Archive of Our Own

It takes a truly exceptional man to shape an entire world in his own image—even if that world is only ten kilometers around in any given direction.

Braxiatel has never experienced anything else approaching to his pride in this place. Those in the wider universe may call it ‘The Braxiatel Collection,’ but among the residents it is only ‘Braxiatel,’ and that is as it should be. This planetoid is not a separate entity from himself, any more than a fighter from her sword or a librarian from his books. The Collection is an extension of everything Brax is and has always been, and he takes the same care with it that he has always taken with himself. Genius, after all, is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

The Collection has cost him any amount of pain, of every conceivable variety. Perhaps the crowning example is the story of how he came to own the Knossos frescoes. The seventy-third century collector from whom Brax obtained the paintings refused to let them go for any lesser price than a pint of Brax’s own blood, convinced that the sanguis vitae of a Time Lord would inevitably unlock the secret of eternal life. The worst part of that experience had not been watching his own veins empty themselves under the covetous Silurian’s eye; it had been the excruciating transfusion he underwent half-an-hour before the exchange. Another Time Lord would not have survived even that brief span with his veins full of borrowed Human blood, but Braxiatel has certain unique qualifications. He had been only half-dead of blood poisoning when he returned to the Collection with the frescoes in tow, and fully himself again by the time his furious fellow-collector showed up to bellow in vain for a refund. A dusky-hued bullfight still hangs on the wall behind Brax’s desk, a solid reminder that great gain is only born of equal sacrifice.

Braxiatel’s sacrifices are made; his gains continue to accrue. Over the past centuries, he has watched his life’s work grow around him, stone by stone and artifact by artifact, edging ever nearer to perfection. Every morning, he awakens a bit more contented, a bit more certain that everything on this planetoid is precisely as it ought to be. And today, as he stands on his balcony and looks out over the gardens towards the chateaux and the Trianons, he tastes in the air, with absolute certainty, the knowledge that the time is finally right.

There is a mirror hanging in Braxiatel’s rooms that isn’t truly a mirror—partly because there always has been, and partly because this form of communication amuses him. He would never give it up, even if the security of the web of time did not depend upon his scrupulous adherence to what he personally knows will occur. Brax has lived the younger sides of so many conversations before; he is old enough now, alarmingly enough, to have circled around to approach them from this angle. And so circumstances demand that he stage these repeat performances, read the lines on the other half of his scripts, and build his own past through his actions in this present.

The temporal coordinates of every conversation Braxiatel has previously conducted through this device are already pre-programmed and waiting. In most cases, he has included the odd note to remind himself of the subject of discussion—TFD, says one, the initials not of a person but of a bomb, and Sèvres porcelain, another, and Battle of Zarathustra, which involved a future self that he is in no hurry to become—but this call requires no notation. He recalls this particular conversation down to the word, every look and gesture. He has been waiting for this for a very long time.

With the flick of a switch, Braxiatel’s face disappears from the glass to reveal the back of his own head, bent over the desk of what was once his study at the Academy. The Brax in his office on the Collection spares a single moment in nostalgic yearning for the homeworld he hasn’t visited for so many years, and then clears his throat ostentatiously.

The younger Braxiatel in the mirror executes a jump of surprise, one so understated that no other pair of eyes would ever notice it. Still an unacceptably visible response, but Brax flatters himself that in this day and age, he has improved beyond such weakness. His young doppel turns, and Brax wonders, not for the first time, what he could possibly have ever been thinking with that moustache.

“You’re looking well,” says the other. “Always a fortunate remark to be able to make to oneself.”

“And particularly to a self some pages later in the calendar,” says Brax, cheerfully. Often enough he is taciturn or sullen with his younger selves—he is the nearest thing he will ever have to a person who can be trusted with his own bad moods. But today, there is no cause whatever for ill-humor. Today, sulking even to himself would be a diminishment of this painstakingly-earned perfection.

“What is it today?” his younger self asks him. “Mountains to move, miracles to achieve?”

“A very strenuous assignment indeed. I am certain that you will find your resources taxed to the limit,” says Braxiatel, as his eyebrows acquire a sarcastic slant. “Harsh though it may seem, I require you to deliver a letter.”

Brax stretches his arm through the mirror, tasteful off-white envelope in hand. The younger Brax takes a startled step back.

“I had no notion that you could do that,” he comments, as he takes the envelope from Braxiatel’s hand.

“We have always been able to do that.” Brax smirks. “Our true capacity never fails to dazzle, does it?”

“You are in a nauseatingly good mood.”

“So will you be, at my age.”

He rolls his eyes at himself—or, rather, his younger self rolls his eyes at him. Braxiatel thinks that it is rather like dealing with one’s children, if those children had reason to believe that they understood their parents’ thoughts as well as the parents themselves. Which, Brax has learned over long years of communication with his various selves, is not true at all, even in the opposite direction. He is not actually certain of precisely what that younger version of himself is thinking or feeling at any given moment in time. He can guess, certainly, and probably with a high degree of accuracy, but then, he is Irving Braxiatel; he can guess what anyone is thinking or feeling, and be almost certainly right. The significant point is that his memory is imperfect where minutiae are concerned, that even he can’t remember well enough to watch chains of thoughts nearly a millennium old trail their way through his younger self’s head. He wonders if the Collection and his driving motivation to preserve the past does not partially spring from observation of this same phenomenon. Even among time travellers, few but he have experienced so intimately the speed with which recollection can fade.

Through the mirror, the younger Brax is turning over the envelope, reading the direction with a quirked brow. “Isn’t this dangerous?” he asks. “She isn’t meant to remember who we are, for her own good. She won’t even recognize me when I deliver it.”

“I don’t intend that you should speak to her directly,” says Brax, “merely see to it that envelope reaches her hands.”

“Yes, but you intend to speak to her, don’t you?”

“I do,” he agrees. “That is an invitation for her to visit the Collection for a month of postgraduate study. Under my personal tutelage, naturally.”

“It’s an irresponsible risk,” his other self argues. “The entity in her mind...”

“...Will not bother her for some time yet,” he says, “but when it does, it will force her to regenerate, and to be brutally honest, while her second form does have its own unique charms, on balance I cannot see the change as entirely a gain. Yours is a vintage year, my boy—she is old enough to know her own mind and how to use it, but young enough not to be soured by cynicism or jaded by experience. You don’t think, having waited this long, that I’d have failed to choose my moment with absolute care, do you?”

“I had rather hoped we would have grown out of this particular taste by now.”

“No you hadn’t.”

His younger self sighs. “No, I hadn’t, but I had thought we might be beyond the chase and enjoying the fruits of our labors by now.”

“If we must speak in senseless mixed metaphor, I would point out that the longer the chase, the sweeter the fruit.”

“And how would you know that, if you haven’t tasted it?”

“Like you,” he says, “I have been informed of the fact by an absolutely reliable source.”

“Ah,” says his other self. “Give ourself my best regards.”

“I suspect I shall have rather better things to be doing in the near future than talking to us,” he says, “but naturally, he knows that he is always in our thoughts.”

“Well,” says the younger Brax. “If that’s all, I’ll be sure to see that she gets it.”

“See that you do. And if you could just speak a few words in the right ears at the CIA to see that her travel pass is approved? You know the general idea—harmless organization to which you’ve made a sufficiently sizable donation that they slapped your name on the door, perfect atmosphere for a promising young Time Lady, that sort of thing. You can improvise from there, I trust?”

“Of course.” The other Brax’s moustache twitches. “My own future depends upon it.”

Brax nods to himself and cuts off the connection. At any stage of his existence, he has never had a taste for goodbyes.

*

He does not go to welcome her himself. He knows how this ought to be, how it must be. He is Irving Braxiatel, Almighty in this his Dominion, and the visitor who has just touched down on the Collection is not the President of Gallifrey, not yet the Time Lady who has captivated him for centuries. She is a girl only just old enough to call herself a woman, barely out of the Academy—untried, untested, untraveled, but already entirely herself. She has the entitlement of aristocracy and the arrogance of genius and the grace of self-aware beauty, and none of them yet marred by pain or loss or hardship. She is cool but not yet cold, hard but not yet toughened, lofty but not yet unreachable. Fifty-three days from now in her own personal timeline—centuries ago in his—she will fly away from Gallifrey in a rusting blue box, and when she returns she will be an untouchable object, though no less exquisite than ever. But for now, she is a tangible presence, and it requires all of his self-control not to test that truth the moment it becomes fact.

Braxiatel recognizes that no one can ever know how completely he has planned this, down to the very last detail. He is fully aware of the range of reactions that revelation would provoke in any right-thinking individual—anger, pity, fear, but never the appreciation he deserves. No one else would grasp the fact that plans are simply how his brain functions, that he could not possibly have considered her in any other way than this. He is a prophet, a future-seer; he is an artist, and time has always been his canvas. He shapes futures. That is what he is and what he does. There are moments when it chafes him that he, who has always celebrated the inspiration of others, will never be celebrated in his turn. But on his better days, the irony of it fuels his sense of humor, and today is as ‘better’ as any day could be. Today, he can see the final figures of the dance that is his masterpiece reaching out to him through the dimensions, and he steps into them laughing and laughing within his own mind.

She is only one of many arrivals on the Collection today, though she is the only Gallifreyan. Their collective pretext is an exchange program of promising young academics, chosen by the most exclusive standards, only the very best to be granted the honor of a month in his magnificent cultural repository. Many of the other visitors are non-corporeal, or non-humanoid, or in some way very noticeably non-Time Lord, and the few who would not be visually out-of-place on Gallifrey or Earth are visually out-of-place here, as the most unaesthetic specimens on a planetoid devoted to the beautiful. Braxiatel recognizes and gives himself full credit for his own pettiness, but if pettiness is the worst offense he commits in the course of this game, he will consider himself to have escaped very lightly indeed. He has no intention that she should be diminished by comparison with anyone. He has no intention that he should be, either.

