Chapter Text
The centre of the universe. Tegan told me once that on her world, it's an expression people use to denote someone or something they care about more than anything else, to such a degree that, as far as they're concerned, the universe may as well revolve around that object as a planet does around its sun.
When I was a child, the centre of my universe was my father, Tremas. I began to grow up the day he was ripped from me, and shortly thereafter, my whole world as well. Deprived of that locus, I found myself suddenly cast adrift, a wanderer like the Doctor.
But no...no, that's a false analogy. The Doctor was always a traveller by choice. If his universe had a centre, then it was the TARDIS and the freedom it represented. He needed nothing else, and indeed he shied away from the sort of permanency in which most people find security.
Though I might have travelled in that same TARDIS, I was a very different sort of nomad during those years. Much as I hate to make the comparison, I was more like Mondas, the world that birthed the Cybermen: cast out from its source of light, wandering in the cold and the dark just trying to survive.
I've never failed to appreciate the irony that the end of my journey brought me to the literal centre of the universe. Still, even though I made the choice to remain, it wasn't until many years later that I found a new centre for my universe, in Lasarti and our daughter, Nica.
Now Lasarti was gone and Nica was far, far away at school. As proud as I was of her, still I felt at loose ends. I was restless and lonely and desperate for something--anything--to happen that would chase those feelings away. I craved companionship. Though I had my work and many friends on the station, it didn't matter. I wanted more than they could give.
There's another Earth expression Tegan taught me: "Be careful what you wish for."
You just might get it. And someone you love may be the one to pay the price...
~*~
One thing that hadn't changed since Nyssa had first come to Terminus: the arrival of a hospital ship was still momentous. Right now, the main operating theatre was filled almost to bursting with patients awaiting triage. The difference now was, when they weeded out the most severely ill, it was so that those most in need of treatment were the first to receive it.
Moving smoothly through the hustle of bodies--doctors and nurses herding patients this way and that--Nyssa glanced up, as she always did, at the faces looking down from the gallery. A rueful smile curled her lips. Terminus was far more self-sufficient than it had been when she arrived here but the money they made treating patients (never more than the family could afford) still wasn't enough. Not if they wanted to both maintain their operating costs and have enough left over for her ongoing improvements to the station. That meant patrons--or investors with foresight and patience enough to see the same long term potential that she did.
Terminus was already a much better investment now than it had been when she arrived, or even before the Corporation Wars; still, she hated the necessity of treating their work as sport for those wealthy, philanthropic individuals they hoped to woo. Things like money and the desire to make more of it had been quite foreign to her Trakenite upbringing.
What her travels with the Doctor hadn't taught her about avarice, though, Terminus had. Few beings in the universe would readily give without expecting something in return. Oh, most species had moments and individuals of such generosity, but it wasn't the norm.
She wondered, sometimes, what her father and the elders would've thought of the changes wrought in her by exposure to that larger universe. Perhaps, like the people she'd met in Traken's ancient past, they would have taken it as confirmation of their choice to have little contact with worlds outside the Union. The idea that exposure to evil made her strive all the more to be a better person would be incomprehensible to them.
Another troop of Vanir entered the theatre, leading those patients who were still hale enough to walk and bearing the others (all with a variety of ailments or injuries) on pallets. One in particular caught her eye, burned almost black from head to toe. Nyssa frowned, wondering why they'd brought a corpse into the operating theater. Then the figure moved, letting out a low moan.
Nyssa gasped and hurried forward. She could tell the being on the pallet was a trakenoid male from the breadth of his shoulders, but considering the severity of the burns, that classification was a kindness at best. There was a gaping hole where his nose ought to have been and his ears were long gone, flesh and cartilage charred away, so she doubted that any other external soft tissue organs could have survived.
