SerenBex

One appeared briefly across the Thames during rush hour, turning the surface of the river into black glass through which another London could be seen upside down beneath the water. Another swallowed up part of a supermarket in Llanelli for seven minutes, replacing aisle six with, what witnesses later described as, a sort of glowing swamp full of screaming birds.

Almost the entirety of UNIT stopped sleeping properly; the lower levels of headquarters operated around the clock with the scientific teams rotating in exhausted shifts under the harsh fluorescent lighting, while the military personnel monitored disturbance sites across the country. Even the air inside the building felt strained somehow, humming faintly with the sounds of overworked machinery.

Threading through all of it came the slow, strangely dangerous, softening of feelings between Tegan and Nyssa. The change between them wasn’t open or even visible to most people. That would, perhaps, have been easier for them to deal with. Instead, it trickled through gradually, with cups of tea being placed silently beside one another during late-night research and conversations that were starting to fall back into a painfully natural rhythm after decades apart, terrifying them both.

x-x

The Northumberland mission began as something entirely routine. Which, by UNIT standards, meant only a moderate risk of complete temporal annihilation.

A mining village near the Scottish border had reported repeated atmospheric distortions: lights appearing underground, voices heard speaking backwards and entire stretches of road briefly vanishing at dusk. UNIT traced the source of the strange occurrences to an abandoned moorland research station that had been left derelict since the seventies and Kate dispatched a small team immediately.

Tegan found herself shoved into the back of a tactical transport vehicle beside Nyssa and immediately adopted the unmistakable air of someone who was personally being punished by fate.

“You could at least pretend not to hate having to sit next to me.” She muttered as the vehicle bounced violently along narrow country roads.

Nyssa kept her attention fixed stubbornly ahead. “I do not hate it.”

“That sounded suspiciously like a hostage statement.”

Ace snorted from her seat on the other side of the transport vehicle and Mel immediately nudged her in the ribs, shooting her a warning look. “Behave.”

“I am behaving!” She objected with complete sincerity. “This is me being emotionally supportive.”

“By actively escalating the situation?”

Ace shrugged. “That’s what I bring to a crisis.”

Despite herself, Tegan laughed quietly under her breath. She shook her head, looking down at her hands as though attempting to hide the smirk threatening to appear on her face.

Nyssa noticed immediately. That had become the biggest problem with being near Tegan again; she remembered far too much. It wasn’t just the big, important things that had come flooding back but all the tiny details she had spent years trying unsuccessfully to forget; the slight crinkling near Tegan’s eyes whenever she was genuinely amused and the warmth that softened the sharper edges of her voice when she stopped guarding herself for a moment and the way her expression briefly lost some of its exhaustion when she laughed properly.

Nyssa had forced herself not to think about those things for years because remembering them hurt too much. Now she was sitting close enough that their shoulders brushed together every time the UNIT transport jolted across the uneven ground and each brief point of contact felt cruelly, painfully familiar.

Finally, they got their first glimpse of the station itself, sitting isolated against endless rolling hills. The wind howled through broken fencing and shattered windows, causing the group to shiver as they waited for the UNIT soldiers to finish sweeping the perimeter.

The fractures inside were proved to be unstable immediately. Reality flickered unpredictably through the station corridors, causing walls to intermittently look as though they were covered in frost from impossible winters and entire doorways to suddenly appear that, on closer inspection, lead nowhere at all.

Romana had stayed back at UNIT HQ in London, coordinating the operation remotely with Osgood, while the field team mapped the central disturbance. 

Leela, naturally, ignored all instructions regarding caution.

“She enjoys the adrenaline rush.” Romana informed Kate flatly through the comms device that the blonde was clutching like a lifeline.

Kate watched Leela leap fearlessly across a partially collapsed stairwell without hesitation. “Yes,” she agreed tiredly, “I’d gathered that.”

Near the station’s lower reactor chamber, Nyssa worked painstakingly carefully to try and repair a damaged stabilisation array, while Tegan hovered nearby pretending that she wasn’t worrying.

“You're staring.” Nyssa observed quietly, resolutely not raising her gaze from the panel in front of her.

“I’m supervising.”

“You are absolutely not qualified to supervise this, Tegan.”

“I’m still supervising.”

Nyssa’s mouth twitched very slightly.

Before she could say anything, however, the floor trembled violently and the lights above their heads exploded. A pulse tore through the station, hard enough to throw everyone off their feet.

“Tegan!” Ace screamed through the comms from somewhere far away.