The reception is planned for that evening, to welcome the new arrivals. If this program were no more than what it claimed to be, he would hardly go to the trouble of making an appearance for the benefit of this gaggle of over-educated and underwhelming youths, but of course, every scene of this masquerade is only staged for her. And so he resigns himself to delivering a pompous speech of welcome, followed by small talk and champagne and hors d’oeuvres—Bernice is in attendance, at least, so there are certain amusements to distract him for a time from sinews humming with anticipation—and he waits.

Meanwhile, she stands across the room, chatting with polite disinterest to various scholars who fail to merit the privilege of sharing a room with her, which she knows as well as he. She is wearing dark blue, simple and clean and classic, the kind of dress that draws attention not to itself but to the woman inside it. He is consumed with the longing to fling wide the cases in the jewelery exhibit three storeys below this room and fill her hair with diamonds. He cannot recall wanting anything so strongly in the past several decades of his life, a compulsion so intense that his fingers curl in pantomime battle against it.

Five times he catches her watching him. She never sees him look at her at all.

He does not need to listen for the clack of her heels when the appointed moment comes. He knows this scene. He wrote it himself, scripted a dozen drafts, edited and polished. He has blocked it just-so. The effort of maintaining his portion of their tableaux, turned stolidly away from the sound of her, is more than it ought to be, as though destiny requires one last demonstration of his commitment before it delivers itself into his keeping. But he passes this test, as he has passed all of those that have come before it.

“My Lord Braxiatel?”

He turns slowly, savoring this as it deserves to be savored. “I’ve grown shamefully unused to that title; they call me ‘Mister Braxiatel’ here. I believe I owe you a debt of thanks.”

“I hardly see why.”

“Is it wrong to be grateful to those who remind us of what we truly are?”

She quirks her head, and her eyes brighten, agleam with fascination. If he were another man he would laugh or dance or shout or cry. He has just won his victory, and nothing can change that now.

“My name is Romanadvoratrelundar,” she says, and offers him her hand.

“Oh yes,” he says, allowing her fingertips just to brush his palm, “I know.”

*

He is not so clumsy as to follow her, is never so crude as to resort to surveillance. When he encounters her in the Grand Library the day after her arrival, it is honest coincidence, or as honest as any experience of his life has ever been. He plays his part to the hilt, the proprietorial interest of the Collection’s owner meeting the casual interest of the stranger combined with the fraternal interest of one Time Lord for another, with only just enough of the covetous interest of the lover of beauty playing in the slant of his eyes to prevent her feeling that her charms have gone unappreciated. They pass a few brief minutes in cordial conversation—enough to establish mutual attention without descending to vulgar familiarity—and he makes his departure safe in the knowledge of a job well done.

Of course, praising the glories of the gardens at dusk in the course of their morning conversation is nothing more than a ploy to arrange a further meeting; he would never play the ingénu so far as to suggest otherwise to himself. But when their paths do cross again that evening, accented by the music of the fountains and the scent of orange blossoms, it is perfectly easy to make the point that he himself was wooed by his own pitch some hours ago.

“It has been months since I took the time to appreciate it properly,” he says. “I wonder if you would do me the honor of accompanying me? To see this world through a fresh pair of eyes is always doubly pleasurable.”

“If it’s been so long since you last took the trouble yourself, aren’t your own eyes fresh enough?”

He quickly discards ‘fresh, perhaps, but not nearly so lovely as yours,’ as far too much far too quickly; he considers a remark on the vitality of youth, but he is not certain that drawing attention to the difference in their ages would act to his benefit.

“Very well, then—a prevarication, I admit it! But you can hardly blame me being loath to surrender such engaging company.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Well, then,” she says, and slips an arm through the crook of his elbow, “perhaps I feel rather the same.”

For a moment, he hiccoughs internally. He had planned on restricting himself to a bare minimum of physical contact until at least the end of this first week, and the possibility that she might initiate touch had failed, inexplicably, to enter into his calculations. He recovers as smoothly as only he is able.

“Wonderful,” he says. "Shall we stroll the avenues and watch the constellations rising?"

"Does this world have its own constellations?" she asks, sliding a hint closer to him as they set off towards the étoile royal. "I shouldn't have thought it would have been populated long enough to develop those sorts of subjective astronomical designations."

"I saw to it personally," says Brax. "What, after all, is the sense in terraforming the earth if one cannot also leave one's mark upon the stars?"

"Surely you don't mean to suggest that you've been engaging in stellar manipulation for purely aesthetic purposes?"

"Until the present we have, I regret to say, merely been making the most of the skies we have been given. However, if you consider it a priority, I shall put my best engineers to work on it with all possible haste."

"If I consider it a priority?" She turns away from the fountain he named 'Future' to stare at him instead. "We’ve only just met, my Lord. Whyever should my opinion hold such weight?"

"What sort of gentleman would fail to move the heavens at the bidding of a lady?"

Of all the metaphors with which his mind could choose to supply him at such a moment, Brax reprehends himself for settling on anything so undignified as comparing Romana to a fish. Still, the image does neatly capture the sense of the situation: the hook that was planted last evening has clearly sunk still deeper beneath her skin. "Forgive me if this sounds tactless, my Lord Braxiatel," she says, "but you are nothing like any other Time Lord I've ever met."

"Oh, I should wager that I am a bit like one of them," he says, smiling at his little private joke, "but please, my dear, I beseech you—call me Irving."

*

“Irving?” Her head appears around his doorframe, and quickly assumes an expression of surprise. “I’’m sorry, Ms. Jones told me to come straight here. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Not at all, Romana,” he replies. It has been four days since last he saw her. The alacrity with which she accepted his invitation this morning and the look on her face now suggest that the separation was no more desirable on her part than on his, however necessary he knows it was. “I apologize for keeping you waiting. Might I have a moment to finish with Professor Summerfield?”

“Of course,” she says. “I’ll just wait outside.”

She disappears again as Benny turns to face him. “Romana?” asks Bernice. “Is that a common name on your planet?”

“No.”

“She didn’t recognize me.”

“She is considerably younger than when you first met.”

“I guessed as much. What’s such an early version of her doing here, then? I thought you Time Lords usually move in the right order. Relative to each other, I mean.”

“She is one of the visiting students here this month.”

“You pulled her out of time just to come here to study?”

“She will be President of Gallifrey someday,” says Brax. “Seeing to it that she is exposed to the right sorts of influences during her formative years will have a positive impact on the peoples of a million star systems. A worthy goal, wouldn't you say?”

“Exposed to your influence, you mean.” Benny laughs. “Does every powerful person in time and space owe you some kind of favor, Brax?”

“Of course,” he says, smiling. “But most of them will never know it.”

“I doubt it. That last part, I mean. What good’s a favor if you can’t call it in?”

“Quite,” he agrees, “and that is precisely what I am doing now. You promised me after you borrowed that shuttle last month...”

“Yeah, all right, no need to rub it in,” Benny sighs. “I’ll suffer through a month of stifling boredom and sandy knickers if you really think there’s something worth excavating on Dido.”

“Your flight is scheduled for tomorrow morning. Joseph has your itinerary and all the relevant research information. There is room in your budget for half a dozen assistants, but if you can connive your senior students into accompanying you instead...”

“Yes, Daddy Warbucks, I know how it works. Fewer salaries to pay means more new pairs of shoes for Professor Summerfield.”

“More like ‘fewer salaries to pay means higher quality marble for the foyer of the Grand Trianon.’”

“Just curious, does KS-159 contain every scrap of marble ever mined on planet Earth, or just a solid ninety-three percent?”

“The outbuildings aren’t finished yet,” says Brax, smugly. “Give us time.”

“Well,” says Benny, “I have an archaeological expedition to be preparing for, and you have a proto-Romana to mold into a leader of tomorrow. Try not to make her too much like you, won’t you?”

“You have already met the woman she is going to become.”

“Yes,” says Benny, “that’s exactly what I mean.”

“Send her in as you’re leaving,” says Brax, with fond annoyance, and turns towards the mirror, arms crossed behind his back. He watches Bernice’s reflection roll its eyes, but she passes no further comment before leaving. And then another reflection is swimming into view in the glass.

“I did a bit of research on Collection personnel before I arrived,” she says. “Of all the archaeologists you could have selected to head up your department, Professor Summerfield was an... unconventional choice.”

He turns. “Is this your first time traveling off-world, Romanadvoratrelundar?” He already knows the answer, but that never stopped Socrates asking questions. Braxiatel considers that more than sufficient precedent.

“Yes.” She blushes slightly. “None of my classmates at the Academy have ever left Gallifrey either,” she adds, defensively, and then hastily continues, “though of course they aren’t my classmates any longer, since graduation.”

Generally, he finds her youthful naïveté rather charming. It grates in this case, however, and he hastens to quieten her. “I was some years older than you are before I began my travels in the wider universe,” he assures. “And the longer I have spent in those travels, the more I realize that on Gallifrey, the value of conventionality is perilously inflated. Professor Summerfield is a uniquely talented individual in any number of arenas.”

“You think very highly of her.”

“I invite no one onto this planet of whom I do not think very highly,” he says, and is gratified by her answering smile.

“Now,” he says, “I believe I promised you a tour of our newest acquisitions.”

“It’s very kind of you to offer, of course, but you needn’t put yourself out for my benefit.”

