Chapter Text
Time and time again, she found herself returning to the beach where it all began. Or perhaps when it all ended. She wasn’t quite sure how to define that day, where one chapter closed and another opened, divided by a liminal space where she wandered the coastline, her trail of footprints washed away in her wake by the eddying motion of the tides. Every time she came to the beach, she walked the same route: down through the grassy dunes, along to the edge of the sea, then parallel to the wandering coastline until her legs tired, or she was overcome with emotion, or she simply decided she’d had enough.
Sometimes, he walked with her. He only walked in the times where she knew no one would be about, where she could talk to him without fear of strangers overhearing her and wondering why she seemingly spoke to no one. Accompanied by the golden hues of a rising sun glowing against a cerulean sky, or the unfurling bloodied flames of daylight giving its final farewell, she would walk hand in hand with him, her fingers curled over thin air, his eyes so full of warmth and light and yet - when she looked closer - nothing more than a concoction of memories her mind clung onto in order to keep him preserved forever.
They would talk about this and that: redecorating the apartment, their plans to travel the world without fear of an alien invasion, what they - or she - would have for dinner tonight. She promised him that she would eat, and she followed up on that promise every evening, in the apartment that she loathed and yet somehow could not let go of, alone at the dining table with a meal that tasted nice but was nothing compared to how he would make it. She complained to him the next day, and he laughed fondly and told her that she should have a look at his family recipe book, to which she said that she would if the sight of his handwriting in the margins didn’t elicit a fresh wave of tears that flowed throughout the evening and only ceased when she lay her weary head down to rest for the night.
Dinner - and other such domestic subjects, if she was honest with herself - became a topic she avoided in her solitary conversations with him. More often than not, they talked about UNIT: how Shirley was doing, or the hideous amount of paperwork that awaited her on her desk, or the new recruits whose training she was overseeing. They rarely mentioned the War, and when they did, it was when she sat on the dunes at the end of the walk and wept into her hands and grieved for everything that they could have had. He would sit next to her, his arm around her shoulders, and sometimes she could smell his cologne and she would lean to rest her head on his shoulder and then she would lose her balance and nearly tumble down the dunes. That physical jolt served as her painful invitation back to reality and to the one fact that she always had to accept at the end of every walk.
She was alone.
The walks continued through November and December. She celebrated the New Year on the beach, gazing up at the starlit sky and the sliver of moon hanging in the inky black. January dragged its heels, February the fourteenth made her sick to the stomach, March brought fresh new life and fresh new problems to her doorstep. She swallowed down forty milligrams of paroxetine with her coffee every morning, went to work for the majority of the day (and sometimes the majority of the night), returned home when she could to rest, because that was what he would’ve wanted her to do. She hated that she couldn’t show him that he was right in the end, that regular breaks and putting her mental and physical health first really was helping.
Sometimes, she even went out with friends in the evening: Shirley, Donna, Mel, Susan, Osgood, other colleagues whom she’d formed a close friendship with through their mutual grief for lives lost during the War. Those evenings were the happiest moments she had, where she could almost forget her insurmountable pile of woes and the Commander facade was allowed to fall a little further than she usually let it. She’d promised him on the day of his funeral that she would do everything she could to learn how to let go of Commander-in-chief Lethbridge-Stewart when she needed to, and for the most part, she believed she was making progress.
Then she would return to the beach and talk to him, and it was like hitting a reset button, and she would let the Commander take over for however long the wound of grief needed to scab over again.
One blustery day in April, she trod the same path, watching the foam swirl and coalesce around her feet, when her attention was drawn to an oddly-shaped shell. It wasn’t uncommon to see shells along the coastline; in fact, she endeavoured to find particularly unique ones that she thought Christofer would like, which she would take home and put in the drawer of trinkets she’d started collecting, hoping that his spirit might smile upon them and know that he haunted her thoughts every waking second still. Mussels, cockles and scallops of a variety of colours were the most common ones that she found, and so when she spotted the pinkish shell half-buried in the sand and saw its rounded edges, she assumed it was a type of scallop that she’d not yet discovered.
