Tegan takes to becoming a time lord very quickly. Does some time shenanigans to commit genocide, gets a tardis, irritates the doctor all in about 20 minutes.
Temporal Instability and Other Relationship Problems - Chapter Two
Notes:
Chapter two is (finally) here!
Hope you enjoy :)
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Temporal Instability and Other Relationship Problems - February: Operational Necessity - on Ao3
All previous chapters on Tumblr
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Temporal Instability and Other Relationship Problems - February: Operational Necessity
By February, UNIT headquarters had developed the atmosphere of a building that was being held together purely by caffeine, frayed tempers and increasingly dodgy speculative science.
The fractures were spreading; it wasn’t fast enough yet for UNIT or the collective governments to be losing control of the stories they were spinning or for the public to fully understand what was happening, but it was happening quickly enough that everyone inside UNIT had stopped pretending conventional containment procedures were going to solve the problem. The reports arrived hourly, each one slightly worse than the last. There were stories of commuters that had stepped onto Underground trains that didn’t exist on any current map and had vanished for several minutes before reappearing somewhere else in the city, shaken and unable to agree on where they had been, and stories of office workers who had returned from their lunch breaks to find buildings with extra floors that nobody remembered building. There had even been accounts of entire conversations that had splintered into different versions of events, with different people recalling completely different outcomes, while insisting with equal certainty that their memory of the conversation was correct.
The disturbances had started to settle over London itself after dark. Entire streets occasionally seemed to shift subtly at the edges of people’s vision, as though the city couldn’t maintain a consistent shape anymore. CCTV footage became increasingly unreliable after midnight and there were even recorded videos of reflections that moved half a second too slowly.
The stars changed sometimes as well. It wasn’t dramatic enough for most people to notice but it was obvious enough that more and more astronomers had begun contacting the authorities. Constellations appeared wrong for a few seconds at a time and unidentified stars appeared where there should have been empty space. Once, for nearly eleven minutes over South London, the moon had been accompanied by a second smaller object hanging low beside it, before it disappeared without any explanation.
Nobody inside UNIT liked discussing the incidents for very long. Deep beneath the Tower, the main scientific hub had become a battlefield of equations, holographic projections and exhausted arguments. Romana occupied the centre of it all like a furious queen presiding over the collapse of causality itself.
“You are still approaching the problem linearly!” She informed three gathered UNIT physicists with exasperated disdain. “Reality is not a… what do you call those ridiculous things? A motorway!”
One of them opened his mouth weakly before, apparently, deciding against arguing with her.
Nearby, Nyssa adjusted readings on a projection console, while Osgood hovered anxiously beside her, juggling three separate tablets and what looked suspiciously like emergency chocolate. Kate watched the chaos from the platform at the far end of the room, still clutching a mug of coffee she had forgotten to drink. Below her, Tegan and Ace were arguing loudly enough to be heard over the machinery.
“Your problem,” Ace declared, sitting backwards on a chair, “is emotional constipation.”
Tegan looked horrified. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“I am not emotionally constipated.”
Ace snorted. “You and Nyssa can barely be in the same room without looking like divorced geography teachers at parents’ evening.”
Tegan pointed a warning finger at her. “Watch it.”
Ace only grinned wider.
The two of them had fallen back into their friendship with alarming ease over the previous weeks. There was no softness in it at all; their affection expressed itself almost entirely through insults, theft of each other’s chips and arguments that were easily loud enough to alarm passing staff.
Crucially, neither had attempted to discuss the ruins of their respective love lives. Ace knew enough about Nyssa from drunken conversations with Tegan years ago to understand the situation they were in was dangerous territory, while Tegan knew Ace had developed feelings for someone that were deep enough for her to suddenly go quiet when she heard certain songs on the radio.
Mutually avoiding discussing any of it suited them perfectly.
“You know what you should do?” Ace continued. “Pretend that you’re in a relationship.”
Tegan barked out a laugh. “Oh, brilliant plan. Absolutely flawless. That’d solve everything.”
“I’m serious!” Ace continued, enjoying herself enormously now. “You’re all tragic yearning and unresolved eye contact… maybe the universe is just sick of the tension. Maybe if you pretend that you’re happy together then it’ll stick?”
“That is not scientific.”
“No,” Ace agreed cheerfully, shrugging, “but it would be funny for me to watch.”
Above them, Kate froze. Across the room, Romana slowly looked up from her calculations.
Their eyes met and something deeply unfortunate happened.
“Oh no…” Kate murmured.
Romana’s expression sharpened with sudden intellectual interest.
Osgood, noticing both of them looking simultaneously horrified, paled immediately. “What? Why are you both doing that face?”
Romana strode towards her in a sweep of crimson Gallifreyan robes. “The fractures respond to emotional instability.”
“Yes…” Osgood agreed cautiously.
“And, specifically, unresolved emotional bonds.”
Osgood blinked. Then she blinked again. “Oh no…”
Tegan looked between them suspiciously, knowing that there was something that she was missing but having no idea what it was. “Why are people saying ‘oh no’ so many times?”
Kate pinched the bridge of her nose. “Because,” she started carefully, “Ace may accidentally have had a point.”
Silence fell for a long moment as the meaning behind her words dawned on the Australian.
“Absolutely not!” She snapped.
Nyssa looked up from across the laboratory, her own attention drawn towards the conversation as the implications occurred to her. “I beg your pardon?”
Ace nearly fell off her chair laughing.
x-x
Three hours later, Tegan was still sticking to her argument that the entire idea was ridiculous, refusing to accept anything to the contrary.
“It’s humiliating!” She informed them, her arms folded and her eyes narrowed.
“It’s temporary.” Kate corrected.
“It’s psychotic.”
Romana looked faintly offended. “It’s an elegant solution to an entirely messy situation.”
Tegan whirled around to face Nyssa desperately, as though she was expecting solidarity from the Trakenite.
Nyssa folded her arms tightly, mirroring the other woman’s pose. “You cannot genuinely believe that engaging in some kind of emotional… performance… can possibly stabilise multidimensional fractures.”
“Actually,” Osgood cut in nervously, “the preliminary data does support–”
“Traitor…” Tegan muttered, glaring at the younger brunette.
The theory itself was horrifyingly simple. Every major surge so far had coincided with some form of emotional conflict between Tegan and Nyssa. It couldn’t simply be linked to proximity; there was a clear link to the emotional disruption. The stronger the repression, the stronger the fracture response seemed to be.
Romana’s hypothesis suggested that if the instability perceived emotional continuity instead of unresolved tension, the resonance spikes might lessen.
In other words, she told them bluntly, they had to persuade the universe that they were fine, even if they absolutely were not.
“It doesn’t have to be convincing.” Kate assured them with a shrug.
Ace made a strangled noise of amusement somewhere behind her and Tegan glared murderously.
x-x
The first public outing of their supposed relationship took place two days later during a high-level UNIT conference with officials joining them remotely from Geneva.
It began badly and went downhill from there.
The conference room hummed softly with countless overlapping projected displays and translation systems. Diplomats, military advisers and scientific consultants filled the long, curved table while Nyssa sat rigidly beside Tegan looking as though she would rather be facing execution. Tegan, meanwhile, compensated for the discomfort she was feeling in the same way as she always did; with sarcasm sharp enough to remove paint.
A Swiss diplomat smiled politely at them through one of the many screens. “UNIT has assured us the situation is under control.”
“Have they?” Tegan asked. “That’s a bold strategy.”
Kate closed her eyes briefly, barely fighting the urge to pinch the bridge of her nose and display the irritation she was feeling towards her friend.
Beside her, Nyssa attempted damage control. “What Tegan means is that the situation remains manageable.”
Tegan leaned back in her chair. “Well, manageable until reality tears open over Birmingham, I guess.”
Nyssa’s jaw tightened slightly, but she said nothing more and the conversation staggered on around them.
Then one of the Geneva officials asked, with disastrous innocence, “And Miss Jovanka’s role within UNIT is… what, exactly?”
Tegan raised her hands and shrugged. “I used to be a journalist but apparently now I’m emotional support.”
A few people laughed uncertainly. Nyssa didn’t and Tegan realised too late how her words had sounded. She wasn’t just coming across as dismissive of the operation – she was coming across as dismissive of her… of all of this.
Nyssa’s expression closed down instantly. Apparently in reaction, the temperature of the entire room dropped dramatically and every monitor started to flicker violently.
Osgood looked up in horror, unable to keep the fluctuations under any semblance of control. “Oh dear…”
A fracture ripped open across the centre of the conference table as reality split with a shriek like tearing metal. Several officials shouted as one of the screens dissolved briefly into static and impossible landscapes. Papers flew sideways as gravity lurched violently.
