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Ace woke to a face full of dirt, a head full of anger and rage, and a fight that was apparently already in full swing despite the fact that she couldn’t remember ever getting into it. Somebody was pinning her to the ground, or trying to anyway. They had a knee on her back and her wrists in a tight, unnaturally strong grip. She tried to rip away from them, but it just wasn’t happening. She growled, furious.
“Stop. Fighting,” snarled the person. “Believe me, it will only make things worse for the both of us –”
Ace’s immediate thought was yeah, right, because whoever it was had the exact sort of voice that you should never trust under any circumstances. The sort of voice that just screamed I’m going to feed you to my tank of piranhas after I explain my dastardly plan for world domination. Not the sort of person you listened to if you valued things like being alive and not being stabbed in the back.
She snarled and thrashed wildly, managing to dislodge her unwanted assailant with a particularly vicious shake. She lurched to her feet, gasping, and pushed herself from the ground and into a defensive stance, whirling to face her opponent. Her vision narrowed to a yellow blur as she glared at him. He was vaguely familiar, but at the same time not really all that familiar. That didn’t matter to her as much as the way that he was holding himself – in much the same way that she was. Somewhat wary, but already falling neatly into a ready-to-fight position. His bright eyes glistened at her, like he was already completely certain that he’d win.
But suddenly he stiffened, and then seemed to forcibly shake off the aggression. It fell off his frame like cooked meat off a burnt bone, and he drew himself up to his full height. “No,” he said. “No. Stop.”
All this meant to her was that he probably wasn’t going to fight back. She coiled her muscles, arching her back. A grin sloped messily across her face. Her teeth were sharp inside her mouth.
“I am the Master, and you will obey me – and you will stop,” barked the man, like it was some prayer or magic spell that would keep her at bay – as if words could do anything to her.
She lunged, and he darted backwards – not quite as graceful as she was, but graceful enough that he could evade her claws. He breathed in sharply, and then said, – quick as a whip and just as sharp, – “What would the Doctor think of you right now?”
And that was all it took. Ace flinched, a full-body jolt. The yellow haze that had overtaken her fell away abruptly, leaving her horrifyingly aware how close she had just come to ripping someone to shreds with her bare hands. She took a step back and just about crumpled to the dusty ground.
“Oh – oh, God,” she breathed, pushing back her hair from her eyes.
“Not currently,” said the man who she had been about to enact severe violence onto only moments before. “But you wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.”
She breathed heavily for a moment or two, taking in her surroundings properly: the red-tinged sky, the rough terrain, the bones half-buried and scattered all across the sand. She squinted and saw some of the cheetah creatures prowling across a distant hill, but otherwise there was no real sign of life apart from the two of them.
Which brought her back to Beardy McBeardface. The Master, apparently, who the Professor had said previously was their, quote unquote, ‘oldest and deadliest enemy’. The phrase ‘evil genius’ had also been thrown around in that same conversation. Not exactly the person you want to be alone with on an alien planet.
“Why,” she said, at a loss for anything else to say. “...Why would you do that for me?”
Evil Deadly Genius straightened up and attempted to brush off dust from the lapels of the weird dress suit he was wearing – which was very ragged and dirty-looking, incidentally. “Kindly do not mistake this situation for any form of altruistic act,” he said. “I merely am...” He trailed off, as if the words he was trying to say were almost physically painful for him to get out. “...In need of your assistance. And your succumbing to this damnable virus is not at all conducive to my needs.”
Ace blinked and blinked again. Just when she thought this situation couldn’t get any more surreal... – “And why should I help you?”
“Because if you don’t,” he said, “you will most likely die here along with me.”
“Is that a threat?” she demanded, stiffening.
He gave her what she could only describe as a weird look. A what-are-you-some-kind-of-idiot? look. “It’s a statement of fact. This planet?” He raised a hand to gesture theatrically around them. “It is slowly disintegrating. Collapsing in on itself. Without instruments, it’s markedly harder to say, but at a guess – there are mere weeks until all of this is destroyed.”
Ace thought hard. That all tracked with what little the Professor had mentioned in passing. “Fine,” she said, “brilliant, great – but why do you need me?”
