Fic: Postscript (PG, 1/1)

[nonelvis]

Title: Postscript
Characters/Pairing(s): Eleven/Romana II, Eleven/River, Romana II/River
Rating: PG
Word count: 3,800
Spoilers: none
Warnings: none
Summary: Romana finally turns up after years of exile ... and she's got robbery on her mind.
Beta: platypus
Disclaimer: Not mine, obviously.

Author's Notes: My Eleventh Doctor entry in who_at_50's 50th anniversary fanwork-a-thon-a-thon. Takes place sometime after "The Sum of Their Memories," but you don't have to have read that story to understand this one. (Nor should you read it unless you're 18 or over. "Postscript," however, is rated PG only for innuendo, and is otherwise gen.)

::xposted to who_at_50, who_at_50, dwfiction, dwfiction, and eleven_fic, and archived at Teaspoon and AO3




The Doctor was very busy recaulking the bath when the post arrived, not that he'd been expecting post in the first place, much less post hand-delivered by a very confused postman wondering why he was knocking on a police box door.

It was a valentine. A touching thought, albeit less touching than it would have been had it arrived in February instead of what was probably October, at least in some parts of the universe. A valentine circa 1985, with Snoopy in a deerstalker, and text reading "It Would Be A Crime ... To Forget To Wish You A Happy Valentine's Day!"

The interior contained coordinates in River's loopy scribbles, coordinates where she no doubt expected him to extract her from whatever foolishness she'd got herself into now, never mind that he'd do it without her asking. Still, a "please" every now and then wouldn't hurt.

It was the postscript that made his decision for him.

It read "P.S. Romana sends her love."

* * *

The coordinates led to an evergreen forest on Telamos IV that smelled of pine and recent rain, sharp and clean. This late at night, he could barely see the sky through the thick forest canopy, and pale straws of moonlight only hinted at the landscape.

But he didn't need light to recognise a voice.

"Hello, Doctor," Romana said.

There: footsteps crunching on twigs and pine needles; a slim, deep blue shape in the blackness. "Romana?" he called out, stumbling towards her.

"Here," she said. "Right here."

"Romana." His hand brushed her shoulder, the nape of her neck, the curve of her cheeks. It was her: really her, not just his memories whispering to him in the dark. He pulled her into a hug and said nothing else, felt only the thumping of her hearts against his.

"I tried to find you," he said when his breath came back to him. "But I couldn't – there was just me – and – "

Quietly, Romana said, "River says we're the only ones left."

"We are."

"What happened? The war was still going on when I was exiled to E-space. And I came back, and no one could take me to Gallifrey ..."

"I had to destroy it, Romana. I locked it away forever in a time loop. And it came back for a little while, because Rassilon's a crafty old bugger, but it's gone again now, probably for good." His eyes were adjusting to the darkness. When he pulled back from Romana, he could see the outlines of her face, not that he didn't know it by heart anyway.

"So we can't go back."

"Would you really want to, with that madman in charge? You could travel with me if you like. Us in the TARDIS again, eh? Just like old times."

"Yes," she murmured. "Old times."

Softer crunching on the forest floor now; broader steps. A bobbing light approached from his left.

"I hate to interrupt, sweetie, but we didn't invite you here for just a reunion."

"And what sort of trouble have you got yourself into now, River?" he asked.

"We're not in trouble yet, and if we do this right, we won't be. It's just a bit of light burglary."

"And I'm supposed to help? Why would I help you commit burglary, River? And Romana, what are you doing wrapped up in this?"

"You've got the getaway car, sweetie," said River. "And you might be useful for other reasons," she added with what he was sure was a wink, not that he could see her clearly enough to tell.

"This isn't just any burglary," Romana said. "We're here to rob Kervon Tesh."

"Kervon Tesh? Kervon Tesh, the arms merchant? Have you both gone completely mental? Do you know what kind of weapons he probably keeps lying around the house? Fracture grenades in the pantry! Nuclear missiles in the loo!"

"Based on our surveillance, all we've seen are perimeter guards with laser rifles," River said. "There's also a force field round the house, and some kind of anti-chronon field designed to keep out time machines."