Kate was already on her feet barking orders as UNIT guards instinctively rushed forwards towards the chaos.
Tegan stared at Nyssa as the other woman stared rigidly ahead. She didn’t seem to be angry, exactly. Her expression was more wounded and that, somehow, felt infinitely worse.
Romana, gripping the edge of the table as the fracture pulsed above it, snapped, “Congratulations, Tegan. You’ve emotionally inconvenienced spacetime and now we’re all paying the price.”
x-x
The second attempt at fooling the universe that they were a happy and functioning couple happened at an active incursion site on the outskirts of Sheffield, where an abandoned warehouse district had become unstable enough that UNIT had been forced to evacuate several square miles around it. The entire area existed in a constant state of partial overlap with another reality which was causing the buildings to phase in and out without warning, their structures flickering between familiar industrial decay and something entirely alien. Corrugated metal walls rippled into smooth black surfaces covered in unfamiliar symbols before snapping back seconds later and windows looked out onto different skies depending on when someone glanced through them.
One street in particular had become notoriously dangerous amongst UNIT personnel because it refused to remain physically consistent for more than a few minutes at a time. Entire rows of warehouses periodically vanished beneath dense alien vegetation that burst through the cracked concrete with impossible speed. Towering trees with pale silver bark pushed their way upwards to where loading bays should have been, their branches threaded with luminous vines that pulsed faintly in the dark. Thick, humid air rolled across the site carrying unfamiliar scents and distant animal sounds that didn’t belong anywhere on Earth. Then, without warning, the jungle would collapse back into derelict buildings so abruptly that leaves, moisture and organic debris simply stopped existing mid-motion.
Nobody trusted the site anymore. Soldiers moved through it with guide ropes attached to their harnesses in case corridors disappeared around them, while the scientific teams worked from heavily shielded mobile stations parked well outside the most unstable zones. Even then, their equipment failed constantly and maps rewrote themselves in real time. Structures appeared larger inside than outside and at least two UNIT soldiers swore they had briefly seen people moving through the jungle who didn’t look entirely human, although none of their recordings had ever confirmed it.
Tegan accompanied Nyssa towards the central anomaly scanner while the UNIT soldiers spread through the fractured warehouse district, establishing perimeter lines and motion checkpoints. Floodlights swept slowly across the shifting buildings as technicians shouted readings backwards and forwards over radios. Somewhere nearby, metal screamed as part of a warehouse briefly attempted to become something else.
Neither of them seemed remotely capable of behaving normally around the other after their meeting with Geneva. Every interaction carried an exhausting level of caution, as though they were both trying to navigate a minefield without admitting it existed. Their conversations never moved beyond clipped observations about the operation and even those sounded overly deliberate, as though each sentence had been carefully considered before being spoken out loud.
The silences were worse. They stretched far too long, settling heavily between them despite the surrounding noise of UNIT activity. There should have been enough distraction in the chaos of the incursion site to make the awkwardness less noticeable and yet, somehow, it only sharpened it further.
Then, without warning, a pulse ran through the distortion field ahead of them.
The air twisted sharply as Osgood’s voice crackled through communicators, “Readings spiking again!”
Nyssa instinctively reached for the stabiliser controls at the exact same moment that a section of broken flooring collapsed underneath her.
Tegan reacted before she had properly registered what was happening, her hand closing firmly around Nyssa’s arm as the ground shifted beneath them. She pulled her back instinctively, dragging her away from the unstable edge of the distortion just as part of the concrete dissolved into flickering jungle undergrowth. Nyssa stumbled directly into her waiting arms, the impact hard enough to force them both off balance and, for one long heartbeat, neither of them moved away.
The anomaly stabilised almost instantly. The distortion still shimmered around them, but the violent fluctuations eased into something strangely calm. Around the site, UNIT monitors finally stopped screaming.
Ace, watching from nearby, grinned openly. “Well, that’s incredibly embarrassing for both of you.”
Tegan still had one arm wrapped protectively around Nyssa’s waist but neither of them seemed to be aware of it.
x-x
That evening, for the first time in weeks, Kate finally overruled the increasingly self-destructive work habits of everyone involved in the operation and insisted the senior team stop for long enough to eat a proper meal. She pointed out, with a level of satisfaction that immediately made both Tegan and Nyssa deeply suspicious, that the breakthrough at the Sheffield incursion site had produced the most stable distortion readings they had managed to record in weeks. The fact that those readings had sharply improved immediately after Tegan had wrapped her arms around Nyssa was not a detail Kate seemed inclined to treat with any subtlety at all, much to the mingled embarrassment and irritation of the two women involved.
She gathered the core team in her office after the briefing, commandeering several takeaway menus from an exhausted lieutenant before ordering enough food to feed a small military unit. Once the door was safely closed behind them, she crouched beside her desk and retrieved an alarming collection of spirits and several bottles of wine from the bottom drawer with the practised efficiency of someone who had been running lengthy UNIT operations for far too long.
The atmosphere in her office remained tired to the point of collapse, but for the first time in as long as any of them could remember it no longer felt as though everyone in the room was quietly waiting for reality to end around them. Equipment hummed softly beyond the walls and radios still crackled somewhere out in the corridor, meaning that no one could relax entirely, but the sharp edge of panic had dulled somewhat.
Ace stole chips from Mel’s plate with the relaxed confidence of someone who had been getting away with it for years, while Mel objected automatically without making any real attempt to stop her. Across the room, Osgood was making a valiant and increasingly unsuccessful effort not to glance towards Kate every few seconds whenever she spoke. Tegan approached her gin and tonic with the grim focus of someone fortifying herself for battle, which Nyssa was trying extremely hard not to notice despite sitting directly beside her. The effort clearly occupied a significant amount of her concentration. Every so often she opened her mouth as if she was intending to say something, only to reconsider and return her attention very firmly to her food instead.
Leela and Romana arrived noticeably later than everyone else, both women looking faintly dishevelled and yet considerably more relaxed than the rest of the exhausted UNIT team combined. Whatever they had been doing before entering the office had apparently left Leela in a very good mood and Romana with the air of someone unsuccessfully attempting to maintain her dignity. The moment they sat down in the remaining seats near the desk, Leela reached across without hesitation, stole one of the prawn crackers from Romana’s plate and examined it briefly before nibbling at it with thoughtful suspicion. Romana didn’t even attempt to protest, which suggested to their companions this happened often enough to have become routine.
“You have your own.” Romana reminded her with mild impatience as the bruentte helped herself to another prawn cracker from her plate.
The exchange was delivered with such complete normality that nobody initially paid much attention to it beyond Romana, who sighed with the air of someone giving in to a deeply familiar inevitability, before handing over her remaining prawn cracker without argument. Leela rewarded her action with a broad, pleased grin before leaning across to kiss her gently and entirely absent-mindedly.
The conversation around the room faltered almost immediately and not because the gesture itself had been particularly dramatic. If anything, the opposite was true, as it had carried the effortless familiarity of something that had been repeated countless times before and had been performed without self-consciousness or ceremony. The quiet intimacy of it was what had landed far harder than it should have.
Ace stared at them both for a long moment. “… wait a minute.”
Romana paused, her wine glass hovering between the table and her lips. “Hmm?”
“You two are… together?”
Leela frowned, visibly confused by the question. “Yes?”
“You never said.”
Romana took a calm sip of wine, one eyebrow arched with faint amusement. “Nobody asked.”
Then, with exactly the same casual tone someone might use to mention the weather, Leela added, “We have been married for many years.”
The reaction around the table was immediate and chaotic. Tegan inhaled sharply enough to almost aspirate her gin and tonic. Nyssa blinked several times in rapid succession as though her brain had temporarily stopped processing language correctly. Mel looked delighted in a way that suggested she was already mentally reviewing several weeks’ worth of interactions in retrospect. Osgood emitted a tiny strangled noise of pure astonishment, while Kate outright choked on her whisky and had to put the glass down before she injured herself.
Meanwhile, Romana and Leela looked mildly puzzled by the level of shock they had apparently caused.
Ace stared at them in astonishment. “Married?”
“Yes.” Romana nodded slowly. “Why is everyone behaving as though we have announced an assassination?”
“You don’t act married.” Tegan protested, still blinking as though she had not entirely recovered from the revelation.
Leela frowned at her with genuine confusion. “What does married act like?”
An awkward silence followed, in which no one around the table managed to produce a coherent answer. The absence of one felt, for several people present, uncomfortably revealing.
