Work Text:
“So, I found that big library you never bothered to tell me about,” Nile says, sometime during her sixth month of traveling with Andromache.
“Hmm?” Andy replies from where she’s crammed beneath the time rotor, up to her elbows in the wiring on a huon-filtering turbine that’s been on the fritz for the past few flights. The TARDIS has always been tetchy when it comes to casting Andy and her companions across time and space where they need to be instead of where they want to go, but the last turn of the time rotor plopped them right into the heart of a supernova. This is all well and good for the TARDIS and her impervious outer shell, but Andy’s eyebrows were singed right off when she flung open the door expecting to see Shanghai, instead.
Her eyebrows haven’t quite grown back yet, and the repairs have taken longer than expected, so they’re still stranded in the heart of a star. It’s an ideal place to hide from, say, a squad of Sontarans or a unit of Cybermen. But it’s a terrible place for an immortal time-traveler to hide from her clever, not unattractive traveling companion who she may or may not be feeling an increasingly untenable amount of dependence on. Dependence that borders on something else, something deeper and more terrifying and … well. This is why Andy was trying to land in Shanghai circa 1590 CE: plenty of delicious food, political intrigue, trouble to get into, and distractions in general.
A lack of distraction is exactly how clever, curious Nile got bored enough to stumble into the TARDIS library. Nile’s boots — the only part Andy can see from her position on the floor — shuffle on the grating, tap-tap, tap-tap. “I’ve been doing some reading.”
“Dangerous pastime,” Andy mumbles around the sonic spanner she’s got clenched in her teeth, both hands buried in the mess of wires above her head. Maybe she should reverse the polarity of … something or another? “Didn’t stumble across a book about chrono-mites, did you? I think we might have an infestation in the temporal circuits that we need to debug.”
“No, I didn’t find any books about time bugs. I did find books about a lot of Andromaches, though.”
Andy’s hands stop working for a fraction of a second, then resume. “Andromache the Patron Saint of Tarafallax IV, who saved the capital city from a tafelshrew infestation by luring them out of town with irresistible recorder music? Love that one.”
“Didn’t find that one. But I read about a bunch of Earth Andromaches, and it got me thinking: How many were actually you? There was the Amazon queen, although I can’t imagine you sticking around anywhere long enough to do any ruling. That queen didn’t end up happy though, as far as I could find. Then there was the Andromache who was sacrificed to the Minotaur. And last but not least, Andromache the wife of Hector, who lost everything and everyone she’s ever loved in a war — her husband, her country, basically her whole universe.”
A silence passes, Nile waiting for a reply. Andromache doesn’t feel inclined to give one. Instead, she’s rather inclined to give the TARDIS a good kick for putting those books right where Nile would stumble across them in the first place.
“All of space and time at your fingertips, right? Were those unhappy legends actually you?” she finally says, clearing her throat loudly. “Or is Andromache even your real name? Did you pick the name because you relate to their stories? Or is this a chicken-and-egg situation?” Another pause. “Are you an egg or a chicken?”
Andy’s skin feels like it’s vibrating, which is either a result of the galaxy-devouring discomfort she feels about this particular topic of conversation, or it’s a sign that the chrono-mites have migrated from the console wiring onto her epidermis and are burrowing their way into her bloodstream.
“Pass me the hammer, would you?” she says, sticking a hand out from under the time rotor and wiggling her fingers. Nile crouches down, rummaging around in the nearby toolbox and plopping a temporal measuring tape into her palm instead. Andromache takes it without comment and busily pokes around the conduits and wiring without actually doing anything. She’d rather be eaten by chrono-mites than stick her head out far enough to meet Nile’s (gentle, beautiful) eyes and see the knowing look on her (unfortunately very attractive) face.
“You’re the last of your people, you told me. Alone.” Still squatting, Nile fidgets as if she’s tempted to take Andromache’s hand. Instead, she laces her own fingers together and squeezes them into a ball. “The Andromache who lost everything in the war?”
Andromache shoves the temporal measuring tape into the wiring and pushes the button to activate it. A spectacular spray of sparks fly out, the time rotor grinds angrily in protest, and Nile flails backward and falls flat onto the grating.
Andy slides from under the console and pops to her feet, offering Nile a hand. “Come on, let’s go find those debugging books.”
The dreams are a quirk of biology that have nothing to do with her Time Lord genetics and everything to do with chance. Occasionally she has visions that aren’t exactly prophecy but are simply a statement of the future: the people who will come into her life and change it forever. For some inexplicable reason, they often dream of her, too.
Quỳnh was the first to haunt Andy’s evening hours; Quỳnh was the only other Time Lord who ever did. She didn’t know what the dreams of the beautiful dark-haired woman with the babbling-brook laugh meant until they came face-to-face on their first day at the Academy — a moment of openmouthed shock immediately followed by a hundred lifetimes of devotion.
