Who: Wren, Chessie, Sunny, the Tardis + a cameo by dying!Tony What: A trip to the past Where: DC door → Marvel door When: During the Switch Plot Warnings/Rating: Nope
The thing about the cuffs, Chessie discovered, was that they worked intermittently. They seemed to require a dexterity of self and a jaunty lack of care for trouble that came with dipping in and out of time for fractions of a minute. They were heavy and unwieldy and her wrists were too small for the buckles to be truly secure but the cuffs (and the rushing, heady sense of freedom that came with slipping into the space between times) were better than the alternative. The light overhead flickered brackish green, miserably in tune with the steady and slow sliding sound of a drip. The jail-cell - it was a jail-cell first even if it was secondarily a home - was decorated gaudily with what Chessie supposed were trophies as much as they were anything else. There was a bit of turquoise jewellery that was, to her informed eye, something more ancient than present day Alexandria. There was a small canvas of something of the masterpiece about it, and various sundries dotted about the concrete floor that kept the place from full stale misery and made it something more. River clearly, did not allow jail to lower her spirits. She thumbed her nose at the entire point of it. Why she was in jail, Chessie did not know; the guards did not speak to her at all but when they spoke to one another she had established ‘intergalactic’. She did not question the jail-time nor consider breaking free seriously at all, River was the kind of woman who contributed to widespread plague. Jail was always going to be in her intermittent if not immediate future.
The experiments had come only as the experiments with the door itself had failed; she could not leave - the door to the cell was locked securely. Whatever trickery River managed, Chessie did not possess it. But as the twenty-four hours slid past, there was only the thought of what River would do to Vegas that had Chessie shoulder past the door-frame and back into gray, somber lack of anything to sit out the next time period spinning pass.
Now the cuffs were not entirely a known quantity and they were not reliable but it was better than the ball of hot impatience in her throat, starving her of anything but the keen desire to be out, to be beyond, to be free. Chessie twined her fingers together, stared at a Van Gogh that had never been displayed before and was cheerily tipped against solid, not-steel bars. She took a breath. The mechanism on the cuff was almost ornamentation; it looked like detailing on accessories rather than the delicate balance of time and infinity. It might be five minutes back, it might be five million and somewhere else. But it would not be the jail cell. Chessie twisted it and closed her eyes tight.
Wren had been talking to Chessie on the journals about going back into the past, but she didn't actually expect anything to come of it. She wanted to believe that what Chessie was saying was true, wanted to believe that she could at least say goodbye to Silver. But she didn't believe it could happen. She was pretty sure that the candles she lit at the church would have to suffice, or that the conversations she had with the painting he'd had delivered would have to fill in for a real goodbye. But it was nice to hope it could be true.
But Gotham didn't leave a lot of time for hoping.
The abandoned house was anything but abandoned. Oh, the sign that faced toward Crime Alley said the two story building was condemned. And it looked condemned, with paint peeling off the termite eaten wood that turned grey in the soot-smog that served as air in Gotham. The porch sagged in the center, and there was a hole in the steps, and the roof had windows where there shouldn't be windows, where shingles had been torn away and buckets collected rainwater.
Inside, the house was loud. There were a dozen boys running around, teenagers, fighting, playing video games, tormenting multiple cats, and counting money on a rickety card table in the living room. The television in front of the patched up, threadbare couch was tuned to the news, and Wren sat in front of the television, the colors playing off her face as she tried to count how many cops were currently diverted from the museum she was supposed to lift a painting from. And maybe she was looking to see what the Batfamily was up to, but she wouldn't admit as much. Being the Cat was starting to settle into her bones, and there was nothing she could do about it.
The new Cat was wearing Selina's clothes; a pair of skinny black jeans and a black, long-sleeved shirt with a snug grey tee layered over it. Her hair was tucked up in a clip encrusted with emeralds that matched her Pit-green eyes, and she wore heavy boots that were tucked up beneath her. She had Selina's phone in her hand, and she was distractedly scrolling through stolen schematics for the art museum, which she'd borrowed from the Bat.
But, yes, Chessie's offer was all but forgotten. Gotham was all about living in the now, where gunshots rang out in the street and no one even moved to see who had gone down. That was Gotham, and survival was the name of the game.
Time was neither sideways nor an ordinariness of lines. It was a yawning maw, a chasm of infinity that smelled like ozone and ocean-water, like nothing and star-dust and that licked coldly along Chessie’s skin in that split-second between Then and Now wherever Now was. Gotham might have lived in the Now but Chessie had a tightrope’s edge between myriad nows, and when she stepped out from the black into solidity, it was with the lurching certainty that whatever she’d last eaten was likely to make a return appearance, thick acidity coating her throat and her hands shaking. It was adrenaline like a rollercoaster, soaking through her veins, the near-death of orgasm or of being a hairsbreadth from no oxygen at all. Time-jumping without something solid between you and It was a pebble, rattled along in a vast, wide ocean.