Ace suddenly became acutely aware that her knee had been resting against Mel’s underneath the table for several minutes without either of them moving away. At exactly the same moment, the redhead appeared to discover an intense fascination with her drink and became temporarily incapable of looking directly at the woman beside her at all. Across from them, Kate was concentrating far too hard on neatly rearranging takeaway cartons while very deliberately avoiding risking meeting Osgood’s gaze and, next to her, Tegan and Nyssa had both gone so still that they looked almost alarmed by their own existence.
Romana observed the entire table with growing fascination, wearing the expression of someone who was watching several very intelligent people collectively realise that they had wandered into territory they were catastrophically incapable of navigating.
Leela leant back comfortably in her chair, entirely unaware that she had just triggered a minor existential crisis in each and every one of her friends.
“People,” she declared with deep fondness and no small amount of bafflement, “make courtship unnecessarily confusing.”
Temporal Instability and Other Relationship Problems - Chapter One
Summary:
Temporal fractures start tearing holes in reality so UNIT decides to assemble a chaotic team of former companions and emotionally repressed disasters to stop the world collapsing completely.
Unfortunately, the instability seems to feed on unresolved feelings, which becomes a bit of a problem when Tegan and Nyssa are forced to fake a relationship for the sake of spacetime, Ace discovers Mel is jealous, Kate and Osgood continue dancing around their feelings with absolutely no subtlety at all and Leela and Romana’s marriage hits a stumbling block.
In other words, eight dorks have six months to save the universe.
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Notes:
This is the first thing I've written in SO long thanks to a combination of work, real life, burnout and utter exhaustion.
Massive thanks to @this-isnt-heathrow for your encouragement and for assuring me that it wasn't completely unintelligible!
This story - in true me fashion - is absolutely NOT the story I set out to write. It completely got away from me about half way through the first chapter and took on a life of its own!
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Temporal Instability and Other Relationship Problems - January: The Women from Nowhere - on Ao3
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Temporal Instability and Other Relationship Problems - January: The Women from Nowhere
Beneath a steel-grey January sky, the moor stretched for miles, the frost-stiff grass crunching under the constant movement of boots and tyres. UNIT had turned the empty Yorkshire hillside into a full operational site. Floodlights blazed across the dark in harsh white beams while generators rattled against the wind. Soldiers moved in organised lines between temporary barriers and equipment stations, weapons slung over their shoulders as technicians shouted readings over the noise. Portable scanners swept back and forth across the ground and cables snaked through the mud towards banks of humming machinery and monitoring screens glowing blue in the cold.
At the centre of it all hung the impossible thing itself, suspended above the moor as though the sky had split open and forgotten how to close. It hovered perhaps eight feet above the ground, not a portal, exactly. The thing that UNIT were studying wasn’t anything nearly as neat as that.
The distortion did not look like a hole or a tear. It looked like reality had stopped behaving properly around a single fixed point in the sky. The air warped and shifted as though space itself was under pressure; folding inwards in slow, uneven movements that made it difficult to focus on directly. The edges never stayed still and the light bent the wrong way near them, stretching into thin smudges before snapping back into place.
Every few seconds the landscape inside it changed without warning. One moment there was only the dark moor beyond it. The next, an unfamiliar city stood beneath a green sky crowded with aircraft that moved far too quickly and silently. Then came towering crystalline structures, that might have been trees, with strange colours flickering between their branches. Once, briefly, the distortion opened onto what appeared to be a Victorian drawing room complete with wallpaper, firelight and a grand piano, before the image vanished so suddenly it left several UNIT technicians convinced that they had imagined it.
Then everything snapped back into place and the moor returned once more.
Kate Stewart stood with both hands buried deep inside the pockets of her coat, watching the anomaly with the exhausted expression of somebody who had not slept properly in days and no longer expected to sleep again any time soon.
“Energy spike increasing.” Osgood reported, peering anxiously at her tablet. Her scarf had nearly blown sideways in the wind. “Temporal instability at seventeen percent and climbing.”
“Seventeen percent compared to what?” Kate asked, furrowing her eyebrows at the younger woman.
Osgood hesitated. “That’s the worrying thing… we don’t actually have a scale for this.”
Kate closed her eyes briefly. “Of course we don’t.”
Behind them, UNIT soldiers shifted uneasily in the mud, checking safeties, tightening grips on their rifles and watching the distortion with the fixed concentration of people waiting for something to go very, very wrong. Nearby, scientific teams crowded around banks of equipment that refused to behave consistently. Readings climbed, vanished and rewrote themselves faster than anyone could record them. Arguments broke out in clipped, frustrated bursts as technicians recalibrated scanners for the third or fourth time, only for the numbers they were seeing to change again immediately afterwards.
No one wanted to admit how little they understood. Orders were still being given, data was still being logged and reports were still being filed, but the entire operation had the fragile tension of trained professionals forcing a well-practiced routine onto something that sat completely outside of their experience.
And somewhere just behind Kate’s left shoulder came the relentless scratching of pen against paper.
She turned sharply and her eyes landed on Tegan Jovanka, standing in a thick dark coat with a notebook balanced precariously on one arm, scribbling observations with infuriating calm.
“You are not supposed to be this close.” Kate reminded her, for perhaps the sixth time that evening.
“And yet here I am.” Tegan replied bluntly without looking up.
“You’re a journalist.”
“Yes, Kate, I’m aware. I was there when I got my degree… and my job, for that matter.”
Kate fixed her with a look that was capable of cracking concrete until Tegan finally glanced up, meeting her with an expression that was equally impressed.
The years since they’d first met had altered the Australian far less than Kate might have expected. Tegan was older, certainly, and sharper around the eyes. There was silver threaded through her hair and the sort of weariness that settled into people who had spent decades surviving impossible things. Since her return to Earth in the 1980s, she had reported on wars, natural disasters and injustices across the world – narrowly escaping death on countless occasions. Despite all that, however, the core of what made her who she was had remained unmistakable.
Tegan Jovanka was defiant and difficult and entirely too brave for her own good.
Officially, Tegan was attached to UNIT on a temporary consultancy basis while investigating the unexplained disappearances connected to the disturbances. In practice, however, she had been ‘temporarily attached’ for the better part of a decade. The paperwork changed every few months, new authorisations were signed and someone in Geneva continued pretending there might eventually be an end date to the arrangement. Nobody seriously believed it anymore; Tegan knew too much, had seen too much and had become far too useful to remove from operations like this. UNIT, for its part, continued to play the bureaucratic game and so did she.
Kate had, therefore, settled for pretending to be more irritated with her friend and her presence than she actually was. “You’re not publishing any of this, you know.”
Tegan snorted softly. “You think any editor would really run a story titled ‘Reality Begins Peeling Open Like Damp Wallpaper on Yorkshire Moor’?”
The distortion pulsed violently, causing every monitor in the temporary command centre to start screaming and flashing at once.
Osgood’s face drained of colour. “Ma’am? Something’s coming through.”
The thing hanging above the moor began to widen again. Reality seemed to split unevenly around it, dragged sideways by some invisible force rather than being pulled apart cleanly, leaving blurred and jagged edges behind. The sound that followed rolled across the hillside like someone was dragging metal across concrete, layered with bursts of distorted radio chatter that rose and then died before it had really started.
Several soldiers reacted instinctively, their guns aimed upwards towards a target that none of them could properly define, while nearby technicians stumbled backwards away from their equipment as monitors filled with meaningless symbols and the screech of audio feedback. Across the moor, the floodlights dimmed and flared erratically, throwing the entire area into pulses of white light and shadow that made the widening distortion appear far larger than it had been seconds earlier.
Then, without warning, a figure fell out of the rupture.
She hit the frozen moorland hard in a low crouch already armed. She had a knife, very visibly, gripped tightly in her hand before the soldiers surrounding the anomaly had even fully processed that somebody had emerged from it at all. For half a second the entire UNIT perimeter froze in collective shock as the impossible shimmer still hung open in the air behind her.
The woman rose slowly with a wary, predatory grace. Dark leathers reinforced with heavy furs clung to her body, going some way to protect her against the brutal cold as the wind tore violently through her wild dark hair. Her piercing blue eyes moved constantly, rapidly assessing the armed soldiers surrounding her and calculating angles and threats with unnerving speed. Every line of her posture suggested that she was someone entirely prepared to kill her way out of danger if necessary.
Several UNIT operatives instinctively raised their weapons higher.
“Stand down!” Kate ordered immediately, holding out her arm and striding over the frosty ground towards the newcomer before anyone nervous enough could make a catastrophic mistake.
The stranger’s knife never lowered. Her gaze snapped instantly towards Kate instead, sharp enough to feel almost physical beneath the floodlights.
Then the rupture convulsed again and a second figure stumbled out of the distortion far less gracefully, almost losing her footing altogether as she emerged in a violent swirl of layered crimson robes and incandescent irritation. Unlike the first woman, she looked less immediately dangerous and more profoundly offended by the universe itself.