"Almost as if he thought the Time Lords might not be pleased he sold arms to us and the Daleks," said Romana.

"But none of us are left to threaten him anymore!" the Doctor said. "Besides, what could he possibly have that you would want that badly?"

"You don't know why I was exiled, do you?"

"Of course I do. Rassilon staged a coup, and I managed to convince him to spare your life."

"Which left him no choice but to get rid of the one person who'd uncovered how he'd been paying for our weapons: by plundering state jewels and stealing all manner of treasure he'd no right to take, much less give to someone else, much less to a man who sold the Daleks the exact same weaponry." Her voice started to rise, and River placed a hand on Romana's shoulder. "It took me years to find a soft spot between E-space and N-space, and now that I'm back, I can't even mount a counter-coup. But I am still the rightful president of Gallifrey, and if I can rescue any part of our heritage, I will."

Through the dim torchlight, he could see Romana's chin jutted towards him, and the narrowing of her eyes. How could someone so small make him feel even smaller?

He bowed his head, saying, "Lead the way."

* * *

The woods stopped abruptly fifty metres from a dirt road that curved in front of the mansion's front gate, where two armed guards stood watch, the shimmering half-dome of force fields behind them. The Doctor, Romana, and River crouched behind scrub brush, watching.

"I've got the guards," River said. She lowered the zip of her black catsuit just enough to be entertaining, and withdrew a silver tube. "Give me five minutes."

She was a dark silhouette along the road before the Doctor even had a chance to wish her good luck.

"Your wife is a remarkable woman," said Romana. "Did you know she was the only person in the spaceport who'd heard of Gallifrey? Congratulations on your wedding, by the way. I imagine it was quite the spectacle. Was it on purpose this time?"

"Never going to let me forget that, are you? One little temporary wedding on Kreetax Minor never hurt anyone, Romana, least of all you."

"Mmm. I suppose the wedding night wasn't bad."

"‘Wasn't bad'? It was a fair sight better than ‘wasn't bad.' Try ‘amazing, Doctor.' ‘Do that again, Doctor.' And that was when you weren't making that little high-pitched –"

He could practically hear her glaring at him. Just like old times, exactly as he'd said.

"I remember now," she said. "I think I gagged you somewhere in the middle of that."

"‘Wasn't bad.' Honestly." He sniffed. "Anyway, River and I had a very old-fashioned ceremony: a short-form handfasting in an aborted universe with multiple colliding timelines."

"How romantic." Romana sighed.

"Strangely, it rather was."

"Mind you, I'd like to know why she knew where to find Kervon Tesh. She was quite mysterious about that."

"She's quite mysterious about a lot of things," the Doctor said. "She seems to think it's alluring."

"It is."

"Well, yes, but ... you know, Romana, it's starting to sound as if you and River are ... somewhat closer than I'd expect, given how little time you've known her."

"We are," she replied. "Oh, look! I think she's lowered the force field. Come on."

The Doctor stood up, brushing twigs and a cobweb from his trousers. "How close exactly, Romana?"

"Close enough," Romana called over her shoulder.

"Close enough for ...? Oh, never mind," he muttered. "Spoilers, probably."

They met up with River at the gate, where she was wiping her mouth with a handkerchief, making sure every last trace of lipstick was gone. The guards, each wearing a Shameless Scarlet smile, were piled dazedly atop one another, laughing and rolling on the grass.

"Come on, we haven't got all day," River said, tramping round the side of the mansion.

"All right, all right," the Doctor said. "Do you think this is my first robbery? I was breaking and entering before you were a gleam in your parents' human little eyes, River –"

"Good. Then you can help us sort out which part of that brick wall I disintegrate so we can get inside the gallery without destroying anything."

It certainly was a brick wall, tall and solid and windowless, a peculiarly blank canvas on a mansion otherwise festooned with fancy columns and French-doored balconies. No wonder Romana and River were so certain it bordered a gallery filled with stolen valuables.

