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Zenobia III is trundling dutifully around its orbit, shouting distance from Gryben but decently far away from the edges of the War encroaching into Gallifreyan occupied territory. Four guards, a maintenance worker, a handful of droids, and periodic checkups from remotely-linked Precogs relying mostly on algorithm.
Narvin, who has a mostly-working set of access codes and biodata, and who has yet to relearn how to play well with others, has been entrusted with an elderly freighter (the cloaking device all but literally taped on) and loose instructions to find something useful. He knows all about useful.
The guards are on predictable rotation, the air filtration systems on these old stations break at the drop of a hat (or a passing piece of debris nudged into an intercept course) and thus the maintenance worker easily distracted; the droids are as susceptible as any to a memetic jamming transmission on the right frequency. As the humans say: Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. The Precogs, well, he supposes every mission needs a little zest, else he might get cocky and spend more than a day without experiencing an excruciating quantity and quality of fear.
He thunks gracelessly into the ship through a disused port, horribly sweaty in his space suit, dragging the salvager's trawl behind him. First left, then second right: the warehouse. The ceilings are cavernous, the aisles infinite. He leaves his visor down in case any camera is curious enough to poke through his ambiguity field and gets to work.
Dalek pieces, Dalek weapons, casings piled high. The personal effects of the dead and imprisoned. Links, cables, circuitry, screws. Hats, for whatever reason. He tosses things into the trawl at random. Skiff components, TARDIS components. Five microspans before he has to turn back.
He stops short in front of what looks like a nearly-intact TARDIS, the rational part of his brain alerting him to the fact that one oughtn't put a dimensionally-transcendent object into a dimensionally-transcendent object, lest one fall victim to an endless loop spiraling ever further from its referent. The other part of his brain is. Well. Compelled. Like he knows this ship, like it's familiar to him.
"10% chance of an unsolveable paradox, give or take," he whispers. "I've bet on worse odds." He cranks the jaws of the trawl open wide enough to swallow the TARDIS. He watches it go for a split-second, the void stretching and repeating, mirror-glitter branching, breaking. He snaps the trawl shut and turns around.
He waits until there's enough room between him and Gallifrey's reach to breathe, and ratchets the ship down into an automatic, unobtrusive flight path back to headquarters (with a few stops along the way, just in case). Stepping through the military junk, the industrial cast-offs and obsolete widgets, the tiny viewport detailing the nothingness outside, he approaches the TARDIS.
He knocks, for whatever reason. And then pries the doors open with a crowbar, willing it to find some vestiges of power, just enough to know it's alive. Jumper cable from the freighter's heart to the TARDIS console. Not too much, he doesn't want to burn it out, just enough -
The lights flicker; the ship shudders, glitches. There's a bell ringing out. And then another, and then an absolute cacophony as the grey-white core slips out to a riot of colors and shapes.
"A circus?" he asks.
ACE'S AWESOME ARCADE, reads the hand-painted sign above the console. The console itself is ringed with cabinets, all covered with different designs, all beeping and flashing.
"Close enough," he says roughly, throat thick and eyes prickling. "I thought I'd avoided being haunted, but you always were stubborn, weren't you."
A box labeled MS. PAC-MAN emits a tinny melody in response. Anthropomorphizing already, Narvin? Maybe so. And also: so what. He adjusts the cabling, more for something to do with his hands than anything necessary, and sits down on the floor until the power transfusion is complete.
The haul is inventoried, labeled with possible uses, cross-referenced, the bits worth saving taken to storage and the junk sent to the demat for scrap. He doesn't avoid mentioning the TARDIS, per se, but he does wait for Eris to bring it up first.
"It's working?"
"More or less."
"Good enough for the fleet?"
"Yes, but. Eris, I know we have better uses for it, but it's - idiosyncratic, at the moment. And it belonged to a friend of mine, and I..." He trails off, realizing he doesn't have anything that would pass for an argument.
"You want your own personal TARDIS." Eris sighs, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Would it be nepotism to say yes? Or is that cronyism..."
"But you are saying yes?" Narvin squints, suspicious. There's no way that half-begged request had worked.
