Chapter Text
Roda
Got screwed over by time, and I need someone. Will you be my someone tonight?
(Sorry about the bluntness of this by the way, but my current regeneration is about as romantic
as a pair of bolt cutters. Hope you don't mind too much.)
S.
Roda held the Seeker’s hypercube between fingers and thumbs, rolling it over and over in her hands while she tried to understand… exactly how she should answer his call.
It had never been in her character to turn down a cry for help; not even the time — now a couple of centuries ago — when she had accidentally become his confidante, back when she had still found it nigh on impossible to see past his parentage.
He’d been a tot, barely a quarter of a century old, lost and heartsbroken and hiding from everyone; and she had stumbled into the situation unexpectedly and unprepared. Especially the latter.
But he claimed that she had helped him, and his honesty and brokenness had helped to further differentiate him from his father.
In the scant two hundred years since, their tutor-pupil relationship had grown into an unconventional friendship. But this plea was something else again.
“Be my someone,” she whispered to herself.The wording tripped her up. What did it mean?
It was one thing to reach a solid friendship stage, to move beyond that bone-deep fear she never lost for his father, and quite another to be his 'someone’. Whatever that was.
Was it… a human phrase that he thought she’d understand? He’d grown up on Earth, dealing with humans and human culture from infancy, and even though Roda had been around them for even longer she still didn’t understand them the way that the Seeker did; their customs and conventions often strange or illogical to her eyes. On the other hand she hadn’t had a proper Gallifreyan upbringing either. Hers had been more cloistered. Maybe that was why he wanted her; it was a point they shared.
She couldn’t turn him away, she knew that much, but it still left far too many possibilities open… She frowned at ‘screwed over by time’. In what way? What had happened? What did he want from her?
Would she be enough?
She pushed the questions to the back of her mind, glancing at the proximity camera above her TARDIS console that was keeping an eye on the night-dark courtyard in the centre of the Seeker's home, waiting for him to appear. This isn’t about you, she reminded herself. This is about the Seeker. And so she rocked back on her heels, and wondered if she’d tracked his cube to the correct year, and triple-checked the coordinates, and glanced at the cameras for the umpteenth time.
Social calls had never been her forte, either. Too many years of isolation. Much as she tried not to fuss, she tended to approach anything other than the most necessary time spent with anyone but her inner circle to be tricky at best and potentially a faux pas waiting to leap out of the shadows at worst. She could pretty much spend an infinite amount of time with Jack, tolerated the Doctor since his regeneration, and felt more or less at home if she ever returned to Sherwood… But these were uncharted waters, something clearly distinct from her tutoring lessons of the past.
He had been known to get her to sit down and just have a cup of tea with him occasionally (that human upbringing cropping up). Or rather, he had tea and to his eternal vexation, she drank coffee. But clearly this was something else again.
As she caught sight of him approaching the door on the feed out of the corner of her eye, she shook her head, ran a hand through her hair and switched off the cameras. Before the Seeker could knock or let himself in, Roda swung open the door and was caught off guard by not the face of Alexander Saxon, child of Harold Saxon, but instead a flash of vivid, red hair.
She was about to comment that the hair suited him when she saw the look on his face, and made the second surprising decision of the day.
The Seeker gave a small gasp as Roda — all instincts in her body wanting to protect him — pulled him into a hug and wrapped her arms tightly around him. Her fingertips, still stained blue with woad, left marks on his dark blue coat that he would probably be annoyed about later on. She stood there, holding him and murmuring nothing at all, until the Seeker weakly returned the embrace, simply allowing himself to be held, before stepping back to look her in the eye.
He’s not bad-looking, Roda thought to herself. She’d seen him flirt with Jack before, she knew that he wasn’t a child… but the new face changed something. Long face, sharp features, blue eyes, bright hair.
Her overly careful reply, via hypercube, that he was ‘always welcome’ now felt a little flat.
“You came.” His smile was obviously forced; Jack often wore a similar one. Roda nodded gently, and then opened her arms to invite him to step back into them. Hesitating for just a moment, he held onto her and dropped his head to her shoulder.
“I wasn’t sure if you would. I’m a terrible flirt.”