He smiled thinly. “You’re infected with the virus, are you not?”
“So are you,” she retorted, and saw his expression tighten. Apparently he wasn’t fond of being reminded that his eyes were still a faint yellow and slitted down the middle, cat-like. Not to mention the fangs.
“Yes,” he snapped, “but my homeworld isn’t Earth, now, is it?”
She glared at him, unwilling to admit that she had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, then whirled, searching the nearby area. “Where’s the Doctor?”
“Gone,” said Weirdo Cheetah Hobo. Was that a taste of bitterness she detected there? “Back to Earth, no doubt, with the rest of your little friends. You, my dear, are the only human left on this Rassilon-forsaken planet.”
She laughed humourlessly. “Oh, now I know you’re lying. They’d never just ditch me here, like this. ‘Specially not with you.”
“Believe what you want,” he said, with a slope of the shoulders that was almost a shrug. “But I’d really rather leave this planet sooner rather than later, if you don’t mind.”
She looked back and forth. Somewhere deep inside her, she knew that he was right – that he wasn’t lying to her, not about this. The Professor was not on this planet. Which meant...
“All right,” she said. “I’ll try whatever it is – but I still don’t trust you, so don’t get any ideas.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He came over to her as she rose to her feet and placed a hand on her shoulder, the gesture utterly unsentimental, and then said, “Go.”
“Go how?”
“You should feel a connection with your home,” he said. “A thread of relevance linking you from here to Earth, or so I’m led to believe. All you need to do is find that thread and pull on it.”
She huffed, unsatisfied with this, but nonetheless tried to do as he suggested. It was easy enough to find that thread, weirdly enough – it was there like it was a part of her, tied into her very essence. But when she attempted to tug on it, it slipped away like a dream. She tried again and again, but every time it was the same.
“Well?” said Annoyingly Sharp Fingernails, who was clutching her arm hard.
“I’m trying,” she told him. “Just give me a sec –”
‘A sec’ turned into five minutes, which turned into ten, and when she finally informed Painfully Sharp Fingernails that it wasn’t happening, he just about snapped.
“Useless girl!” he snarled, grip tightening.
She shook him off violently – elbowing him in the side and pushing him away from her. She fought the urge to tear his head off, pushing back the yellow and the bloodlust. “Don’t,” she said.
“You’re not trying hard enough!” He grabbed her again, catching at her wrist. The urge to murder him on the spot became almost unbearable. Valiantly, she fought it back. “Picture what it looks like – what it feels like –”
“I am!” she screamed in his face. “I’m picturing as hard as I can and I know it should be working but it isn’t because it’s just not there anymore!”
Something in her anger must have got through to him, because he froze. She wrenched her hand away from him again, taking a few steps back. She could feel her mouth, filled with fangs, and she could see that horrible yellow flickering in his eyes.
“Damn it all,” he hissed and then turned sharply on his heel, walking away from her. It wasn’t an angry walk. He just looked tired. Like he had given up on his last hope, which, – she supposed, he had.
“Where the hell d’you think you’re going?” Ace called after him, words clumsy around the unfamiliar shape of her mouth.
“Does it matter?” came the dour reply, and he kept walking.
Ace looked over her shoulder, at the hill where the cheetahs had been prowling before. They had stopped prowling; now they just watched her. If she hadn’t seen them in motion before, she would have sworn they were statues. Even from a distance, they looked hungry. She glanced back at Weirdo McBeardo, and decided that, out of the two options, she’d rather take her chances with a hopeless-looking, possibly murderous Time Lord. She took off at a jog after him.
As it turned out, the place where he had been heading was a small pseudo-village that was on the outskirts of one of the planet’s many lakes. There were a number of tents scattered around what appeared to be a long-abandoned communal eating pit. Scraps of ribbons and cloth were scattered around and tied to various parts of the camp, and there were (of course) bones and bits of abandoned meat littering the ground too – obviously, the Cheetah People had been here at some point, although they weren’t here now.