Most horrifying of all, what little flesh hadn't been burned away already showed signs of necrosis from severe radiation exposure. "What happened here?" she asked, incredulous. This one couldn't have come from the ship--in this condition, he could never have survived the journey: whatever had happened to him must've happened on Terminus. Which meant he had to be one of the Vanir or one of the technicians or...well, it hardly mattered: he was one of her people and he'd been mortally injured on her watch. What that meant for the safety of the station and the effectiveness of her improvements was equally troubling.
She shouted for a burn kit and oxygen before turning back to Yurek. "Who is this man?"
"I've no idea," Yurek confessed as he and Emar moved the pallet into one of the emergency locks. An orderly rushed over with the supplies she'd requested, while Nyssa's eyes flickered over her patient, searching for even one patch of healthy skin they might be able to use for an emergency graft.
"One of the first things I did when I found him was a status check on all my men, checking in with the other commanders as well." Yurek continued. He looked as shaken as she. "All are accounted for: no one's missing."
"No one?" Nyssa echoed, surprised. "Then where did he come from? What happened?"
"Again, I don't know. We found him like this, passed out on the floor in a hallway outside some sort of...well, it looked rather like a large packing crate but that it was blue and had the words 'Police Box' over the door."
Nyssa's head snapped up from where she'd been examining her patient. She suddenly felt dizzy, as if her world--no, her entire universe--had tilted quite suddenly on its axis. "What did you say?" she repeated in a rasping voice barely above a whisper.
Startled, Yurek repeated his description and Nyssa looked back down at her patient with new eyes.
Horrified, she reached out one trembling hand to carefully clasp the wasted fingers, whispering, "Doctor?"
Lidless, staring grey eyes seemed to become aware of her for a split second before sliding away, but in that instant she saw more than enough: she saw recognition...and desperation. His mouth struggled to form her name, but with no lips and likely no tongue as well, how could he?
For an instant, hope surged through her--most species would have no chance of surviving so much physical damage, but this was the Doctor and the Doctor was a Time Lord. Almost immediately, though, panic replaced it. The Doctor was clearly dying, so why hadn't he begun to regenerate? Was something holding back the process? Or worse...had he somehow, in the time since she'd last seen him, managed to run through all the rest of his lives?
She had to know if there was any chance of saving him and could think of only one way to find out.
"We need to take him to Lasarti's laboratory," Nyssa ordered briskly, her fear plain in both her eyes and her voice. Both Yurek and Emar looked startled, and understandably not entirely sure what good a dream laboratory would do a dying man. "I believe I can save him, but you must trust me. Quickly, please, there's not much time!"
Both men still looked somewhat bewildered, but the admonition to trust her had done its work; she'd earned their trust time and again over the years by treating every single person who came onto the station, no matter who, as though they personally were of value to her. Baffling as her actions might be, neither Yurek nor Emar had any reason to believe that was likely to change with this one patient. If Nyssa said something in Lasarti's laboratory could save this man's life, she knew they would believe her (or at least believe that she believed it).
Fortunately, the laboratory that had once belonged to her late husband wasn't far. Of course, reaching it was only the first step. The last time she'd used Lasarti's machine, she'd been trying to experience a dream she'd thought was her own. Not until she'd accidentally made mental contact with the Doctor had she realised it had been him reaching out to her telepathically across time and space which had triggered the dream in the first place. This time, she'd had no warning at all. If Yurek hadn't told her where they'd found the Doctor, she might never have even known it was him.
But he'd known her and yet still hadn't reached out for her help. Judging by the despair she'd seen in his eyes, she wasn't entirely sure he even wanted help. If something was blocking his regeneration, he wasn't fighting it. That frightened Nyssa more than anything.
Ultimately Nyssa decided to hook the Doctor up to the dream machine's primary circuit, the one she'd used on herself before, and this time attach herself to the secondary one that Lasarti had used to join her.
She could only hope it would be enough.
The last time Nyssa had been inside the Doctor's mind while he was regenerating, his internal landscape had been a blizzard conjured by the Master to stop the regenerative process. It was reasonable to assume this time wouldn't be the same, but as for what it would be like, well...she didn't know what to expect.
