Alone in the Dark

But there was, it turned out, a whole section of real books, the kind of wonderfully trashy stuff Tegan loved -- the tri-gender romances of the twenty-second century were her favorite new discoveries so far. Even more fortuitous was the discovery that The Brat Turlough never came here, which made it a perfect refuge... especially these last few days, with the Doctor moping and being such an all-around grump that even the TARDIS was getting annoyed with him. Sure, Tegan missed Nyssa too, and yes, it was obvious that the recent events on Getty Prime had upset the Doctor a lot more than they ever could have bothered Tegan or Turlough, but still... This was getting ridiculous.

***

"Go away!"

A quick change out of her hot cocoa-soaked clothes later, Tegan was rapping gently on the door of the Doctor's workshop.

"I've brought you a nice cup of tea, Doctor," Tegan said. It was a chore to keep any hint of irritation out of her voice, but she could be gracious if that's what it took.

"I don't want any tea." It was a sorrowful mutter, and the lights in the corridor flickered with his misery.

"You have to come out sometime..." Tegan could hear the edge creeping back into her voice.

"No, I haven't, actually."

The TARDIS rocked again in sympathy with his brooding, tossing Tegan and the teacup against the door, drenching her once more in hot liquid.

"Rabbits!" She couldn't help it: she actually stomped her foot, and hated herself for being so childish. But he was acting worse. "That's it, Doctor. You come out right now so we can--"

"He'll never come out." It was The Brat Turlough, oozing up behind her. "He's just going to stay in there and sulk forever, or at least until the TARDIS has had enough of this infantile behavior and crashes us into the nearest convenient sun."

The workshop door flew open to reveal an enraged Doctor. "Until the TARDIS has had enough?" He was a mess after his days-long self-imposed exile: unshaven, his shirtsleeves unevenly rolled up, and frankly -- Tegan wrinkled her nose -- he stank. "The TARDIS is the only one who understands me!"

He pushed past them, stalking toward the console room. The Brat actually had the nerve to smirk at her in triumph. "I'd have thought," he said, "that you'd know him well enough by now to know how to get him to do whatever you want."

Tegan couldn't very well admit that Turlough's tactic had worked. "You're evil," she said instead.

***

After a forever or two, it felt a spark of presence that was not itself. Another existence? Another being to commune with? It rushed toward the heat, hoping...

***

Tegan had calmed down by the time she reached the console room, and entered so quietly that the Doctor -- hunched over the console and stroking it and murmuring "I know, old girl, I know..." -- didn't notice her.

Turlough's reverse psychology was mean, and Tegan didn't see how she could possibly use it, with the Doctor in such distress. She would have thought that meeting that other Time Lord on Getty Prime would have made him feel less alone, but it had had the opposite affect. Maybe it was a reminder of home, which he must have missed occasionally even though he regularly insisted that Gallifrey was a miserable place that he was well shut of. (Even Tegan had to concede that she did feel a small pang of longing for Brisbane once in a rare while.) Maybe something else had transpired between them that she knew nothing about...

The Doctor looked up at her at last, and gave her one of those melancholy smiles of his, and cast his gaze down again, and sighed.

"Will the TARDIS crash us?" Tegan asked, putting all her effort into being pleasant. "Is that why it's behaving like this?"

"No, we won't crash." He caressed the console again. "The TARDIS is... The TARDIS and I... We're connected. Here." He tapped his temple. "And here." He crushed a hand to his chest, his fingers spread to encompass both hearts. "The TARDIS is alive, in many ways. A TARDIS only ever really works properly when it shares a sort of telempathic link with its operators. And there should be six of us. I'm afraid the old girl has got a bit neurotic with only me to link with all these centuries." He snorted a quick, bitter laugh.

"You have seemed very depressed these last few days." Tegan approached the console, keeping herself between him and the door so he couldn't dash out again. "Could the TARDIS be reacting to that?"

"Yes, that's it. I'm afraid her psychic circuits got thrown wide open on Getty Prime -- that was unavoidable, I suppose, given the circumstances -- and now she's very susceptible to my influence." He shrugged. "I'm sorry, Tegan." His gaze flicked to her tea-stained T-shirt. "For everything."

Maybe Turlough's tactic could work in a different direction. "Well, I've been pretty down, too. I miss Nyssa..." With Adric gone as well, it seemed like Tegan had lost all grip on the few foundations of normalcy that life in the TARDIS had ever offered. "Why don't we go somewhere really nice to relax and cheer ourselves up?"

He seemed to consider the idea. "Such as?"

"Oh, I don't know. Someplace with a beach and fruity drinks with little paper umbrellas in them, where we can get a massage and a tan. You know, spoil ourselves for a couple of days."

He quirked a skeptical eyebrow at her. "Is that relaxing?"

"Hey, you mentioned that pleasure planet..."

He frowned. "So I did."

"That sounds like just the thing. A whole planet devoted to pleasure..."

He heaved an enormous sigh. "All right, then," he said, and set about inputting coordinates.

"Good! Oh, and Doctor, you might want to clean yourself up."

He rubbed his stubbled chin with chagrin. "Yes, you're probably right."

***

Yes. There was something there. It was sad, like itself, and crying out in despair... but it had company! The being it was racing toward in its remote corner of the vacuum and the darkness was not alone. There would be much companionship. Oh, it could not wait to embrace this fellow creature...