"Why not? You never ask for anything. Well. Nothing like this, anyway." He gives Narvin a little lip-quirk smile. "Two conditions. One, be prepared for passengers. Two, take a few days off before hurtling directly into the sun or whatever it is you plan on doing." He pauses. "'Idiosyncratic'?"
"It's an arcade - an Earth games house, play-room, thing. And it doesn't seem interested in changing to anything more practical."
"Hmm. Well. Let me know if you ever manage to reprogram it to be more user-friendly."
It's Narvin's turn for delayed processing: "You're sidelining me?"
"I'm telling you to take a vacation."
"Vacation?" he repeats, voice rising an octave. "There's a war - "
"There is always the War," Eris interrupts. "Today, tomorrow, yesterday. We have to make time for ourselves or this will all fall apart. We're not machines, Narvin." Except for me, he doesn't say, wryly or otherwise, and his hand doesn't linger on Narvin's shoulder when he does his usual squeeze.
Narvin heads to the room he always rents when he has more than five spans worth of downtime. The contents of his knapsack and pockets turned out and arranged neatly on the desk, coat hung up, shoes off and tucked under the bed. He lies down stiffly and stares at the ceiling, watching the breakdown coming like a storm on the horizon.
Eris has the same look Romana used to get, that particular type of exhaustion. Bone-deep, hearts-deep. He carries not just the logistics but the weight of it all, the grief he has no time for and the hope he needs but cannot trust. He's good at this, unfortunately. Both innately and well-practiced.
Narvin could bristle at a former mentee now running him out on missions (or not, as the case may be) but there'd be no heat in it. He'd had the will and the way once but not so much the knack. His relative lack of ambition and resistance to the more flavorful excesses of power had carried him along well enough but he hadn't been, as Braxiatel had never hesitated to point out, a natural leader.
He gives up on rest and tries reading, dutifully avoiding anything that might be termed 'work' and, with equal success, thinking about Everything.
(What would his life been like if he'd been a little less gung-ho? If he'd stayed in his office out in the Death Zone, bloodlessly building his atrocities? Would he be a little cog in the War machine? Would he ever have noticed that what he was doing was wrong, if no one was around to rub his face in it? Was the goodness in him now even there back then, lying dormant, or had it been implanted in him somewhere along the way?
He's met enough of himself to know that there almost certainly is a Narvin out there happily laying himself down onto Rassilon's assembly line. He could drive himself around the bend - has in fact done so on multiple occasions - trying to root out the seeds of evil in himself. But that's never been the point, has it. He's never been the point. There's no sense trying to atone.)
Weapons is Galaga and navigation is Frogger and the data-banks are accessed by successfully completing a level of Donkey Kong and these are all words that have meaning for him, now. He's even getting good at some of them. The first time he cracks a leaderboard, it's Burger Time (bizarrely compelling, if incomprehensible).
Painstakingly twiddling the knob, he puts in
NAR
, fruitlessly tapping on the V. Three letter limit. Works fine if your name has three letters (the ACE at the top of the leaderboard lets off a little pixelated firework), less so for a regular person with multiple syllables. An older version of him might go by CIA but that ship has long since sailed. Decisions, decisions. Perhaps an abbreviation:
NRN
"Nurn," he mutters. "Hello, a pleasure to meet you, my name is Nurn." He tries again,
NVN
, and leaves it.
(ACE has the top score on all but one of the games. He beat her once - Burger Time again - and overwrote her name before he could come to his senses, and spent the rest of the day (week) in a sulk. He's careful to keep some distance from her scores, now.)
Eris sends him on a routine chauffer mission and it's very boring but also somehow extremely tense, given that this is the first time anyone else has been inside his ship since he found it.
His passenger is named Cordell and is a diplomat, doing his best to not mention the situation they are currently occupying. He spends most of the journey doing paperwork, pausing here and there to give Narvin a baffled expression.
"Another Time Lord, eh?"
He smiles thinly. "So they tell me." He nudges a joystick, the math on the turbulence compensators ticked over a hair.