“What are friends for?” Roda mumbled into his neck, stroking his shoulders. The Seeker laughed darkly, the quiet sounded muffled further by the coarse fabric of Roda’s tunic where he had buried his face.
“I assume you mean bad days…” Roda made a non-committal noise in response. “But there wasn’t anyone else I could go to.”
She nodded and then asked, hesitantly:
“Do you want to talk about it?”
He trusts me. Roda repeated it in her mind — the knowledge still as strange as it had been two hundred years ago — stretching out her leg behind the Seeker to kick the TARDIS door shut behind him. He trusts me. The lights of her TARDIS dimmed to a gentle orange-red, welcoming him in too, and the Seeker swallowed hard, burying his face deeper in Roda’s shoulder.
“I…”
“If you don’t want to,” Roda added hurriedly, cautious of saying the wrong thing, “I’m here for that, too.”
He seemed so small, and so helpless, despite now being taller than he had been before. Roda found that all she wanted to know was who had hurt him and how, so that she could give their name to Jack — or Gallifrey help me, even the Master — so that somebody else could hurt them right back. She wanted the Seeker to be safe, protected, shielded from harm. To stop hurting. Of course, she’d wanted it before, but it felt so much more visceral now she knew him better.
A Time Lord’s first regeneration, she knew, could be one of the most agonising experiences of their lives. Many young Time Lords, back in her youth, chose to regenerate voluntarily, on Gallifrey, where they could ensure that if anything went wrong, or the pain was too much, they were around people who would know what to do. It reduced the risk of regeneration sickness, and disassociation. But the Seeker — so distanced from the average Time Lord, she supposed — had presumably had to do it alone.
She gave him one last, tight squeeze and then pulled back to invite him into the rest of her home, smiling softly.
She wanted to ask if he was okay, but it seemed like a stupid question; insulting, really. But she wasn’t sure what else to do. I could offer him tea? That seemed to help before. The Seeker smoothed down his shirt collar and gave her a hard look, and before she could overthink things any further, she jerked her head in the vague direction of the kitchen.
“Do you… want to go somewhere quiet?”
***
Roda still wasn’t sure how it happened. One minute the two of them had been talking — they’d made it to the Library, rather than the kitchen — and the next, they were kissing.
It wasn’t entirely unpleasant. In fact, it was incredibly pleasant, if something of a surprise. Roda found herself wondering, briefly, if Jack had ever given the Seeker any other advice about something other than kissing, because it was obvious that he had taught him this. The Seeker's mouth felt almost familiar against hers while still being new, exciting, and slightly desperate.
And he was hurting. Roda could feel it in every touch of his hands, and the way that he gripped her as though she was a life-raft in a storm and he would sink without her. She knew he was an adult — had known, technically, for years — and that an adult Time Lord could be expected to take care of himself. She knew who he had been raised by: the Doctor, the Master, Lucy, Jack, herself. Himself, in a sense.
But until she had received his hypercube — with its elegantly enamelled ‘S’, an autograph and a declaration of self — she hadn’t realised how much that his adulthood meant that he could still hurt. The hurt was far more contained than the messy pain of the half-suicidal tot she remembered, but equally as vivid. Ageing hadn’t chased away his grief any more than it had hers.
Something had happened, and she was beginning to worry that he hadn’t been killed by somebody else. The thought scared her, and made her want to keep him close.
She expected him to pull back after the first kiss — to apologise, or to decide that he had made a mistake. I wouldn't blame him. Though she’d enjoyed the kiss she tried to give him the space to leave, if he changed his mind… but he didn’t. And as she slowly came to realise that, and by extension what he needed she reached for the small of his back and dipped him into the cushions of the comfortable sofa she had shepherded them both onto. Last time I was getting him off the couch. Funny how it comes around.
She understood this — this coping mechanism. She’d fallen into enough beds of her own in her time, seeking a way to take her mind off of pain she didn’t want to admit. Maybe all he wanted to do was kiss, and maybe he wanted something more, but she didn’t need instructions to know what part she was meant to play.
