Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
It begins as a low hum, something like background noise, something that might have always been there – so stop worrying about it.
But it tugs at her with every pulse; every drawn, minute oscillation drawing its grip tighter. A calling. Come home. Soon it’s an insect against her ear; a shrill, sharp buzzing. Phantom breaths upon her neck, their eyes burning holes into her back – hands reaching across the universe.
…
It started when she picked up the phone, housed in the boxed compartment inlaid beside the TARDIS doors. It’s always a gamble, answering that phone. She doesn’t give her number out to just anybody. It could be a threat, a cry for help, an old acquaintance. This time, it was all three.
She dropped the phone before the receiver reached her ear, swiping her hand back as if the plastic had scorched her skin. The phone swung, black cord dangling, the thrum of noise from the speaker vibrating against blue wood. A pendulum, hypnotising. A captured, closely held moment of shuddering breaths, slowing hearts. With a shaking hand, she reached out and wrapped her fingers around the phone, jamming it back into the compartment with a click and a satisfying ding. Too late. The words were already tattooed behind her eyes; circular spirals folding in upon her vision, making her head spin. She felt time press in upon her like a vice, and with it, a voice; a threat, a plea, an order: come home.
…
The buzz of the mobile resting on her desk seems to shake the entire room. So much for silent.
Yasmin Khan leverages herself up onto her elbows and blinks away the bleary dark, reaching a languid arm over to the phone still juddering on the plastic-painted-wood surface of her bedroom desk. Who could be calling her at this time of night? That time being – the digital red of her alarm clock tells her – one o’clock. She’s not on call tonight for the station, which has awoken her on some occasions – usually just someone sleeping rough somewhere they shouldn’t, a group of drunken teenagers, or a party running too late and too loud into the night. She doesn’t exactly have any friends apart from Ryan, Graham, and the Doctor. Ryan’s got better friends to call, Graham sleeps more than any person she’s ever met, and the Doctor, well – the Doctor doesn’t call. No, the Doctor shows up when you least expect it – unannounced, but always anticipated. Always adored. The Doctor materialises in the middle of Yaz’ bedroom and starts raving about an alien marketplace with the most extensive range of biscuits in the universe. She pulls Yaz by the hand, out of the dark, into the soft, euphonic glow of her time-ship – and makes Yaz late for work.
Yaz taps her phone screen awake and squints at the familiar, too-bright light. She goes to examine the number, only, there is no number. She figures it’s some new UI update – did it even show the number before? No one can be sure of such things at this time of day, one foot still dipped into the pool of unconsciousness. She taps the green call icon, and the speaker unleashes a stream of faint, garbled static. Yaz jumps, nearly dropping the device, body now wound tight with adrenaline; exhaustion forgotten. Apprehensively, she presses the speaker up to her ear, rolling herself up onto her hips, back cold and bent against the headboard. The static continues, with spikes in the signal like bones pressing up under the skin. They sound like that, too – like bright bruises and the sharp flash of colour in the eye that accompanies pain. It sets her mind racing towards something she’ll never reach. Her thoughts run on a hamster wheel, speeding up, unravelling – but she can’t stop listening. The pulses become voices, warping themselves, ungainly, into some semblance of human form.
“Hello?” she chokes. It sounds like the start of a horror movie (Hello? Hello, is there anyone there?)
“Lord President –“ it wavers – an amalgam of voices converging to one, like it’s trying to get the sound right. “Lord President, your presence is required on homeworld.” A flash of static stabs at Yaz’s eardrum.
“Who is this?” she says, a little louder, clearer. Calm wrapped around her fear.
“Comply,” it echoes, warped, “or we will be forced to –“ it stutters out into drilling noise, droning on into silence.
“Hello?” she mumbles. Finally, feebly. (Hello? Hello, is there anyone there?). The screen goes dark against the side of her face, and the sudden lack of light makes her start. Her phone battery is drained, completely.
Her first thought is aliens – which, as a self-proclaimed practical-sort, is an idea that would have made the Yaz of a few months ago balk. She would call the Doctor, except she’s never given them her number. There’s never danger here in Sheffield – discounting the killer tooth fairy and the giant spiders, which might seem like quite a lot to discount to anyone else – the danger is always out there; out in the wide universe where they seek it. The Doctor drops by on the weekend (barring a few exceptions), takes them out for an adventure or two, and drops them back into the middle of mundanity. Two lives. They aren’t supposed to intersect.
Yaz half expects to hear the grating wheeze of the TARDIS materialising in the room, for the Doctor to jump out and grab her by the shoulders, exclaiming with an almost inappropriate amount of glee that there are aliens attacking the telephone network or something. Instead – as her conscious mind begins to shed the sheer terror of those noises, the not-voices, burying what it cannot comprehend – she begins to settle amicably upon the idea that it was just a prank call. A reasonable logical leap, she thinks, as exhaustion overtakes her with a sinister swiftness. Just a prank call (just the wind/trick of the light/someone playing a joke/a very convincing mask). Horror logic.
Yaz sleeps fitfully.
…
Ryan hears the message in the pub. The night is still young, but he can already feel a premonition of the headache he’ll be swimming in during his shift at the warehouse tomorrow. With any luck, he’ll be able to catch a few winks afterwards before the Doctor drops by. It would be very unwise to climb aboard the TARDIS with an aching head and a lack of sleep.