A cloth covering the entrance to one of the tents swayed slightly. Sulky Broody Bastard must have gone in for a sulk and a brood. She didn’t feel much like talking to him, but it occurred to her that a place like this might have some kind of food or, at the very least, some shelter.
Days passed.
Ace had elected to stay in the same village area as Sulky Broody Bastard – it was the most convenient location, and she didn’t especially fancy trying her chances against the rest of the planet. Every morning began with the entire planet literally shaking as the red sun rose over the horizon – a faint tremor that got more and more insistent with each new day, as if to reinforce the fact that the planet was, indeed, breaking apart around her, and there was nothing that she could do about it.
The Cheetah People weren’t bothering them, for whatever reason. And the two of them seemed to have an unspoken agreement to leave each other alone, which suited her just fine.
Every so often, one of them would go out on a food-gathering expedition – never going all that far from the camp – to find anything remotely edible. Which was mostly what Ace tended to refer to as ‘rabbit food’, and wasn’t entirely appetizing – but the alternative was meat. And oh God, did she crave meat – would probably kill for it, raw or otherwise – but that was almost entirely the reason why she knew she couldn’t have it. She didn’t know what it would do to her, and she didn’t want to find out.
Ace had initially left the berries and assorted dubiously edible plant scraps that she hadn’t ended up eating outside the Master Of Sulking’s tent of shame, as a general courtesy. She hadn’t actually expected him to return the favour. She had actually been unsure that he had been the one doing it – although, who else could it have been? – until she caught him in the act of setting down a branch of greenish berries just as she emerged from her tent.
At first he froze, apparently unsure of how to respond, but then he seemed to gain a mask of superiority. “Your breakfast, my dear,” he said, with a blank expression and a sweeping gesture to the meagre offerings.
“Ace,” she said.
“What?”
“My name. It’s Ace.” He made what sounded an awful lot like a disbelieving noise, and she whipped around sharply to glare at him. “I really couldn’t care less what you think, because it’s my name and I chose it, and your opinion just does not matter to me.”
She had expected an angry retort in response to that – maybe even a full-blown argument, which she was actually vaguely looking forward to; it would be something to break up the monotony, at least. Instead, he just blinked, stared at her for an uncomfortably long moment, then walked away.
She wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that.
*
On day eight of this unplanned, deeply unfortunate camping trip, Ace woke up, looked down at her chest, and shuddered. In the midst of rolling out of her makeshift bed of fur scraps to look for her binder, she realized that she didn’t have it – it was literally galaxies away, somewhere on the floor of her room in the TARDIS.
She swore and let herself tumble painfully to the floor so she could stare up at the half-shredded ceiling of her tent. It wasn’t that big of an inconvenience, she told herself. She had survived much worse than an uncomfortable gender in the past, and chances were that, by tomorrow, she’d feel more comfortable looking like she did. She told herself that twice. Then she swore again, softer this time, because none of it was making her feel less like she wanted to claw her own skin off.
Slowly she pushed herself to her feet, and grabbed her bomber jacket from where she had hung it off a wall. Putting it on made her feel a little better – it was voluminous enough that it swallowed her physical form, making her look less like a woman and more like some kind of genderless gremlin, which was definitely what she was going for.
Lord Scruffysuit was actually outside his tent today, sitting at the edge of the firepit, and drawing diagrams in the ashes with a stick. He barely glanced up as he emerged – which wasn’t unusual – but said, “Such unladylike language. I’m shocked.”
She resisted the urge to kick him hard, and snapped, “Well, I’m not exactly feeling very ladylike right now, am I?” before going to find something from their communal food scrap pile to eat.
There was a short silence, broken only by the (now quite insistent) rumbling of the planet beneath them. Somewhere in the distance, there was a chorus of animal screeching and howling that gradually fell silent as the ground did.
Ace found some root vegetable that looked the most appetizing out of their supplies and chewed on it, studiously ignoring the horrible prickling of her skin. It was like the yellow anger, somehow, but worse – worse because it couldn’t be blamed on some alien virus. It was all her own body’s bloody fault.
There was a noise from behind her, and it took her a moment to realize that the Gender Policing Wanker had cleared his throat rather awkwardly. “What?” she said, turning.