“Oh, splendid!” She snapped before she had even fully regained her balance. “Absolutely splendid. Thrown halfway across creation by an emotionally constipated temporal fracture.”
She stopped abruptly, noticing approximately twenty UNIT guns aimed directly at her chest. Slowly, she looked around the armed perimeter with an expression that did nothing to disguise how deeply unimpressed she was by the entire situation.
“How reassuringly primitive.” She added coolly, arching one elegant eyebrow.
Tegan stared openly at the first woman in disbelief. “Oh… you have got to be kidding me.”
The second stranger turned sharply at the sound of her voice. For the first time since emerging from the rupture, genuine surprise broke cleanly through her irritation. She glanced quickly towards the knife-wielding woman beside her before looking back at Tegan.
“Tegan Jovanka?”
Kate frowned, her eyes moving rapidly between them. “You know each other?”
Tegan gave a short disbelieving laugh. “Leela and I could probably be described as friends.” Her mouth twisted slightly into something fondly exasperated. “Although it’s been a very long time.”
She muttered something under her breath about ambassadors and being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the Doctor as usual, but Kate’s attention had already fixed more firmly on the two women standing in front of the rupture.
The second woman straightened fully now, gathering herself back into a posture of immense dignity despite the frozen Yorkshire moor, the armed soldiers and the fact she had very clearly just fallen sideways through unstable reality. She carried herself with unmistakable authority; every movement was controlled, elegant and faintly imperious beneath the elaborate Gallifreyan robes layered around her. Silver jewellery glinted faintly at her throat and wrists while sharp intelligent eyes swept across the UNIT operation with immediate assessment and visible disappointment regarding its technological limitations.
Beside her, Leela remained silent but watchful, her knife still loosely held in one hand. Compared to the composed refinement of the woman beside her, she looked almost feral; her powerful shoulders wrapped in weather-darkened furs and a myriad of scars visible against bronze skin whenever the floodlights shifted across her. Yet there was unmistakable awareness in the brief glance she cast towards the second woman, which was followed by a subtle, instinctive re-positioning that placed herself fractionally closer as though ready to intercept any danger before it could reach her companion.
The second woman noticed and the tension around her expression eased by the smallest degree.
“I am Lady Romanadvoratrelundar,” she announced at last with cool formality, as though introducing herself in the middle of an armed UNIT containment zone was perfectly ordinary behaviour, “former President of Gallifrey.”
She gestured gracefully towards the warrior beside her.
“This,” she continued, a note of unmistakable affection softening the edges of her otherwise regal composure, “is Leela of the Sevateem.”
Leela inclined her head once in acknowledgement, her suspicious eyes never leaving the soldiers surrounding them.
“We were hunting the instability.” Romana continued. “It appears it has, instead, hunted us.”
The distortion behind them convulsed without warning.
The rupture folded violently inwards, its unstable edges twisting through impossible angles as every monitor and scanner across the moor simultaneously dissolved into static. Floodlights flickered erratically and radios burst with warped fragments of overlapping voices that did not belong to anyone standing there. For one sickening moment the entire landscape seemed to shudder sideways out of alignment with itself.
Then it vanished with a deafening crack that tore across the Yorkshire hills like the world itself was splitting apart. The sound echoed through the freezing air long after the distortion had disappeared, rolling across the moorland while soldiers instinctively flinched and several pieces of scientific equipment overloaded in showers of sparks.
Silence followed immediately, flooding the entire containment site with an abrupt, unnatural stillness that even seemed to swallow the sound of the wind. The cold intensified sharply in its wake, no longer merely winter air sweeping across the hills but something deeper and stranger, as though the rupture had left behind the lingering absence of somewhere reality itself had briefly failed.
Kate exhaled slowly. “Well,” she said calmly, “that’s probably not good.”
x-x
UNIT HQ spent the next forty-eight hours descending into what could only be described as controlled chaos.
Romana proved brilliant, imperious and almost entirely intolerant of human technology. She understood the distortion more quickly than anyone else in the room and was entirely willing to share her own knowledge, but every attempt to work alongside UNIT’s systems seemed to drive her closer to open fury. More than once, she launched into withering complaints about basic equipment, while frustrated technicians exchanged exhausted looks around her. She demanded to know how anyone expected meaningful analysis to be carried out using computers she described as barely more advanced than children’s toys and seemed to be genuinely offended by the idea that humanity considered any of the equipment in the command centre remotely sophisticated.
Leela nearly put three UNIT soldiers in hospital before anyone fully grasped that attempting to restrict her access to anywhere was an exceptionally bad idea. Initial assumptions that she was simply violent or unpredictable had lasted less than a day. To their growing embarrassment, UNIT personnel quickly discovered that beneath the intensity was someone far sharper and more instinctive than they had given her credit for, capable of reading a room, spotting weaknesses and reacting to threats faster than most trained operatives. By the time the third officer hit the floor, bruised and struggling to breathe, the organisation collectively accepted that Leela tolerated cooperation far more readily than containment.
Osgood adored them both almost instantly.
Tegan remained at UNIT far longer than anyone had originally anticipated after Romana declared that she possessed “relevant experiential context regarding alien catastrophes and emotional stupidity” and therefore could not be excluded from discussions. Kate, who privately suspected Romana had just been looking for an excuse to keep one other person in the room capable of arguing back without being intimidated, allowed it with only minimal, performative, protest.
Three days after the Yorkshire incident, Nyssa arrived.
Kate met her personally near the lower laboratory levels after Osgood practically vibrated with excitement through an entire briefing explaining why they needed “one of the foremost scientific minds in two galaxies”.
Nyssa stepped from the lift with composed elegance, her dark coat still dusted with rainwater from the London streets above. She looked older than Tegan remembered, although only in the faint, technical sense that time had clearly decided some visible passage was necessary. The changes were subtle enough to feel almost deliberate; her hair had lost some of the soft curls it once carried, falling straighter now around her face, but her eyes remained exactly the same impossible shade of sea-green that Tegan remembered from another lifetime.
Nyssa looked entirely composed.
Then she saw Tegan standing beside the observation windows and her composure fractured. Not dramatically, because Nyssa was not dramatic by nature, but that almost made it worse, somehow. Something tightened visibly in the Trakenite’s expression before she smoothed it away again with practised control.
Tegan, however, visibly froze.
Silence settled across the control room in a way that felt immediately unnatural, spreading outwards as conversations died mid-sentence and even the constant background noise of equipment seemed to fade. Kate’s expression remained carefully neutral as she looked between the two women, but there was unmistakable curiosity in her eyes as she watched them face one another for the first time in decades.
Romana, watching from across the room, murmured quietly to Leela, “Ah… there it is.”
Leela folded her arms, her expression knowing. “Pain.”
“Yes.”
Tegan recovered first, forcing a smile onto her face. It didn’t meet her eyes, but that hardly seemed to matter at that moment. “Nyssa.”
Nyssa nodded once. “Tegan.”
Nothing else followed. Any expectation that one of them might immediately speak about the years between them, let alone attempt to untangle the circumstances of their parting in front of a room full of UNIT personnel, dissolved almost instantly into disappointment. Neither woman seemed willing to offer the audience anything so simple or private.
Instead, there were only two names, spoken quietly by voices that had not used them in far too long, left suspended in the cold laboratory air while the people in the control room watched with the uncomfortable awareness that something enormous had just passed between them, entirely unspoken.
Kate suddenly understood why Romana kept referring to emotional instability with the expression of somebody discussing explosives. The tension between them felt physical.
Osgood glanced nervously between the pair. “Tea?”
Nobody answered.
“Right,” she continued faintly, “excellent.”
Nyssa threw herself into work immediately. Together she and Romana began analysing the temporal fractures while simultaneously terrifying UNIT’s scientific staff by discussing multidimensional physics as though they were doing nothing more than arguing over crossword clues.
Almost as soon as she had arrived, the monitoring equipment started behaving strangely whenever Tegan and Nyssa occupied the same space. At first, the anomalies were subtle enough to dismiss: brief spikes in the distortion readings, sudden flickers across screens and energy surges that vanished before the technicians could properly isolate them.
But the pattern repeated too consistently to ignore and, with every incident, Tegan became increasingly determined to avoid Nyssa whenever possible. Unfortunately, that became difficult remarkably quickly inside a UNIT operation where both of them had apparently become essential personnel.
Osgood noticed. Romana definitely noticed. Leela noticed because Romana would not stop smirking.
Then, midway through the week, Ace arrived.
The briefing room doors slid open halfway through one of Kate’s increasingly grim operational meetings and Ace strode inside, carrying a duffel bag over one shoulder and wearing the expression of somebody already halfway through an argument with whatever authority figure she was about to encounter.