“Nonsense!” he proclaims, in his most jovial boom. “Setting aside the fact that showing off the treasures of the Performing Arts Wing to a lovely and articulate young lady is hardly my idea of an ordeal, you are the best and brightest of Gallifrey, my dear. Even if I did find it a hardship to further your xenocultural education, my duty to the future of our planet would demand that I shoulder it. You are heir to Heartshaven, not to mention the top of your class—a triple first, so I’m told. You deserve the best the universe has to offer, in every respect.”

“I don’t usually talk about that,” she says, as he takes her by the elbow and guides her from the room. “The triple first, I mean. It does seem a terribly vulgar thing to go bringing up in general conversation.”

“I should mention it as often as I could, if I were you,” Brax advises. “Never be afraid of your own exceptionality, Romana. This universe will give any of us the respect we have earned, but only if we have the courage to demand it. And your accomplishments are such that you may demand a great deal of respect even for a Time Lady. You must know already how far beyond the herd your academic achievement has placed you; many of our people would kill to be able to claim as much. My own brother only scraped through his exams with fifty-one percent on the second attempt.”

They share a laugh at that. She laughs easily at this age; he had forgotten how easily. Braxiatel can hardly recall the last time he saw his Lady President do other than scowl, at anyone or anything.

“I suppose I have accomplished quite a bit for my age,” she says, snapping him back to the present, “but I can hardly rest on my laurels in a place like this, my Lord...” He inclines an eyebrow dramatically, with a half-spoken ‘ah’, and she pauses. And then her lip curls, something purposefully transgressive in the expression. His own lips twitch in answer. “Irving,” she says, dragging out the syllables. “Seeing all you’ve accomplished here...” She pauses at the top of the Ambassadors’ Staircase, a kaleidoscope of reflected gold gilt patterned on her retinas. “I cannot imagine how much time, effort and care you’ve expended on the Collection.”

“More than even I should care to boast of.”

“It shows. There doesn’t seem to be a single detail anywhere on this planet left unconsidered.”

She trails her hand along the marble balustrade as they descend the stairs. She is quite unconscious, he is certain, of how the motion displays the elegance of her fingers, of the inherent sensuality of that delicate touch. She has always been this way: entirely self-aware when it comes to her own strengths, and yet supremely ignorant as to her effect on others.

“I warn you, Romana, I am terribly susceptible to flattery where my Collection is concerned.”

“I’ll remember that,” she says, with a sly little smile.

He leads her down the corridor towards the theatres, and calculates carefully whether his plan for the afternoon is fully justified. Earlier today, he might have been concerned, but the look in her eyes as she spoke his name on the staircase has increased his confidence. He has timed it all perfectly, of course—estranged from his people or not, he is a Time Lord. He delayed with Benny just long enough, carefully paced the walk, has a firm handle on how to arrange the next few minutes. The question is not whether he is capable of making this happen, but whether it will serve his greater interests to do so. He will make his final judgment when the moment comes, he decides, and until then, he will keep his options open.

“Our Performing Arts Wing,” he says, “is much more than simply a collection of recordings, though of course it is that as well. Since the completion of our facilities here, the Collection has begun to host new performances of all varieties: theatrical, musical, terpsichorean, poetry recital, oration, light displays, whatever the artists of a million sentient worlds can present. These performances are, of course, captured for posterity, but a reproduction is never quite the same as being present for the event itself, is it?”

“I’m certain,” she murmurs, distractedly. He is not offended by her lack of attention. He has just led her inside the largest of the theatres, and it is a pleasure to watch her stare. The opulence of Gallifrey and the opulence of the Collection are of two very different kinds; the starkly shining metal and glass atmosphere of the Citadel cannot prepare her for his rich, dark world of plush velvet and gleaming marble and intricate filigree scrollwork. This sort of grandeur is meant to be overwhelming, and he is gratified to find her overwhelmed.

“There is an opera scheduled here for tomorrow night,” he says. “Die Zauberflöte, I believe.” (Although he knows, of course he knows, and how could he have chosen anything else?) “All of those studying here at the Collection have been issued with tickets, but as I shall be unable to attend myself, I wonder if you would do me the favor of sitting in my own box? It would be a crime against art to see the best seat in the house go empty.”

“It’s very kind of you,” she answers. “Naturally I accept, though it is a pity you won’t be there too. I’m sure I should enjoy it so much more if you were.”

“Would you indeed?” he asks, genuinely surprised. “In that case, I shall certainly endeavour to reschedule my meeting.” There is no meeting, of course, and never was; the plan was always for him to find himself ‘unexpectedly’ free, and join her for the performance. But he had not expected to be able to admit that his attendance will be for her benefit.

“I studied Human culture a little, at the Academy,” she says. “I’ve seen recordings of opera, but I get the impression that it’s an art that translates very badly through a lens.”

“And you would be quite correct. Much of the power of the music is lost when the sound waves cannot be felt physically shaking through the body.”

“You make it sound so...primal.”

“That is precisely what it is.” He dares a hand on the small of her back as he guides her from the theatre. “As perhaps the most sophisticated form of art ever developed by Human culture, opera has a uniquely double-edged emotional impact. It elevates, but via that same elevation it also grounds. It is built upon the most perfect melodies, stretches the humanoid vocal chord to the utmost limit of its capacities, is an expression of the very height of artistic beauty, and yet the plots it depicts are nearly always either farcical or tragic. It is a reminder that no matter how exalted our goals, how transcendent our ambitions, we remain flawed, imperfect, creatures of the flesh. It is humbling and exultant within the selfsame breath.”

“Are you trying to say that you believe we mortals are doomed by our own ambition?” she asks. “That we ought not to reach for what we might not grasp?”

“Absolutely the opposite. I mean that the striving is what renders us greater than ourselves.” He stops, turns to face her. “Ambition is all we are, Romana, the only thing we have. Never abandon your ambitions. Never limit them. You, you personally, can accomplish feats beyond the dreams of lesser men, if only you have the courage to aspire to greatness. Don’t ever permit yourself to believe otherwise.”

He only remembers once the words have passed his lips, when she is staring at him bright-eyed with wonder, what else is in Romana’s mind apart from just Romana, and what the Pandora creature feeds on. He reproaches himself for his own negligence, and vows not to let it happen again.

“But I am sorry, my dear,” he says, as lightly as he can. “I promised you a proper tour, and here I am lecturing you on opera and the transformative power of aspiration. Shall we visit the Cinematographic Archives? The curator, Raoul, does love an excuse to show off. He’ll turn positively purple to see you.”

“Purple?” she asks, with a hint of a laugh.

“It’s how his species expresses enthusiasm.”

“Is he an Alpha Centauran?”

“A good guess, but you’ve forgotten the pronoun. Alpha Centaurans are genderless.”

“Pyraxian, then.”

“Very good.” He smiles. “Have you ever met one?”

“I’d never met an alien at all, before this week.”

“The pheromones he excretes can be somewhat overwhelming initially, but so long as he is in a good mood it’s a rather pleasant experience overall, and as I said, I am certain he’ll be glad to meet you.”

“I’m sure it will be an enlightening experience.”

They have just emerged into an atrium, small by the standards of the Collection but large enough to hold three times the twenty-strong crowd gathered around the round, slightly elevated stage at its center. After a moment, a figure peels away from the group and flutters in Braxiatel’s direction, her gown trailing innumerable scraps of satin that grant her an uncanny resemblance to the hundred-tailed moths of Hedrapheny V.

Ms. Adriana Penworthy, director of the entire Performing Arts Wing and the woman particularly tasked with managing all live performances at the Braxiatel Collection, was one of Ms. Jones’s hires. That fact is and has always been painfully obvious. Ms. Penworthy is a specimen of the same terrifyingly efficient type, though in her case the effect is both diminished and oddly enhanced by the trappings of the Artistic—always with the capital—in her mannerisms and dress. When Brax was plotting this particular scene, the chance to so entirely unsettle Ms. Penworthy was, he confesses, one of the points listed in favor of the plan.

“Irregular,” Brax murmurs to Romana, well under his breath. “Most irregular.”

“I’m sorry?” Romana asks.

“You’ll see,” he says, and turns to face the oncoming Penworthy.

“Irregular, Mister Braxiatel,” says Ms. Penworthy, with a loud sniff through overlarge nostrils. “Most irregular.”

Romana breathes out a laugh behind her hand, and Brax gives her a momentary, approving sidelong glance.

“And what, if I may ask, is so very irregular, Ms. Penworthy?”

“We have a dance performance scheduled for this stage at this very moment, Mr. Braxiatel,” says Ms. Penworthy. “Inexplicably, no one saw fit to inform me until five minutes ago that the performers had not arrived, and as yet, all I have been able to confirm is that there was some variety of mix-up with the shuttle tasked with delivering them. It is my responsibility to see to it that these sorts of situations cannot occur on the Collection, and I have failed in that duty.”

“I’m sure no one blames you, Ms. Penworthy. Accidents will occur from time to time in an institution as large as this one, and this was hardly a major event—a mere demonstration of the form, I believe.”

“Nevertheless, Mr. Braxiatel, if you feel that it would be fitting for me to tender my resignation...”

“I’m certain it needn’t come to that,” he says, as reassuringly as he can manage. He breathes. This is the last moment when he can call off this particular spectacle, one of the more theatrical and therefore more risky scenes in his drama. But he has never had the strength to resist a touch of the theatrical, and the risk, he calculates, is one worth running. “What sort of dance was it meant to be, Ms. Penworthy?”

“Is that strictly relevant?” Ms. Penworthy pushes her spectacles up her nose, the garishly beaded chain jangling on the back of her neck.

“Humor me, I beseech.”