The corridor behind them folded inwards. It wasn’t collapsing, it was very definitely folding, like paper being scrunched up by invisible hands.

Nyssa lunged for the stabiliser controls at the exact moment that the ground underneath her gave way. The concrete disintegrated into jagged fractures of light and darkness that tore sideways through the warehouse floor with a shrill, grinding sound. One second solid ground had existed beneath her feet and the next there was only an open void where the platform had been.

The void plunged into something vast and impossible under her, a shifting chasm filled with violent flashes of other places bleeding through unstable fractures in space-time. Entire worlds flickered in and out in broken fragments: burning orange skies above skeletal towers, upside down oceans and forests, endless metallic corridors lit by cold white light, skies filled with unfamiliar constellations. None of the images were held in place long enough for either of them to fully process before another slammed violently across it.

Nyssa barely had time to realise she was falling.

Tegan moved entirely on instinct, her hand shooting forwards through the collapsing debris and closing around Nyssa’s wrist with bruising strength, milliseconds before gravity and the distortion dragged her fully into the darkness. The impact nearly yanked Tegan forwards with her. Pain shot through both of them as Nyssa slammed hard against the broken edge of the platform, half her body left hanging over the void while fractured reality churned violently beneath her.

The darkness below seemed alive now that she was so close to it. The shifting fragments of other worlds no longer looked distant or abstract. They moved too quickly and the shapes that were flickering at the edge of her vision might have been structures or creatures or entire civilisations collapsing in on themselves. Somewhere far below, something enormous made a noise that echoed up through the distortion with enough force to vibrate through the concrete that was still left intact.

“Tegan!” Nyssa’s voice broke sharply as another section of flooring splintered away under her.

Tegan dropped to her knees instantly, both hands locked around Nyssa’s arm now, her entire body braced against the unstable ground while the alarms screamed through the warehouse around them. UNIT soldiers were shouting somewhere nearby but the noise barely registered over the deafening roar coming from the fracture itself.

For one terrible moment, Tegan genuinely thought she was about to lose Nyssa again.

“Tegan…”

“I’ve got you. I am not letting you go. Not ever.” In her panic her words came out much more sharply than she had intended.

Nyssa stretched up and gripped Tegan’s arm with her free hand. The effect on the instability was immediate. 

Somewhere over the comms, Osgood made a sound of absolute disbelief. “Oh, come on.”

With a burst of strength fuelled entirely by panic and adrenaline, Tegan dragged Nyssa back onto stable ground before another section of the platform could collapse beneath them. The effort nearly tore something in her shoulder, her arms shaking violently from the strain by the time Nyssa finally landed against her in a tangled heap of limbs and fractured breathing.

For several long seconds neither of them moved.

The warehouse alarms were still screaming around them and distortion energy flashed wildly across the broken floor. Somewhere nearby UNIT soldiers were shouting orders over the comms, while the fractured reality beneath the platform continued to churn and howl like something was trying to force its way out. None of it seemed remotely real compared to the fact that Nyssa was alive and solid and still there in Tegan’s arms.

Nyssa’s hand had twisted tightly into the fabric of Tegan’s jacket, hard enough to crease it beneath her fingers. Tegan still had both arms locked around Nyssa’s waist with the desperate grip of someone not entirely convinced she had actually managed to save her. Their faces were painfully close together now, both women breathing hard as shock and relief crashed through the narrow space between them with an almost unbearable intensity.

That had been far too close. Tegan could still see the abyss beneath them every time she blinked. She could still picture Nyssa vanishing into it.

Then Ace’s voice burst through the communicator with her usual irritating timing. “Are you two finished dramatically yearning at each other,” she demanded over the crackling line, “or are the rest of us still on the verge of dying here?”

The effect was immediate.

Tegan let go of Nyssa so quickly that it was almost undignified, scrambling backwards while trying to regain some approximation of composure. Beside her, Nyssa abruptly redirected all of her attention onto the damaged stabiliser controls with the fierce concentration of someone who was attempting to forget the previous few minutes had happened at all. Tegan tugged pointlessly at the front of her jacket, avoiding eye contact entirely. Neither of them managed to speak.

Through the communicator, as if she had actually witnessed the scene, Ace dissolved into near-hysterical laughter.

x-x

Sunset brought with it a significant worsening of the situation. A storm rolled dramatically across the moors with frightening speed, dragging a darkness behind it that was almost too deep to be natural. Communication systems began failing almost immediately and, one by one, the UNIT teams lost contact across the hills.