“Right,” she announced, “which idiot decided alien reality soup was my problem this time?”
Then she stopped. Mel blinked at her from across the conference table.
Ace stared at her. “… Mel?”
Mel’s entire face lit up instantly with delighted surprise. “Ace!”
Before Kate could react, Mel had crossed the room and pulled Ace into a fierce hug. Ace looked startled for approximately two seconds before hugging her back just as tightly.
“Well,” Kate said dryly, “lovely reunion, terrible timing.”
Ace finally released the redhead, grinning despite herself. “Sorry… didn’t know you were involved in this nonsense, Doughnut?”
“Neither did I.” Mel admitted. “Kate called me yesterday and asked if I’d come and help.”
Ace looked her over quickly, almost subconsciously checking for injuries. Mel realised what she was doing and her smile softened slightly.
Across the room, Tegan watched with folded arms as her old friends greeted each other. “Those two are going to be trouble.”
Romana glanced towards Nyssa. “Oh, certainly.” She agreed easily, smirking lightly. “Though, perhaps, not the worst offenders.”
Ooooh, FANTASTIC premise, mate; loving this already!
'Kate Stewart stood with both hands buried deep inside the pockets of her coat, watching the anomaly with the exhausted expression of somebody who had not slept properly in days and no longer expected to sleep again any time soon.' So no change since the incident with the sea devils, then.
Tegan's a journalist! That's such an excellent job for her; great characterisation!
'Tegan Jovanka was defiant and difficult and entirely too brave for her own good.' I see your adoration of a certain Australian has yet to abate, mate XD
'The woman rose slowly with a wary, predatory grace. Dark leathers reinforced with heavy furs clung to her body, going some way to protect her against the brutal cold as the wind tore violently through her wild dark hair.' LEELA! YEES!
And Romana too! I haven't listened to the Gallifrey series but I love their dynamic as you've written it!
'By the time the third officer hit the floor, bruised and struggling to breathe, the organisation collectively accepted that Leela tolerated cooperation far more readily than containment. Osgood adored them both almost instantly.' PFFFT XD
'Three days after the Yorkshire incident, Nyssa arrived. Kate met her personally near the lower laboratory levels after Osgood practically vibrated with excitement through an entire briefing explaining why they needed “one of the foremost scientific minds in two galaxies”.' NYSSA! And OF COURSE Osgood would be fangirling over her!
'Nyssa looked entirely composed. Then she saw Tegan standing beside the observation windows and her composure fractured. Not dramatically, because Nyssa was not dramatic by nature, but that almost made it worse, somehow. Something tightened visibly in the Trakenite’s expression before she smoothed it away again with practised control. Tegan, however, visibly froze. Silence settled across the control room in a way that felt immediately unnatural, spreading outwards as conversations died mid-sentence and even the constant background noise of equipment seemed to fade' THE REUNION! THE REUNION TO END ALL REUNIONS!
'Romana, watching from across the room, murmured quietly to Leela, “Ah… there it is.” Leela folded her arms, her expression knowing. “Pain.” “Yes.” YOU DON'T SAY-
'Tegan recovered first, forcing a smile onto her face. It didn’t meet her eyes, but that hardly seemed to matter at that moment. “Nyssa.” Nyssa nodded once. “Tegan.” Nothing else followed. Any expectation that one of them might immediately speak about the years between them, let alone attempt to untangle the circumstances of their parting in front of a room full of UNIT personnel, dissolved almost instantly into disappointment. Neither woman seemed willing to offer the audience anything so simple or private. Instead, there were only two names, spoken quietly by voices that had not used them in far too long, left suspended in the cold laboratory air while the people in the control room watched with the uncomfortable awareness that something enormous had just passed between them, entirely unspoken. Kate suddenly understood why Romana kept referring to emotional instability with the expression of somebody discussing explosives. The tension between them felt physical.' Ahhh, one of your patented "emotionally fraught Tegan/Nyssa reunion" scenarios, I see…
Osgood being adorable and trying to alleviate the tension XD
'Almost as soon as she had arrived, the monitoring equipment started behaving strangely whenever Tegan and Nyssa occupied the same space. At first, the anomalies were subtle enough to dismiss: brief spikes in the distortion readings, sudden flickers across screens and energy surges that vanished before the technicians could properly isolate them.' HMMM-
'Tegan became increasingly determined to avoid Nyssa whenever possible' Yeah, good luck with that, Tegan XD
'Osgood noticed. Romana definitely noticed. Leela noticed because Romana would not stop smirking.' PFFT XD
ACE AND MEL REUNION! At least one of these reunions is a bit happier XD
'Across the room, Tegan watched with folded arms as her old friends greeted each other. “Those two are going to be trouble.” Romana glanced towards Nyssa. “Oh, certainly.” She agreed easily, smirking lightly. “Though, perhaps, not the worst offenders.”' YOU MAY JUST BE ONTO SOMETHING THERE, ROMANA XD
Absolutely wonderful chapter, mate; super looking forward to seeing how this fic progresses! Fantastic return to fanfic writing! :)
So no change since the incident with the sea devils, then. - She probably hasn't slept since then tbh 😂😂
I see your adoration of a certain Australian has yet to abate, mate XD - I don't think it ever will! 😂
And Romana too! I haven't listened to the Gallifrey series but I love their dynamic as you've written it! - I love them so much… if there's a BF series to get into, I would recommend Gallifrey every time!
Ahhh, one of your patented "emotionally fraught Tegan/Nyssa reunion" scenarios, I see… - I don't think I'm capable of letting them have any other sort of reunion 😂 It's definitely going to get worse, though… sorry about that 😂
ACE AND MEL REUNION! At least one of these reunions is a bit happier XD - I am FAR more capable of letting THEM have happy reunions, apparently 😂
Thank you so much for reading and commenting, mate! I very much appreciate it ☺️
Summary: Ian and Barbara have arrived back in London after their time with the Doctor. But a misunderstanding as to their absence may just cause their friendship to change.
~~~~~~~~
Read on AO3.
~~~~~~~~
Barbara Wright sat down on her bed, and took a deep breath.
Home.
She was finally home.
It had been a wild few years since that fateful evening in the Totters Lane junkyard. Ian and herself had been whisked away on a fantastical journey through time and space, never knowing where they were going to end up next. But now? They were back on earth, admittedly two years later than hoped for, but they were back in the present day.
Barbara looked around her room. It looked much the same as it had done, although the bedsheets and curtains did look a little thinner than previously.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Barbara?’
Smiling, Barbara crossed the room and opened the door, revealing Ian Chesterton.
‘Settled in alright?’ he said, as Barbara gestured for him to step inside. ‘My landlady was saying that someone had been paying the rent for me while I was gone.’
‘Strange; Mrs Jones has been saying the same thing. You don’t think…’
Ian chuckled.
‘Well, maybe the Doctor did finally manage to get the hang of landing at the right time. Must have travelled back to the day we left and set up accounts for us.’
‘Ever so sweet of him,’ Barbara said, smiling. ‘I really will miss-’
There was another knock at the door.
‘Miss Wright?’
It was Mrs Jones, the landlady. Barbara opened the door again and the older woman stepped through, smiling kindly.
‘Thought you both might like a cup of tea,’ she said, putting the tray down on the table nearby. ‘You two must have had a long journey.’
‘Er… yes,’ Barbara said, as Ian bit the inside of his cheeks to stop himself giggling. ‘Rather a long journey, I suppose.’
Mrs Jones smiled.
‘It is nice to have you back with us, Barbara; did you two enjoy your honeymoon?’
Barbara froze. Beside her, Ian choked on the mouthful of tea he had been halfway through swallowing.
‘Er…’
‘Oh, it’s no issue to me. People used to do the same during the war,’ Mrs Jones added, waving a hand airily. ‘Do you go anywhere nice? Me and my Reg stayed on the Isle of Wight.’
‘Oh, w-well…’ Barbara stammered. She could feel her cheeks flushing. ‘Dorset; nice little place by the coast, very quiet.’
‘Lovely, lovely…’ Mrs Smith said, heading out the door again. ‘Well, I’ll leave you two to clear out the rest of your things; oh, young love…’
The door swung closed behind her, leaving a very awkward pause.
‘P-people think we eloped for two years?’ Ian stammered, blinking very quickly.
‘I-it would appear that way, yes,’ Barbara replied. ‘Well, I suppose it is the nineteen-sixties. By the sounds of things, the world has changed a lot in the intervening years.’
‘Good gosh…’ Ian breathed.
Barbara swallowed.