***

Tegan slipped off her slingy heels before tiptoeing back into the suite they were crashing in: she wouldn't dare give Turlough the satisfaction of being able to complain about her clicking across the parquet floor and waking him up as she snuck in a few hours before dawn. The starship officer on shore leave she'd met in the nightclub had kept her out very late -- though somehow he hadn't been quite appealing enough to entice her back to his room -- but she wasn't so tipsy as to forget that The Brat must not be allowed to get the upper hand.

But he was nowhere to be seen. She'd expected he'd be sprawled drunkenly across the sofa in the lounge, as he'd been the night before, and the night before that. Perhaps he'd gotten even luckier than usual tonight: He'd been spending his time at the beach, swimming in the clear green ocean and chatting up girls of many humanoid species at the seaside bar -- it was disgusting how many females were taken in by his oily charm.

Tegan was suddenly struck by how very lonely her life on the TARDIS was. She'd never admit it to Turlough, but if he had been able to find some company tonight... "Good for him," she whispered.

"Tegan!" The Doctor's voice came, low but urgent, from the balcony. "Tegan, come here, quickly!"

She padded out onto the terrace, certain that there was no emergency but indulging him yet again. "What is it this time, Doctor?"

"Look." He pointed to the balcony of a room a few floors down and a few degrees along the curve of the massive hotel, where two shadowy figures moved in the moonslight. "I've been watching them for hours. They're up to something."

Tegan laughed, then sighed, then collapsed onto one of the chaises longues. "I expect they're up to what everyone else is up to." It was an impossibly romantic planet, with the three silvery moons and the balmy, aromatic breezes and the lower gravity that made you feel light and untroubled. "Doctor, there are no alien conspiracies here. No one is plotting to blow up the universe. Everyone is just having a good time. Except for you."

He hadn't gotten the hang of the place. She'd thought he had, that first day, when she'd rearranged her spa appointment to go with him to the gallery of local art... until he'd insisted an abstract sculpture was a lost Gallifreyan artifact. (The curator had assured the Doctor that the artist had created the piece before a dozen witnesses in that very gallery only the week before.) Yesterday, their stroll along the beach had nearly ended in his arrest by peace officers when he'd accused a small reptilian child playing in the sand of being an agent of something called the Ambiquitous Collective.

At least now there were no witnesses to his inability to unwind, and no possibility of criminal prosecution. Perhaps that was a sign of improvement.

"Did you drink this whole thing?" Tegan held up the empty blue bottle next to the empty glass on the little table between the chaises.

He stretched out opposite her, gazing up at the stars. "I did. There's another one." He inclined his head toward the liquor cabinet inside.

Tegan went and got it, and another glass, and poured them both full measures of the golden liquid, and told herself to forget what Auntie Vanessa always said about the inadvisability of mixing your boozes.

They sipped and stared out into the beautiful night in companionable silence for a while, until Tegan broached something that had occurred to her earlier. "If the TARDIS can pick up your feelings," she asked, "can it happen the other way around? Could something be bothering the TARDIS that's affecting you?"

"Are you saying there's something wrong with me?" But he smiled as he said it.

"Yes, I am." Tegan couldn't honestly say that she'd ever seen the Doctor cut loose, but she'd never seen him so on edge before, either. She'd never seen him so afraid of just relaxing and being with himself. "You're not going to regenerate again, are you?"

"No," he snorted. "And you don't have to sound so gleeful about the prospect. I'm not particularly enjoying this... paranoia, you know. It's the oddest thing. I feel like... it needs me."

"The paranoia needs you?"

"The universe needs me. To interact with it."

"There are other ways of interacting, Doctor..." Like what those people on the balcony below were up to. Like what Turlough was probably up to. Or maybe the Doctor needed another Time Lord for that. Maybe that's why Getty Prime had him so miserable, because it reminded him that he was lonely. If he was lonely, that way. It was so hard to tell with him.

He didn't seem to have heard her. "The TARDIS's power is almost infinite," he was musing. "And with the psychic circuits wide open, it could reach, well, across universes..."

"Universes? Plural?"

"Oh, Tegan, there are universes. Tweak the laws of physics just a little, and you get universes that blink in and out of existence in a nanosecond, universes that go on forever and are utterly cold and empty, maybe even universes that are nothing more than the flickering conscious thoughts of pure energy creatures we can't even begin to imagine."

"That sounds lonely," she said softly. If he turned to look at her now...

But he didn't: he was lost in the stars above, and she might as well not have been there.

***

The next morning, they didn't walk back to the TARDIS, tucked away in a quiet grove, so much as they stumbled. Turlough, it transpired, had been out all night carousing with some enlisted crew from the visiting starship, and was even meaner hungover than he was sober or full-on drunk. Tegan's head was pounding in a rhythm that seemed to throb "AuntIE VanESSa, AuntIE VanESSa," over and over.

Only the Doctor was back to his usual chipper self. "One of the benefits of Time Lord biology. The affects of alcohol don't linger, unless we want them to."

Tegan had to laugh, even though it made her head thud even harder. "So you don't have to worry about the TARDIS getting a hangover?"

"No," he said, as he hit a few buttons and turned a few knobs on the console. "But I'm shutting down the psychic circuits completely for a while anyway. Just in case the TARDIS has picked up some stray gloom from the other side of the galaxy that it's transmitting to me. Poor old TARDIS..."

***

It was formless, and infinite. It was sentience, and pure instinct. It was isolated in its void, the only being in its own small, unbounded universe. It was eternal, and needy as an infant. It had tasted a brief moment of connection with another, and then it was over, and it was alone again forever.