Running her hands up his slender spine, counting all of the bumps, Roda drew out the kiss and treated the Seeker the same way she would any lover. As her fingers traced the shoulders of his coat, pulling it off him hungrily, she tried not to dwell too much on the faint smell of burned fabric, or the places where it was visibly scorched, or the blue stains that her own fingers were leaving behind like a story of their own. Once the coat had hit the floor (she wasn't sure she wanted to know why it was singed, and could think of a hundred unfortunate ways to die involving fire or being fired on) she paused, her brow knitting into a frown and she paused to study his face.
“Are you-?”
The Seeker took hold of her hand, clasping it tight as if to assure her that he was fine. He had made his choice. He wants to lose himself in the moment, she suddenly realised, squeezing back.
“Yes, Roda…”
And so she obliged. It had been a long time since she’d been with another Time Lord. She supposed she was the Seeker’s ‘first’. This isn’t the time to giggle about that. A few seconds passed of gentle, curious kissing before the Seeker’s hands found the back of Roda’s neck, her shoulders, thumb rolling down to pass briefly over her brand — yet she didn’t flinch — before his fingers tightened against her arms and their bodies pressed together as much as their mouths. Roda found herself — within minutes — half horizontal, leaning over the Seeker and pressing a kiss to his jaw, his collarbone.
He began to relax beneath her practised fingers, and so did Roda.
They picked up speed and confidence as they picked up on each others’ ticks. Roda had to stifle a laugh so hard she almost hit her head on the arm of the couch as the Seeker rolled up her shirt accidentally and discovered exactly where she was ticklish. For her part, Roda worked out pretty quickly that the Seeker reacted just as positively to being bitten as Jack did, and made cruel use of the knowledge. He helped her out of the last of her clothes and the catch on her bra — she was still getting used to that — and she realised that she was thinking far too much when his knee landed between her legs and she made a faint, keening noise.
Yes. Less thinking, Roda, she told herself, earning a chuckle from the Seeker as he read her surface thoughts. More of this.
Still, Omega help her, she had to be sure. Had to know the Seeker really knew what he wanted. She reached down to cup his cheek, resting her forehead against his.
“And you’ve-?”
“Yes,” said the Seeker, caught between a laugh and a groan. “Yes, Roda, I chose you.”
(Right, so that’s what ‘Be my someone’ meant.)
Nothing else mattered after that. Nerves swiftly gave way to impatience, and in the ensuing hurriedness they almost left the sofa twice as the Seeker helped Roda out of her shirt by pulling it over her head and she undid the buckle and zip of his trousers without even looking. Hadn’t he joined the circus at some point? briefly crossed her mind as, by some miracle, they didn’t hit the ground. But then the two of them were skin to skin and taking a moment to appreciate each other and it hit Roda like a freight train that neither of them expected anything from one another. It was just them, in that moment, finding a common ground and making it theirs.
She leaned over him, her weight on her arms, and rolling her hips enticingly, pressing her lips to his neck and switching instinctively to telepathy.
«I want you.»
The Seeker laughed out loud as he took hold of her again, eyes lidded with seduction.
«I know.»
***
There were at least two larger, far more comfortable beds in her TARDIS, but neither of them really wanted to get up from the couch. Roda groped blindly underneath it, looking for one of the blankets that she knew she’d abandoned there, one of the many times she’d fallen asleep in the library. It echoed as she flapped it open, and she shuffled to one side of the sofa so that she could offer the Seeker an open arm to curl up against as she pulled the cardinal red cotton sheet over them both.
As a satisfied expression threatened to break past the solemn one that the Seeker had begun the night with, Roda planted a kiss to his forehead and stretched out her legs, properly untangling them from her with a contented sigh.
“Well, Seeker. That was pleasant.”
The Seeker snorted, and closed his eyes. “That’s one way to make a guy feel special. ‘Pleasant’.”
She smacked the back of his head with a flick of her wrist, letting her head rest on the arm of the chair as she closed her eyes as well. Casual, at peace. Even if she’d wanted to run away — which she didn’t — she would have been entirely at his mercy at that moment, and that was fine.
“Fine. Very pleasant. How about that?”
“It’ll do.”
He is his father’s son, thought Roda, absentmindedly, but that’s… okay. Because he’s not him. Though she would never admit that there were parts of the Master that she liked — if she never saw him again, in any of her lives, it would be too soon — she had to admit that the Seeker’s confidence and charm was, well, charming. Just so long as it didn’t turn into the confidence to do things like dominate worlds or pull the legs off insects… She ran her hands through his mussed hair, appreciating that he had let her in close enough to see him when he wasn’t at his best; both emotionally, and physically. On purpose, rather than by accident.