Gradually, starved-senses returned to her. Noise. She could hear noise; the guttural city-sounds of sirens and traffic and the mundane, prosaic hum of television. Children - that was unexpected; Chessie stood very still in her scrap of shadow and she listened, separating sound from language, parsing words into location. English. America, then. The unfamiliar weight on her hip, the blaster gun slung there in the much-scarred leather belt was now a reassurance of her own gravity and Chessie dug her chilled hands into the pockets of River’s pants, aware of the ripple of February cool air over her bared arms. She had expected something else, somewhere else - the hustle of a fifteenth century market, perhaps or the Shakespearean tones of Elizabethan England. Not this infinitely modern, familiar blare of America.
A cat moved past her ankle, water-silk slide of fur against her in a luxurious undulation of apparent lack of care. Chessie jumped, took a heavy step back and the wooden boards beneath her creaked. The cat stared at her, unblinking yellow gaze from a foot or three’s worth of distance, and strolled on into the bedlam beyond.
It was the creak of the floorboards that got the attention of the inhabitants of the abandoned house - well, all of them but the cats.
Within seconds, the money at the table was stashed. They younger boys hid, and the older boys took up position at the windows and beside the door, knives and guns, and a life that had made them wary of anyone that showed up uninvited. Gotham was cruel under its belly, and the boys were a product of that cruelty, bare feet and jeans too short at the ankles.
Wren hadn't been there long enough to immediately react, not the way Selina would have done in the same situation. Oh, she heard the creak right away, but she still retained the desire to ask questions before sneaking up and putting a knife to someone's throat, though the desire was there. And, yes, in times of stress it was definitely a knife for Wren, and not Selina's whip at all.
Which was why, in that moment, Wren stood, scaled the back of the couch with a grace and ease that she normally did not possess, and pulled a butterfly blade from her boot. The balisong's familiar weight was soothing, and it helped her to stay her ground. She tested the weight against her palm, and she watched the door, waiting. Maybe that was bad strategy, waiting for the threat to actually come to her. Selina would have blindly intercepted it; she could have chosen action, even if it was ill-planned. But Wren knew the bad things always came, and all without anyone needing to go looking for them.
Wren leaned back against the couch, and she waited.
Sunny knew a lot of things that John Smith didn’t know. She knew about what he was supposed to be, and without his swirling, magnetic madness taking bits out of her sanity she also knew a lot about who he was. For all that, she hadn’t been particularly enjoying the reversal of roles. For all her complaining (and the little problem with the federal government), Sunny was attached to her talents much the same way the Doctor was attached to his, and she didn’t enjoy getting stuck in the career of a boring cardiologist with more job than life. The idea of examining peoples pumping muscle flesh gave Sunny the heebies, even though she was technically John and she probably could have done just fine, she simply refused.
John was also the Doctor, even if he didn’t know it. Refusing to cooperate seemed to be what he did.
So, using the knowledge that John wasn’t even supposed to have, Sunny went looking for the TARDIS. She knew just where the Doctor had stashed it, and even though she wasn’t dead sure how to pilot it, she knew the general stuff. It was hers (in this world, anyway, for the moment), and it was alive, and once she got in she was pretty sure it would take her somewhere more interesting than a New York hospital.
She was right. She wasn’t as pleased about it when she opened the blue door and stuck her head out into a dark, grimy alley, though. The TARDIS was still wheezing and the neighboring building had lost a few chunks, but Sunny was not to be disheartened. She stepped out and swiveled her head to either side, looking around for The Interesting Things that were supposed to start happening. Nothing did, so, with typical brass, Sunny sidled up to the first door and knocked. Knock-knock-na-knock-knock. Knock. Knock.
Chessie was not attuned to small movements and sharp sounds the way River was. River did not think, she reacted and she did this in the same way each time, with the common thread of survival and opportunism above all other things. She knew in the same instant she stepped back and away from the cat that the silence was sudden and forced and an action that she had caused and she saw the growing silhouette of the woman on the couch as she rose until she was an outcrop. The woman looked toward the door and the light blurred against her until she was a black outline rather than a woman to make any observation of at all. Chessie would have noticed the stance or what she was wearing; some semblance of River noticed the glint of the knife.
Her hand went to the belt, to the butt of the gun and it was instantaneous and unthinking, not Chessie at all. She didn’t know who the woman was nor where the room itself was but danger shuddered in and settled like ash-dust. Her feet had planted more solidly in all the noticing, she was stood steadily and Chessie knew without knowing, in that way of finding memories not your own but having an affinity for them that if she had drawn the gun she was perfectly balanced to shoot.
