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Narvin had his hands tangled in his robes, staser-focused and worried as always, but Romana’s mind had begun to wander. This wasn’t new, of course. She could divide her life into sections by the ways her mind strayed off course from the task at hand: there was the time when pain and brainfog had pulled her out of dull meetings, the time when overwhelming frustration that no one else on this blasted planet would leave her be to allow any progress at all made it hard to respond civilly, the time when terror for the future of her people drowned out all else.
Now, she thought, she was a little hungry. It might have been an odd thought, in the middle of the CIA tardis bay with the lights turned down, barking a quick handful of orders at Eris. But it was the truth and, besides, nothing much mattered now. This wasn’t going to work.
Romana was incapable of giving in, but she was also pragmatic, and well aware that this war was beyond stopping. Rassilon was beyond stopping. Her proud and learned people might truly, before long, be as bad as the daleks (mind probes were used again and she had no doubt that, somewhere conveniently off-world, there was a lightless cell holding some starving alien until she told the Time Lord guard what she knew). Maybe they would succeed today and save a planet, but eventually they would fail. Eventually she would face public disintegration as surely as Trave had.
So, she was hungry, because there was no point anymore in focusing on the doomed big picture more than necessary.
The tardis faded away, the shining gray cylinder becoming ghostly on its way out. The sound was softer in newer models, but it filled her with the same nameless longing it always had.
Eris had been in the last Academy class that graduated before war training took over from old-fashioned schooling. He had been a good student, and back in the days with more options had considered a life of politics. But he saw when that became more dangerous even than being a soldier, and applied for the CIA instead. He’d still thought then that they might be doing the pre-war type of intervention that would hardly be talked about or shared openly.
He had been disappointed. The privileges to scan timelines for anomalies were reserved for Coordinator Romana and Deputy Coordinator Narvin, now that the web was so cluttered with anomalies it was difficult to work out which ones could or should be fixed. In the last 6 years, Eris had been sent on two off-world missions to put the timeline back in place, and five more as an attache to the War Council. Trained CIA operatives, in theory used to the rest of the universe, came in handy when tracking down information and resources. Although Eris privately suspected he had been chosen specifically for his inexperience.
He leaned against the small single-driver console and watched through the heavy shied—a mini transduction barrier—as the pillar rose and fell and he faded into the vortex. At least this time he was going to save someone, even if he wasn’t totally sure what made this one time different. At least the Coordinators seemed to have realized he was capable of more than standing in the corner. All he had to do was arrive, explain time travel and the rescue plan, and promise to return. It was easy, simple.
Eris wished so hard his teeth ached that there was more he could do to make the universe right again.