The first wave of heat caught her by surprise. It swept over her like a firestorm, stinging her eyes and thickening the air so that it was a struggle to draw a breath. She barely had time to register the ruined landscape around her before the Doctor heard her gasp and turned.
He stood in the centre of it all, like the eye of the storm--except there was nothing calm about him. The face was a stranger's, but Nyssa knew it was him and not just because of the grey eyes that she'd last seen lidless.
It was almost painful, looking at that face for the first time after having seen the wreck of it. He'd been handsome, this time around. Not so handsome as the Doctor she'd known best, the one she still rather thought of as "her" Doctor, but still, there were hints of a curious, almost delicate beauty in his features. Even without the burns and visible scars, though, that beauty had long fled, leaving hollowed out cheeks beneath high cheekbones and haunting shadows in eyes that, by their laugh lines, had once danced. She could only imagine what he must've looked like when he smiled, because he wasn't smiling now. Nor was there any welcome recognition in his eyes as he looked at her, only suspicion.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, almost an accusation.
"You're on Terminus--" she started, but the Doctor cut her off.
"Yes, yes, yes, I did notice that. Rather difficult to miss one's surroundings when one can't close one's eyes. I mean what are you doing here?"
Nyssa didn't answer, taken aback by the bitterness in his words. She'd never heard anything like it from him before. But then, granted, she'd never seen him die quite so horribly before. "I..." For the first time, she looked around her properly. They were standing on a low, broad plain that was charred almost as badly as the Doctor's body outside this dream world. A few stubborn flames even still danced across it. She could see mountains and the ruins of a city on the horizon, both still blazing. Even the sky seemed to be on fire: what little of it she could see through the thick haze of smoke seemed to the same angry red as the flames. Impossibly, it looked almost familiar. "Why...what is this place?"
The Doctor looked at her again and there was something a little mad and almost hateful in his eyes. "What, don't you recognise it?" he asked snidely.
Suddenly careful, Nyssa answered, "I've only been inside your mind the once before, Doctor. If you recall, that was a snowstorm, not...a firestorm."
He laughed but there was no joy in the sound. "Yes, Nyssa, I remember. Nonetheless...you have been here before. Though I'm hardly surprised you don't recognise it." His face twisting in agony, he turned with deliberation to look out again over the ruined landscape. He then repeated: "Why are you here?"
In all her years on this forsaken place at the centre of the universe, Nyssa had never felt so bewildered or so foolish as she did now. It was as though she were a child again, her naïve faith in the permanency of her world being swept away for the first time. It angered her that the Doctor treated her like that child now, when all those years ago he hadn't. "I came to help you," she answered crossly. "I thought you might be having trouble regenerating."
Another laugh: this one more humourless and bitter than the last. "Then you can save yourself the trouble. I don't intend to regenerate."
Don't intend...but that implied some degree of choice! Could he do that, simply will himself to die before his time? And if so, why would he? Nyssa felt suddenly cold. "Doctor, look at me."
He did, and despite the suffocating heat all around them, Nyssa shivered. There was nothing in those eyes, not a shadow of the enthusiasm or curiosity she remembered, only despair.
"Why would you do this?" she asked, surprised at how frantic she sounded. But then, why shouldn't she? Not only was he one of her oldest and dearest friends, but she couldn't imagine the universe without him. "Why would you choose to die when you don't have to?"
"Why should I live?" he asked, in a voice as harsh and jagged as glass.
"Because the universe needs you," she cried out, beginning to feel a bit desperate herself. I still need you, or at the least...I need to know you're out there.
"The universe is better off without me!" He waved a hand at the devastated landscape around them. "It's gone, Nyssa. It's all gone, and it was my hand that did it."
There was something she was missing, something that ought to have been obvious, particularly to her, and Nyssa hated herself for it. Still, she couldn't comprehend why the Doctor was taking his failure to save one world so personally. It wasn't the first time, and while he'd always grieved before, it was never like this. Not even when Traken had been destroyed.