“Human orgins—Earth—originated in the mid-nineteenth century...” Ms. Penworthy pulls an uncreased sheet of paper from a pocket that appears at least three times too small to have held it, and consults it. “Tango, apparently.”

“And you have no replacement performers waiting in the wings?” Brax asks.

“As I said, Mr. Braxiatel, it all is truly most irr...”

“Then I shall step in myself.”

She blinks. “Step in, sir?”

“In the most literal sense of the phrase.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Braxiatel, I’m still not certain I grasp...”

“I learnt the tango in Cuba in the ‘20s, Ms. Penworthy, whilst in the midst of a quest to acquire the best cigars ever produced by mankind. Though the woman who taught me was Argentine, a traveler like myself...but that’s another story. Suffice it to say, I am perfectly proficient myself. I’m certain I could make a respectable showing of it.”

Ms. Penworthy gapes. “But sir,” she says, “are you quite certain...the dignity of your position...”

“Will be lessened only should I happen to bungle the business,” he says, “which, I assure you, I have no intention of doing. It does seem a pity to leave this eager audience unsatisfied when they have come here solely in pursuit of knowledge and culture, does it not, Ms. Penworthy? Particularly when we ourselves promised them this demonstration. I don’t believe we ought to scoff at any feasible alternative to sending them away disappointed.”

Ms. Penworthy is clearly struggling to supply an argument, any argument, that can dissuade Braxiatel from his intended course, preferably—he hopes—without implying that her employer is a deluded egomaniac. “It says here that the tango is a dance for two, Mr. Braxiatel,” she says, primly. “I am sorry, but I do not see how I can be expected to provide you with a suitable partner on such short notice.”

“As a matter of fact, I had considered that problem myself, and I think I know just the person.” He turns to Romana, and addresses her directly. “Provided that she is willing, of course.”

Romana frowns. “Surely you don’t mean me?” she asks. “The only dance I’ve ever been taught is the Gallifreyan waltz.”

“Nevertheless, you are uniquely qualified among the Collection’s residents.”

“How so?”

“You are a Time Lady.” He raises his hands and rests his index and middle fingers on her two temples, resisting the urge to let his palms slide forward to cup her cheeks as he does. “Unlike anyone else here, I can teach you the basics in a matter of moments.” He pauses for a beat. “If you will permit me.”

Romana’s cheeks darken by a shade. It is a perfectly reasonable request for him to make of her, but only in the same sense that it is reasonable for a pair of actors rushing through a change of costume in the wings to tolerate exposure to each other’s nudity. There are impersonal, practical reasons why two Gallifreyans might wish to to engage in psychic contact—as with any kind of touch, the context is more significant than the act itself—but the tint of intimacy involved in a joining of minds cannot be completely overlooked. He can see her struggle against the mix of prudery and curiosity so characteristic of the inexperienced.

“You mustn’t feel pressured,” he assures her. “I really must apologize; it is inexcusable of me to put you on the spot in such a way. If you are in any way uncomfortable or afraid...”

“Afraid?” Something sharpens in the set of her mouth. “Why should I be afraid?”

“Not everyone enjoys the pressures of performance,” he comments mildly. “Stage fright is a perfectly legitimate...”

Her eyes flash. “If you expect me to be daunted by anything so petty as...”

He cannot restrain a smile. She stops abruptly, studies his face. “You were taunting me,” she accuses.

“Say ‘tease’ instead. It does sound so much less cruel.”

She quirks an eyebrow, purses her lips. In that moment, she looks more like the Romana in his head than at any other time since she arrived here, especially once the amused glint steals into her eyes. “Very well, my Lord Braxiatel,” she says. “If you are so very desperate for a partner, I suppose it would only be generous of me to take pity on you in your moment of need.”

Oh, but she is good, already and always. He nearly tells her so, but settles for a controlled smirk. “Are you ready?” he asks, pressing his fingertips slightly more firmly against her skin by way of clarifying the question.

“Teach me,” she says, and holds his eyes as he initiates contact.

He is absolutely professional about the business; he does not so much as think of straying into any corner of her mindscape where he fails to belong. It is not as though he does not know what to expect. He has been inside Romana’s head before, quite recently from her perspective, locking Pandora behind a sturdy mental barricade and reluctantly instructing Romana to forget him. But for all that this experience is not unprecedented, he cannot prevent the rush that comes of touching her mind. It is his favorite part of her, the root of her exceptionality, infinitely variable and with capacity to match. It would be foolish and wasteful not to savor this experience. Braxiatel is neither of those things.

It requires no more than seven seconds for him to transfer the relevant knowledge into her mind, their contact as brief as he promised her it would be. There is time enough for her to frown, however; he suspects she is feeling a certain familiarity in his mental touch, a hint of déjà vu, and for her own safety she cannot be permitted to probe too deeply into that sensation. He finishes as swiftly as he can, then releases her and steps back.

All of the raw information Romana needs is in her brain now. He watches her face as she consciously considers the data he has implanted. Her eyes widen by a fraction and flash up to meet his as she understands precisely what she has volunteered for—just how unlike Gallifreyan waltzing the tango actually is, how unlike anything she has ever experienced before, how far he proposes to push the boundaries of anything that could possibly be considered proper by their cold and stately culture.

He quirks an eyebrow, a question and an invitation and a challenge. She studies him for a moment, and then lifts her own brows in answer. He smiles, small and satisfied.

“Ms. Penworthy,” says Brax, as he crosses to the stage, “I trust you can attend to the music?”

“Yes, sir,” she says, “but I feel it necessary to reiterate that I cannot recommend...”

“I am not planning on stepping onto the front line of a battlefield, Ms. Penworthy,” Brax says, permitting himself the hint of a sigh, “nor have I suddenly decided to give up the tedious life of managing this Collection for the thrill of the stage. In either of those cases, your concern would be justified. But the universe will not end because the director dances.”

Brax hands Romana up onto the stage, permitting his fingers just to brush against her wrist as he does. Her pulse is slightly elevated, as he had hoped it might be. He climbs up beside her, removes his jacket, and hands it to the sour-faced Ms. Penworthy, still standing beside the stage.

“If you would be so kind as to give us a few words of introduction,” he says, pleasantly, and snaps his fingers. The lights at the edges of the atrium dim by a shade as those above the stage grow brighter. It is not proper stage lighting, nothing so overstated, but it is enough to stop the crowd from chattering, focus their attention.

Brax’s own attention is centered on Romana, even as he maneuvers himself into a suitable starting position and watches her carefully do the same. He pays no heed to the reluctant, cursory prologue Ms. Penworthy provides for the benefit of their two dozen onlookers; neither she nor they are of any real significance to the scene. They are no more than petty props, set dressing to lend an aura of artistic verisimilitude, whereas Romana, as usual, plays the all-important roles both of heroine and audience. She is all that he wishes or needs to be thinking of just at present—that is, until the opening phrase of the music falls on his ears.

He has, of course, rehearsed this in his head. Every motion and every word is planned. But the one aspect for which he could not fully prepare is her. He has not factored for the momentary dryness of his mouth, for his own inexcusable hesitation. His feet are ahead of him, however, stepping with the strings, pacing him towards her with perfect, rhythmic intensity.

“Tango,” he says, pitched for the benefit of their audience—because of course, this is a show, in every sense, “is not a dance for the actor. If anything, the art it demands is much more nearly akin to that of the politician.”

He has stopped just beside Romana now, his feet clicking to a halt in time with the first notes from the piano. Her expression is unsure, but when he lifts his hand in time to the next beat, she lifts hers to match it. As their fingertips meet, he takes advantage of the touch and of the residues of their mental contact of a few minutes ago, flashing an image of the next steps into her mind. Her eyes widen, but she recovers almost instantly. When he turns, begins pacing them in a circle around their two hands, she takes one step forward for each he makes backward, the pair of them spinning together in perfect time with each other and the rhythm.

“Like the politician, it is not the dancer’s business to deceive.” He holds Romana’s eyes as they reverse the circle, she retreating and he advancing this time. “A counterfeit performance, however artful, will never touch a viewer. The truth of the tango may not be the truth of life off of the stage, but what is important is that while they are on the floor, the dancers themselves believe the reality they are attempting to present, just as completely as they would ask their audience to believe.”

They pause for a beat, and then he slides their joined hands outwards. On the next, he slips his other arm around her waist, ignoring the burst of heat in his own chest to focus on her barely-audible intake of breath. For the next few measures, to gently test her proficiency and to free his attention to speak, he settles for a simple few steps in parallel, advancing her across the floor, and then a reverse, permitting her to lead them back to where they began.

“The tango is a dance of emotion. Whatever the dancers are to each other off of the floor, even be it complete strangers, their emotional connection through the medium of the dance must, within that moment, be true. And just as the best politicians can believe a lie for long enough to speak it as their truth, so the dancers must live the emotion of the dance, entirely and without reservation.”

The strings of their accompaniment sound stronger than before, the rhythm of the music more pronounced, necessitating a more dramatic performance to match. Lifting Romana’s hand as he plants his own feet, Brax spins her rather suddenly, twirling her in place as he remains still. After two rotations he lets her come to rest, her free hand flying to his chest. Their gazes lock for half a beat, and then he is spinning her in the opposite direction. This time, he gives her a moment’s mental warning before he releases her. She spins away across the stage on her own steam, coming to rest facing him, the space of four long strides between them.

“Unlike many human dances, the tango is not predictable from one dance to the next. Just as the steps vary, the specific emotion that the dancers convey changes from song to song, and even within the course of a single dance. At times,” he is stalking towards Romana now, “the tango speaks of seduction, the art of the chase.” She holds out her hand when he is one step away from her, and he takes it. On the next beat, she retreats as he advances, the length of their two arms still separating their bodies. “The emotions it sings are those of fight against the self, of the beloved fleeing from her own hidden desires. And as she flees, so he pursues, in perfect parallel. The steps tell the tale of the lover’s persuasion, the temptation he offers, urging his partner to admit what she needs as much as he.”