That meeting happened before they both left Gallifrey, together at first in every way. But over the course of a few centuries the things they saw, the adventures they experienced, affected them differently. Andy found it easier to see the good through the bad — there was more than enough of both to go around — but Quỳnh’s vision increasingly fixated on the latter. Their relationship was strained even before Cardinal Merrick tracked them down and told them that not only were they summoned back to Gallifrey by the High Council, but they had been called upon by Rassilon himself.
Andromache would have torn the universe itself apart to disobey the summons, if she’d known what was to come. But how could she have predicted that whole misbegotten series of events would culminate with Quỳnh being cast into Oubliette of Eternity, the Time Lords’ most terrible punishment device? There was no worse fate than this: to be erased from all of time and space, your memory obliterated from the universe, forgotten by all who have ever known and loved you.
Quỳnh was locked in the Oubliette, and in an instant everyone forgot that she had ever existed. Everyone except Andromache. Impossibly, miraculously, Andromache remembered. It was a blessing and a curse; there was no one with whom to mourn Quỳnh’s loss, and no one with whom to remember her life. It was as if Andromache alone suffered from a particular form of madness, remembering the un-rememberable.
She mourned and she tried to move forward, because surely that’s what Quỳnh would have wanted. She spent her time helping people, lending a hand here and there when it seemed the right thing to do, but she was alone. She dreamed of others on occasion, but what did those dreams matter when Quỳnh was gone?
Centuries of lonely travel later, along came the stowaway from Alzarius: Lykon. He hid away on the TARDIS before she left his planet, and Andy would have done a tire-screeching time-space U-turn to drop him back home if it wasn’t for his toothy white smile and sparkling gaze, so familiar from her dreams. His mind was as sharp as a spear when it came to maths, and he was irritatingly smug about it.
She let him stay on the TARDIS. Then he ended up sacrificing himself on a suicide mission to stop a ship full of Cybermen from destroying the Earth.
(Watch your back, she’d joked before he boarded the space freighter, before they knew its cargo hold was infested with Cybermen. That’s your job, he’d retorted with a cheeky grin. It was the last time she ever saw him. It was the first time she realized that it probably wasn’t just bad luck; it was the fact that she was fucking terrible at keeping her friends alive, actually.)
She spent ages alone after that, her dreams as empty as her TARDIS. Then there were nightmares of death and men with blood-soaked hands. A matter of months later, Nicolo and Yusuf both ran through the TARDIS doors, screaming obscenities at each other.
She’d accidentally landed in the midst of the Trion civil war, and the two of them were on different sides of the conflict. At this point she doesn’t remember who was on which side or which one of them chased the other through the TARDIS doors first, both howling insults and slashing at each other with blades. They were so obnoxious about it that, even after she convinced them not to spill each other’s blood all over her console room, she was tempted to strand them together on an uninhabited moon until they sorted themselves out.
At a certain point, she convinced herself she didn’t even care if they killed each other, if it meant they’d stop arguing and fucking shut up for ten microspans.
She never did get around to kicking them out, because she knew their faces. She’d seen them in her blood-drenched dreams. As the days and months went by in (and outside of) the TARDIS, Nicky and Joe slowly fell out of the habit of putting each other in mortal danger. At first it was out of necessity, a begrudging cooperation to keep them all from dying at the hands of the Sea Devils on Sea Base 4. (It’s hard to yell insults when you’re preoccupied with not drowning.) Although their bickering and insults never stopped, they gradually transformed into a fond teasing.
When they weren’t all three running for their lives on misadventures, the two of them began disappearing into the depths of the TARDIS for days on end. They reappeared with bruises in odd places, and at first Andy assumed they were fighting again.
Turns out, they were definitely not fighting.
She doesn’t know the precise moment when their hate-fucking turned into infatuation, or when that infatuation deepened into soul-sworn devotion, but at a certain point it was inescapable. It was like being haunted in her own ship. She could hear their laughter — their giggling — through Joe’s bedroom door, or in the locked larder in the kitchen, or behind the paper-thin changing room curtain beside the TARDIS swimming pool.
Andy had spent centuries alone, but sometimes being with the two of them in such a besotted state was the loneliest she’s ever felt.
She didn’t ask them to leave, but when their journeys brought the TARDIS to Trion again, she didn’t ask them to stay, either. They stood in each other’s arms on their home planet, its civil war long over as their own lives together just beginning, and they watched the TARDIS vanish into the Time Vortex.
There were others here and there whose time with her was as brief as a firefly, bright in the darkness before they flared out. Andrei the pilot, who Andy rescued from the Mechanoids. Celeste the doctor, who Andy met in a hospital full of Judoon on Earth’s Moon — generous, thoughtful Celeste, who gave of herself and got so little in return from Andy that she finally decided to leave.
She picked up Booker on Earth, in a billionaire’s bunker in Utah during the 21st century. He was a brilliant engineer, adept at picking apart scraps of scavenged alien technology he didn’t quite understand. Before she met him, she’d caught glimpses of his life through the dreams: the grief of losing his wife to disease, the way he lost himself to addiction soon after, and ultimately the choice to cut himself off from his old life by going to work in this strange, cloistered career for an American oligarch tyrant.