Upon further inspection, however, she discovered it was not a shell at all. It was a petal. A sakura petal, if her gut instinct was correct. Crouching down, she plucked it from the sand and ran a thumb over it, frowning.
Another sakura petal washed up near her feet.
Then another.
And another.
The entire ocean, for as far as the eye could see, was brimming with pink petals. Kate watched, astonished, as they drifted along in clumps, some carried along by the invisible currents, others ending up on the sand in soggy piles. For one furious second, she thought they were the remnants of someone’s wedding or party, left to clog up the ocean - but no. They appeared as if by magic, bubbling up from a spot just before the horizon and getting caught up in the swell of the sea.
Her neck prickled. Wheeling around, she spotted a figure standing at the apex of the dunes. The sun was bright, yet the figure was shrouded in unnatural shadow. Kate got the uncanny sense that they were observing her, and she reached for the gun in her coat pocket, quietly cocking it.
The figure lifted a hand and waved… well, merrily was the only way to describe it. They waved with a vigorous cheer that didn’t align at all with the ominous atmosphere that made Kate’s gut twist and her grip tighten on the gun. Was she being paranoid? Perhaps her vision was going (she spent far too long at a laptop each day) and that’s why she couldn’t see them properly. It was probably nothing. It had to be nothing. Yet in her line of work, ‘had to be nothing’ almost always resulted in the ‘nothing’ being very much a ‘something’, and a world-threatening ‘something’ at that, so Kate took a deep breath and strode towards the figure.
“Kate.”
It was like he was right next to her. She froze, head twisting to the side, his name instinctively ghosting her lips as she stopped herself from calling out to him.
When she turned back, the figure was gone, along with the sakura petals.
No matter how hard she tried, Kate couldn’t shake off the encounter. She threw herself into the day’s business with a vehemence that startled even Shirley, who had seen her on some of her worst days. The Chief Scientific Officer made several valiant attempts to break Kate’s hyperfocus, the eighth of which involved a warm pastry in a paper bag and a large dark roast coffee and was the most successful of them all. Kate, quietly touched by how much her friends refused to give up on her, wrangled five minutes out of her day to take the lifts up to the roof of the Tower with Shirley for a few moment’s peace and a wonderful view of London’s cityscape.
As she sipped her coffee, she sensed Shirley was watching her.
“Have I got something on my face?” she asked, dabbing at her cheeks for any crumbs the cinnamon swirl may have left.
“No, no.” Shirley shook her head. “You just seem… tense today. More tense than usual, that is,” she added swiftly before Kate could make one of her dry quips about the stress UNIT piled on her every day. “Did something happen?”
“I…”
She hesitated, wondering whether Shirley would send her straight to the psychiatrist if she confessed the events of the morning, especially as she herself was starting to wonder if her hallucinations had levelled up their game. The reflexive urge to dismiss her friend’s concerns was palpable, but after a brief consideration, she swallowed that urge back down and said, “I saw something unusual on the beach today.”
Shirley listened as Kate recounted the events. When she mentioned hearing Christofer’s voice, her friend’s face creased in sympathy and she brushed Kate’s arm.
“You know,” the scientist said thoughtfully, once Kate had finished. “The behaviour of the petals is too unusual to put it down to the wind or the currents. I can dispatch a nearby ground team to have a look, if you want?”
“You believe me?” Kate said, startled.
“I’ve heard far stranger things in my life. You were worried I wouldn’t?”
“I thought I was - oh, it doesn’t matter. What about the figure?”
“We can do energy readings.” Shirley had already pulled out her tablet and was tapping away at it, but she glanced up with a look in her eyes that Kate recognised all too well. “But - and don’t take this the wrong way - do you think it might have been - ”
“A result of my overactive imagination which tends to go wild nowadays whenever I get paranoid? Yes, I do.” She sighed. “It just felt real, that’s all. You’re probably right.”
“I am rather good at being right.”
“And don’t I know it.”
They grinned at each other, laughing, and for the first time that day, Kate felt a little less weighed down by the trials and tribulations of her duty and her own mind.