‘Oh, dear. Do you think the school thought the same? I spoke to Mrs Spencer over the telephone earlier and she invited both of us round to hers for a catch-up.’
Ian stared at her for a moment.
‘Oh. Well, that would explain the strange conversation I had with the headmaster half an hour ago.’
Oh, dear, Barbara thought. This had all suddenly got very complicated…
*
Barbara slipped her hand into Ian’s, and ignored the spike in her heartrate. Was her hand sweaty? Was she sweaty? Oh, good grief, what was wrong with her? This was Ian, for goodness sake. She’d been through so much with Ian. Survived megalomaniacal despots, emperors and cutthroats; surely holding hands didn’t require bravery.
‘Barbara?’ -Ian’s voice was soft, gentle and steady- ‘Are you alright?’
Barbara swallowed, then nodded.
‘Sorry. Just… a little nervous.’
Ian smiled gently.
‘That makes two of us, then.’
He pushed open the gate to Mrs Spencer’s house, and the two of them headed up the garden path. He gave one last nervous smile to Barbara, and then knocked on the door.
Mrs Spencer appeared a short while later, beaming at them both and ushering them inside.
The sitting room was packed full of people, a mix of teaching staff, caretakers and school governors. Barbara felt her heartrate increase again, and squeezed Ian’s hand without thinking.
‘Congratulations!’ chorused the rooms occupants, all of whom were smiling. There was an outbreak of applause.
Heat rose in Barbara’s cheeks as she smiled.
‘Well, we did assume that you’d eloped,’ chuckled Mrs Spencer, before taking a quick bite out of her biscuit. ‘Two years is pushing it a bit though, isn’t it. What made you both decide to move back?’
‘Er…’ -Ian and Barbara exchanged a quick look- ‘We just missed the old place.’
‘Lovely,’ said Vanessa, one of the flatmates of the school secretary. ‘I imagine it’s changed a bit since 1963.’
‘You have no idea,’ Barbara said, with a quick grin in Ian’s direction before turning back to the Australian and spotted the small group of newcomers stood next to her. ‘Oh, are these relatives of yours, Vanessa?’
‘My sister and her family, visiting from down under,’ said Vanessa, indicating the young couple. ‘Oh, and here’s the newest addition to the Jovankas too!’
The young girl toddled forward. She couldn’t have been more than four years old.
‘Tegan, say hello to Mr and Mrs Chesterton.’
The girl stared up at Barbara, eyes widening. A small blush appeared on her cheeks.
‘Pretty lady…’
The various adults all burst into affectionate laughter.
‘No, Tegan…’ said Mrs Jovanka, kneeling down next to her daughter. ‘What do we say when we meet someone?’
‘Lo,’ Tegan mumbled, sticking out her bottom lip.
‘So what do you say to Mr and Mrs Chesterton?’
Tegan looked up again.
‘Lo… pretty lady.’
‘Sorry about her,’ Mrs Jovanka said, fondly. ‘She gets a bit caught up on things like this. Probably copying her brothers, no doubt.’
‘No need to apologise,’ Barbara said. She kneeled down in front of the toddler and smiled kindly at her. ‘Thank you, Tegan; I think you look very pretty too.’
The girl gave a giggle.
*
‘Well, that went easier than I initially feared.’
‘Yes,’ Barbara said, as they walked along the quiet street. ‘Er… Ian?’
‘Hmm?’
‘We… do seem to play the part rather well, don’t we.’
Ian chuckled.
‘Yes, I suppose we do. We’ve known each other a long time, after all, and we did go through a lot together.’
They arrived at Barbara’s front door.
‘Well, goodnight, then,’ Ian said, with a smile.
‘Yes… goodnight.’
Before she could overthink things, Barbara leaned forward and pressed her lips to Ian’s. The man froze, but did not pull away.
‘Oh,’ Ian said, as their lips parted. ‘Lovely. Er…’
‘I’ve been wanting to do that for a while,’ Barbara said, quickly. ‘Quite a while, actually.’
Ian smiled, his cheeks flushing a lovely pink colour.
He leaned in close and pressed his lips to hers.
‘Me too, Barbara,’ he whispered, soft against her skin. ‘Me too…’
~~~~~~~~
Thanks for reading, everyone; hope you liked that! Apologies for the weeks delay with this one; real life for me has been busy lately, what with the start of better weather. Apologies again; next weekend, I'm off to a friends wedding so the next chapter of my WIP won't be published until the week after at the earliest. Stay tuned!
Buddy! I haven't had the brain space to read fanfiction for an absolute age. Every time I saw that you'd posted a chapter I wanted to read it, but just couldn't get into the right frame of mind. When this one popped up I was finally in the right place! I will go back and read the others, I promise! I'm looking forward to it!
I LOVE the idea that the Doctor would have been paying their rent! Such an adorable touch. 😊
‘It is nice to have you back with us, Barbara; did you two enjoy your honeymoon?’ Barbara froze. Beside her, Ian choked on the mouthful of tea he had been halfway through swallowing. ‘Er…’ - Excellent! I can just imagine this! 😂😂
I think Barbara and Ian might be the only two people in existence that would be surprised at the thought of them eloping! 😂
‘Barbara?’ -Ian’s voice was soft, gentle and steady- ‘Are you alright?’ Barbara swallowed, then nodded. ‘Sorry. Just… a little nervous.’ Ian smiled gently. ‘That makes two of us, then.’ - They are so utterly, utterly adorable! 😍
I saw Vanessa and Australian and was like, "Oh! Yes! Such a cool tie in idea!" and then read on a bit and let out an actual screech of excitement! I adore the inclusion of little Tegan in this and have absolutely no doubts that, on first setting eyes on Barbara, she would indeed say, "pretty lady" 😍😍
Before she could overthink things, Barbara leaned forward and pressed her lips to Ian’s. The man froze, but did not pull away. ‘Oh,’ Ian said, as their lips parted. ‘Lovely. Er…’ - IAN YOU ABSOLUTE DARLING 😍
This was SUCH a lovely, lovely story to return to fanfiction reading on! 😊😊
In a weird coincidence, I'm also at a friend's wedding next week! 🤷♀️😂 Have the best time, pal!
Temporal Instability and Other Relationship Problems - Chapter One
Summary:
Temporal fractures start tearing holes in reality so UNIT decides to assemble a chaotic team of former companions and emotionally repressed disasters to stop the world collapsing completely.
Unfortunately, the instability seems to feed on unresolved feelings, which becomes a bit of a problem when Tegan and Nyssa are forced to fake a relationship for the sake of spacetime, Ace discovers Mel is jealous, Kate and Osgood continue dancing around their feelings with absolutely no subtlety at all and Leela and Romana’s marriage hits a stumbling block.
In other words, eight dorks have six months to save the universe.
*****
Notes:
This is the first thing I've written in SO long thanks to a combination of work, real life, burnout and utter exhaustion.
Massive thanks to @this-isnt-heathrow for your encouragement and for assuring me that it wasn't completely unintelligible!
This story - in true me fashion - is absolutely NOT the story I set out to write. It completely got away from me about half way through the first chapter and took on a life of its own!
*****
Temporal Instability and Other Relationship Problems - January: The Women from Nowhere - on Ao3
*****
Temporal Instability and Other Relationship Problems - January: The Women from Nowhere
Beneath a steel-grey January sky, the moor stretched for miles, the frost-stiff grass crunching under the constant movement of boots and tyres. UNIT had turned the empty Yorkshire hillside into a full operational site. Floodlights blazed across the dark in harsh white beams while generators rattled against the wind. Soldiers moved in organised lines between temporary barriers and equipment stations, weapons slung over their shoulders as technicians shouted readings over the noise. Portable scanners swept back and forth across the ground and cables snaked through the mud towards banks of humming machinery and monitoring screens glowing blue in the cold.
At the centre of it all hung the impossible thing itself, suspended above the moor as though the sky had split open and forgotten how to close. It hovered perhaps eight feet above the ground, not a portal, exactly. The thing that UNIT were studying wasn’t anything nearly as neat as that.
The distortion did not look like a hole or a tear. It looked like reality had stopped behaving properly around a single fixed point in the sky. The air warped and shifted as though space itself was under pressure; folding inwards in slow, uneven movements that made it difficult to focus on directly. The edges never stayed still and the light bent the wrong way near them, stretching into thin smudges before snapping back into place.
Every few seconds the landscape inside it changed without warning. One moment there was only the dark moor beyond it. The next, an unfamiliar city stood beneath a green sky crowded with aircraft that moved far too quickly and silently. Then came towering crystalline structures, that might have been trees, with strange colours flickering between their branches. Once, briefly, the distortion opened onto what appeared to be a Victorian drawing room complete with wallpaper, firelight and a grand piano, before the image vanished so suddenly it left several UNIT technicians convinced that they had imagined it.