She finally came face-to-face with him in that bunker full of alien junk, he was standing alongside a Dalek. He didn’t know what it was or what it meant, and through the course of that whole horrifying day he’d had a revelation that there was so much more to learn, so he begged to come with Andy.
Even without the dreams, she probably would have said yes. He was curious and clever and so very lonely and aching with loss, and they could have been two peas in a pod, in that regard.
A few months in, she discovered him trying to sell her out — well, sell the tech and knowledge that came as a side effect of time traveling. He was intent on making a profitable business out of their time together, as if that was what life in the TARDIS was about. They weren’t peas in a pod at all; they were toxic together. Dreams or no dreams, she ditched Booker back in Utah and didn’t look back.
Then came the War.
Andy hadn’t been back to Gallifrey since she lost Quỳnh and she’d long since stopped thinking of it as home, but once it was gone … it was like that last vestige of Quỳnh was gone too, like losing her all over again. The War touched everything from her youth — tainted it, obliterated it. The choices that Andy had to make, that she made alone, she couldn’t help but wonder how things would have been different if Quỳnh was there.
After the War, her dreams were chaotic and nonsensical, the echoes of a thousand time-locked Time Lords. She stopped paying attention, new faces or not.
One day, on one of her many lonely adventures, she discovered a Nestene infestation at the Macy’s in downtown Chicago, on Earth. There was an explosion that Andy had everything to do with, and the squads of firefighters who showed up to deal with the alien infestation’s aftermath. One firefighter, in particular, bravely and doggedly insisted that she needed to go inside to make sure no one was hurt or stranded.
Nile Freeman. Brilliant, brave, stubborn, pain-in-the-ass human extraordinaire. The woman whose face Andy had been willfully ignoring in her sleep. The fog of war made Andy’s entire existence grey, and Nile’s presence has burnished the universe back to radiance.
How had she missed so much of the good around her, before Nile started walking by her side?
Over the months of traveling together, they’ve begun to hold hands longer than is strictly necessary. Sometimes Nile falls asleep on the console room jumpseat instead of going back to her own bed, and Andy covers her with her black leather jacket and putters around with the time rotor just to stay in the same room. And one evening, Andy talked Nile into watching a Silurian movie, just in the hopes that Nile would end up clinging to Andy’s arm and burying her face against Andy’s shoulder and then insisting Andy walk her back to her room because she didn’t want to go through the TARDIS corridors alone.
Everything went to plan, except when Nile asked Andy to stay so she didn’t have to sleep alone. Andy had stayed, holding her until she dozed off.
Andy is experiencing a sea of emotions she hasn’t felt since she lost Quỳnh. She’s hopeful and more than a little frightened, and so she has engineered dozens of ways to keep her relationship with Nile teetering on the precipice of … well, everything.
“I am so allergic to wasps,” Nile hisses frantically in Andy’s ear. The dark wardrobe they’re huddled in smells faintly of mothballs, and a sequined gown on a hanger tickles the back of her head. Nile is usually the one who leaps into danger first, especially if it looks even remotely like a good time, but the minute this enormous insect appeared she freaked the fuck out. “If that thing touches me, I’m going to die!”
“I won’t let it touch you,” Andy promises, shifting so she’s between Nile and the wardrobe door, and the giant wasp buzzing in the room beyond. This was supposed to be a fun weekend of flapper dresses and gimlet cocktails and Agatha Christie, but instead they’ve had a theft and a murder and a humiliating kitchen incident. And, apparently, a freakishly large insect.
Nile’s arms slip beneath her leather jacket, around her waist, and she squeezes. Andy’s hearts thump in a syncopated rhythm that isn’t entirely due to the life-threatening nature of their predicament. The woman in her embrace smells so much nicer than the wardrobe, of coconut and soap and a hint of adrenalin. Her fingertips are blazing hot where they fiddle with the hem of Andy’s shirt, brushing her exposed hip bone. Her breath is humid in the crook of Andy’s neck.
“Hey, I promise it’ll be okay.” Andy slips one hand up her back and brings the other to her cheek, fingertips brushing along her jaw as she holds her tight.
Nile huffs a laugh into Andy’s neck, shifting so she’s chest-to-chest and their knees bump. “That’s what you said in New-New York. ‘Me and these three cat-nuns will keep you safe.’ Remember how that turned out?”
“We were strapped down in that lab, almost turned into living petri dishes.”
Nile’s head shifts as she very distinctly nuzzles the pulse point beneath her jaw. There’s an audible, dry click as she swallows. This is the moment where she pulls away and barges into the room to confront the wasp and engineers an enormous, disastrous distraction from the intimacy in this quiet, dark space.