The banging, loud and obtrusive, derailed the trail of motion. Chessie left her hand on the gun but she cleared her throat, and she looked reproachfully for the cat that had caused all the fuss - nowhere to be found.
“Hello?” her voice was clear but it was not distinct, it had the apologetic undertones of someone who has stepped far too near you when there is space to allow you a modicum of privacy. And then, “Aren’t you going to get that? They sound pretty insistent.”
Wren was, when it was all said and done, still Wren (Cat or no Cat). She recognized Chessie immediately, and her posture lost its rigidness, that tenseness that said she'd been ready to pounce. The knife got tucked in her boot again, though she didn't look down or away when she tucked it out of view again. The boys were slower to catch onto her new demeanor, but they began filing back to where they had been within seconds. The money, noticeably, stayed out of sight, though, and tucked away wherever they'd hidden it. "Chessie," Wren finally said, and the noise in the house started up again, the Cat's voice and toning indicating relief, not tension, and the video games began and the yelling started anew.
Until, that was, the horrible sound from outside crashed upon the house. Everything shook, and Wren was pretty sure the roof had more windows than it had a moment earlier. This time, the boys ducked and covered. Fighting an intruder was one thing, but this was bigger, even if they couldn't see it. They whispered about Kal-El, and they whispered about Wonder Woman, and they whispered about Watchtower falling out of the sky. It was all foreign to Wren, who had no idea what any of those things were, but she knew trouble when it came knocking, and it was definitely knocking.
The knife came out again, just as quickly as before, but Wren didn't actually walk to the door. The distance was an advantage with the balisong in her palm. "Come in, but keep your hands where we can see them," she called out, realizing she sounded more like a cop than like a thief, but not really caring very much. She considered calling for help, but that seemed like a waste of time, especially when the noise from outside would surely send someone calling for help soon. And, if she knew Luke, he'd show up as soon as that call went out.
"Move away from the door, Chessie, okay?" Wren whispered. She hated Gotham.
Sunny was seized by an insane Doctor-like disregard for any danger. Screw the dark alley and the strange sounds within. She had this feeling that the blue box would take care of her. She could probably stumble back inside it and it would zap her someplace warm and safe without too much trouble. That might have been true and it might not have been, but she felt like it was, and that was all that mattered just at that moment. Sunny decided that she was the one with the blue box now. She opened the door and stuck her head inside. “Hi!” she said, cheerfully.
It took her a little while to adjust to the dim light within, but she started taking in all the tables and the staring eyes, not realizing she was disappointing people who were expecting immortal she-gods and space aliens. “Hi!” she said again, putting her hands out in front of her chest and giving them little palm-out waves. “I’m visiting! Who are you?” She twisted her chin down against her collarbone when she caught site of Chessie and picked up into a trot to get closer to her. “Look at you. Where’d you get those? They look familiar.” She pointed at Chessie’s wrists, disregarding all the knives and the guns pointed in her direction.
Chessie was phased by little usually and with River’s pleasantly psychotic blend of nonchalance and the dreamy-clear quality prompting adrenaline-seeking that was caring very little about anything that was not immediate, she was phased by even less. The waving made her smile and she forgot the question she had intended to ask Wren, namely about the knife which had swung out into glinting view, prompted by the appearance of the woman with the box. It was a nice box, very blue but it pulled at something far away and very distant, like a forgotten memory or someone else’s childhood. It was a sweet, sharp thing that was there, like a blade buried and it sliced when Chessie tried to reach for it, until she let go.
“They’re not mine,” Chessie said, amenably, and she held out her hands - both of them, palms down, so that the cuffs could be seen. They were heavy, leather things and encrusted with the metalwork of tiny mechanisms. If you were exceptionally close, you might have seen a very small spinning needle encased in shiny silver, but it spun very fast and it was very small indeed so it was unlikely to be seen otherwise. “Do you know River? They’re hers. Who are you?” She didn’t move away from the door, or the woman who had walked through it, but she looked across at Wren with the apologetic look of someone who has trodden inadvertently on someone else’s foot.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know how they worked properly. It went sideways, not back.”
Wren didn't know the newcomer, but that wasn't really surprising; she didn't know many people outside of her close circle these days. She watched warily for a few seconds, but it was Chessie's smile that made her put the knife away again, though she kept it closer at hand this time; a pocket. The blue box didn't mean anything to her, and she had no association with it, but Chessie's talk about going sideways instead of back, that did jog her memory.