He was grimacing, and it seemed to be a physical effort for him to say, “Are you... quite all right?”
There was a pause. “No,” she said eventually. “No, not really. – Why the hell do you care, anyway?” she added, glaring.
“I don’t,” he said shortly, leaning back over his sketches in the dirt, “so feel free to forget I ever asked.”
There was another pause. Ace studied her breakfast, pulled a face, and circled the firepit to see what Tall, Dark, And Kooky was drawing. She glimpsed TARDIS-like schematics and a rough doodle of some kind of battery-powered device. Then he saw that she was looking and scuffed it out with one elegant flick of his shoe.
She rolled her eyes and said, “Dysphoria. I sorta hate myself today for no reason, and I left my binder at home.” She didn’t really expect him to understand.
“Ah.” He nodded as if that explained everything. Which, it did, but – “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and he sounded genuine about it too.
“Why?” she asked before she could stop herself.
He gave her a disbelieving stare, and then said, “Is it so hard to believe that I could feel empathy and/or sympathy for your current state of biologically based body horror?”
“Kinda, yeah,” she said. She did quite like the way that he had phrased that last bit – it resonated with her in a way that not many other terms ever had.
She ignored that in favour of studying him again as he sighed and scratched another few lines in the dirt at his feet, then stopped. As he stared at the ground, Ace became aware suddenly of how exhausted he looked, and how that exhaustion made him look almost normal, as far as normal could get. Tattered clothes and yellowish eyes aside, he almost looked like just another person she could pass on a street somewhere.
“I know a thing or two about not feeling comfortable in my own skin,” he said, rather softly.
At first, she thought he was referring to the whole cheetah thing, but – no, it didn’t feel like an allusion to that. There was something in his voice – a certain pointed significance to his words. He had recognized her particular brand of body discomfort. He had been instantly sympathetic. He – wait... what? –
“Surprised?” said the Master of Unexpected Plot Twists, a sudden smile on his – their? her? – lips. “Or were you unaware that species outside of humans could have similarly gender-based issues?”
“No – I – yeah, of course, but –”
A sigh, a nod. “But you never expected me, the villain. I see.”
“Have I been misgendering you?” Ace asked, somewhat uncomfortably. “All this time, I mean. You looked like a bloke, but – assumptions, you know – ”
“He, him, and his have always served me well,” said the Alien of Unexpected Transgender Solidarity, “in this incarnation, at least.” A beat. “And... you?”
The Professor’s evil furry arch-nemesis is asking me my pronouns and offering me gender sympathy, Ace thought, and she had to choke back a hysterical laugh at the absurdity of it all. “Er – yeah, she/her, ninety percent of the time.”
He nodded. “But you don’t appear to enjoy gendered descriptions being applied to you.”
“Not today.”
Another nod, rather thoughtful, and then he said, “Are you still feeling...” and let the sentence trail off. He didn’t need to say anything else. It was pretty obvious what he was referring to.
“Yes,” she said, in a this-is-obvious sort of way, “I still want to tear my tits off, and maybe also my skin while I’m at it.”
Yet another nod, and then he stood, staring down at her for a long second.
“Come,” he said, rather imperiously. When Ace gave him a distinctly unimpressed and sceptical look, he sighed and added, “Don’t be ridiculous – even if I were planning on killing or maiming you, which I most assuredly am not, I’d hardly need to take you to a secondary location to do so. Come with me.”
She got up, shrugging her jacket up around her shoulders so it was a lot more form-consuming, and watched him walk off – out of the camp area, without looking back, as if he was expecting her to just follow him.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
He glanced over his shoulder. “For a walk,” he said, as if it were obvious.
“A walk.”
“Yes. I’ve often found it helps me clear my head and distracts me from unpleasant circumstances – if only temporarily.”
Ace hesitated for maybe a moment, and then hurried after him. When she reached him, she slowed down to match his pace so they were now walking side by side.
“Is being transgender as a Time Lord the same as it is for humans?” she asked before she could stop herself, and watched his face go through an interesting range of expressions almost comparable to the stages of grief – as if he were about to make a disparaging comment, but was forcibly stopping himself from doing so.