Except today, she hesitates a beat longer than usual. Nile lifts her head just far enough to brush her lips along Andy’s jaw; her hearts are thundering now, a herd of racing horses thumping in rhythm to Nile’s single heart, pressed against her chest.
She ought to say something. Something clever, of course, but something so that Nile knows. So she understands. “Nile …”
“Andy, shut up.”
Nile’s mouth finds hers in the darkness. A single touch, a brush of warm skin followed by a gasp of breath. Andy moves without thinking, chin shifting forward as she chases another kiss. An awkward bump of noses and then teeth, a giggle, and their mouths open and their tongues meet. Andromache is moving without realizing it, pinning Nile to the wardrobe wall, desperate for every inch of contact she can find — as if she should make up for all the months of denying herself this by saturating her senses all in one go. Nile tilts her head to deepen the kiss, her hands fisting into the back of Andy’s t-shirt, her hunger matching Andy’s — a nip on her bottom lip, a huff of breathless excitement.
There’s a buzzing in her head, her whole body vibrating with it, merciful Omega why did she deny herself for this long? Why didn’t she –
The wardrobe judders and rocks sideways before crashing to the floor in a loud, chaotic heap as the horse-sized wasp bumps it over as it crashes through the bedroom window to escape.
It begins at the end of everything.
“That’s so fucking melodramatic,” Nile laughs. She bumps her hip against Andy’s as they stand side-by-side at the console, Andy flipping levers and twirling knobs. “You’re so fucking melodramatic.”
“Bullshit. I’m a realist,” Andy retorts, bumping her back hard enough that she takes a half-stumble but then reels herself back in instantly, so they’re touching again. “You were the one who said the TARDIS couldn’t do it, so where did I take us? To the end of the universe, as requested. A simple statement of fact.”
The time rotor grinds and thuds to a stop. Nile squeezes her hand, grinning like the cat who got the cream, and then sprints for the door. “I’m going first.”
“Hey!” Andy’s right behind at a flat-out run, throwing herself in front of the TARDIS door before Nile can fling herself into danger. Again. “I’m going first this time. Maybe next time, you can go first.”
“Fine.” She sounds irritated, but her eyes are sparkling. Heat rises to the nape of Andy’s neck, her fingertips sparking with the desire to touch the other woman. There’s been a lot of that lately — touching and partaking and generally enjoying each other. But now is not the time, so she chastely takes her hand and they step out of the TARDIS and onto the last outpost of life in a pocket of reality sequestered at the end of time itself.
Instead of stepping into a fantastic vista from reality’s edge of a spectacular implosion to nothingness, they’re standing in a dim, deserted space station corridor. The bulkhead paint is peeling, and purple fluid drips from the pipes lining the ceiling.
“Jesus, it smells,” Nile says, wrist to her nose. The environmental recyclers here are clearly straining to process the very limited amount of breathable air, and the water recyclers are probably on the fritz, if the ripe, overwhelming scent of unwashed people — human or otherwise — is anything to go by.
“When all of existence is holding on by a thread, showers probably aren’t a priority.”
“Let’s go find these smelly people and see if they need help,” Nile says, arching an eyebrow before she marches down the corridor, pulling Andy along.
They do find people — almost a hundred of them, living in the bleak corridors and sleeping on makeshift pallets. The appearance of two strangers in this closed, inescapable place is a nuclear shock.
“Take them to the Master!” someone shouts in the hubbub, and the call is taken up by others like an echo, until it becomes a strange marching song as they’re driven like cattle through the station and to an unknown destination. “To the Master! To the Master!”
Nile ends up pressed against Andy, one finger hooked through a belt loop in her jeans so they can’t get separated in the press. Andy slips an arm around her waist, too, just to be sure. And maybe she holds her tighter than is warranted, and maybe Nile’s hip is blazing warm where her shirt rides up a little in the chaos, and definitely Andy shouldn’t be thinking of sex at a time like this, but Time Lord brains are quite large and complex and capable of multitasking, thankyouverymuch.
They’re led into the Master’s domain, a rusted-out space station hangar that has been converted into a makeshift lab. At the center of the space stands a large fusion-driven ship with half its guts out, cables and gaskets and engine parts strewn about as if they were shot from a confetti cannon.
At the center of the mechanical chaos stands the Master.
Her hair is barely contained by a bun, more than half of it cascading down her shoulders in long, loose tendrils. A pair of round, gold-rimmed glasses perch on her nose, her tongue caught between her teeth as she leans over to squint at a set of blueprints on a drafting table cobbled out of empty oxygen canisters.
Andy goes rigid with shock, feet bolted to the metal deck plates. Nile stumbles as Andy lets go of her hand and whips around to stare at her in concern. “Hey, what’s — oh? Jesus, you look like you just saw a ghost. You okay?”
Andy is the least okay she’s been in her entire 6,000 years of life, which is saying something. She’s been sent to hell dimensions — two of them, on two separate occasions; she spent a harrowing few days split into three simultaneous versions of herself at once; she nearly died in a nuclear holocaust caused by a horde of farting Slitheen; and most devastatingly, she lost her first love when that woman was cast into neverwhere through the Oubliette of Eternity and erased from the universe’s collective consciousness.