Cordell harrumphs, facial fronds fluttering in the breeze. Time passes slowly. Narvin almost pulls a muscle trying to maintain the old CIA straight-backed posture, faithful-civil-servant facial expressions included, and simultaneously thwap the landing procedure on Street Fighter II, the buttons to which are sticky for absolutely no reason other than 'immersion'.
The ship clunks out of the vortex and lets out a triumphant melody in a chorus of single-voice synth chips.
"Here we are," Narvin adds unnecessarily.
Cordell bows, and thanks him profusely, and slips in something that is almost certainly a double entendre (political, not sexual) (probably) but Narvin is tired and his face hurts and he wants, very much, to go back to being lonely on his stupid ship.
He stops, bag in hand and halfway to the door, looking like he's made a decision he deems to be important. "I know how recalcitrant ships like this can be, especially considering the current state of things. Hopefully you can convince it to, hm. Tone itself down, a bit."
Narvin can feel his brain starting to go fizzy. "Actually, I might encourage it to get worse."
Cordell blinks, and Narvin smiles blankly; he opens the door with a skee ball sunk into the 20-point hole.
He gestures to the bustling port outside, ball white-knuckled in his hand. "Goodbye. Be safe."
"And you." Cordell gives him and his ship a suspicious once-over before walking out with dainty steps, like the floor itself is something revolting. (It's not sticky there, that's only in the corners and around the pool table and on the buttons of Street Fighter II.)
The door swings shut and he slumps against the side panel of Galaga. "Is that why people become renegades?" he asks. "The freedom to say anything you want?"
Galaga beeps in a way he chooses to anthropomorphically interpret as 'quizzical'. "Rhetorical question," he specifies. "Oh, good grief. I'm talking to my TARDIS. Worse, I'm convinced that it's talking back. Renegade indeed."
The inquisitive beeps flutter from Galaga to Dig Dug, the dot matrix display blinking.
"Right, good idea. Let's pick something from Eris' wish-list."
The ship settles down about five kilometers from where he'd pointed it. "Navigational drift? Vortex cruft? Or are you simply not feeling up to it today? Or this week. Month." He sighs. "Year."
The pinball cabinet thweeps and chirps and rattles loose a handful of balls, each of which sink unimpeded back down through the drain.
The House on the hill had come unstuck from Gallifrey awhile back; the psychic aura is overwhelming. The planetoid is sick from it, the ground dried and cracking where the foundation is festering. He's meant to be attempting to send it home but he suspects he'll be blowing it up instead.
The House is frightened and the House is angry and the House is mean. The House is Heartshaven, of course. One ghost wasn't enough. He refuses to see her, he refuses to remember. It's not real. It's not her. The haunting isn't for him, at least: the dark-haired woman who rushes past him has no meaningful bite in the whip of the psychic echo that snaps over his brain. Still.
The floors are soft and rotted-out and the walls slough from the frame like skin, and stairs rearrange, and he disassociates as a self-defense mechanism. He only makes one self-destructive mistake (timing issue with a jury-rigged detonator) that's mitigated by the surprisingly robust personal safety device Eris had forced on him. The House falls easily, collapsing into the crater it had dug on impact. He emerges covered in fire-supressant foam, left arm peppered with shrapnel but otherwise unharmed.
The first aid station on the TARDIS pulses a bright blue as the splinters and shards are vaporized, and gives him a doleful low-C warning note.
"I know," he says.
It sprays him with ointment and presents a glass full of neon green fruit punch and a slice of pepperoni pizza. He takes the glass but doesn't drink, cradling it in his hands until the ice cubes melt. The pizza is (disappointedly, he projects) absorbed back into the dispenser with a quiet snorf.
When he gets back from Phaidon, there's a new cabinet by the console. It's called Gauntlet and it's about hitting people with axes or shooting them with arrows or whathaveyou, and it's for four players. Playable by two, he is given to understand, the TARDIS floating him a mental note.
He sits down in the cockpit of AIR COMBAT 3047: Escape From Mondas and cries.
(Gauntlet is quietly replaced by Rampage, a smash-em-up for one to three players, and a few feet of tickets are quickly printed and then redeemed for a hot-pink stuffed pig-rat, which is left carefully on the control panel.)