Messy suited him in this regeneration, though unless there was a repeat of — of this, she suspected she wouldn’t be seeing it again any time soon.
She wouldn’t mind a repeat.
Actually, she’d enjoy a repeat.
“So, how do I compare?”
Roda blinked, startled out of her thoughts by the question. “Huh?”
“To Jack.”
“Oh. Oh.” Her eyes widened in recognition and then she chuckled loudly, running a hand over her face to wipe away tears of laughter. Palm lingering over her mouth, as though she could force her words back in, she struggled to hold it together. The Seeker looked at her with blue paint on his cheek and his hair sticking out at all angles, and the giggles didn’t stop. C’mon Roda, she chastised herself, since when were you a giggling Tot again?
“You don’t want me to answer that.”
“Isn’t that what guys do?” The Seeker smiled. “Besides I must confess to a certain curiosity — we've never shared a lover before." A beat. "Sorry, this is coming out all wrong. Told you I'm no good at this...”
Roda prodded the Seeker in the side. “If it helps, I don’t think I could. Compare, I mean.”
Her fingers danced up and down his bare side thoughtfully.
“You’re too different. But… wow.”
She stuck out her tongue at the reproachful look he shot her as her hand withdrew. May as well say it. He did say he was blunt this time around. “You should visit more often.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Maybe I’d like that.”
The Seeker hummed, his eyes dropping ever so slightly once more.
Roda tightened her embrace around his shoulders and lowered her voice. “So. Time screwing you over? Wanna talk about it?”
“Yes and no…” The Seeker played with a stray strand of Roda’s hair, pushing it behind her ear to join a feather he had well and truly dislodged in their tumbling. Roda pulled a face, gesturing at him to continue with her free hand.
“It’s just…”
He took a deep breath, and launched in at the deep end.
“Remember way back when you found me on my friends’ sofa, horrifically hungover and practically suicidal because my girlfriend, my — my Allison, had broken up with me?”
She nodded, wondering where this was leading.
“Even back then it occurred to me that I could… fix it. Changing time isn’t that hard. I’ve done it on occasion: simple, minor adjustments. But changing minds — in any and every sense of that world — that’s where the nightmares begin.”
He paused briefly, and she could guess where his thoughts went. But then he shook his head.
“Let’s not dwell on that, you know the story. The point being: She had made a choice, and I knew I couldn’t take that away from her. But now…”
“We met. Tonight. I was helping Jack chase down some criminals and we ended up in Cardiff in… 2029. And she was there. I could feel the timelines locking into place, like handcuffs snapping around my wrists, binding me. Could feel the way her choices were stolen from her — and me. She was right in front of me, and yet in that moment she was lost forever. Like a mirage or… an echo or a ghost…”
He swallowed painfully and, grasping the situation, Roda gently stroked his back in slow soothing motions. She understood, and she understood why he had come to her. Or she almost did. Had Jack needed to go somewhere urgently, meaning that the Seeker had to look for someone else to talk to about the night’s events? The Doctor, presumably, was off somewhere adventuring and inaccessible… She’d always thought them more his confidantes than she was, but she didn’t mind being the back-up.
For a long moment he simply allowed himself to be held, before opening his eyes again and studying her with those clear blue eyes.
“The thing is — I could do it, Roda. Fairly easily too — after all, Dad invented a paradox machine-” Roda flinched, slightly, at the memory, “-the theory is all there, ready to be used. That's the worst part.”
“Do…?” she asked, hesitantly. She suspected she knew exactly what he meant, but she wanted him to speak the words.
“Time Lords. We’re supposed to be so all-powerful,” the Seeker clarified, his face serious.
Roda shot the Seeker a look he possibly didn’t know her well enough, yet, to understand.
Yes, she remembered being told that. How the Time Lords had so much responsibility and power, and how they were better than everybody else in the universe because… well, because they said so, so far as she’d ever been able to work out. Because he had said so, and she didn’t dare argue with him.