“There are... quite a number of differences, really,” he said eventually. “At least in terms of society and in terms of biology – humans can’t simply regenerate when they don’t agree with the gender they were assigned at birth.” He gives her a quick sideways glance. “Surely you should know this already – you must have discussed it with the Doctor at some point.”
Ace just shrugged. “...Only offhandedly. And the Professor isn’t really a good example of... well, anything. I wouldn’t know if they’re normal by Gallifreyan standards or whatever.”
Strangely More Friendly Than Usual Evil Sorcerer Guy almost cracked a smile at that, but it was quickly gone. “I suppose that’s true, yes. As it happens – occasionally, Time Lords do regenerate into a body that they – feel distinctly uncomfortable in. I suspect that the sensation of disconnect experienced is similar to what a human might experience under similar circumstances. In that case, they – we – would seek out certain medical solutions to realign our bodies to what we would prefer them to be.”
“Like Time Lord testosterone or something?”
She definitely wasn’t imagining the faint upwards curl to his lip now. “Something like that.”
“So you transitioned,” she said. “And you ended up looking like a two-bit Bond villain.” Hastily she added, “Not that it’s a bad thing, or anything. You look great. Probably.”
The smile was definitely there now. “What,” he said, gesturing with both hands, “is the point of remaking your entire appearance and aesthetic if you don’t seize the opportunity with both hands and become the gloriously over-the-top villain you’ve always aspired to be?”
Ace was grinning too. “Hah, I knew you were doing it on purpose.”
“Bwa-ha-ha,” he deadpanned and then sighed, raking a hand over his face. “Not that I’m living up to that particular image very much right now.”
Ace thought of her own eyes and fangs and winced in sympathy. “Yeah, it’s – yeah.”
They continued walking for a while more, in strangely companionable and comfortable silence. They travelled through a valley littered with bones and scraps, skirted the edge of a forest, and passed by a lake. At no point did they see any Cheetah People – or kitlings, for that matter, although the sounds of them in the distance could be heard.
Eventually, they arrived in an area Ace had never seen before – a wide, open clearing littered with scraps of metal and technology that looked more or less like a bomb had hit it, except – no. There was something about the dimensions of the area that were just flat-out impossible. The angles were wrong, and so was the perspective. There was a large column of some black material at the centre of the clearing that looked like ground zero for the explosion of metal and assorted machine parts. Just as she caught sight of it, she heard a sharp intake of breath.
“What’s this?” she asked, looking over at him – he appeared rather stunned, and was standing in place, scanning the area carefully.
“It’s – my TARDIS,” he said. His mouth twisted downwards. “Or what’s left of her, anyway.”
“You crashed,” Ace guessed, stepping carefully over some snaking cables to get closer to where what looked like the remains of the console were.
“I did,” he said, “rather suddenly and violently. Ah –” He let out a sad sigh and placed a hand against one of the jutting spikes, almost tenderly. “My dear, I’m so very sorry for abandoning you.”
Ace looked away in embarrassment. This TARDIS was dead, had been for ages; she could feel it – and she felt like she was intruding on a private moment. She probably was, really. The relationship between Time Lords and their TARDISes had always baffled her, to be honest.
As her gaze wandered, she caught sight of something gleaming underneath a fallen support beam, and she reached out to brush the dirt off. Her eyes widened. It looked relatively undamaged. “Hey, isn’t this some sort of – transmat device?”
His head jerked up, and he hurried to her side. He pried the device from her hands, gave it a cursory glance over, and then inhaled sharply. “Yes. Yes, it is. How in Rassilon’s name did you-?”
“I pay attention to the Professor when they’re rambling,” she said, cutting him off. “Sometimes, anyway. So can we fix it?”
“We can try.” There was a curious gleam in his eyes now – excitement and anticipation – and she could feel it echoed within her.