"Back in time, you mean," she said, and she glanced from one woman to the other, her curiously entirely hers and not the Cat's at all. She didn't know about the myriad of conversations Selina and River had about River's doctor, or she might have put the pieces together right then. But she didn't know, and so she couldn't fill in those blanks. So she was stillness and quiet, and not a bit of fidgeting as she watched them, her unnaturally green eyes blinking slowly.
"I and the Village is going to have to wait," Wren said of the painting that was on the night's heist agenda. She couldn't leave them here, Chessie and the strange woman with the blue box. The statement alone was enough to make the boys scamper, and one came up and whispered in her ear, a question, which she answered with a nod. Tomorrow, okay, she would do it tomorrow. It would give them time to create a better diversion for Gotham PD anyway.
In the end, Wren stayed right where she was, a stretch back against the couch that was all cat, and a long, denim-clad leg swung over the back as she simply parroted Chessie's question more slowly, with husky curiosity. "Who are you?"
“Oh, River Song.” Sunny smiled, the natural dusk of her skin making the smile tan and bold and excessively natural. Her dark eyes kept sliding to the side at the sheer number of people, and when the boys scattered she stopped to watch curiously. The decision to be like the Doctor had been a conscious one, and her mind provided from the many months of his starshine madness, but that didn’t mean she really was him, deep down. She was a little relieved when the number of people went into decline. “I thought I would like you. And I do.” Sunny smirked. “All of you.”
She started weaving through the tables, flirtatious, but not entirely centered on her audience. She looked around the room, taking in its purpose, which reminded her of many a warren in the gray stone of Paris, when she had lived there and done illegal, dangerous things with paint and brush.
“I’m Sunny,” she said, stopping in front of the knockout blonde and giving her the bright smile again. Where Chessie had gotten the smirk, Wren got some star-eyes that were admiring but not real hopeful. Wren had the kind of figure that must make people melt, and Sunny didn’t have a lot of hope that anyone wearing that much leather was going to be interested in her. She could drool a little though. Politely. “It’s nice to meet you. Sorry about the roof. I think it’s an entrance thing... comes with the gig. You were just talking about Chagall? I just love how he totally disregards gravity and makes all the animals upside down. Don’t you?”
Chessie was not River. She did not thrive on difficulty, on the possibility of her own extinction. People crowded into one room with the potential of weaponry was not an unorthodox challenge, a swift calculation of the fastest way through. As the boys crowded out of the room, her gaze tracked to the littlest, to the way he hauled along a cat with him, furry bottom half dangling from the grip he had on the cat - gone floppy with resignation. She smiled; it was not a smirk and it was not remotely River. It was warm and fully-given and she looked at Sunny with the naked curiosity of someone laying cards down on the table without keeping even a single one back.
“Yes, back in time,” she said to Wren, belatedly but watching instead the byplay and body language like someone at the theater. Sunny was calm, the bone-deep calm of control whether it ought to be there or not and that resonated like a note in an old song learned a very long time before. Her right hand trailed away from the holstered gun and in Sunny’s stillness - up close with Wren, Chessie circled away herself, looking at the dust spiraling in the new light source, across floorboards and tables. Chessie outweighed River with a strength of contentment that was more than River’s own eternal need for spotlit certainty of her own importance. It helped that she liked Wren, and had no idea who Sunny was.
“I think we meant who are you replacing, as well as who you are,” she said, inspecting the torn nest of cushions where either a boy or a knot of cats had been resting momentarily previous. “At least, that’s what I meant.” She threw a smile over her shoulder that encompassed both of the women.
Wren didn't actually care who the exotic "Sunny" was replacing. She cared if the woman was dangerous, if she was someone from the police or the federal government, if she was some wronged mafioso come to collect. She had Selina's fears, and not her own. But Sunny was a woman and, hopeful smile or not, that made Sunny less threatening to the blonde who had a perpetual distrust of unknown men. "I just steal the paintings," she admitted, not knowing Chagall from Degas. "I don't really know anything about them."
Hand finally coming away from the leather belt that she'd moved the knife to, Wren pushed away from her lazy recline against the couch. The movement almost brought her into contact with Sunny, but came just shy of it; the Cat's kind of game. "So we're doing that?" she asked Chessie, and the hopefulness in her voice was unmasked. She was young thing then, one that had been told she could do something she'd never believed she could. Luke wouldn't like it, something risky like time travel just to say goodbye to Silver, but Wren didn't let that change her mind. No, in this she was like that Cat. She would leap without looking, if it was even slightly possible. And, after all, everything seemed less important here, less permanent. There was no child who needed macaroni and cheese and chicken nuggets in the shape of zoo animals. Even Luke was off happily being a Bat. No, if the possibility existed, she would go.