The music is louder now, stronger. Romana’s retreat brings her to the edge of the stage and she is forced into a halt. With nowhere left to run, she throws up her chin in submission, her eyes fixed on his. With one tug of his arm he pulls her in close to him, just as the violins are crying out in triumph.

“At other times, tango is an expression of passion,” he says. He is holding Romana as before, one pair of their hands joined and his other on the small of her back, but now their dance becomes a matter of footwork, quick and sharp. “It blazes as desire expressed but far from satisfied, dangerous in its potential, burning lover and beloved both.”

They are both turning relative to each other even as they describe a circle around the stage, like a planet spinning within its orbit. He and Romana are mostly in volcada, their torsos tilted together, his more practiced hands transforming this purposeful imbalance into something graceful and fluid. But Romana is acquiring a feel for what she is doing now, beginning to enjoy and even embrace this experience. She has begun adding flourishes of her own, her face turning towards him and then away as their feet cross and recross, her hips swaying with a more purposeful lilt. He pushes one of his thoughts into her mind—Look at me, Romana—and her eyes snap up to meet his. “The question of the dance now is no longer ‘if,’ but ‘when,’” he continues, holding her gaze with exquisite intensity, “the consummation now inevitable but painfully delayed.”

He is breathing faster now, a weakness he is too preoccupied to correct. At least he is no more obviously affected than Romana is herself. She is, and was meant to be, entirely unprepared for this experience. She is, and was meant to be, entirely overwhelmed. But she dances without hesitation, almost afraid of how easily her own body responds and yet allowing it to lead her. And that is everything he sees in her: forever uncowed, unbreakable, unwilling to be anything but her strongest self.

“And sometimes,” says Brax, and spins Romana suddenly, a half-turn, so that her back is pressed against his chest. Both pairs of their hands are still joined—the left outstretched, the right pressed to her stomach. He has never touched her like this, nothing nearly so intimate, so adamantly sensual. The rush of it is so strong he has to close his eyes against it. But he keeps their bodies stepping in time with the music, the beat urging towards its climax.

“Sometimes, the tango becomes a frank expression of lust,” he says, his voice clear and steady even as he is breathing in the scent of her neck. “What was before implied is now enacted, a pantomime coupling, the purest and most intense expression of the form.” She uncurls her right hand from around his and raises it above her head, then brings it down backwards to rest on his nape, pressing back into him as she does. “All coyness is set aside, all denial in the past—both partners equally affected, equally in thrall to this sensation.” Her head falls back onto his shoulder, and still their two pairs of feet keep dancing, dancing, keeping time to this relentless beat. “And through it all,” they are so close, so close, his nose nearly brushing her cheek, “the partners in the dance must go on believing that this is real and true and right.” He spins her to face him. "And for the sake of one dance, one single expression of beauty,” her eyes are nearly black, “for the sake of their audience and the sake of themselves,” the music hits the crest of its crescendo, “they must commit themselves," her leg slides behind her dramatically, "body and soul,” she lets herself fall, “to the ancient and exquisite art,” completely overcome, “of falling in love.”

There is absolute silence in the hall. Brax is holding Romana in his arms, she bent backwards and he bending over her in parallel, a classic final figure. She has hold of his lapels as his two hands support her back, holding on to him like he is the only solid object in the universe, and after a moment, she opens her eyes.

He had been concerned about this dance, about enacting this particular ploy so early in her stay. But he felt that it was important to fix this impression of him in her mind early; he will not have her thinking of him as a kindly uncle or the distant, untouchable lord of this world. Necessary it may have been, but even so, it might easily have failed. This has all been the sort of excessive gesture that no other man, no other man, could pull off without absurdity, but he is not any other man, and it has worked. She is not laughing at him, and she is not unaffected, and she is not angry. She is looking at nothing but him, and not breathing, and there are fervor and bewilderment and hunger in her eyes, and they are for him.

Brax straightens his spine, pulling Romana up with him, and releases her, and bows in her direction. And as the applause begins among the gathered crowd, tentatively at first but soon strengthening, Romana returns the gesture, as the flush of her cheeks slowly diminishes and her breathing begins to even out.

“Thank you all,” says Brax, turning to bow to the audience this time, and reaching out a hand to Romana. After an instant’s hesitation, she takes it, and turns to bow with him one last time. He lets go her hand, crosses the few steps to the edge of the stage, and leaps down, the crowd parting to let him through. She follows him to the edge, and he extends his arms to her. She allows him to lift her down, his hands steady around her waist. And when she is back on solid ground, she does not immediately step away.

“I hope you didn’t find the experience too taxing, my dear,” he says, reluctantly removing his hands.

“No,” she says, sounding slightly faraway. “On the contrary, it was rather... invigorating.”

“I’m pleased to hear it,” he says, smiling gently at her. “I quite enjoyed it myself. Much more... invigorating than a typical day of managing accounts and paging through auction catalogues. I believe you are a positive influence on me, Romana.” He glances away from Romana’s tentative smile to address the figure advancing on them. “Wouldn’t you agree, Ms. Penworthy?”

Ms. Penworthy opens her mouth. “Ah, thank you,” Brax says, taking his jacket from where it remains draped on her arm and slipping it back on. “I trust we will not be seeing any more such little slip-ups from your office in future, Ms. Penworthy? Lest, of course, I should be compelled to intervene a second time. Which, I get the distinct impression, would be contrary to your own preferences.”

He almost feels sorry for her as he watches her face purple. He knows perfectly well that Adriana Penworthy was not responsible for the shuttle that failed to be dispatched to collect the dancers booked for today’s performance. But pity has never ranked foremost among Braxiatel’s emotions, and pity for overbearing, self-important Ms. Penworthy would be wasted in any event.

“I will do my best, sir,” she says, jutting out her chin, “and none of us can be expected to do more.”

“Very true, very true,” he agrees, swallowing a laugh at his own excessive magnanimity. “Now, if you will excuse us, the Lady Romanadvoratrelundar and I have an appointment with Raoul in the Cinematographic Archives, and you know we mustn’t disappoint him. The last time that happened, half of his assistants suffered minor psychological breaks.”

Ms. Penworthy sniffs. “I really have been meaning to address that point with you, Mr. Braxiatel,” she begins. “Raoul may be an enthusiastic and learned scholar of the cinema of many eras and worlds, but his brand of chemically-induced empathic projection is not, in my opinion, conducive to a workplace that is...”

“Of course, I appreciate your concerns,” he says, gravely. “If you make an appointment with Ms. Jones...”

“But if you could only spare a few moments now, I believe...”

“Oh!” Romana says, sudden and overloud, and stumbles against Brax’s shoulder.

“Romana?” he asks. “My dear, are you feeling unwell?”

“I think it’s possible I may have sprained something with all that dancing,” she says—but she is not actually resting any weight on his chest where she leans against him, and she gives him what looks suspiciously like a very quick wink. “Might we find somewhere to sit down?”

His lips twitch. “How thoughtless of me not to offer sooner,” he says. “Right this way, Romana. Until later, Ms. Penworthy.”

“Sir,” says Ms. Penworthy, resigned. Romana leans on Brax, or appears to, until they have turned a corner into the nearest empty corridor, and then immediately straightens.

“My apologies if that was a conversation you actually wanted to have,” she says, smoothing her skirt.

“Very much the opposite, I assure you. Your intervention was perfectly judged. In fact, as both my savior from Ms. Penworthy and my merciful dance partner, I now owe you not one but two debts of gratitude.” He throws wide his hands, an expansive and excessive gesture. “Demand whatever ransom you like of me, my Lady, and it shall be yours.”

Romana’s body language shifts, a subtle but hugely significant change. “Anything?” she asks, coyly, glancing sideways at him from under her lashes.

His breath catches in his throat. She has shown interest in him before—fascination, even—but this is something else. He knew another Romana, once, just like this one but older, who shared her wine on a strange new Gallifrey and threw herself at him with delicious abandon; that was enjoyable, certainly, but he was never quite able to forget that as Romanas went, she was not his. He has been flirting extravagantly with his own Romana for centuries, and occasionally received perhaps so much as a sidelong glance or half a smile as a reward. But she never gives him more than that, and very frequently less.

The fact that everything is going precisely to his own painstaking plan does not make it any easier to process the fact that, for the first time in either of their lives, she is flirting with him.

“Romanadvoratrelundar,” he says, “do you know the story of Salome?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“She was offered half a kingdom as the price of a single dance.”

“Are you offering me half of your planet, Irving?”

He leans casually against the wall in a way that—quite incidentally, of course—draws him closer to her. “I would never do you the disservice of supposing that your time was worth less than hers.”

Romana bites the corner of her lip. “And did Salome accept the offer?”

“I’m afraid not. Her somewhat less charming price turned out to be a man’s head. Without the neck attached.”

Romana makes a face. “I certainly have no use for severed heads,” she says, laughing. “And so long as your Salome didn’t actually take the half-kingdom, I think I can safely refuse to do the same without undue modesty.”

“Then suppose that instead of either kingdoms or heads,” he says, “I pay my debt by escorting you to the opera tomorrow evening, being terribly attentive, and doing everything in my power to see to it you enjoy every moment.”

“Weren’t you planning on doing that in any case?” she asks, arching an eyebrow with all the art of a virtuoso and pursing her lips into a perfect moue.

“I was certainly hoping to be permitted the pleasure.”

“Well, then,” she says, smiling, “I think I’ll save my favor for the future, and take the time to think it out properly. If you don’t object.”