As an improvisational teleporter repair team, they worked pretty well together. Ace’s rough, patchy knowledge of where to put mechanical parts and how to screw them all together meshed really rather well with specific technical knowhow. Surprisingly, the transmat didn’t take all that long to repair, but while they were working on it, they talked – because of course they did. Apart from repairing, there wasn’t much else to do. Conversation was somewhat awkward at first, but then they stumbled upon a mutual fondness for old action movies – for entirely different reasons; Ace was partial to the explosions and stunts while the Master Film Critiquer preferred the villains and their presentation and motivations – and they ended up spending quite a while dissecting the genres at levels of academic bullshittery that Ace had never imagined she could talk at. This occupied quite a lot of their time.
They did a very good job of mutually avoiding the metaphorical and literal cheetah in the nonexistent room. The virus. The virus that was changing them, mutating them, making them both become something that they really did not want to be. With every second that passed, Ace could feel herself becoming more and more aware of the fact that she was not the her that she used to be. She had spent so long trying to find a balance with her body that she was happy with and, prior to this, had almost reached a comfortable equilibrium. And now it was just wrong. She didn’t want to think about it for any longer than she had to, in the hopes that ignoring it would mean that it would eventually go away (never mind how unlikely that was) and she had the feeling that the Master of Staying Silent Even When Distinctly Uncomfortable was much the same. So they just didn’t talk about it. And they were very good at not talking about it. And this meant that, by extension, gender talk wasn’t really on the table. So old action movie discourse it was.
And after only three days, the teleporter was nearly completely fixed, and it was at about that point that a problem arose. Ace had been taking a short break outside, but had been waylaid by a group of Cheetah People, unexpectedly angry and active. There’d been basically no choice but to fight – not a good idea, considering her condition. She had only barely managed to get away and limp her way back to camp, cursing and swearing the whole while.
“Bad news,” she said, breathlessly ripping open the fabric of the tent. “We’ve got company.”
He looked up from his work, took one look at her, and stood abruptly. “You tried to fight,” he said – not a question. “Why would you –”
“Well, it was that or die,” she snapped at him, dimly aware of the fact that her eyes were flaring bright yellow as she did. She was angry. So angry, and so very hungry...
He took her firmly by the shoulders, and shook her – not hard, but not exactly gently. “Focus. You need to focus.”
She blinked, grimaced, then shook her head, trying to get the cheetah out of her head. “Shit. They’re coming closer, fast – five minutes, I think. They can smell us. They’re hungry. I’m hungry.” She gasped with exertion and tried to shake him off, on instinct, but he held on tight – which she appreciated. “I can’t fight. I know I can’t fight. I’ll – I’m gonna lose myself if I do. This isn’t good.”
“It’s not ideal, no,” he said and tugged her down to join him next to the teleport device. “The wiring is all that’s left to do here. Red to red, blue to black, anything else can be matched up in any order. Don’t let the pairs touch. Do you understand?”
She was so hungry. She shook herself; gritted her teeth. “Yeah, I’ve got it.”
He nodded, handed her the makeshift pliers, and rose in one elegant movement to tug a wooden rod from the side of the tent. Ace set to work instantly, but looked over quickly at him, shooting him a questioning look.
“You can’t fight,” he said simply.
“Neither can you,” she shot back.
“Not for long, certainly, but for a short while... Why are you talking? Finish wiring! We haven’t got much time.” He tone was curt but tense, and there was a steely glint in his yellowed eyes as he stared out at the landscape, and at the distant sound – growing closer all the time – of the approaching Cheetah People.
She tore her attention away from him and started matching up wires. Black to blue, red to red. It was fairly simple, but not enough that she could break her concentration to see what the Master of Brandishing a Tent Pole was up to. The intermittent tremors that shook the ground of the planet increased. A near-constant rumbling underneath her caused her fangs to rattle and her hands to shake, and it really wasn’t ideal because she couldn’t let the wires touch.
A rustle. She chanced a glance up, and saw that he had already left, closing the tent flap behind him. She could hear growling and snarling outside, and she swore under her breath. It would only take her another minute to finish, she knew – she’d just have to hope that he could handle himself for that long without her.
She fumbled her way through the last few connections, double-checked to make sure they were all in order, and then slammed a hand down onto the power-up switch. For a brief, horrifying second, she thought that she had messed up somehow – but then the lights came on along the sides of the teleportation device, and it began to hum reassuringly. She whooped, pumping a fist in the air, and then scrambled to her feet. She looked back and forth, snatched a rock from the ground, and then barrelled out of the tent and into the biting evening air.
