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.