“My dear Romana,” he says, leaning conspiratorially close, “you and I have all the time in the universe.”

They both linger for a moment, perfectly matched in their expressions of knowing amusement—perfectly matched, Braxiatel knows, in every other way besides.

“But in the meanwhile,” he says, pulling back a step and offering her his arm, “we have a tour to complete. If you are still interested, of course.”

“Well then,” she says, smiling, and tucking her arm into his, “whatever are we waiting for?”

*

As a man who appreciates the significance of a perfectly tailored suit—the sharp cut of a jacket, the crisp knot of a tie, the razor’s edge fold of a well-pressed trouser leg—it has always stuck Brax as one of life’s bitter little ironies that the Romana he knows has been so consistently trapped in the prison of Gallifreyan robes. He has seen photos from her years of travel, two bodies and as many hundred ensembles as she worked her way through what was apparently the entire contents of the Doctor’s wardrobe room and the fruits of several shopping sprees besides. He knows that fashion, high and otherwise, is among her plethora of interests. But Academy students and Presidents of Gallifrey are granted very little in the way of sartorial liberties, and during those periods of their lives when he and Romana have interacted with each other on a daily basis, Brax has only rarely seen her in any ensemble that does not cover everything from collarbone to heel, and in very poor style to boot.

The Romana on the Collection now, at this early stage of her life, has had little opportunity to see herself in less restrictive clothing any more than Brax has. It is how he knows she will accept his offer to avail herself of the Costume Wing before the opera this evening. She registered the requisite protests about the antiquity and intrinsic value of the artifacts on display there, but he rejoined (and quite correctly, in his own opinion) that no piece of art is more valuable than the enjoyment derived by those who interact with it. She is too practical—and, at this stage in her timeline, too impressionable—to fail to see the logic in that argument. Particularly when dressing herself to the nines is precisely what she wants to do in any case.

Her choice of gown, as it happens, is so nearly ideal that when he first sees her that evening, he experiences several seconds of pure, unanalytical enjoyment before his mind catches up sufficiently for proper evaluation. It is not absolutely perfect, a shade more overstated perhaps than he would have selected for her himself, but he has always admired her willingness to stand out in a crowd. And he cannot deny that the gown flatters her in every conceivable way. It is a soft shade of silver-grey, full-length with the hint of a train. The design is just tight enough to emphasize the shape of her without vulgar clinging, and is finished with a large and elaborate yet delicate collar, silver and onyx, to lend visual interest to the otherwise simple silhouette. For a Time Lady, the most daring feature is the back—though that has as much to do with her choice of hairstyle as of gown. It is hardly cut particularly low as evening gowns go, only to just below her shoulder blades, but with her curls piled atop her head, it leaves the whole of her neck exposed. The desire to touch that pale expanse of sensitive skin, to taste, to kiss, is nearly irresistible.

He wonders, after yesterday, whether she will be eager enough to rush straight up the stairs to him the moment she arrives at the theatre—or whether, contrarily, she will avoid him for as long as she can. To his intense satisfaction, she chooses a middle path superior to either extreme. Her eyes seek him out as soon as she enters the room, a gaze he meets and holds. But then she smiles, looks coyly away, and makes a show of diverting her attention to the ethics professor from Bellaphores who happens to be standing beside her.

Brax smiles. There would be no satisfaction in this game if he could not be sure that she is aware of her status as a player in it. Every time she proves that she knows the rules and plays with her eyes wide open, he becomes more certain that it is worth his while to win. Though that fact was, admittedly, never truly in doubt.

His original intention is to wait for her to seek him out in the more elite crowd of the theatre’s upper landing, rather than descending from his elevated position to mill amongst the petit bourgeois in the main lobby. That resolution holds until the moment Brax notices an unexpected and utterly out-of-place figure elbowing his way in Romana’s direction. And then Brax’s feet are carrying him towards her with all due haste, though not quickly enough to prevent the inevitable.

“I thought you must be new,” Brax catches on the edge of his hearing, clear above the sound of the crowd. “I’ve never claimed to be the brightest guy this side of the galaxy, but even I couldn’t have helped noticing a woman—excuse me, a lady—like yourself on a planetoid this size.”

Brax quietly groans, and manages to miss the next few lines of conversation as he is hurrying down the stairs. He is within a few long strides of Romana and her accoster before he hears, “Romana? That’s funny, there was a Romana at my...”

“Mr. Kane,” says Braxiatel, as loudly as is practical without attracting every ear in the room, “I had hardly expected to see you here tonight. How heartening to see you taking an interest in culture beyond your own... lofty directorial efforts.”

“Oh, you know,” says Jason, “never pass up a chance for a good opera, me.”

“I’m sure,” says Brax, the words dripping with a minimum of six individual varieties of venom. He turns, completely transforming his aspect as he does. “Good evening, Romana,” he says. “My dear, I can hardly bear to look at you tonight; the despair is far too great.”

“Despair?” she asks, a hint wounded. “What a terrible thing to say.”

“But the truth, I’m afraid,” he announces, with a melodramatic sigh. “Here am I, having devoted the whole of my life to filling this world with the most beautiful objects in the universe, and then you arrive, my Lady,” he lifts one of her gloved hands and brushes a kiss across her cloth-covered knuckles, “and effortlessly outshine every one.”

She cannot prevent the blush that covers her cheekbones, or perhaps she does not try. She does, however, arrest her smile before it has spread beyond the corners of her mouth. “I believe you ought to thank Mr. Kane,” says Romana. “I would have said that was a horribly trite line, except that it positively dazzles by comparison to his efforts.”

“Then I owe him a very great debt of thanks indeed.” In Brax’s peripheral vision, Jason is turning faintly purple. “I must beg your forgiveness for forgetting to warn you about him. He does get into all sorts of mischief whenever his wife is away.”

“Ex-wife,” says Jason, defensively.

“Of course,” Brax demurs. “And how is your son tonight? I am so fond of the little chap. It must be difficult, coping with him all on your own while Bernice is on assignment.”

Romana’s eyebrows inch a degree higher. “He’s fine,” says Jason. “And I’ll bet you don’t even know the ‘little chap’s’ name,” he adds under his breath.

“Peter is so fortunate to have such a responsible daddy to look after him.”

Jason’s glare would melt a sheet of laserproof plasticine. It is immensely satisfying. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I’ll just go check on him now. I seem to’ve lost my taste for opera.”

“How disappointing,” Brax says. “A brief word before you go, if you wouldn’t mind.” He is turned away from Romana, and he makes certain the danger of the words is in his eyes, not his voice.

“Am I in the way?” asks Romana, not so much uncertain as testing.

“My dear Romana, the very notion is unthinkable,” he turns back to face her, “but I should hardly care to bore you with trivial matters of business. Perhaps you would care to make your way to our box? The performance is about to begin, I believe, and I shan’t be more than a few steps behind. Any of the ushers can direct you.”

“Of course,” she says, with a familiar expression of knowing amusement.

“You are far more generous than I deserve, to pardon such an ungentlemanly act of inattention. I promise, I shall do all in my power to make it up to you.”

“See that you do,” she says, a wicked curl in her lips, and then turns back to Jason. “Good evening, Mr. Kane. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Jason grumbles, as Romana melts away into the crowd. The moment she is safely out of earshot, he turns to Brax. “Listen,” he says, “I had no idea she was with you, all right, how could I have? I mean, you’re not usually the sort to go after...well, anybody. Not that I don’t see why you’d make an exception this time, she’s a knockout, but...”

“Jason,” says Brax, serious and cold, “listen to me very carefully. As you were about to comment when I arrived, you have met Romana before, when she attended your wedding. She, however, has not yet met you. Exposure to someone such as yourself, who has knowledge of her future but without a complete understanding of the temporal ramifications, could be extremely dangerous to her entire timeline. For her own safety, you will not speak to her again while she is here. Do you understand me?”

“You don’t need to talk to me like I’m stupid, you know, I...”

“No. No, I need this to be absolutely explicit.” Brax shifts something in the direction of his gaze—subtle, so subtle, but suddenly Jason’s eyes are growing hazy. “You will not come near Romana for as long as she is visiting this planetoid,” he says, his voice low and absolutely commanding. “You will not look at her. You will not speak to her. You will not touch her. You will obey these instructions absolutely. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” says Jason, without expression, his eyes focused on everything and nothing.

“Good,” says Brax, and steps past Jason’s still form, in the direction of the stairs. But he pauses when they are standing side by side. “And one more thing,” he says, tilting his body so he is very nearly whispering in Jason’s ear. “If you do intentionally seek Romana out? It will not be necessary for me to find you, nor to hurt you. If you attempt to initiate contact with her, your lungs will seize and stop. You will cease to breathe, and within a matter of minutes, you will be dead. Your own body will not permit you to survive the experience.”

Brax turns away, puts his hand on Jason’s shoulder, and gives him a small shake. “Think on that, won’t you?”

Jason blinks, stumbles, frowns. He shakes his head, trying to clear the cobwebs, to snap fully out of Brax’s trance. “Right,” he says, uncertainly. “I was... I was...”

“You were heading home to check on Peter,” says Brax.

“Yeah,” says Jason. “I’ll just...go, then.”

“I think that would be for the best.”

“Right,” says Jason, distantly, and wanders for the door with a small frown still fixed on his face. Brax watches him for a moment, thinking of long games and larger problems still to be solved. But there is a time for those sorts of considerations, and with Romana waiting for him upstairs, that time is not now.