That neverwhere woman is here. Alive. In the flesh. Andromache’s brain has gone to white static, her emotions a deep, dark roiling ocean.
“Master, we have visitors! Intruders! Interlopers!” the overlapping resident voices are impossible to discern properly, the lot of them boiling with excitement. The so-called Master looks up from her work to the commotion pouring through the airlock door. The horde of refugees finally step clear enough for her to get a glimpse of Andy and Nile. She instantly blanches a similar shade to Andy’s. Her lips hang open in what might be shock or might be a silent scream, it’s difficult to tell.
“What’s wrong?” Nile stares back and forth between them. “Somebody fucking say something.”
As if her words have broken a spell, Quỳnh’s eyes go wide, blazing with fury. She jabs an accusatory finger at Andromache. “You traitorous bitch!”
“How — I’m — what the fuck?”
“Okay. Well, I’m Nile,” she chirps with forced cheerfulness, “and apparently y’all know each other. We just stopped by, here at the end of the universe, to check things out. We weren’t trying to get in your business or anything.” She’s being sensible and level-headed, keeping a wary eye on the station inhabitants who are shifting nervously at the unexpected hostility of this person they’ve designated as their Master. And this is why Andy stood in front of an ancient creature imprisoned on the cusp of a black hole, howling with its fire and anger issues and styling itself as Satan, and gave a whole speech about how I've seen fake gods and bad gods and demi-gods and would-be gods. I've even been worshiped as a god. But if I believe in one thing — just one thing — I believe in her.
Nile slips a hand in hers and squeezes. Quỳnh’s gaze is still boring through Andy’s soul and straight into the past, like an arrow through time and space to that moment in Rassilon’s throne room when the Chancellery Guards tore Quỳnh out of her arms, screaming, and hauled her away to the Oubliette.
“Give us a moment alone,” Quỳnh grits out. The station inhabitants shuffle, nervously indecisive, before she waves at them sharply and they file dutifully out the door. Her gaze flicks to Nile. “Her, too.”
“She stays,” Andy replies, and Nile squeezes her hand. “She’s with me.”
“Ah, is she.” Not a question; her intonation is that of a merchant contemplating how much they can get at market for a shipment of goods. Andy is so distracted as she tries to drink in all the details of this face — this beloved face — that she hasn’t seen in millennia, that she misses the sum of its parts: the cold calculation as Quỳnh tilts her head and sizes them up together.
“Miss me, Andromache?” Quỳnh says.
What a fucking question. “A bit. Yeah.”
“So what the hell’s going on?” Nile lets go of Andy’s hand and crosses her arms.
“This is Quỳnh. She’s a mate from school.” Andy’s voice sounds dry as a hollow bone.
“This is Andy,” Quỳnh retorts. “She was the love of my life until she abandoned me to suffer an eternity of nothingness and then destroyed our planet, in the process sending me careening through time and space until I ended up at the end of the universe.” A pause, deep and heavy as a gravity well. “But I guess you two have met already.”
“Okay?” Nile blinks at Quỳnh slowly, like an unimpressed cat. “So, these people keep calling you ‘Master.’ What’s that about?”
“Ship-Master,” she replies, gesturing at the dead spacecraft behind them. “They think I’m rebuilding this bucket of bolts to fly them out of this place.”
“There’s nowhere to fly to.” There are thousands of far more important things to say, but this is what comes out of Andy’s numb lips. “There’s only ten thousand square miles of space in existence anymore.”
“Yeah. They’re morons.” Quỳnh shrugs, a sly half-smile creeping up her left cheek. “But they’re not half bad at scavenging, and they keep bringing me fuel and building supplies. If I can just find a half-dram more of chronium, I can finish building this time ring and get the fuck out of here.”
A time ring only works for one person. Which means Quỳnh intends to leave everyone on this station behind, abandon them to the end of everything and save herself.
Have the lights in this hangar always been so bright? Has the air always been so hot and suffocating? When Andy inhales, there isn’t enough oxygen — are the air recyclers on this ship already burnt out?
(She is, in fact, having a panic attack. She does, embarrassingly, pass out.)
Six hours after Quỳnh locks them inside the dead fusion-drive ship, a makeshift prison, Andy and Nile sit beside one another and stare glumly out of a porthole at the workshop beyond. Quỳnh has instructed the inhabitants of the station to bring the TARDIS in, and she’s attempting to cut her way through the blue front doors with a magnesium-fire blowtorch. Her failure has been spectacular and increasingly frantic.
“She won’t get in that way,” Nile says, more of a statement than a question.
“Nope.” Andy pops the p sound. A silence passes, punctuated only by the hiss of the blowtorch and Quỳnh’s occasional shouted curses when she pauses to swing a crowbar at the TARDIS shell.