Then everything snapped back into place and the moor returned once more.
Kate Stewart stood with both hands buried deep inside the pockets of her coat, watching the anomaly with the exhausted expression of somebody who had not slept properly in days and no longer expected to sleep again any time soon.
“Energy spike increasing.” Osgood reported, peering anxiously at her tablet. Her scarf had nearly blown sideways in the wind. “Temporal instability at seventeen percent and climbing.”
“Seventeen percent compared to what?” Kate asked, furrowing her eyebrows at the younger woman.
Osgood hesitated. “That’s the worrying thing… we don’t actually have a scale for this.”
Kate closed her eyes briefly. “Of course we don’t.”
Behind them, UNIT soldiers shifted uneasily in the mud, checking safeties, tightening grips on their rifles and watching the distortion with the fixed concentration of people waiting for something to go very, very wrong. Nearby, scientific teams crowded around banks of equipment that refused to behave consistently. Readings climbed, vanished and rewrote themselves faster than anyone could record them. Arguments broke out in clipped, frustrated bursts as technicians recalibrated scanners for the third or fourth time, only for the numbers they were seeing to change again immediately afterwards.
No one wanted to admit how little they understood. Orders were still being given, data was still being logged and reports were still being filed, but the entire operation had the fragile tension of trained professionals forcing a well-practiced routine onto something that sat completely outside of their experience.
And somewhere just behind Kate’s left shoulder came the relentless scratching of pen against paper.
She turned sharply and her eyes landed on Tegan Jovanka, standing in a thick dark coat with a notebook balanced precariously on one arm, scribbling observations with infuriating calm.
“You are not supposed to be this close.” Kate reminded her, for perhaps the sixth time that evening.
“And yet here I am.” Tegan replied bluntly without looking up.
“You’re a journalist.”
“Yes, Kate, I’m aware. I was there when I got my degree… and my job, for that matter.”
Kate fixed her with a look that was capable of cracking concrete until Tegan finally glanced up, meeting her with an expression that was equally impressed.
The years since they’d first met had altered the Australian far less than Kate might have expected. Tegan was older, certainly, and sharper around the eyes. There was silver threaded through her hair and the sort of weariness that settled into people who had spent decades surviving impossible things. Since her return to Earth in the 1980s, she had reported on wars, natural disasters and injustices across the world – narrowly escaping death on countless occasions. Despite all that, however, the core of what made her who she was had remained unmistakable.
Tegan Jovanka was defiant and difficult and entirely too brave for her own good.
Officially, Tegan was attached to UNIT on a temporary consultancy basis while investigating the unexplained disappearances connected to the disturbances. In practice, however, she had been ‘temporarily attached’ for the better part of a decade. The paperwork changed every few months, new authorisations were signed and someone in Geneva continued pretending there might eventually be an end date to the arrangement. Nobody seriously believed it anymore; Tegan knew too much, had seen too much and had become far too useful to remove from operations like this. UNIT, for its part, continued to play the bureaucratic game and so did she.
Kate had, therefore, settled for pretending to be more irritated with her friend and her presence than she actually was. “You’re not publishing any of this, you know.”
Tegan snorted softly. “You think any editor would really run a story titled ‘Reality Begins Peeling Open Like Damp Wallpaper on Yorkshire Moor’?”
The distortion pulsed violently, causing every monitor in the temporary command centre to start screaming and flashing at once.
Osgood’s face drained of colour. “Ma’am? Something’s coming through.”
The thing hanging above the moor began to widen again. Reality seemed to split unevenly around it, dragged sideways by some invisible force rather than being pulled apart cleanly, leaving blurred and jagged edges behind. The sound that followed rolled across the hillside like someone was dragging metal across concrete, layered with bursts of distorted radio chatter that rose and then died before it had really started.
Several soldiers reacted instinctively, their guns aimed upwards towards a target that none of them could properly define, while nearby technicians stumbled backwards away from their equipment as monitors filled with meaningless symbols and the screech of audio feedback. Across the moor, the floodlights dimmed and flared erratically, throwing the entire area into pulses of white light and shadow that made the widening distortion appear far larger than it had been seconds earlier.
Then, without warning, a figure fell out of the rupture.
She hit the frozen moorland hard in a low crouch already armed. She had a knife, very visibly, gripped tightly in her hand before the soldiers surrounding the anomaly had even fully processed that somebody had emerged from it at all. For half a second the entire UNIT perimeter froze in collective shock as the impossible shimmer still hung open in the air behind her.
The woman rose slowly with a wary, predatory grace. Dark leathers reinforced with heavy furs clung to her body, going some way to protect her against the brutal cold as the wind tore violently through her wild dark hair. Her piercing blue eyes moved constantly, rapidly assessing the armed soldiers surrounding her and calculating angles and threats with unnerving speed. Every line of her posture suggested that she was someone entirely prepared to kill her way out of danger if necessary.
Several UNIT operatives instinctively raised their weapons higher.
“Stand down!” Kate ordered immediately, holding out her arm and striding over the frosty ground towards the newcomer before anyone nervous enough could make a catastrophic mistake.
The stranger’s knife never lowered. Her gaze snapped instantly towards Kate instead, sharp enough to feel almost physical beneath the floodlights.
Then the rupture convulsed again and a second figure stumbled out of the distortion far less gracefully, almost losing her footing altogether as she emerged in a violent swirl of layered crimson robes and incandescent irritation. Unlike the first woman, she looked less immediately dangerous and more profoundly offended by the universe itself.
“Oh, splendid!” She snapped before she had even fully regained her balance. “Absolutely splendid. Thrown halfway across creation by an emotionally constipated temporal fracture.”
She stopped abruptly, noticing approximately twenty UNIT guns aimed directly at her chest. Slowly, she looked around the armed perimeter with an expression that did nothing to disguise how deeply unimpressed she was by the entire situation.
“How reassuringly primitive.” She added coolly, arching one elegant eyebrow.
Tegan stared openly at the first woman in disbelief. “Oh… you have got to be kidding me.”
The second stranger turned sharply at the sound of her voice. For the first time since emerging from the rupture, genuine surprise broke cleanly through her irritation. She glanced quickly towards the knife-wielding woman beside her before looking back at Tegan.
“Tegan Jovanka?”
Kate frowned, her eyes moving rapidly between them. “You know each other?”
Tegan gave a short disbelieving laugh. “Leela and I could probably be described as friends.” Her mouth twisted slightly into something fondly exasperated. “Although it’s been a very long time.”
She muttered something under her breath about ambassadors and being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the Doctor as usual, but Kate’s attention had already fixed more firmly on the two women standing in front of the rupture.
The second woman straightened fully now, gathering herself back into a posture of immense dignity despite the frozen Yorkshire moor, the armed soldiers and the fact she had very clearly just fallen sideways through unstable reality. She carried herself with unmistakable authority; every movement was controlled, elegant and faintly imperious beneath the elaborate Gallifreyan robes layered around her. Silver jewellery glinted faintly at her throat and wrists while sharp intelligent eyes swept across the UNIT operation with immediate assessment and visible disappointment regarding its technological limitations.
Beside her, Leela remained silent but watchful, her knife still loosely held in one hand. Compared to the composed refinement of the woman beside her, she looked almost feral; her powerful shoulders wrapped in weather-darkened furs and a myriad of scars visible against bronze skin whenever the floodlights shifted across her. Yet there was unmistakable awareness in the brief glance she cast towards the second woman, which was followed by a subtle, instinctive re-positioning that placed herself fractionally closer as though ready to intercept any danger before it could reach her companion.
The second woman noticed and the tension around her expression eased by the smallest degree.
“I am Lady Romanadvoratrelundar,” she announced at last with cool formality, as though introducing herself in the middle of an armed UNIT containment zone was perfectly ordinary behaviour, “former President of Gallifrey.”
She gestured gracefully towards the warrior beside her.
“This,” she continued, a note of unmistakable affection softening the edges of her otherwise regal composure, “is Leela of the Sevateem.”
Leela inclined her head once in acknowledgement, her suspicious eyes never leaving the soldiers surrounding them.
“We were hunting the instability.” Romana continued. “It appears it has, instead, hunted us.”
The distortion behind them convulsed without warning.
The rupture folded violently inwards, its unstable edges twisting through impossible angles as every monitor and scanner across the moor simultaneously dissolved into static. Floodlights flickered erratically and radios burst with warped fragments of overlapping voices that did not belong to anyone standing there. For one sickening moment the entire landscape seemed to shudder sideways out of alignment with itself.