The orchestra are tuning when he pushes back the curtain of his private box, its silken fringe brushing his arms as he steps inside, like the delicate fingers of a last night’s lover unwilling for a morning parting. Romana glances up at him with a smile. He meets it with the hint of a bow as he makes his way across the box, to where a bottle is chilling in a silver bucket on a little table in the corner.

“Your business with Mr. Kane was concluded satisfactorily, I trust?” she asks.

“Perfectly, my dear, thank you for asking.” He uncorks the bottle, pausing a moment to let it breathe. “I really must apologize once again that you should have been subjected to his pestering. I tolerate the man’s presence on my world for Professor Summerfield’s sake, but unlike others, he is not my idea of a welcome guest.”

“He wasn’t as bad as all that,” she says, “and in any case, you soon arrived to rescue me.”

“If I had arranged things better, you wouldn’t have needed rescuing.”

“I am quite capable of looking after myself, my Lord Braxiatel.” She is pulling off her gloves, one finger at a time, as though she may at any moment be called upon to prove that statement with her fists. “I don’t suppose I shall ever need rescuing. But there’s actually something rather pleasant about the experience... when it’s done by the proper person.”

He looks up from his pouring. She is watching him intently. “I’m glad you think so,” he says, with quiet intensity. Their eyes lock for an overlong few seconds, until she colors by a hint and glances down at the dark puddle of her gloves in her lap. He turns back and finishes pouring their second glass.

“There are signs all over the lobby forbidding food and drink in the theatre,” she observes, as he carries the glasses over, “but I suppose no one on this world would dare to tell you ‘no.’”

“You would be surprised by how often I hear that word, even here,” he says, smiling as he sits, “or what terror I live in that I shall soon be hearing it again, from your own lips.”

“And what was it that you were planning on asking?” she says, her voice silken with promise.

“Would you care for a glass?” he says, innocently, extending it in her direction.

She bites her lip on a smile, a bright contrast in white teeth and deep red lipstick. “What is it?”

“They called it simply ‘nectar.’ From the planet Heaven, before it fell. There are only a few dozen bottles left in the universe, and the flavor is incomparable.” He does not mention that the taste is the result of a unique balance of nutrients in Heaven’s soil, caused by the enormous number of corpses laid to rest on that burial world. There is an interesting philosophical debate to be had on the subject, but he feels it might interfere with the mood.

“Then yes, thank you,” she says, and brushes her fingers quite intentionally over his as they wrap around the stem of the glass.

“There may be an entire wing of poetry downstairs,” he says, “but through your lips, Romana, I cannot imagine any more perfect words than those.”

The lights dim in the instant that he finishes his sentence, the first notes of the overture humming in the air. But her eyes glitter even more prominently in the darkness, and he swells with satisfaction far more potent than the music or the wine.

*

As he is walking her back towards the guest quarters afterwards—the long way, through gardens bright in the moonlight—he asks her which part of the opera she enjoyed most.

“I quite liked the Queen of the Night,” she tells him.

No matter how rude it may be when he cannot explain the joke, he laughs himself nearly to tears. It is almost better than the kiss she brushes across his cheek as they are standing by the door.

“I had a wonderful evening,” she says, both of her hands in his. “Thank you.”

“The pleasure was entirely mine.” He purses his lips in a small smile. “If I can invent a new pretext to spend time with you within the next few days, may I depend upon you to play along with the pretense?”

She smiles outright, no hesitation or restraint, and it strikes him all over again: this is Romana unbroken, whole. That fact in itself is unspeakably beautiful. “I think it’s extraordinarily likely,” she says.

“Excellent.”

He lingers for a moment. Some part of him is tempted to press his luck. She has made no move away from him, still near and warm and soft, and he is nearly certain he could have more than this if he asked. But he is at least three days ahead of schedule already, far closer than he had dared hope, and even a kiss would advance his timetable weeks beyond where it belongs. He has no intention of succumbing to carelessness. She deserves for every part of this to be precisely right, and so it will be.

“Goodnight, Romana,” he says, and drops her hands with a final squeeze.

He does not permit himself to believe that the momentary flicker in her eyes is disappointment. “Goodnight, Irving,” she says, and watches as he strides back through the gardens towards his own bed.

*

It has not ever been about possession. None of it—nothing he does, has ever done—is about that. He does not wish to own Romana, to point to her and proclaim ‘This is Mine.’ He wants to know her, in every possible way.

The nature of academia is selective. This area, this subject, this work is deemed worth of study only at the expense of others—and Braxiatel’s chosen field of expertise is her. He wants to build a whole new wing devoted to the discipline, recruit the greatest scholars in time and space. He wants treatises on her stubbornness, odes composed to the curve of her hips. She is unique, exceptional, a mind unlike any other he has touched, and he intends that all the worlds should see what he sees. If his Collection declares her a worthy subject of study, then the universe will follow; influence is his coin, and he is a very, very wealthy man. He has already made her a President, and, what is more, a great and genuine leader. In a few more millennia, he can make her a mythical heroine, a greater-than-mortal being. Given an epoch or two to work with, he can make of her a goddess, worshipped across a million stars, and for a billion years.

What meaning is there in ownership, the covetous grasping of the jealous lover, for a man who can exercise that kind of control?

This final step will be like all the others. Ever since he met Romana, he has learned her every way he can. He knows her moods, her thoughts, her reactions; he knows her history, her tastes, her desires. Only the physical remains—the pettiest, perhaps, and yet most intimate variety of knowing. This seduction is a practical examination of all he has yet discovered. And his reward, should he succeed, will be a greater influx of new facts than he has ever before experienced in so short a time.

All of the sensory data he has heretofore been lacking, all of the simple little secrets he has never had a chance to know, they will all be at his fingertips, and soon. She is a woman like any other woman, yes, and yet she is and has always been unique. He needs to know whether that individuality extends beyond his previous experience, whether the truths of her body will affect him as profoundly as those of her mind have always done. He knows the grace in the curve of her spine, but not undisguised by layers of interfering clothing. He knows the quiet beauty of her face in repose, but not the reckless ecstasy of those same features burned hectic with concupiscent carnality. He knows the fragrance she chooses to wear, and some hints of the scent of the woman beneath, but he has never breathed the alchemy of sweat and heat and need and Romana, the unthinkably primal bouquet of sex all tangled up with her. He knows her closed-off, inaccessible and sheltered, but craves her open and vulnerable and exposed.

Control is in the knowing. He needs to know her every way. He needs to see and touch and feel and taste and understand. And if he can do that, if he finally knows all of her, if she is perfectly contained inside his mind, locked in a string of facts and fictions, collected, complete, then perhaps... perhaps...

He falls asleep thinking of secrets, and the power they convey.

Brax dreams himself a watchmaker, a surgeon, opening her skin with bloodied hands to watch her clockwork innards spin, and wakes up feeling powerful, and guilty, and alone.

*

She returns the silver gown to the costume wing, along with the shoes and the gloves, at nine o’clock sharp the next morning. Before noon, he sees to it they are neatly folded, boxed, wrapped, and delivered back to her door, along with a note which no one on the Collection but the two of them can read.

Romana—

I make it a custom on the Collection to acquire my artifacts as late as possible in their lifespans, to permit their original owners and cultures to enjoy them for as long as possible. Beautiful objects belong with the people for whom they were made, and it could not be more obvious that these were made for you, and belong permanently in your keeping.

I must admit, however, I had considered retaining one of the shoes. Do you know anything of traditional Earth stories? There is a myth that appears across many of the cultures on that planet—look up ‘Cendrillon’ in the library, and you should find the general idea. But I require no fur slipper (nor glass, as the story was latter corrupted) to lead me to the woman with whom I spent so enchanting an evening, and thus find myself still more fortunate than the prince in the old tale.

After this next confession, however, you may not consider yourself as lucky, for if you cherished any fond illusions where I was concerned, I fear I may be obliged to shatter them: I promised you a plausible excuse for our next meeting, and now must prove myself a liar. Wrack my brains though I may, I can think of no reason to see you beyond the simple, selfish fact that I want to see you. Dare I hope that might seem to you reason enough? If you have not yet visited the Classical paintings—which you must, I promise you, see while you are here—perhaps you might consent to tolerate my company as you stroll the galleries.

I shall be there at two tomorrow afternoon. If you harbor any feelings of kindness towards me, I beg you, send no answer to this message. Permit me to live in hope at least that long.

Your humble servant,

Irving Braxiatel

He is, of course, prompt to his hour on the following day. But she is already waiting when he arrives, wearing a smile and an impeccably charming hat.

“My dear Romana.” He stops with ten paces between them, slides his hands into his pockets. “Just stay there for a moment and let me commit you to memory. What a perfect picture you make.”

She pauses for a beat, and then asks cheekily, “Am I permitted to move yet, or is your survey not yet complete?”

“Oh, not nearly complete.” He halves the space between them with a few quick steps, and halts again. “That was merely the long view, you see. But it wouldn’t do to forget the middle distance,” he pauses, then steps closer still, to a reasonable separation for conversation, “nor the near view, either.”

She takes a step closer, definitely inside his personal space. “And from here?” she asks.

He arches an eyebrow, and steps closer still, until they are nearly touching. “So far as I am concerned,” he murmurs, “there is no angle of the compass from which you do not deserve to be appreciated.”

There is a breathless moment of proximity, in which he wonders whether perhaps it was always this simple. Perhaps this degree of closeness was never the impossibility he considered it once; perhaps she was always here, just as he was, always within his reach had he only troubled to extend his arm.

That is precisely what he does now—not to embrace, but with bent elbow, offering it to her to hold. She does, locking her arm with his as they fall into sync for the few steps to the door leading into the wing.

“Now, Romana, which of the Classical Painting Wings would you care to see?” he asks, pausing at the keypad beside the door.