Shirley encouraged (as she put it) or summoned the wrath of a thousand gods to force (as Kate described it) Kate out of the door at six pm sharp, promising to finish off anything she had left unfinished. London’s pavements were alive with the hoards of commuters heading towards the nearby Underground station in their thick coats and suits and carrying briefcases and rucksacks and cooling flasks of caffeinated beverages. Not for the first time, Kate was glad she didn’t have to take the Tube home; even spending a few minutes in the crowds as she wove round UNIT Tower to the underground car park entrance was enough to tighten her airways to the point where she could hardly breathe. Another thing the War had left her with, and unlike so many other effects, she couldn’t pinpoint the cause. Maybe the crowds reminded her of the apocalypse of plastic raining down from the sky? Maybe it was because she hated all the eyes that could be watching her? Maybe she feared that one of them might draw a gun and catch her unawares and then -
In the driver’s seat, Kate gave herself a few minutes to calm down, her forehead pressed so firmly into the steering wheel that it left an unflattering imprint when she finally lifted her face.
“Another day survived.” She met her own gaze in the rear view mirror and gave herself a soft smile. “Well done.”
The drive home brought its usual clogged-up roads, angry drivers, and traffic lights which stayed on red for far too long and flashed between the other colours faster than she could blink. More than once, Kate thought she saw a sakura petal in the corner of her vision, but she shook herself and carried on. Seeing things when walking was dangerous enough. Seeing things when steering a one-tonne hulk of metal was on another tier of danger altogether, and she would rather not have to call Shirley to bail her out of jail a second time.
Arriving, Kate chose to take the stairs up to the twelfth floor where her apartment was so she could mentally prepare herself for the all-consuming emptiness that greeted her every day, rather than the scent of spices and trails of cologne and a warm hand on her cheek as lips pressed against hers. She’d done her best to give it a sense of homeliness - lavender diffusers in every room, more photos on the walls, blankets on every sofa and armchair available - but nothing brought the sense of home quite like Christofer had done. She called it her home, yet to her, it was really just an apartment too big for a single woman.
Had she considered moving out? Yes. Could she look at the window which the bullet had shattered? Not all the time, no. Did she want to start afresh? Maybe, she had considered it many times in the small hours where she couldn’t sleep. Could she let go of that one place where she’d built so many memories with him? Absolutely not.
Putting her key in the lock, Kate paused. Her sharp ears picked up the sound of a sweet violin sonata coming from inside, its notes quivering in the air. She often had the radio on in the mornings where she had time to make breakfast, but she had gone straight to the beach this morning… unless she put it on out of habit, of course. It bothered her that she couldn’t remember, but didn’t bother her enough that she spent more than a few seconds pondering it before she pushed the door open.
Sakura petals greeted her in the hallway.
Kate halted, her breath catching in her throat.
They were everywhere, scattered throughout her apartment like some twisted flower girl had thrown them to mock what she could now never have. Her hand was on her gun in a split-second, drawing it out and cocking it. The violin only grew louder as she crept down the hallway, reaching for her phone in her pocket, ready to dial Shirley’s number.
“Oh, don’t bother with that, dearie!”
A figure - the figure - pranced out of the kitchen. Her cat-like blue eyes flicked up and down Kate as Kate let out a strangled cry and pointed her gun at the woman’s heart.
No, hearts. Time Lords had a binary vascular system, so it would take two shots to properly disable her, and then a third to the brain stem just in case -
“Seriously?” Missy pouted, folding her arms. “My, you have grown a bit antsy since you last saw me, haven’t you? Stop trying to act like Daddy, Commander, and put the gun down, it won’t do you any good, and it certainly won’t do me any good if I’m bleeding out on the floor like your poor boyfriend.”
“Don’t you dare talk about him,” Kate hissed.
“Oh, we’re going to talk about him, alright.” Her lips curved upwards into a glittering smile. “And we’re going to have a lovely tea party whilst we’re at it!”
She dipped a low curtsy, gesturing towards the kitchen. Come through, dear. I’ve made scones!”