Wren climbed back over the couch with that same inherited feline grace, slower than Selina, more sensual than sex, but something very much in the same wheelhouse. She disappeared around a corner, and she came back a few seconds later, tapping on her phone as she left a message on the forums, a whip for a belt and a leather jacked over the layered shirts she wore. She didn't bother with the cowl or the suit; it wasn't like she was going to steal anything. A circle of knives was secured to her thigh, and the smile on her lips was bright and bold. "Ready whenever you are."
Sunny didn't have Wren's moves or Chessie's looks, but she wasn't particularly envious of either right at that moment. Too many other things to think about. The Doctor wouldn't have noticed; he would have noticed the wood grain in the old boards and the make of Wren's knife, but he wouldn't have noticed attraction if it hit him on the head (and frequently it had). Sunny, herself, knew well enough to know when she was being played, and she grinned after Wren's departing sway without further comment.
Sunny hopped over the sunken remains of a couch and straddled a chair, working it over her knees and balancing on a spindly leg while she watched the other two move around, like a sun watching planets orbit. She was wearing a soft silk shirt the color of new daisies, which made the simile even more apt. "I'm somebody who can move in space and time," she said, cheerfully. "With some help, at least." She watched Wren skip away (metaphorical skipping), and then when she returned, Sunny said, "Are you planning on stabbing somebody wherever we end up?"
To Chessie, she said, "Are you friends? You weren't planning on giving her those bracelets, were you? I am pretty sure they're not good for you." She couldn't exactly say why, or how she remembered, because she didn't have the Doctor's memory or his brains. She decided not to advertise that.
Chessie didn’t know the Doctor to know what Sunny missed, what attraction was and how it span itself into nothing, dwindled like light passing across the room into shadow. She saw Wren and she saw Wren move the way she supposed Wren moved when she had been something other than shy and pure and dressed all in white but this was not worthy of comment; Chessie approved of the smile as bright as it was even if she did not think much of the knives on her thigh. She reached, with outstretched hand and heavy cuff sitting over bony wrist and she squeezed at Wren’s fingers, all warmth and reassurance for someone who did not need it.
The leather was comfortingly heavy on her wrists; like the belt it was surprisingly easy to get used to. Chessie fingered the edge of one worn leather band and she looked at Sunny, eyebrow arched and it wasn’t quite surprise as it was a challenge, more River than Chessie right then. “I thought I could take her along with me.” She didn’t care that they weren’t good for you and she was certain in a way that went beyond tired dreams and bars and the reeling sense of time spinning away backwards from her, that she could make them work. “Do you crash your blue box everywhere?” That was blunt, it came out sweeter rather than utterly rude but that was Chessie leavening River a little.
Wren didn't pull away from the squeezing fingers like she might have normally done. But she didn't need the reassurance either, that much was true. She gave Chessie a smile that was all distant confidence, nothing like Selina's immediateness, and she looked back at Sunny. "I'm not going to stab anyone. I just want to say goodbye," she admitted. It sounded small, yet sure, and she nodded toward the circle of knives. "These are just to be safe, just like her gun." She wasn't sure what Sunny kept with her for protection, but maybe a woman with a crashing blue box didn't need any protection. But Wren was impatient, and she shrugged shoulders covered in layers of grey and and black. "How do we get there?" She rattled off the day Silver died without having to think about it, assuming that small detail would be important. The fact that she would end up in Stark Tower with both Tony and Selina dying didn't come into it. The fact that they were on the wrong side of the door to see Silver wasn't registering at all just then, and she didn't consider the fact that they might end up somewhere completely different. She was just thinking of the opportunity, and not about the logistics at all. It was, all things considered, rather Selina of her.
Sunny crossed the floor to lean into Chessie’s arm, not proprietary, but definitely conspiratorial, as if they were all little children about to cross a stream together, slipping on wet rock and getting their feet wet. It was how the Doctor would have done it, she knew, and very much like the Doctor, she wished she had a friend to bring along with her. She searched her mind for more information on the leather bracelets, but strange things surfaced in her mind instead. Manipulating bloody families... that couldn’t be right. “Two people might be okay. Depends on where you are going, I’m almost sure. But then once you get there you’re... unprotected.” Sunny twitched four fingers in an odd little blessing over the Chessie’s right wrist-strap. “And the energy scrambles things like a molecular blender,” she added cheerfully.
Abruptly stepping back and allowing the two women to have their singular moment of mutual support, Sunny spun briefly on the spot to face the way she had come. She stretched forward like a yoga master saluting the sun, and then she flicked up her hair and literally tied it into a loose knot. “Specific destinations. Very shady. It depends on if she wants to cooperate. If she decides she wants to smash something good, she will.” This was an over-exaggeration and a truth in one thing, but it was the Doctor’s nature to tell a truth and a lie that could occupy the same place in space and time.
