumours that an entire wing of St. Peters hospital is dedicated to the new recruits, who have succumbed to what they call paradox sickness. Weakened by the constant stress of Unreason, the threads of their personal timelines have become caught and spun, pulling them between times and spaces in a way that they cannot comprehend. They end up stretched thin in the liminal space of what could be, suspended in a permanent state of being partially Unmade and Remade, until it's a mercy to hand them over to the Unkindness and let the Tower’s ravens devour them whole.
Or so the rumours say. It’s difficult to know what's true or not when it comes to the goings-on of the Faction, and especially when it comes to something as potentially damaging as this. It's none of her business, of course, but the image lingers in her mind and makes her shudder involuntarily in revulsion and fear. She’s been Unmade once; she has no desire to go through that again.
Father Kreiner breaks her out of her thoughts with the click-click-click of bone on wood to get her attention. She scowls, but says nothing.
“So.” The mechanism of his voice must be more worn than she remembers; his voice intermittently creaks and thins. “How are you?”
“Fine,” she says stiffly; and then, at his look, concedes: “Better. Still a little sore.”
“Yes.” Wryly: “I can imagine that being caught in the radius of a Shxan relithium bomb might have that effect.”
So he knows. Fine. She can manage that.
“Well, I got here, didn’t I.”; she retorts. Dragged herself here, battered and bleeding, the loose threads of her timeline trailing behind her like entrails. A journey through the Time Vortex with only a vortex manipulator is never pleasant; when trailing raw Time like blood for hungry Vortisaurs, even less so. It had taken a hell of a lot of modifications to force it to punch through the gap between the 1st and 2nd of September, 1752 without leaving chunks of her timeline- or her body- behind in the process. A feat of engineering, if she said so herself. It hadn’t escaped her notice upon waking that she was missing it.
“Yes,” he says, slight amusement colouring his tone; “Mādar Zarathustra was very taken by your adaptation of a Vortex Manipulator. Inventive, she called it. Among other things.”
“I don’t suppose she fancies giving it back any time soon?” she asks, without much hope. Between the sharp, arching teeth of his mask, he grins.
“No,” she sighs. “I suppose not.”
“It's impressive technology,” he says lightly. “For Sh-cksan.”
“Shxan,” she corrects automatically; and then scowls at his amusement. “You learn how to pronounce it well enough when you’ve been living there for as long as I have.”
Two years. Two years of her life, spent fighting the good fight; or rather, helping the rebel army against the Imperial Army of the Kirsto Corporation, and doing her best to curb their excesses against the civilians on the continent. They were paying her at least, and it wasn’t as though she had many other useful skills- fighting and surviving. She was good at that.
“It’s not,” she concedes, even though he’s blatantly fishing for information. “Most of its stolen from the Kirsto Corps.” Most. She keeps her peace about the other things, the strange alien scanners and med-kits and weapons, the futuristic tools that seem to just appear from the ether. The Faction either know about it, or they don’t; nothing to do with her.
“Ah. Of course. You joined the rebel army, I presume?”
“Not joined. I’m freelance.”
“My mistake. I wasn’t aware that your contract with them extended to allying with the Shxan International Aid services either.”
She gives him a sharp look. “Yeah. Well.” What's there to say? She’s got her reputation to think of, of course, but she’s not a monster. Even now, after all this time, she’s not a monster. She’s not.
She glares at him, defensive, daring him to press the point. Perhaps he’s about to; but then Big Ben strikes thirteen, and a cacophony of bells all loudly announce their various hours, and even in a timeless enclave, he's still got places to be.
He stands up to leave, slowly. For a moment, he’s nothing more than an old and tired man, far older than he should be.
“Leaving so soon?” she says drily; “And here I thought you were enjoying my company.”
“I’m sure,” he responds in kind, making his brisk way around the room; checking over her hospital notes, repositioning his chair. Stalling. Her eyes track his movements with a calculated precision.
By the door, he hesitates, and looks back out again through the window, where the mortared fortifications of a Roman watchtower are crumbling away, and something not yet clearly defined is rising in the landscape to take its place. A radio tower, perhaps, of austere steel and blinking red lights. Perhaps not.