Because they discovered the trick to time travel, first? Because they could accelerate cellular regeneration when fatally wounded? Because they had a fancy planet with a lot of fancy architecture and Lords and Ladies in fancy, stiff collars making fancy rules to show off how fancy they were?
Back in the Academy they’d heard it night and day like a mantra. Even renegades like herself, the Doctor, the Master, were still touted as paragons of greatness. Some, like the Master, still lived by it; the Doctor dispensed justice by it.
Roda, for all that she wished she wasn’t a part of it, knew that she benefited from it, too. How many times had she swept in to save people who hadn’t asked for her help, no matter how grateful they might be later on? And she had survived the destruction of her species because of sheer dumb luck… and technological advantage. But that wasn’t a topic for today, and the thoughts rushed through her mind to the back of her thoughts as the Seeker continued. I can’t blame him, she reminded herself. That’s all his father ever told him.
"I was always taught that I was... different. Powerful. That anything I wanted was just there at my fingertips...” Roda nodded, encouraging him to continue. “My father wants me to take it, the Doctor is always worrying that I will. Just like Al-"
He fought against the pain, and Roda rubbed his shoulder again. “Just as Allison did, once she understood what I was. But what then?”
The Seeker shrugged, burying his face in Roda’s collarbone again.
“And sometimes... oh sometimes I know exactly why Dad decided to do whatever the hell he liked.”
There were a lot of things Roda could have said but she kept her mouth shut. He trusted her with this, so in return she trusted him. “The power we have is very real. But the freedom to use it? That is only an illusion. It-”
“Trust me,” Roda interrupted, bitterly, despite telling herself not to. “I know.” She’d been the victim and the beneficiary of that freedom; that power. She knew.
At the Seeker’s surprised expression, she sighed and elaborated. “The first time I met Jack, he was a Time Agent. That was… messy.”
The Seeker’s face said, amongst other things, ‘no shit!’
“And the first time I was flagged by the Shadow Proclamation, I just thought – with a flick of my wrist, a quick trip in the TARDIS, none of these people would give a damn what I did. Tick, boom, no Judoon.”
“Oh yeah, I know that feeling,” admitted the Seeker. “I’ve gotten very close to — to things I shouldn’t have done.”
“Because if you just… tweaked things, just a little…”
“They wouldn’t know.”
She stroked his cheek. “And they wouldn’t —couldn’t — judge you.”
“But we’re Time Lords,” continued the Seeker, darkly. “So who are they to judge us? Except… they’re just as important. But sort of… not.”
“Exactly,” nodded Roda, opening up. She knew what he was trying to say, despite how it was coming out. “I didn’t always like the way Gallifrey was ruled in my time but I still felt… entitled?”
She shook her head, cheeks flushing.
“Raz — the Lord President, he wanted me to go into politics. Plenty of Time Lords would have killed for the ‘casual internship’ I got. People said I’d been handed a life on a silver platter, but I never wanted it. Not really.”
And it made me time’s bitch.
The Seeker rested his hand on her knee with a familiarity they hadn’t had just an hour ago.
“That was my idea of hell,” she added.
“All my life, I've been told I'm entitled,” the Seeker sighed. “I mean, in a way, they’re right. So were you. We can do anything. I learned that quickly enough.”
He looked at the ceiling. “But when I was a kid, the Doctor told me that I had to look after time. Sure, I can bend the universe to my will, but lately I’ve realised it’s the other way around. You told me when Rassilon and the others made us Time Lords, it wasn’t always meant for everyone, right?”
Roda nodded.
“It was meant for the nobility, and then gradually, that changed. Time Lords started to think they were all important. But ‘Lord’ is the wrong word.”
Roda tilted her head. Of all the people in all the universe… “What would you choose?”
“We’re servants,” concluded the Seeker. “Servants of time. We’re not meant to exist outside of it because without being on our master’s leash, we feel ill. Wrong.”
Roda wrinkled her nose. “Poor choice of words.”
“Ah. Yes.” The Seeker flushed. “Sorry. But you know what I mean. All the old laws, you said they taught us to respect and fear what our upbringing told us was our birth right. It's just... I've known all this in the abstract, and following the rules has always been a choice — a pre-emptive choice. I've never... felt the force of time before. Felt it literally weigh me down, and known just how great a force would be needed to-"
He stopped himself, eyes lost.