There was a possibility, though, provided he could locate something in his pockets, which was always a bit of a gamble. Handkerchiefs, windup toys, something wriggling he might have forgotten to feed, sentient lint ... ah, there it was: an early-model iPod filled with his ABBA playlists. Easily replaced, in any case, which was good, considering he was about to wipe and reprogram it entirely.

"Romana, do you still have your sonic?"

"Of course."

"Good. Give it a nice, low frequency and aim it at that wall."

A few moments of sonicking later with his own screwdriver, and the iPod was displaying black and white jitters of what might have been pedestals or display cases. Whatever they were, they were large and squat and definitely on the opposite side of the brick.

"Sonar, Doctor!" Romana exclaimed. "Oh, very clever."

He twiddled his bow tie. "Good to know I can still impress you after all these years."

"Occasionally," she said, then peered down at the display. "Between those two columns, don't you think? River, four paces to the left and a half-metre from the ground, if you please."

"Yes, ma'am." River aimed carefully and fired. A perfect square of brick vanished into the gun's memory, revealing a room that glowed butter-yellow with light.

Kervon Tesh's collection wasn't a few stolen treasures. It was a museum-quality gallery in what was likely a converted ballroom with an intricate parquet floor, gilded wallpaper, and a mural on the ceiling eight metres above. With sophisticated brushstrokes, masterful realism, and subtle colouring, the mural depicted the traditional Telamite harvest festival orgy.

"The Telamites seem quite serious about their ploughing," River said, prompting a raised eyebrow from Romana and a stare from the Doctor. "Oh, please. As if you weren't thinking the same thing."

"As a matter of fact, I was admiring the execution," said the Doctor. "The artist has an excellent sense of proportion."

"Of course, sweetie."

Romana, wincing, aimed her screwdriver at the four corners of the room in turn, readjusted the screwdriver and repeated the process. "That takes care of the motion detectors and cameras," she said. "So if you two are finished pretending to ignore the pornography, I believe we have some artefacts to liberate. Shall we start at this end?"

She led the way to the nearest corner of the gallery, pausing at the first pedestal to rub her temples. The case was devoted to Ventraki jewellery boxes and their contents, neatly arrayed in half-circles flanking their original containers. Pin spotlights gleamed from the pedestals below the cases, highlighting rubies, sapphires, black opals, each jewel sparkling and magnifying the others' reflections.

Beside the Ventraki section of the room, they found cases devoted to Lobellian turquoise. Beside those, glass cases with hand-wrought mediaeval Taran armour. Beyond those, porcelain and jade and paintings from more worlds than the three of them could count on all their hands.

And in the furthest part of the gallery, an empty granite pedestal surrounded by more jewellery cases, these with the treasures of Gallifrey.

Battered bronze medallions with inlaid seals of Rassilon; signet rings scattered carelessly like marbles, too many of them to bother arranging; a flat-edged silver bracelet decorated with cutouts and curlicues. The Doctor popped the lock with his sonic and swept them all into his pockets. Treasures of his people, locked away in a private museum by the man who'd stolen every last thing of value from a race at war.

Well, not every last thing. The Doctor had taken that himself.

Romana stood beside him at an open case with a white point star diamond the cut and size of a quail egg, nestled on a midnight blue cushion. Her hands gripped the pedestal rim. "One of the presidential jewels," she said bitterly. "Rassilon must have traded it after I was exiled."

"Romana ..."

"We're taking all of it. Every last piece." The diamond disappeared into her bag. "Now, if I could just get rid of this damnable headache ..."

"Not a headache, I don't think," said the Doctor. "More like vibrations in the vortex – but the frequency's all wrong. Something's rattling round us, and it doesn't quite know how to say ‘hello.'"

A familiar prickling inside his skull, words he knew he should be able to speak stuck on the tip of his tongue.

"Something lost," Romana said. "Something trying to find its way home."

River was frozen beside the empty pedestal, hand pressed to its top. "It's ..." she began, her voice shaky.

The Doctor knew the word he wanted then, and wondered why it had taken so long to find it. Probably because what was talking to them was damaged, poor thing, and had been on its own for so many years it had nearly forgotten how to communicate.