Nile finally hazards, “So you’re the Andromache who lost her love and her kingdom, and that woman — Quỳnh — she was your Hector?”
Andy drops her head, scrubbing a hand through her hair so it sticks up, before she lifts it again to look at Nile. “Time is very long, and it leaves things behind — whether you want it to happen or not. But it brings new things to remind you, sometimes, of what it’s like to see things with fresh eyes. Of the joy and pain and beauty in every moment.” Carefully, as if holding something infinitely fragile, she takes Nile’s hand in her own and touches it to her lips.
Nile leans over and kisses her properly. Andy hums in pleasure and leans in, and for a moment it doesn’t matter what else is happening outside of this room, beyond the heat of Nile’s mouth and the way her hand comes to rest on Andy’s chest, over one of her hearts.
She pulls away, her lips enticingly plump from being sucked on. “That was good, Andy. You rehearse that in your head before you said it?”
“Maybe once or twice in the bathroom mirror,” she laughs.
Nile takes a deep breath, her dark eyes growing serious. “Okay but what are we going to do about your Time Lord ex-girlfriend who’s back from the dead?”
In fact, Quỳnh isn’t exactly back from the dead. She’s back from oblivion. There was a moment in the Time War when a shattered paradox rift tore the Oubliette of Eternity open and scattered everyone and everything that had ever been cast into it across the ages like sparks blown from a fire, dancing across the treetops of time and landing in forests far afield, wreaking even more chaos to the timelines than the War had already.
Andy didn’t realize it before she did what she did to end it — to end the Time Lords and the Daleks altogether — but the Oubliette’s destruction was one of the final surges of chaos that drove her to that precipice, that made it ever-so clear that if someone didn’t do something to bring an end to it all, reality itself would collapse.
But that’s a conversation for another time.
“You think we’re actually stuck in this bucket of bolts?” Andy gestures at the dead spaceship that Quỳnh made their makeshift prison.
Nile grins, teeth flashing in a way that makes Andy’s stomach flip a little. “I figured out how to get us out of here about twenty minutes after she locked that door. Surely you figured it out in two minutes flat. I was just waiting for you to share whatever the rest of your brilliant plan is before I brought it up. But that person out there — Quỳnh or the Master or whatever she wants to be called — you’re still working that part out, right?”
“A hundred lifetimes and a handful of personalities ago, I knew her better than anyone else in the universe. The woman out there, she’s … a very strange stranger.”
Nile’s eyebrows shoot up, and she lifts a finger to point out the window. Quỳnh has pulled over a ladder and climbed to the top of the TARDIS to use a hacksaw on the top light, wiggling her hips to some music that’s impossible to hear through the dead spaceship’s glass porthole. Or maybe there isn’t any music; maybe there’s just a samba inside her head. “She’s clearly got some issues.”
“She’s been through a lot.”
“We’ve been through some shit, too, but neither of us would manipulate a whole space station full of people into being our gophers in the hopes that we could abandon them to death at our earliest convenience. So, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to invite her onto the TARDIS to come with us.”
Nile’s eyebrows somehow climb even higher. “Beg your fucking pardon?”
And this was the reason Andy hadn’t jailbroken them out of this dead spaceship thirty nanospans after Quỳnh locked them in here: She’s been trying to think of how to bring up this topic of conversation. How to ask this un-askable favor. “I’d like her to come with us only if you agree, of course. The TARDIS is your home — our home — and she won’t step foot inside unless you say yes.”
Nile shifts back, and the air in the dark ship feels suddenly colder. “I have a thousand questions.”
Andy looks up at her through her eyelashes. It’s a dirty trick, because she knows Nile can’t resist when she does that. “I’d expect nothing less.”
“We aren’t leaving all of the people on this space station to die, no way in hell.”
“That’s less of a question, more of a statement,” Andy says, wobbling her hand back and forth. “But I assume it’s because you know I have a plan for them, too.”
“You always have a plan. Most of the time it’s a shitty, half-assed plan, but … it’s there.” Her nose crinkles and her eyes narrow, a beguiling combination of judgment and affection. “I just need to hear you say that they’re all going to be okay.”
“Those people are going to be okay. We’re going to save them from the end of the universe.”
“And Quỳnh?”
“If we offer, she’ll definitely accept a ride back to normal time and space. If she agrees to stay for a while, things might be weird inside the TARDIS. I promise to keep you safe.”
Nile breaks into laughter, full-throated and warm. “You’re gonna protect me from her? I can protect myself just fine, thanks.” She pauses, surveying Andy critically. “If anything, you’re the one who’s gonna need looking after.”
Clever Nile, always seeing through Andy’s bullshit. “But we can do this? Together?”
“I trust you.” Nile pulls in a slow, deep breath, her eyes turning to Quỳnh again. She reaches blindly for Andy’s hand and finds it on the first try. “We can do this, together.”