Sunny paraded forward. “I hate goodbyes, but I guess we should go somewhere, and that’s a somewhere.” Sunny pushed open the door to the warehouse, and then she immediately pushed through another door, this one tall and blue. The interior of the blue box was much bigger than its exterior, the flight deck somehow small and impersonal, obscure and constructed in its glowing blue and green. There was nothing warm about the place, and Sunny’s pale yellow silk seemed unaccountably soft in a way it had not yet been.
She started strolling in a wide circle, stabbing at buttons, whirling wheels, and pulling at switches. The blue box started to whine and wheeze, and it wobbled on its axis like a mad circus attraction without any warning whatsoever. “You’re going to want to hold on to something,” Sunny commented cheerfully. She was beaming like a kid at Christmas.
It looked like no home Chessie had ever lived in, from Hong Kong to Israel but it felt like home, this throbbing, asthmatic mad topsy-turvy box that choked in great, warning gasps as if it might suddenly stop working, run out of whirr. It was not designed to feel like home and it was neither the wide open emptiness of Chessie’s own place nor the crammed and cramped homes she had passed through. And yet, a surge of warm, happy affection made her hug herself briefly; Chessie hid it by walking around the central part of the deck and she trailed her fingertips over its mechanics like stroking a bad-tempered cat.
She didn’t know anything at all of Sunny but the puppet-master knowingness pulled strings she didn’t know she had. “She’ll co-operate,” Chessie said, soft and loving and with a calm sort of understanding despite never having seen the blue box before. “You just have to tell her how.” She curled a hand around the gleaming silver of the staircase rail and she leaned into it like a teenager at prom, confident of its support.
A look thrown across at Wren; the date had been very clear and very quick like a raw thing rather than something smoothed over by time. That was worrying, somewhere dim and deep down. But Wren didn’t look soft and breakable and delicate, all white light and easily crumpled. She had knives, a smile all its own blade. Perhaps it didn’t matter that time had unbound itself, separated a date so easily from the rest of them. Perhaps. And then the place shuddered, jerked uneasily and a gust of steam blew upward from the central mechanism and Chessie clung to her stair-rail.
It felt nothing like home to Wren, who had developed a certainty about her ability to land on her feet, but who still liked a solid roof beneath her whenever possible. It was nothing like home, either. It was all machines and lights and sleek surfaces. She missed warm mustard walls and a couch like browned butter, the laughter of a child in one of the back rooms and the clicking of a dog's nails on the wood floor. The machine didn't feel like home at all to her, but she could tell the other women liked it. And, if it took her to Silver, she was willing to put up with the odd thing that seemed bigger inside than out.
Wren, all survival instinct and cat, held on when she was told. But she stayed near the door, in case escape became necessary, though she had no plan for escaping from a place like this. She closed her eyes, and she thought of things she wanted to see again. It was hard through the haze of Selina's wants, the distance the thief kept from anything that could hurt in anything but a physical way. But Wren managed it, because Selina wasn't actually cold in the end, and it was just a facade, like everything else.
And if Wren thought it strange that they were talking about the blue box like a person, she kept it to herself. After all, who was she to judge? It's not like things were any saner in Gotham.
The box didn't crash this time. It seemed that the blue box was not a one trick pony, and perhaps the sober date and its new location took any of the mischief right out of it. Certainly Sunny started to frown, deep and dark in her sweetly generous round cheeks, as soon as the box lurched into being. There was no sound from the exterior, and no real time to consider it, but the console suddenly lit up. A naval air horn circa 1906 started wailing warning, and lights started flickering all over the place, mad lightning bugs insane with terror.
And just like that, all three women just knew. Sickness was in the air outside. They were to be careful. They were to stay in the boundary.
The mental warning hit the brain like inspiration, except it had a definite circuitous pattern. Sickness, careful, boundary. Sickness, careful, boundary. As if telepathic broadcast could be mechanical, as if a warning could be thought and not just light and sound.
"Alright!" Sunny was shouting at it, trying to make herself heard over the air horn. "Alright, we get it, we get it, stop!" She slammed her hand down on one final switch and the TARDIS abruptly went dark and silent. A hush fell over the interior of the ship, and soft safety lights lit up a clear path to the door.