His mate Ian is buying the next round. The rest of the crowd are shoved into a booth in the back corner surrounded by tall glasses in various stages of emptiness (or fullness, as his Nan would’ve said, because a little optimism never hurt anyone – and he thinks the Doctor would say that too). There’s a small flat-screen TV mounted on the wood-slatted cornice, a rerun of an old footy match. The commentator’s voice and the crowings of the crowd waver dully in the background, an echo of the past. He finds his heartbeat quickening when the players draw closer to either goal, letting out stifled noises of indignation at a nasty tackle or an obvious foul. The game has already happened, of course. He could look up the final score on his phone right now – every detail of the game, in fact. The notion never mattered to him before – but having access to a time machine tends to have an impact on one’s linear perspective.
He could be there in the crowd right now. Then, he would always have been in that crowd, despite the fact that whenever it was actually played, he was here in Sheffield doing something entirely different.
He has a habit of doing this, thinking in circles. It isn’t doing him any favours at work, or in getting his life together. Travelling with the Doctor feels a bit like living in circles, and that makes it all harder still. Lately they’ve been restricted to singular weekly outings, like a treat for getting through another dull segment of regular life. She used to take them on month-long escapades, family road-trips across the cosmos. Their lives, then, were as brilliant as they were relentless, and as much as he misses his great swathes of time spent aboard the TARDIS, he’s relieved that he doesn’t have to lie to his friends anymore. He’s a pretty terrible liar; but, then again, so is the Doctor. Something’s bothering her, something that’s making her reluctant to strike out on any new adventures. It’s all been easy places – resorts and wildlife parks. Tourist attractions. Canned fun. Easy fun. Pushing them back towards mundanity, maybe – trying to soften the blow when she…
He doesn’t want to say ‘abandons,’ because it’s happened far too many times, so he contents himself with a gulp of beer, feels the foam slide up his lip like a silencer. He swallows it quick, and as the fizzing settles in his gut, it stops him wanting to think about much at all. That’s when the TV shuts off. A few scattered, half-hearted cries of indignation. It was just a rerun, after all.
An explosion of pixels bursts across the screen, scattering crackling static – and not the usual kind. It seems to push itself from the screen, to undulate in waves with just a hinted sheen of colour. The once-muted stereo sound is suddenly very loud, and, about ten blocks away, Yasmin Khan answers a call.
“Lord President–“ the static spews the words in a garbled mess that only seems to knit itself together into tangibility after the fact, as if reality is trying to make sense of itself, to reorder things. He definitely isn’t drunk enough for this. He doesn’t think that anyone has ever been drunk enough for this. “Lord President, your presence is required –“ He looks around at his mates, tearing his eyes away from the cacophonic display with morbid difficulty. It’s like looking down at a sprawling cityscape from a great height, relishing in the fear that laces tight in your gut as the mind flashing a warning, a simulated sensation of falling. Around him, his friends are still talking, laughing, drinking.
“You okay Ryan?”
“– take desperate action.” the static spikes, and the clangour of it sounds like his feet on the rungs of a ladder, and the ringing sound through hollow metal as you slip…
“Hey, mate, you feelin’ alright?” He can’t tell which face it’s coming from. He can’t even tell them apart; dollops of clay, murmurs of a strange language lost in the noise.
“Your weakness is known. It will be exploited.” He feels his eyes cross and his joints wobble. If he was standing, he would have crumpled to the floor. Instead, he feels a sharp pang as his head hits the table, and cold creep sticky across his neck where his drink has sloshed over.
He jerks up with a start. Someone is holding his shoulder steady. He looks up, and the TV is blank.
“Are you gonna pass out of something? You’ve only had a few drinks.” It says. He can’t quite recall the names.
“Nah, m’alright.” Ryan grumbles, holding a hand against his temple. “Just had a long day or something.”
“We were gonna go down the park. Reckon it’d do you some good, yeah? Fresh air, you know?” Another one speaking now.
“Yeah,” he grumbles in reply. Anything to get him out of this pub, away from… something alien, probably. Only, no one else had seen it, and that was never a good sign, especially when he had a few drinks in him already. Maybe he had just had a long day. Excuses are easy to spin, and the colours are already slipping from his mind. Washed away; only a stain left behind.
Next up; drunken loitering. Yaz would be furious.
…
Graham doesn’t hear anything at all. He’s a heavy sleeper, and he likes to savour every second of it thank you very much.
(“If I’m gonna be larkin’ about on some alien world,” he’d defended, when Ryan had ridiculed his perfectly respectable bedtime of 8pm, “I’m gonna need ten hours at least. It’s all very well for you to run off of four hours and a couple’o’cans of those energy drinks – which, by the way, your Nan’d have a fit if she seen you drinkin’ – but I need my shut-eye.” And it’s better than sittin’ like we used to, he’d thought, in front of the telly or reading in those big armchairs that seemed to envelop your whole body, because he’d look up with a grin on his face and a lark on his lips, and she wouldn’t be there. At least in the dark he could almost pretend. Sometimes he could almost feel her breath on his back.)
When Graham O’Brien gets a call at one o’clock, he doesn’t answer. It rings out in the kitchen while he sleeps on – but he dreams of a woman wrapped in knitted shawls and a warm, wide smile; and she’s telling him that the President is coming home.