"It's a TARDIS," he said.

"It can't be. Even Rassilon wouldn't have traded a TARDIS for a weapon," said Romana, but when she approached the pedestal, her eyes narrowed. "How could he? A TARDIS! And its resonator coils are malfunctioning; I can hear the harmonic dissonance. I can fix it if we can only find a way in ... ." Her fingers slid across the stone surface, tapping carefully, searching for the door.

"Here," River said, kneeling and pushing three fingers into a mottled grey blotch that looked no different from any of the pedestal's other mottled blotches. Hidden hydraulics puffed, and the TARDIS creaked open at the side. "You want into a TARDIS? Ask the child of one."

Romana beamed at her, took her by both cheeks, and kissed her soundly. "River Song, you are magnificent." Then she crawled inside the ship.

"Wait for us!" the Doctor said, crouching down beside River.

A voice from across the room called out to them. "Don't worry; it's not going anywhere," it said. "Now, I'd like you to stand up, step away from my ship, and put your hands in the air."

* * *

Kervon Tesh was long and willowy, a matchstick of a man in a bright white suit. He had spiky black hair and arms that dangled nearly halfway down his thighs. One arm, anyway. The one that wasn't holding the laser pistol pointed at them.

River raised her hands and nudged the Doctor with her hip, unbalancing him. He stumbled against the pillar, then heard the snick of the TARDIS door as it sealed shut. Clever girl, that River. Might be worth keeping for a while, if Romana hadn't stolen her out from under him.

"Kervon Tesh, I presume," the Doctor said, straightening himself while raising his hands. "Heck of an art collection you've got here. Everything a man could want in valuable property traded under duress by desperate people."

"They still traded it, so it's still mine. Which makes what you and your pretty friend here are doing theft, judging by the way you tripped the silent alarms on my cases ... which look empty, by the way. Yep, definitely theft. And that puts me within my rights to kill you right now if I want, you know that? Telamite law's real efficient."

"Yes, but killing people yourself isn't quite your style, is it, Tesh? You do it from a distance, with bombs and orbiting laser platforms."

"I'm just an ordinary businessman dealing in modern technology. What people do with it isn't my problem."

"What they do with it," the Doctor hissed, "is kill. We killed so many of them, and they killed so many of us, and all of it with your modern technology. Along with a few of our own inventions, because we were a clever race, too clever for our own good sometimes. But we'll never know if we could have sorted it all out ourselves, because you sold us out to our enemies."

Tesh smiled then, a horrible, pale gash of teeth. "You think that narrows down who you are? Please. If you were dealing with me, it's because you needed what I sold, and you needed it bad enough that you didn't care if I sold it to everyone else, too."

"He's as charming as I'd heard, Doctor," River said. "Why didn't you introduce us sooner?"

"Been busy. People to see, socks to sort. A truly staggering number of socks."

A low wheeze from behind them, stuttering, as if gasping for breath. It repeated, then smoothed out, rising in pitch and volume.

"What the hell is that?" Tesh asked. He waved the pistol at the Doctor, then River, then back again. "One of you doing that? Whatever it is, stop it."

"That," the Doctor said, "is the sound of our friend Romana fixing the resonator coils in a broken TARDIS. It took her thirty-nine seconds longer than I'd have expected, but perhaps she dropped her hair pin."

The wheezing grew louder still. A breeze whipped through their hair, and then ruffled it back into place.

Kervon Tesh's mouth hung open. Just a bit, not much, but enough for the Doctor to feel a warm sense of satisfaction.

"And that," the Doctor continued, "was the sound of your most valuable possession disappearing."

"She can't have gone far. Anti-chronon field's still up. Now bring it back! Bring it back right now." Tesh marched forward, poked the pistol at River's forehead. He was red-faced and practically toe-to-toe with her. "Bring it back or I swear I'll kill her. I'm going to count to ten."

"Don't worry, River. Everything's going to be fine," said the Doctor.

River laughed. "Do I sound worried, sweetie?"