The Tardis had felt comfortable for all its lurching inelegance in transport (Chessie had been certain, the way one is certain of music and of the sky and of the sound of the letter ‘a’ that it was possible for the Tardis to glide - as certain as she was unaware that she knew what it was called). Now the silence settled in, oppressive and vaguely threatening. Danger lay beyond the door; sickness. Chessie knew the last time she (She, not River. River had asked it, Chessie had walked up to the threshold) had crossed a door, a boundary like this, sickness had come. She looked at Sunny and she saw the round, soft lines of her drawn into pinching sobriety. She didn’t know Sunny and she didn’t know if yellow silk and sunshine smiles and laughing knowingness that skipped occasionally from what was usual and normal to what was not was real for her but the dark and the glow of the safety lights had subsumed yellow silk and warmth.
“She only wants us to understand,” Chessie said softly like it was a dream, “That it’s not safe. At least in this one, they tell you.” It was understood, to Chessie, that the Tardis was both female and well-intentioned. They had had no Tardis, in DC Egypt. She looked over at Wren and it looked as though breezy, madcap adventure was struggling, dwindling. “Your adventure Wren, not mine.”
It took Wren a minute to understand that the she Chessie referred to was the blue box. She thought, at first, that Chessie was referring to Sunny, and Wren thought that yelling for the noise to stop was a strange way to try to get people to understand something. But then it made sense a second later, and she nodded, because Chessie sounded dreamy, and Sunny was slamming her hand on things, and she didn't want to interrupt that strange dichotomy.
The silence disrupted it for Wren, somehow, if silence could disrupt things.
The path to the door was like an arrow, and it pointed somewhere that Wren already knew wasn't right, even before she started moving. She hadn't stopped to think, until the warnings had begun to sound, that this was the wrong side of the door for Silver. Just because she was here, that didn't mean he would be. She knew it would be Tony on the other side. She knew it would be Stark Tower. She could just turn to Sunny and ask her to move the box and take her home, but Wren didn't do any of those things.
Even if it was Tony, Silver was still there somewhere. The two had always been close. It would still count. And maybe, maybe some part of Wren actually wanted to see what Selina had gone through. It was morose, but her own mind had changed so much since that day, and she wanted to see.
Wren walked the rest of the way to the door, and she pushed it open.
A man stood in the white room beyond. Tile, glass, carefully molded steel plates, all hinted with blue light and human starshine. The room curled around him in concave allowance, like a cool egg without warmth. Hushed whirring from well-designed HVAC systems left the room at a perfect temperature, and everything and everyone inside it was cocooned in the certainty of technology and metallic energy. He was the center, and his world spread out around him evenly in every direction. Even the floor seemed to bend beneath his weight, and his stillness was perfect.
Slowly, the man’s hand lowered. The tick-tic-tick sound of cooling metal echoed loudly in the emptiness, and a glaring whiteness centered in his palm faded away. “Wren.” It was not a good sound. His voice was scraped with sawed edges, and he looked out at her with eyes gone milky with coming death. He was a standing corpse, held upright by hydraulics and red alloy, and it was obvious that without that aid he would not be standing at all. His chin hung grotesquely against his chest, and his dark hair hung limp against a sweating brow. He stared at her, at the box. “What?”
Wren didn't wait for Chessie or Sunny to follow.
After walking as far as the safety barrier would allow, Wren merely stood there a moment and looked. It would be easier to look away, to turn and to go, but that would be cowardly, and she wasn't that kind of coward. She looked around the room, wondering where Selina was in all this mess, and then she looked back at him. She couldn't smell the air where he was, but she was pretty sure it would be sick and sweet, that it would smell just like her maman had before the life left her eyes. It was a special smell, the kind of thing that stuck in the nose and didn't ever really leave. At the time, she'd thought it was a smell for grown ups, and not for her. But now she knew what it looked like too, and it looked like Tony.
Wren considered what to say, whether to tell him he died, whether to lie about why she was there. She considered a great many things, but in the end it was her respect for Silver (and Selina's for him) that helped her make the decision.
"I just wanted to say goodbye to Silver. I didn't realize he wouldn't be here." Wren's explanation was a simple one, but no less true for being so. She looked over her shoulder at the blue box. "It won't hurt anything. I promise."
Wren didn’t wait for her to follow and Chessie did not. She lingered instead at the edge of the blue box, and she hung against the door like drapery, like a child watching something too private to come out and show herself. The roiling smell of dying was familiar, cloying and clinging, like burned sugar and rot. She knew it, and Chessie rolled her back inside the door, stood without looking at the sleek, mechanised world of this man who could not keep death from sliding in through the cracks. She didn’t look at Sunny and she didn’t leave the box. Chessie sat, instead, she sagged like a worn paper bag and she slid to the foot of the door, and closed her eyes, and leaned. Just a look was enough, a reminder. Death stored in jars.
“I didn’t know,” Chessie said, whether to Sunny or to the Tardis itself, and she sat quietly, sat still.