The sky was now an angry scarlet, and the sun was blazing like hellfire – and that was quite literally the least of her concern right now. At the center of a group of twenty Cheetah People, the not-quite-so-imposing-anymore figure of the Master of Impromptu Self-Defence held them back with his improvised weapon. He whirled and prodded and jabbed at them with lightning speed.
“Oi, it’s done!” yelled Ace, keeping her distance, but gripping her rock tightly, just in case. There was no response – from the cheetahs or from the Time Lord, and then – she caught sight of his eyes. Blazing yellow. Mindless anger and hunger.
“Shit,” she cried. “No!” and she was running – right into the fray, pushing aside two Cheetah People who didn’t even see her coming, and ditching her rock at a third. “You absolute piece of shit, you do not get to do this to me,” she panted. Grabbing his arm, she hauled him bodily toward the tent. “Come on, you!” she cried, kicking him swiftly in the shins when he growled. “You – no, stop, I’m relying on you, remember?” She grabbed him by the arms, stared him down with a vengeance. “You’ve got to stop, or I’ll die. You put all this effort into keeping us alive up until now! Are you really gonna throw that away?”
For some reason, that seemed to break the spell, in more ways than one – he stopped fighting her abruptly, and the Cheetahs realized that there were not one, but two delicious targets available for hunting in the last minutes of their planet’s survival.
Wordlessly, he and Ace hauled arse back to the tent. With only seconds before their pursuers caught up with them, they confirmed the coordinates and slammed their hands down on the teleporter, waiting for departure.
“Three seconds,” Ace panted. Her companion didn’t say anything; his expression was pained, his eyes flickering erratically as he lifted his hand from the device. he was lifting his hand from the device. “What the hell do you think you’re–?” she began, and then realized that talking wasn’t going to do much good, and instead just grabbed his arm, gripping onto it painfully tight.
And just in time too – because it was about that very moment that everything vanished into a dizzying, sickening whirl of lights and colours, and then the breeze was different and the ground was pavement, and it was mid-afternoon. Everything smelled like ozone, but that was quickly clearing.
Ace sat up, took in her surroundings, and laughed aloud, delighted. She had never imagined that she’d be so glad to see Perivale, in all its horrible familiar glory, but there she was. And more importantly, right at her back, stood – the TARDIS. Big and blue and beautiful, it meant that her owner was almost definitely there too. A few weeks ago, she would have instantly abandoned her unorthodox partner in fixing up the teleportation device and run off to try to find the Professor and let them know that she was all right, but right now –
She leaned over and shook the arm of the person lying next to her, and he groaned and cursed in a melodic language, and sat up, too. His eyes were yellow, but he appeared collected and stable. He looked around, similar to the way she had, and his eyebrows ascended briefly.
“We made it,” he said, sounding faintly astounded at the very thought.
"Not bad for a chemistry dropout and a two-bit Bond villain, hey?” she asked, bumping his shoulder with hers.
He bumped her back rather awkwardly. "Quiet now,” he said, “or I'll feed you to my piranha tank."
Across the street, there was a sudden commotion as a diminutive figure wielding an umbrella burst out onto the road from a diner, clutching their hat to their head. “Ace!” yelled the Doctor, somehow managing to sound worried and delighted at the same time.
“Oh, here we go,” said the Master of Being Bad at Long-Awaited Reunions.
“They’re not that bad,” Ace said and leaned back against the TARDIS, staring up at the rich blue sky.
“You obviously were not partnered with them in Advanced Temporal Mechanics for three semesters running,” he told her, and she laughed, and felt the sun on her face, and she realized that she felt absolutely fine. The Professor was running across the street now, shouting something loud and Scottish. There were a lot of explanations that needed to happen, and she could not wait to have a shower and change her clothes (and dig her binder out from wherever she had left it, because – yeah, she really could use that too), but right now she was sitting outside her home, next to an unlikely friend, and everything was, for this one shining moment, absolutely perfect.