At the same time, as if triggered by his words and the self-loathing that fuelled them, the firestorm grew suddenly worse around them. Far away, an explosion unexpectedly rocked the ruined city, almost blinding her in its intensity. The ground quaked beneath them as if it were about to collapse in upon itself. The few standing buildings left amongst the ruins had already begun to do so.
"Get out," he told her, half angry, half pleading. "Just go, leave me."
"Not until you make me understand!" she insisted stubbornly.
The Doctor's face clouded over. No, it was more as if the entirety of the conflagration around them suddenly coalesced into his form, all of that pure, desperate anger directed at her. He grabbed her by both shoulders and shook her, hard. "You stupid girl, there's no time! Get out while you still can!"
While you still can! Nyssa's eyes widened in sudden understanding. It was what the Doctor had told her before--if he died while she was linked to him this way, she would die too. His mind was too powerful not to drag her under in its wake. This Doctor wanted to die...but he wasn't willing to sacrifice her to do it. She was her own best bargaining chip.
"Then you'd best make time, Doctor, because I'm not going anywhere."
Let him be angry at her for saving his life against his will if he wanted: at least he was feeling something. With luck, maybe she'd be able to fan that flame into something that would make him want to live.
It seemed to be working. Oh, the fire roared up higher around them for a moment, even though there was nothing left for it to consume, but then suddenly out of that wall of flame emerged a ghostly figure. The first time she'd seen this strange sight, its misshapen face and almost mummy-like wrappings had been nearly white. The second time, the white had veiled a polychrome of colours. This time was neither. The figure seemed instead to be shaped from the selfsame shadows that lurked in the Doctor's eyes. Still, she would have recognised this stranger anywhere, for it had once saved her life: it was the Watcher.
The Doctor looked at her again, emotions warring in his eyes. Then he let out a wordless cry that encapsulated all of his anger, frustration and despair at once. He ran towards the figure. They merged in another blinding explosion of light and dark, and Nyssa suddenly found herself once again in Lasarti's laboratory, gasping for breath.
Yurek and Emar hurried to her side, worry etched on their faces. "Lady Nyssa, are you all right?" Yurek asked.
Nyssa nodded breathlessly, not yet able to speak. The entire episode must've taken no more than a few seconds, but she knew the strain of it must show. Still, the Doctor had accepted the Watcher. From past experience, that had to mean he'd embraced his future...even if only reluctantly so.
She looked at his charred body on the pallet, the blackened fingers gripped tightly in her own. For an instant, nothing happened, but then the shift began and she drew a deep breath of relief.
At first, it was more or less as she remembered it, only without the Watcher's physical presence: the Doctor's features began to blur, burnt flesh smoothing over and growing whole again. But then, unexpectedly, he convulsed and his body exploded with light, streaming away in all directions like flares. Startled, Nyssa fell back with a gasp, letting his hand drop.
Yurek swore loudly by the ancient gods of his homeworld, seizing her by the shoulders before she could fall. All three of them just stared.
She'd seen it before, this light. It was artron energy, the same energy that powered the TARDIS; the same energy that was carefully woven into each cell of a Time Lord's body on graduation from the Academy, thus giving them the ability to regenerate. But she'd never seen so much in one place, certainly not in the Doctor--it was as though this regeneration were attempting to expel the vortex itself from him!
How was that even possible? Artron energy was an extremely limited thing, very difficult to transform or convert to matter, which was why the Time Lords hoarded it so jealously. The little Gallifrey controlled was distributed amongst its people and its technology: every Time Lord and every TARDIS living. The only possible way the Doctor could have so much of it in his own body was if...
No. Oh, no.
As the regeneration finally ended, Nyssa lunged forward, breaking Yurek's grip. She looked down at the man on the pallet in dismay. The man she'd dragged into this new life because she couldn't understand why he would want to end it. She, who should have understood better than anyone.
It wasn't just any planet that they'd watched burn. It was Gallifrey.