Then the station disappeared entirely.

One minute, it still existed normally on UNIT’s tracking systems, crowded with overlapping radio chatter, distortion readings and live personnel markers. The next, the entire structure lurched violently sideways out of sync with local spacetime and vanished from the network almost instantly, taking half the team with it – including Tegan and Nyssa.

Sound vanished first – it didn’t fade, it vanished completely and left behind a suffocating silence so absolute that it felt physically oppressive. Seconds later the cold arrived, sudden and brutal, cutting through clothing and skin with enough intensity to steal the breath from Tegan’s lungs.

She staggered instinctively, one hand slamming against the nearest wall for balance just as the corridor around them began to distort. Concrete and exposed wiring rippled before fading away entirely. The industrial warehouse dissolved piece by piece into somewhere older, narrower and totally unfamiliar. Dust-covered wallpaper curled from damp walls and faded, patterned carpets stretched beneath their feet where cracked concrete should have been. Dim yellow lights glowed weakly from brass wall sconces overhead, their flickering flames casting long unsteady shadows down what now resembled the corridor of a nineteenth-century inn.

The air smelled of old smoke, mildew and, underneath it all, something faintly metallic. Somewhere deeper within the building, floorboards creaked eerily despite the complete absence of movement around them.

Nyssa stared, horrified, around her. “This isn’t the station.”

“No,” Tegan agreed faintly, “and that’s usually a bad sign.”

They moved cautiously along the corridor, their footsteps muffled by the carpet, while rain battered the darkened windows hard enough to rattle the glass in its frames. The entire building groaned softly around them with the slow settling noises of something impossibly old. 

The further they walked, the less convincing the place became. The hallway stretched subtly longer whenever Tegan looked away for too long and door numbers shifted between glances. Once, briefly, Nyssa could have sworn there had been somebody standing at the far end of the corridor before the figure vanished behind a wall that should not have been close enough to hide them.

Eventually, the corridor opened into a cramped reception area lit by weak amber lamplight. The room looked decades out of time, with heavy wooden beams crossing the low ceiling overhead, stained dark with age and smoke, while an ancient brass bell sat beside a thick leather-bound ledger on the desk. Dust hung frozen in the air despite the draught creeping beneath the doors and, somewhere nearby, unseen clocks ticked softly out of rhythm with one another.

Behind the reception desk sat an elderly woman in an old-fashioned black dress, her glasses balanced on the end of her nose as she slowly turned the pages of a newspaper that appeared to be yellowed with age.

She didn’t react to their arrival at all. There wasn’t even the hint of a raised eyebrow in response to the fact they had entered soundlessly form a corridor that shouldn’t have existed or to their UNIT equipment or even to the obvious mismatch of their clothing against the strange period atmosphere of the building around them. Her gaze passed over them once with complete indifference, before it returned calmly to the paper in front of her, as though strangely dressed strangers appearing from nowhere happened regularly enough to no longer deserve her attention.

“Storm’s bad tonight.” She said simply, holding out a room key. “Last one left.”

Tegan froze. Beside her, Nyssa closed her eyes briefly and let out a sharp breath.

It took them a while, but they eventually found their room, tucked high under the inn’s slanted rafters. It was small enough that Tegan could almost touch the parallel walls if she stretched her arms out properly. The ceiling beams hung low overhead and the entire space carried the faint scent of woodsmoke, damp paper and old linen that seemed to be embedded in the building itself. Rain continued to rattle steadily against the narrow windows, softened slightly by the heavy curtains that looked as if they hadn’t been replaced in decades.

A small coal fire crackled weakly in the grate near the far wall, throwing uneven light across the room and warming it just enough to contrast painfully with the bitter cold outside. Shadows shifted lazily across the peeling wallpaper and mismatched furniture that appeared to have been assembled from entirely different centuries. Somewhere inside the walls, the pipes groaned softly.

And, inevitably, there was only one bed. It wasn’t even a large one.

It sat under the window tucked against the far wall, neatly made with heavy blankets and an iron frame that looked deeply unforgiving. For a long few minutes neither Tegan nor Nyssa said anything at all. They simply stood in the doorway staring at the bed with identical expressions of exhausted disbelief, as though the universe itself had personally decided that it needed to become unbearable.

Given everything else that had happened recently, the situation felt less like coincidence and more like active hostility from reality itself.

Finally, Tegan let out a single bark of disbelieving laughter. “You have got to be kidding me.”