Sunny stood so she could see through the door, but that was all. She breathed soft under her lemon silk, and she stood closer to Chessie and waited, her eyes on the frame of the door. This traveling through time and space, it was as horrible and wonderful as the Doctor had said. “I think we should leave,” she said softly. She spoke to Wren, but she shuffled a little closer to Chessie’s shoulder as she said it, seeking to join the solidarity she’d seen so recently without noticing what she was doing.
Tony shifted his gaze to Wren once more, leaving the box. He was too sick to do very much, and even thinking was difficult. In his last moments he hadn’t spared a thought for Wren. Silver had, but Silver was not too close, because there was no point in both of them physically suffering. The quiet man drew nearer, however, a cold iceberg moving in the shallow water of Tony’s dying consciousness. Tony shifted as if to fall, but the armor held him up and a soft computer voice muttered something that went unheard. Tony lowered back into a black scoop armchair, and there he hung, like an abandoned marionette. “He is here. Just ‘goodbye’?” Tony smiled slightly.
Wren nodded, and it was a jerky little nod that didn't have any Cat in it at all. The women at her back didn't matter. She heard Sunny's statement that they should go, but she didn't reply to it. She knew they would go eventually, whether she said anything or not, and there wasn't point in wasting oxygen on those words, not when the ones she wanted to say were so hard to manage. "He never liked it when I got sappy," she told Tony instead, a sad damp smile accompanying the hard-won phrase and a slight jerk of movement forward when he almost fell, though she knew there would be no reaching him. "I'll miss him so much. More than he probably realizes. So tell him that too?" she asked, and there was no point in trying not to cry, not anymore. She shrugged shoulders covered in leather and layers of grey and black, and she brushed tears away with the back of one hand. "Selina misses you too, even if she would never admit it maybe. And thank you. I wouldn't be standing here if it wasn't for you." That sounded selfish, even to her own ears, but she had long since passed the point of being articulate.
Tony said, “Selina.” He paused between sentences because it was difficult to get air into his lungs, and when he exhaled there was an ugly gurgle at the end of the syllables. “You better take care of her. She’ll have that whole city if you don’t watch it.” Tony tipped his head back slowly to rest his skull against the back of the chair. The blue lights in the lab and running the length of the armor slowed soft with his energy. “He says... goodbye,” Tony said, abruptly, with what was obviously great effort, the stretch of pallid jaw low on the curve of chestplate and blue fire. He shut his eyes.
Unobtrusive, the blue box slowly came to life again. A few starlights flickered, and the strange circular symbols began to glow very faintly, pulsing as if to a heartbeat. Sunny put her hand behind Chessie’s shoulder and gave the woman a little nudge toward Wren. Go get her. Sunny pressed out a hand and pushed a button shaped like an old cash register trigger. A small bell sounded somewhere in the darkness, and the TARDIS began to move.
It was three steps out of the TARDIS to Wren. Just three but they were very long ones then, in the tomb of a room lit up with the slow, soft light of a dying man. Chessie had Sunny’s hand at her back, warmth and command and it was a prompt that was unwillingly taken up but a prompt that was taken at least. Three steps, one and two and then Chessie was stood at Wren’s elbow, musician’s hand on the soft leather of her coat and she looked at the man she didn’t know with the patience of someone who has seen death as it comes and the groove that death has left a hundred years on. He was not the man Wren had come for, she thought, but it didn’t matter. Her throat was very full; it did not allow for words. Chessie’s fingers spread across Wren’s upper arm and she tugged, like someone with a string to a balloon very far away, urging it back and down and away.
“I’m sorry,” Chessie said softly into the artificial, sterile stillness of a lab that kept a man as more than a man, kept the poison unleashed upon him to him alone. Time had unhitched itself, knotted the three of them into a sad spiral locked into Wren’s own past, their own past. Unease rang along her spine, a cadence that made her head hurt.
“We need to go back,” and she tugged Wren back into the dim womb-calm of the TARDIS itself, a TARDIS that had a mourner’s own gentleness to her, now.
Wren didn't struggle or fight. She looked over her shoulder once, but that was all, and even then the man in the chair was blurred with salt and dampness. She wrested free of Chessie's grip once the door was close enough to touch, those three tiny steps that felt like eternity, and she ran the rest of the way. Oh, what she would give for Selina's ability to maintain distance just then. But it eluded her, and maybe that was as it ought to be; there were some things in life that were supposed to hurt, and this was one of them.
So, with a muffled sob, Wren went to find a quiet corner among all the lights and smooth metal surfaces. For a few minutes, she could be like the Cat she would never truly be; she could lick her wounds in peace and mourn on her own.