Then it vanished with a deafening crack that tore across the Yorkshire hills like the world itself was splitting apart. The sound echoed through the freezing air long after the distortion had disappeared, rolling across the moorland while soldiers instinctively flinched and several pieces of scientific equipment overloaded in showers of sparks.
Silence followed immediately, flooding the entire containment site with an abrupt, unnatural stillness that even seemed to swallow the sound of the wind. The cold intensified sharply in its wake, no longer merely winter air sweeping across the hills but something deeper and stranger, as though the rupture had left behind the lingering absence of somewhere reality itself had briefly failed.
Kate exhaled slowly. “Well,” she said calmly, “that’s probably not good.”
x-x
UNIT HQ spent the next forty-eight hours descending into what could only be described as controlled chaos.
Romana proved brilliant, imperious and almost entirely intolerant of human technology. She understood the distortion more quickly than anyone else in the room and was entirely willing to share her own knowledge, but every attempt to work alongside UNIT’s systems seemed to drive her closer to open fury. More than once, she launched into withering complaints about basic equipment, while frustrated technicians exchanged exhausted looks around her. She demanded to know how anyone expected meaningful analysis to be carried out using computers she described as barely more advanced than children’s toys and seemed to be genuinely offended by the idea that humanity considered any of the equipment in the command centre remotely sophisticated.
Leela nearly put three UNIT soldiers in hospital before anyone fully grasped that attempting to restrict her access to anywhere was an exceptionally bad idea. Initial assumptions that she was simply violent or unpredictable had lasted less than a day. To their growing embarrassment, UNIT personnel quickly discovered that beneath the intensity was someone far sharper and more instinctive than they had given her credit for, capable of reading a room, spotting weaknesses and reacting to threats faster than most trained operatives. By the time the third officer hit the floor, bruised and struggling to breathe, the organisation collectively accepted that Leela tolerated cooperation far more readily than containment.
Osgood adored them both almost instantly.
Tegan remained at UNIT far longer than anyone had originally anticipated after Romana declared that she possessed “relevant experiential context regarding alien catastrophes and emotional stupidity” and therefore could not be excluded from discussions. Kate, who privately suspected Romana had just been looking for an excuse to keep one other person in the room capable of arguing back without being intimidated, allowed it with only minimal, performative, protest.
Three days after the Yorkshire incident, Nyssa arrived.
Kate met her personally near the lower laboratory levels after Osgood practically vibrated with excitement through an entire briefing explaining why they needed “one of the foremost scientific minds in two galaxies”.
Nyssa stepped from the lift with composed elegance, her dark coat still dusted with rainwater from the London streets above. She looked older than Tegan remembered, although only in the faint, technical sense that time had clearly decided some visible passage was necessary. The changes were subtle enough to feel almost deliberate; her hair had lost some of the soft curls it once carried, falling straighter now around her face, but her eyes remained exactly the same impossible shade of sea-green that Tegan remembered from another lifetime.
Nyssa looked entirely composed.
Then she saw Tegan standing beside the observation windows and her composure fractured. Not dramatically, because Nyssa was not dramatic by nature, but that almost made it worse, somehow. Something tightened visibly in the Trakenite’s expression before she smoothed it away again with practised control.
Tegan, however, visibly froze.
Silence settled across the control room in a way that felt immediately unnatural, spreading outwards as conversations died mid-sentence and even the constant background noise of equipment seemed to fade. Kate’s expression remained carefully neutral as she looked between the two women, but there was unmistakable curiosity in her eyes as she watched them face one another for the first time in decades.
Romana, watching from across the room, murmured quietly to Leela, “Ah… there it is.”
Leela folded her arms, her expression knowing. “Pain.”
“Yes.”
Tegan recovered first, forcing a smile onto her face. It didn’t meet her eyes, but that hardly seemed to matter at that moment. “Nyssa.”
Nyssa nodded once. “Tegan.”
Nothing else followed. Any expectation that one of them might immediately speak about the years between them, let alone attempt to untangle the circumstances of their parting in front of a room full of UNIT personnel, dissolved almost instantly into disappointment. Neither woman seemed willing to offer the audience anything so simple or private.
Instead, there were only two names, spoken quietly by voices that had not used them in far too long, left suspended in the cold laboratory air while the people in the control room watched with the uncomfortable awareness that something enormous had just passed between them, entirely unspoken.
Kate suddenly understood why Romana kept referring to emotional instability with the expression of somebody discussing explosives. The tension between them felt physical.
Osgood glanced nervously between the pair. “Tea?”
Nobody answered.
“Right,” she continued faintly, “excellent.”
Nyssa threw herself into work immediately. Together she and Romana began analysing the temporal fractures while simultaneously terrifying UNIT’s scientific staff by discussing multidimensional physics as though they were doing nothing more than arguing over crossword clues.
Almost as soon as she had arrived, the monitoring equipment started behaving strangely whenever Tegan and Nyssa occupied the same space. At first, the anomalies were subtle enough to dismiss: brief spikes in the distortion readings, sudden flickers across screens and energy surges that vanished before the technicians could properly isolate them.
But the pattern repeated too consistently to ignore and, with every incident, Tegan became increasingly determined to avoid Nyssa whenever possible. Unfortunately, that became difficult remarkably quickly inside a UNIT operation where both of them had apparently become essential personnel.
Osgood noticed. Romana definitely noticed. Leela noticed because Romana would not stop smirking.
Then, midway through the week, Ace arrived.
The briefing room doors slid open halfway through one of Kate’s increasingly grim operational meetings and Ace strode inside, carrying a duffel bag over one shoulder and wearing the expression of somebody already halfway through an argument with whatever authority figure she was about to encounter.
“Right,” she announced, “which idiot decided alien reality soup was my problem this time?”
Then she stopped. Mel blinked at her from across the conference table.
Ace stared at her. “… Mel?”
Mel’s entire face lit up instantly with delighted surprise. “Ace!”
Before Kate could react, Mel had crossed the room and pulled Ace into a fierce hug. Ace looked startled for approximately two seconds before hugging her back just as tightly.
“Well,” Kate said dryly, “lovely reunion, terrible timing.”
Ace finally released the redhead, grinning despite herself. “Sorry… didn’t know you were involved in this nonsense, Doughnut?”
“Neither did I.” Mel admitted. “Kate called me yesterday and asked if I’d come and help.”
Ace looked her over quickly, almost subconsciously checking for injuries. Mel realised what she was doing and her smile softened slightly.
Across the room, Tegan watched with folded arms as her old friends greeted each other. “Those two are going to be trouble.”
Romana glanced towards Nyssa. “Oh, certainly.” She agreed easily, smirking lightly. “Though, perhaps, not the worst offenders.”
Rules: Make a poll with seven of your all-time favorite characters from seven different fandoms, and then tag seven people to do the same. See which character is everyone’s favorite.
Which of these seven fictional characters is your favorite?
Hermann Gottlieb (Pacific Rim - and Newton Geiszler; they come as a set!!!!)
Lady Danbury (Bridgerton)
Egon Spengler (Ghostbusters)
Han Solo (Star Wars)
Spock (Star Trek)
Cat Woman/Selina Kyle (Batman/DC Universe)
Sakura Kinomoto (Cardcaptor Sakura)
Voting ended onMay 11
A lot of my fave characters aren't in a fandom as such, so I just let the 7 fandoms guide me.
i love Liv and Helen so much. they're smart and funny and brave. they're also fallible and make mistakes. their personalities are very different, but they complement one another perfectly. they're each other's best friend and they always have each other's back. they love the Doctor and they constantly risk their lives for him and other people. they're also very independent and make their own decisions and rarely listen to the Doctor or follow his instructions if they know there's a better way to deal with a problem.
the Doctor would leave them behind to protect them, and as soon as he's turned his back on them they're already following him or investigating on their own.
they're not in a codependent relationship with the Doctor as other companions are (in fact, it would be more accurate to say they're in a codependent relationship with each other). they're really good friends with the Doctor, but they have their own lives and struggles and they often do their own thing without involving the Doctor. they're also a little older and more mature than most companions and they're not infatuated with the Doctor nor are they easily impressed by him, although they still think highly of him.
they love travelling with the Doctor because they can do good helping people across time and space, but there have been a couple of times when they almost decided to stop travelling with him because he made some really bad choices and the situation in the TARDIS was bad enough that they had to put their own comfort and safety first.
they're constantly keeping the Doctor on his toes, supporting him when he's feeling down, calling him out when he's wrong, saving him time and time again and giving him hope and solutions when he feels like giving up. also Liv is from the future and Helen is from the past and they offer different perspectives on things.
to me Liv and Helen are two of the best companions the Doctor's ever had.
stormborns
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
kaledo-art
andulkaphoto
vaporwave
areudirty