The interior of the TARDIS exists in a state of temporal grace, a protective aura that makes it practically impossible to kill someone. Quỳnh knows this, but she commits her first murder attempt during the second week of traveling with Andy and Nile. She jerry rigs a motion-activated projectile, armed to go off when Andromache walks into the control room. Nile, walking just behind, sees it coming and tackles them both out of the way just as the field of temporal grace intervenes, shifting the flying metal shards into the wall, instead.
As a precaution, Andy tries to lock Quỳnh in her room. She overrides the lock in short order and bounces out with the aplomb of a bird of prey recovering from a failed and slightly humiliating dive at a rabbit.
The second incident is less homicidal and more exploratory: a testing of boundaries, of Andy and Nile’s boundaries, but also of the TARDIS’s. After all, the state of temporal grace means that causing anyone grievous bodily harm is difficult, especially when the TARDIS herself has a mind to stop it from happening. She removes a few floor grates in a darkened corridor, to see if anyone will tumble down and hurt themselves. She fuses a knife to the door of Andy’s study, so it springs forward when the door slides open. None of it causes any harm, though, and Andy catches Quỳnh taking notes on a digital pad after each incident, tongue thoughtfully caught between her teeth.
“Do you want to leave?” Andy asks after the knife incident. “I’ll drop you off anywhere you want to go. You aren’t a prisoner here.”
Quỳnh tilts her head and after a very, very long pause says, “No.”
“If you hurt Nile, I’ll kill you myself.”
“You don’t have it in you.”
Andy bites her lip and crosses her arms. “Try me.”
“Interesting.” Quỳnh lifts her pad and jots a note. She looks back to Andy. “I won’t ask for permission or favors when I leave.” And with that, she wanders down the TARDIS corridor.
Andy told Nile that Quỳnh had been through a lot. Being unmade by the god-king of Gallifrey and then remade during a universe-shattering Time War would give anybody a neurosis or twenty. Andy knew that Quỳnh would be a different person than the pessimistic but generally kind Time Lord from her youth — but it’s one thing to understand the concept, and another entirely to feel it in both hearts.
Quỳnh is not broken — at least, not anymore. She clearly was at some point, and in the aftermath she pieced herself back together like a kintsugi vessel. Andy recognizes some of the shards, but they feel out of place. There are the cracks between them, space where fragments of her old self were unrecoverable and so she filled the gaps with new, terrible coping mechanisms and patterns of behavior.
As they saw with the refugees on the space station at the end of the universe, she has a need to control and manipulate. She’s more than willing to hurt others to get what she wants. There’s the sociopathic impulses that play out in her long-term plans, even when her short-term behavior remains polite and charming.
In spite of all that, she’s still Quỳnh. Andromache’s first love; her first loss. The TARDIS remembers Quỳnh, too, and feels fond; Andy senses the emotion thrumming through her telepathic circuits when Quỳnh walks in the room.
It’s the exact same fondness the TARDIS feels for Nile, in fact.
One morning, Andy walks into the TARDIS kitchen, blinking sleepily and scratching her belly beneath Nile’s Janis Joplin shirt that she stole the night before. Quỳnh is standing at the flaming griddle.
“Is that what I think it is?” Andy asks, eyes widening at the pile of food on counter.
“If you think these are Shobogan flapjacks, then you are correct,” Quỳnh replies with a pert grin. “The kind we used to get when we’d sneak outside the Citadel and go to that food stall in Low Town.”
“Cyrmilla was the cook’s name, I think,” Andy says, pulling a stool up to the counter and leaning forward to inhale the mouthwatering scent of fried cake.
“‘She’s dead now, thanks to you,” Quỳnh says with all the emotion of a weatherman delivering a forecast. “You want some food?”
Andy ignores the jab. “Is it poisoned?”
“Only one way to find out.” Quỳnh wiggles her eyebrows cartoonishly, and Andy purses her lips. She picks up one flapjack and licks it experimentally, tasting for telltale signs as she tries to remember exactly what kinds of poison are lying around the TARDIS and how far into the infinite piles of souvenirs Quỳnh would have had to dig to find them.
The flapjack tastes perfectly un-poisoned. In fact, it tastes like home.
“Oh.” Andy leans back, flapjack in hand, and inhales the scent of it again. “I’d forgotten what a good cook you are.”
“Forgot a bunch of things about me, I’d imagine.”
Andy looks up sharply. “No. The important things, I never let myself forget.”
“Hey, are those pancakes?” Nile is standing in the door, fiddling with the braids hanging down her shoulder. Andy doesn’t worry about how long she was standing there or what she might have overheard, because at this point, what good are secrets?
“Not just pancakes,” Quỳnh replies in a sing-song voice, pouring batter from a pitcher onto the griddle surface. “Gallifreyan pancakes without even a drop of poison! Andy will vouch for them.”
“They’re good,” she says, pulling a short stack onto a plate and setting it in front of the seat next to her, like a lure. “You don’t even need syrup.”