"You should be worried!" Tesh yelled. "You should be very, very worried! Five seconds left now! Four!"

"Three," River said. "Two. One."

Then her boot heel came down hard on Tesh's foot, and as he yelped and jumped, River slapped the gun away with her hand. Tesh blinked at her, shocked, and that was the moment she braced herself on his shoulders and brought her knee up firmly between his legs. He crumpled, howling.

"Didn't anyone teach you not to stand so close to the person you're trying to shoot? It only gives them an opening," River said. The squareness gun slipped from her sleeve into her hand. "I wouldn't try to get up if I were you. But feel free to writhe in pain."

The Doctor lowered his hands. "Excellent work as always, dear."

"It was nothing. Ask me to do something difficult next time. Better yet, ask me to do it with you and Romana," River replied, winking at him.

"You naughty girl."

"You know you love it."

Tesh groaned, curled up in a ball. "Don't think ... you're getting out of here ... alive. Panic button ... guards on their way."

He fumbled in his pocket, withdrawing a black fob and jamming his thumb on it, over and over. Then the sides of his white suit began to ripple, caught in a swiftly growing gush of wind. The faintest hint of a wheeze carried through the air.

"That sounds like our ride," the Doctor said. He reached for River's hand. "Come along, River."

"But Doctor, what are we going to do about ..." River paused, looked around, and grinned.

The gallery was gone. Instead, they stood inside a gleaming white room with a sleek silver console and Romana at the controls. Tesh still lay before them, frozen, eyes wide.

"Tesh, my good man," said the Doctor, "meet Romana, the third member of our band of merry men. Or merry women, I suppose. Romana, I assume you've got Mr. Tesh surrounded by a containment field?"

"Since the moment I materialised," she replied. "Hello, Kervon. We haven't met before, but we should have. I'm the president of Gallifrey, and I'm here to take everything you think you own."

* * *

Deactivating the anti-chronon field was practically as trivial for Romana as repairing her new ship had been. In a matter of minutes, she'd identified the password system as requiring a ten-digit alphanumeric code indexed to the erratic orbit of the moon, had written a program to brute-force the possibilities, and upon discovering that the combinatorics were somewhat larger than she'd expected, had located a spanner in one of the TARDIS' storage bays and smashed the force field controls to bits.

"Higher math has its uses," she said, "but I think Leela would have preferred this approach."

Freed from Tesh's mansion, she piloted the TARDIS back to the woods, landing neatly beside the Doctor's ship. She handled the controls as precisely as always, and while the Doctor noted where he'd have set a dial back three ticks when Romana set it forward one, or where she tugged a lever less forcefully than he might have, she got them where they needed to be just as easily as he might have, and probably more so. She was Romana, after all.

Kervon Tesh, for his part, scowled at them from the floor, interjecting occasional remarks about female pilots until River reminded him which one of them was armed with a laser pistol.

"What are you going to do with him?" River asked Romana.

"I can't very well eject him into space, much as he deserves it," Romana said. "So I think I'll let the Shadow Proclamation decide what to do with him. They're not very fond of artefact thieves, and you've got so very many artefacts that aren't yours for them to find, don't you, Kervon? No, don't bother answering; your impotent rage is satisfaction enough."

"I'll join you," said the Doctor. "The Shadow Proclamation may want to speak to the wronged parties, and ... well ... it's not like there's anyone else left for it."

Romana looked up, and for the first time since he'd last seen her those many years ago, she smiled so warmly at him that his whole body fairly tingled with joy. "I'd like that very much," she said.

He reached for her hand, drew it to his lips, and kissed it. Yes, definitely a tingle of joy, and the fluttering of Romana's hand said much the same.

"I'll meet you there," he said.

"I'll be waiting."

"Not for long," he replied. "Not ever again."

Comments

[jjpor]

Very nice. Very nice indeed. I thought this was great - especially the banter between the characters and the Time War-related explanations. And the ending gave me a warm fuzzy sort of feeling. ;D Thank you very much for this.

[nonelvis]

Thank you! I'm very glad you liked the story.