“Breathe…”
The Seeker shot Roda a grateful, but weak, smile. "I felt my power, felt it right into my very core... And I knew I couldn't use it, no matter how much I wanted to. No matter how much it hurt to... step away. Everything I ever wanted, at my fingertips, ready and willing…”
She could hear the strain in his words, sense the emotions that were obviously still raw and just below the surface. But when he turned to her, he studied her earnestly, his eyes clear.
"I think that's why it had to be you. I can't imagine anyone else would even begin to understand."
Roda laughed sharply. “Try working for time for a few thousand years.”
“I just feel like a puppet. A highly intelligent, powerful… Rag doll.”
He sighed, and smiled. “Bit of a mood kill, huh?”
“Nah,” Roda shrugged in turn, “You should hear Jack’s pillow talk.”
“I’m… not sure if I want to.”
“Clever.” Roda chuckled, and then took a deep breath. “You’re almost right, though. Non-interference policy, Celestial Intervention Agency, Oubliette of Eternity… It was all there to protect time if we screw up.” Roda wrinkled her nose. “You’re a bit more responsible about it than I ever was; you made do without it”
“But we’re not that different.” Roda lifted her head to look at the Seeker more closely. “No, hear me out. I mean, salt and pepper about a lot of things, I get that, but neither of our lives have gone the way we, or anyone else, planned. We both got screwed over one way or another. You’ve rebuilt your life from scratch, but…”
“If you say so.”
“Exactly. I have so many plans… I don’t have time to be so helpless.”
Not feeling all that helpless thank-you-very-much (but understanding the point that the Seeker was trying to make) Roda rubbed his shoulder reassuringly.
“You learn to work with it. Find the cracks, and the hiding places. Little ways to get away from it all, for a little bit.”
Like right now, for example. It’s been… a while, since I let my own guard down like this, with anyone but Jack.
“And then with practice, you make the cracks bigger and bigger and hope for the best."
“Is that what Jack is?” asked the Seeker, knowingly. Roda made a noise of surprise.
“And me?” He added, a little more tentatively. “Safe hiding places?”
“Places I don’t have to hide,” Roda corrected, catching herself off guard with the truth. “And then once they’re — you’re found, don’t ever let them, or one person, or the whole universe tell you when to let go.”
The two Time Lords slipped into silence once more, eyes closed and breathing slow. Neither one of them wanted to dwell on their own mortality. The sex, the letting go, and the talk… It had been good, for them both. Excellent, even.
Eventually, though, he opened one eye and squeezed Roda’s arm to get her attention. She looked down at him, eyebrow quirked.
“I was thinking, you have this whole thing about how your friends call you Roda, not Redjay. So — what do friends-with-benefits call you? If that is what I am now?”
Roda laughed, thumping him in the side, but the cheesy grin didn’t budge.
“Ask Jack, you menace,” she commented, sliding out from underneath him and straddling his lap. Her arms penned him in by the shoulders, as she made herself quite comfortable where she was. She leaned in, her mouth just inches from his ears and relished in the way that his whole body tensed, and then shivered. Her fingertips stroked his neck before her hands rested on his collarbones, and she nuzzled into him.
“So…”
The Seeker smirked. “So?”
“I was wondering about the face. I’d presumed that’s why you called, but apparently… not?”
He blinked, looking surprised.
“Huh? Oh no, I’ve had the face for, like, ten years now. Should I have let you know? Is it Time Lord etiquette to make your friends aware?”
She shifted, studying him, uncertain.
“No, but a Time Lord’s first regeneration can be traumatic…”
Her voice trailed off at the look on his face.
So far he’d been hurt or thoughtful, but now she saw a sharpness flashing in his eyes that she didn’t recall ever witnessing before.
“Clearly my life has been a great deal more traumatic than the average Time Lord’s… It was physically painful, sure, but mostly it just pissed me off.”
She opened her mouth, trying to formulate a response, but he shook his head.
“Let’s leave that story for another day. I much prefer to just be… comfy, here and now. And I think so do you."
“You might be right,” she conceded and snuggled further down. As long as he was okay, that was the main thing. Anything else could wait.