“I got it out, anyway,” Quỳnh says, plucking the bottle of Earth’s finest maple syrup from beside the griddle and brandishing it at her. She glances at Andy. “For her sweet tooth.”
For a long time, Andy has sworn that she doesn’t do domestic. No families, no long-term ties, nothing that binds her to any one place or any person for any amount of time. A tickle starts on the bottom of her feet when things get too cozy, propelling her right on to the next place, next person, next thing, next distraction.
She hasn’t felt that tickle since Nile stepped into the TARDIS. Not that she’d volunteer to go to Nile’s family reunion the next time they’re near Earth — Omega’s bones, no! Just that there’s a domestic rhythm to their existence here, the way their laundry piles up together and their bed is arranged just so — a blanket on Nile’s side, only a sheet for Andy, and five pillows that they share interchangeably.
Within a matter of months, in between the regularly irregular adventures they have here and there when they step foot off the TARDIS, Quỳnh has settled into the space around and between them in a way that is also undeniably domestic but still somehow doesn’t trigger those itchy feet.
She’s still unpredictable and unquestionably dangerous. The first time she left the TARDIS with them, she sold them out to a local dictator within a single span — a short hairy hippopotamus woman who threw Andy and Nile into a cell. After a few days, Quỳnh begrudgingly rescued them because the TARDIS wouldn’t let her back inside, otherwise. When they all came tumbling back through the blue doors with a horde of hairy hippopotami soldiers on their heels, Andy and Quỳnh had a proper shouting row about it. Nile left the console room just long enough to make some popcorn and come back to sit and watch them with the gusto of a tennis fan at Wimbledon.
Those are the bad days. But then there are more than enough good days to allmost balance them out, like Andy and Nile’s continued movie night tradition where Quỳnh makes herself comfortable on the one large couch, more often than not, and ends up draped across everyone else’s lap. Last week, Nile began to absently stroke her hair and she practically purred like a Gallifreyan housecat. Andy has walked into various rooms to find Nile and Quỳnh laughing and teasing each other, all good natured and no malice. Their meals have settled into a regular schedule — as much as anything in the TARDIS operates with any schedule at all — the three of them taking turns cooking (or heating up mac and cheese in the sonic microwave, an Earth delicacy that Quỳnh has chosen as her favorite) and then sitting around the table, talking and teasing and generally enjoying each other’s company.
As the months pass, when it falls to Quỳnh to rescue Andy and Nile during a misadventure, she grumbles about it less. She is calculating and clinically observant and frighteningly persuasive, but she tends to use those attributes for far fewer violent ends. There are occasional casualties that might have been avoided, or slightly more violent means than Andy would have chosen, but the general direction of things is ... less catastrophic.
"She's trending toward tolerable," Nile murmurs into the crown of Andy's head one night in bed, Andy tucked against her chest, as they discuss their strange passenger. "Still a menace, but she's our menace."
"Our menace," Andy repeats, rolling the syllables around experimentally, weighing them on her tongue.
There was a place in Andromache’s life — and in this TARDIS — where Quỳnh once belonged. Where the way they were together was undeniably domestic. And when Quỳnh begins to fit back into those spaces, even in and around the places where Nile now exists, it doesn’t make the soles of her feet itch even a little bit. Instead, she wants to stand still, to preserve this fragile and miraculous thing that is crystallizing between them.
Quỳnh kisses Nile first. They’re at a bar on Hallaf, the day after the Hallafians win the battle against a dreadnaught of Cybermen (thanks in no small part to the three visitors and their TARDIS), and the whole city is in a fit of drunken celebration. This particular establishment has a band howling out victory songs on a small stage, and a dance floor full of undulating orange Hallafians, and a twelve-tentacled bartender with a very generous, sloppy pour.
Three drinks in, Quỳnh invites Nile to dance. One song in, jumping and grinding to the beat, Quỳnh seizes her by the face for a sloppy kiss. Nile pulls away and stumbles off the dance floor to Andy, breathing heavily and flushed so deeply her face is practically purple.
“You okay?” she asks, taking Nile by the elbow and steadying her on her feet.
“Yeah, I’m … I wasn’t expecting … I didn’t mean …” She gazes at Andy, more sober now than she was when she followed Quỳnh to the dance floor. “I’m fine, but are you okay?”
Andy probably ought to feel jealous or angry or upset. But now that she knows Nile is fine, she doesn’t feel any of those things. In fact, she feels … hopeful.
Quỳnh is still dancing, swaying in rhythm with the Hallafians as they celebrate her and the fact that she helped save their people.
“I love you,” Andy shouts over the pulsing music, leaning in to kiss Nile before she can reply. Nile kisses back with enthusiasm, one hand twisting into Andy’s short hair in a way that’s almost painful but not quite. She pulls her closer and whispers in her ear, “We could both go dance with Quỳnh, if you want?”
Nile laughs, a sound of pure joy. “I’d like that.”
She takes Andy’s hand and leads her to the dance floor, making their way to Quỳnh together.