Nyssa set down her equipment carefully. “I can sleep on the chair.”

“No chance.”

“Tegan–”

“You’ll freeze to death.”

“Well, you can’t… you’ve been complaining about your back since the Nightjar.”

Tegan pointed accusingly at her. “That is a traitorous thing to remember.”

In the end, practicality overcame pride and they reluctantly agreed to share the bed, although both approached the arrangement as though they were deeply offended by the existence of furniture. They settled themselves at opposite edges of the mattress with almost comical determination, leaving a gulf of untouched blankets between them despite the fact the bed was barely large enough to allow it. 

Rain battered the inn relentlessly while the wind howled through the moors outside. The strange temporal displacement surrounding the building caused time to pass oddly. Hours stretched and folded around them and neither woman had any idea how long they had been there.

Eventually Tegan gave up on silently brooding and spoke into the darkness. “I looked for you.”

Nyssa stilled beside her, barely even breathing. “What?”

“After…” Tegan trailed off and swallowed thickly. “I looked for you for years. The Doctor got us back to Terminus once… but you’d already left. They told us they didn’t know where you’d gone.”

The silence that fell between them after she’d spoken hurt more than Tegan had been expecting. She wondered whether Nyssa was trying to work out how to tell her she wished she hadn’t looked – or, even worse, that she wished they hadn’t been reunited at all.

“I almost came back…” Nyssa admitted eventually. “Many times.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Nyssa stared into the shadows, trying to gather her thoughts into something that would make sense. She wasn’t sure it would be possible. How could she admit to Tegan that she had stayed away because she loved her too much. Because she had been terrified of becoming another impossible thing Tegan lost to the stars. Because leaving once, even if it had been her choice, had nearly destroyed her and she hadn’t believed she could survive doing it twice.

Instead, she said softly, “I thought you deserved a life that… wasn’t hard.”

Tegan turned towards her, her eyes flashing sharply. “I never asked for that.”

Outside, the storm continued to batter the inn with increasing violence. Rain lashed relentlessly against the windows while thunder rolled overhead hard enough to make the old building tremble around them. The rafters creaked in protest and, every now and then, lightning flashed through the curtains, throwing pale shapes across the ceiling before darkness swallowed them again.

Then, without warning, the lights failed completely. The room vanished into absolute darkness so suddenly that it felt disorientating, the weak firelight extinguishing at the same moment with a sharp hiss. Almost immediately afterwards, thunder cracked directly overhead with enough force to shake the walls.

Tegan made a small, startled sound before she could stop herself and instinct took over before rational thought could. She reached sideways through the darkness automatically, searching for something solid and familiar. Nyssa caught her hand almost immediately, her fingers closing tightly around Tegan’s with the same reflexive urgency.

Neither of them let go.

The storm continued to rage outside, the thunder echoing through the old inn as the darkness pressed closely around them. Slowly the tension in Tegan’s grip began to ease as the simple, familiar warmth of Nyssa’s hand grounded her. 

x-x

Back at UNIT, matters were deteriorating in an entirely different way. Ace and Mel were working alongside Kate and Osgood, attempting to locate the displaced station through the worsening storm distortions and stress was making everybody sharper around the edges – particularly Ace.

“So,” Mel said carefully after Ace had snapped at three technicians in under five minutes, “are you going to tell me what’s actually bothering you?”

“Nothing’s bothering me.”

“Ace.”

“Fine… maybe I’m just finding it very annoying watching Tegan being all dramatic and discovering emotional suffering as a hobby.”

Mel smiled softly. “You understand what she’s going through.”

“Course I do… she’s my best friend.” The younger woman muttered, before pointing at her warningly. “Do not tell her I said that.”

“No,” the redhead correctly gently, shaking her head and making her curls bounce around her shoulders, “I mean you understand how she’s feeling.”

Ace looked away immediately, changing the subject to something completely unrelated, which was enough of an answer.

Across the control room, Osgood watched Kate quietly issuing commands underneath harsh monitor light and thought, not for the first time, that she had made a terrible mistake somewhere along the line by falling in love with her boss.

Kate looked exhausted, brilliant and entirely unattainable. The brunette couldn’t help watching as she perused the readings on the data pad in her hands, a soft sigh escaping her lips. Almost as though she had heard, Kate glanced up suddenly and their eyes met across the room. Osgood’s stomach flipped traitorously.

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.

“Yes,” Leela agreed easily, “but yours look better.”

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.”