“I am aware you are not overly discerning regarding the mercenary work that you choose,” he says; putting it diplomatically. “But I would advise you to decline anything that would take you to the Kasterborus galaxy. At any time.” There’s an edge to his voice that may or may not be a threat, and piques her curiosity instantly.
“Why?” And then, muttering to herself, her mind already racing ahead: “Something's going to happen, something dangerous- dangerous enough that you feel the need to warn me about it- something that you don’t want me to disturb- the Faction are planning something, something big- aren’t they always- but why this-”
And then it clicks. Kasterborus. Home of Gallifrey. Home of the Time Lords. She’s heard rumours, of course, even seen some of the casualties herself; planets disappearing and reappearing elsewhere- ships getting caught in loops of wounded time- moons collapsing in on themselves under the weight of their own contradictions.
But she’d never thought- never-
“So it's true?” she says accusingly, horror articulated through anger; “It’s actually true, what they’re saying? Look at me. Tell me. Is it true? That the Time Lords will fight a war of Time and they’ll tear the universe apart?”
He turns. Replies, not unkindly, but steadily, unmoved: “It’s true, in a sense. There will be a Time War. There is a Time War. There has been a Time War. It's already happened.”
Right. Fuck, ok. There's something uniquely horrifying about hearing it said aloud, so calmly and matter-of-fact. She mercilessly subdues her immediate desire to start panicking; Later.
Still, she asks- “Are you sure?”; he does her the dignity of not responding.
Instead, he repeats his warning: “The Kasterborus galaxy. New Peerless too, although I can’t imagine you’d be able to get there to begin with.”
“But why warn me?” she persists. “Alright, so there's a Time War. Why avoid the whole galaxy? I’ll be caught up in it anyway, by the sounds of it. We all will-”
And then it dawns on her. It's both a tragedy and a point of pride, a testament to how far she’s come, that it's taken her this long to think of him.
“Oh,” she says. “It's because of him. He’ll be involved.”
“Is involved. Was involved.”
She ignores his pedantry, too caught up in the partial narrative she’s piecing together. The shadow-shape of an ending looms, inevitable. She doesn’t need to know the details to understand this much.
“I won’t see you again, will I.”
Oh, she might meet him again, a younger version of him at another point in his timeline, but not this him. Not again.
Whirr, click. Whirr, click. The mechanism of his voice catches like a tape recorder, just a shadow of viscera in it. Quietly: “No. I shouldn’t think so.”
She doesn’t know what to say. What can she say. They aren’t even friends, not really; just allies tied together by their connection to the Doctor, always the Doctor. She hasn’t ever even seen his face.
On impulse, suddenly, the words tumble out, bypassing coherent thought to emerge clumsy and unmeasured. “What was your name? Before I mean.”
For a long moment, he looks at her, through the deep black hollows of his eyes, framed by gleaming white arches of bone. The dark-red cowl of his robes hangs over him, shadows flickering and draping themselves in its folds and crevices. Behind the mask’s jaws, its teeth far too sharp and long, she sees slivers of his scarred face, wires and cables running through it like veins. His mouth moves, and she realises he’s mouthing something to himself.
Eventually, he sighs, a strange mechanical wheeze, and left hand on the door, says:
“Fitz. Fitz Kreiner. That was my name, before…before.”
And then, turning the brass handle, the shadows from the hallway already rising eagerly to greet him, he says, “Goodbye, Wade. And- good luck.” And before she can respond, he’s disappeared into the darkness, and she’s all alone once more.
After a moment's thought, she rings for an orderly, dressed impeccably in the starched white dress of a ‘50’s nurse, cotton cap balanced precariously on the shining bone of their mask.
“I want some paper,” she requests, “and a pen. And a galactic atlas, if you have one,” and she glares at the nurse, daring them to say something, when she catches their disapproving look at her flowers.
Defiantly purple. Defiantly alive. There’s worse things to be, she thinks with a shrug; Now. There’s going to be a Time War. No more Faction to rely on. So the question is: what next?