“Which of them?” she asks.

“There are... thirty-seven? No, the Draconian Wing is fully up-and-running now, that makes it thirty-eight. The spaces they inhabit are architecturally identical, down to the views through the windows, and all of them can be accessed through this door, or the one in the gardens. But the Collection is simply far too large for all our paintings to be displayed in one set of galleries, and in any case, attempting to mix the work of so many disparate species, worlds and eras would, while intellectually interesting, be ultimately a disservice to all of them.”

“So you employed a bit of dimensionally transcendental architecture,” she observes. “Stacked thirty-eight galleries to fill the space of one.”

“Precisely so. I’m afraid our Gallifreyan collection isn’t large enough yet to merit a gallery solely for painting—they’re with the other Gallifreyan artifacts up in the annex on the sixth floor, perhaps you’ve already seen?” She nods. “Ah, yes. Good. But many of the planets you will have studied at the Academy are represented here. Does any particular culture strike your fancy?”

“Perhaps Earth?” she asks. “I’d imagine you’re unusually knowledgeable on the subject.”

He frowns slightly. “I like to believe that I have a certain amount of specialist information about all of my Collection, of course, but no more so in the case of the Earth Wing than any of the others. Why should you suppose that?”

She bites her lip for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she says, “have I been indiscreet? I didn’t mean to imply...”

“Of course not, Romana,” he says. “I assure you, being called ‘unusually knowledgeable’ isn’t an experience that will ever offend me. I simply don’t understand where you came by that particular impression.”

“It’s only... your mother was lo...born there,” she says, uncertainly. “Wasn’t she?”

It is the very last thing he expects. For a moment, he is honestly startled. “Ah,” he says. “Yes. Yes, she was.” He attempts a smile that he knows full well ends up slightly queasy. “How well-informed you are, my dear.”

“I didn’t mean to pry,” she says, hurriedly. “I was researching you before I came to stay here, and there was so little about you easily accessible in the Matrix that I thought perhaps Lungbarrow’s family records would be the simplest way to learn...well, anything, and while those held very little information either, there were persistent but unclear references to a ‘scandal’ in all sorts of documents, and I finally... It was an obscure genealogical text in the Panopticon library, I don’t think it had been touched in generations, but I worked in the Hall of Records for a few months, I knew where to look, and... Well, of course I don’t think there’s anything for you to be ashamed of, or... You certainly can’t be held responsible for the choices of others, and... and it isn’t as though there was anything wrong with a Time Lord marrying a Human, of course, merely... unconventional.”

Brax focuses all his energy on the mental note he is penning to himself, to find and confiscate the book in question as soon as possible. He has no one but himself to blame for this conversation; if his efforts to suppress his own history were sufficiently sloppy to leave that information available to her, she deserved to find it. Her attitude—bigoted and condescending and ugly though it may be—is no worse than he was used to in every Time Lord around him while he was growing up. Better than most, in fact, because Romana wants to think well of him. And Brax thinks of Leela, and tries to focus on the woman Romana will become once she outgrows Gallifrey’s blinders, and is almost able not to feel the sick, hot anger roiling in his gut.

“I’m pleased to find you so open-minded,” he says, as lightly as he can manage. “As a matter of fact, our collection of Human paintings is exceptionally good. It’s a fine choice; I think you’ll enjoy it.”

She smiles, obviously relieved to be beyond this conversation with no apparent harm done. And he focuses on keying in the proper code for the door, and wills himself to forget, with as much intensity as he can summon. Forgetting is a form of lie, and Brax lies to himself with the practiced skill of lifetimes of experience. And so by the time the door slides open and he looks back to Romana, he is able to smile, if not with meaning, at least as though he means it.

“Shall we?” he asks, and extends his arm, beckoning her inside.

She steps over the threshold, heels clicking staccato on the tiles. But instead of slipping past his arm, she catches his hand as she passes, threads her fingers through his to pull him along with her.

Her hand is warm and smooth in his, her fingers long and lithe. And while he knows that it is nothing of the kind, knows that she calculates for everything she does, the gesture feels so innocent and uncontrived that it causes a physical ache in his chest. The past few minutes do not erase, but they dwindle and diminish.

“Romana,” he says, gently, and she stops, and turns. He looks at her, studying her face, bright and young and beautiful, the sun through the skylight catching the rich tints of her hair.

He smiles at her, softly, and she smiles back. And it hurts, the way a thousand years of waiting should.

“This way,” he says, retaining her hand as he leads her through the atrium towards the left wing of the gallery. The rooms form a u-shape, two paths leading away in parallel divided by a central wall. “Presuming, of course, that you would care to begin at the beginning. The paintings here are arranged roughly chronologically, with the occasional minor variation for thematic purposes.”

“Which way would you suggest?” she asks. “Do you find it a useful exercise to begin with the more developed forms and trace back their influences to their roots?”

“Sometimes,” he says, nearly laughing as he looks at her, “but today, I think perhaps we’d do better going back to the first budding, as it were, and watching the form blossom.”

“All right,” she agrees, and releases his hand to stride eagerly into the gallery proper. She turns to look back. “Aren’t you coming?”

“Forgive me, my dear,” he says. “I never could resist a flower in bloom.”

Her brow furrows, but he is already closing the space between them with quick, sure steps. “Lead on, Romana,” he pronounces, and she does.

*

The Roman portraits do little to hold her interest, the Byzantines still less. But the Très Riches Heures catches her attention, and Botticelli makes her eyes sparkle. She is suitably fascinated and horrified by Bosch, asking him question after question about the artist and his symbolism, and he permits himself almost to hold her as they linger before The Garden of Earthly Delights. He tells her the story of Judith for the sake of Gentileschi, narrates the tale of Saint Sebastian on behalf of Reubens. He points out Da Vinci’s John the Baptist, with suitable acknowledgement of Salome, and apologizes for the lack of La Gioconda (“Whatever her virtues, my dear, you may console yourself for missing her with the knowledge that she hasn’t any eyebrows”). Titian and the Mannerists, Vermeer and the Rococo—she takes them all in with a keen eye, a delicate sensibility and a well-developed taste. But it is only when they turn the corner on the pre-Impressionists that she stops dead, staring at the far wall.

He understands how this particular painting could have this equally particular effect. Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, greatest work of Édouard Manet, was painted to be shocking in a purely visual sense, though its subject matter is what provoked a furore at the time. Brax recognizes and values that double effect. The nude woman in the foreground, seated at a picnic with two fully-clad men, draws the eye of the viewer as a splash of bright color on a darker ground, a purely aesthetic effect which has no bearing on any social commentary. But the woman in the painting holds that initial attention through the commanding directness of her gaze, and challenges the viewer to linger long enough to consider all the implications of the canvas. It is an undeniable masterpiece in every respect.

“It’s breathtaking,” Romana whispers, after more than a full minute of uninterrupted staring.

For a moment, he looks at Romana with an intention of actually seeing. For a moment, the wonder in her face is profoundly pleasant, and then something within him shifts, and watching her becomes profoundly uncomfortable instead. For a moment, he is terrified that he will say something absolutely true, too-deep words which he cannot yet predict but which will no doubt reveal to him (and, less significantly, to her) some terrifyingly honest corner of his own mind. And then he looks away, and permits his veneer of collected calm to sink in through his skin. The moment dissolves, silently defused.

“Would you care to meet him?” asks Brax, with an inner flush of relief at finding himself reliably back on-script.

“Meet whom?”

“Manet,” says Brax. “The artist. I’ve commissioned a painting from him, something just for the Collection. I’m certain he’d be charmed to meet you.”

There are at least a dozen portraitists per each of the thirty-eight painting wings of whom Brax could say as much. If he had obviously steered her, this particular plan could never have worked. Had the choice been Braxiatel’s own among the human painters already taking his coin, it would have been John Singer Sargent; he is still not entirely convinced that the Portrait of Madam X isn’t this Romana painted later in her life, though admittedly Romana has a more delicate nose. Still, as these things go, Manet is a very solid choice.

“Isn’t that terribly illegal?” she asks. “Interfering in the timelines of significant historical figures?”

“Ah, but the definition of ‘significant’ is so terribly subjective. Should the CIA happen to be monitoring the precise moment in all of spacetime which we elect to visit and come blazing in to arrest us both, I will be more than happy to proclaim that you were a mere innocent, tempted to vice by my dastardly machinations.” Her eyelids flicker as he drags out the word ‘vice,’ and he has to swallow a smile. “I would never permit any harm to come to you,” he adds, inflecting the statement with precisely the proper degree of sincerity. “Trust me, Romana.”

He watches her struggle against his consciously mesmeric voice, unable to look away from his eyes. “My father used to tell me that if any man ever spoke those words to me, I should run in the opposite direction.”

“I’m not certain whether I can second that advice,” he says, stepping into her personal space. “I suppose it would depend.”

“Depend on what?” She is leaning towards him, inch by perilous inch. He can feel the heat of her skin, taste the scent of her in his nose and in his mouth. The brush of her breath against his chin is leaving his skin unbearably over-sensitized. And for this one moment, he grants himself the luxury of recklessness, takes the conscious decision to make a wrong choice, recognizes that his credit is high enough to afford a wager he might lose. He cranes his neck downwards and brings his lips close to her ear.

“On whether you’d be hoping I would chase you,” he murmurs.

Her breath catches. She turns instantly, in time for him to watch her pupils blow to twice their normal size. Her emotions are showing only too clearly on her face: she is utterly and entirely terrified. He doubts, in fact, that she has ever been so afraid in all her hundred and forty years.

He is also absolutely certain that she has never been so aroused.

He could kiss her now. She would allow him, there is no doubt of that. She wants him to kiss her. She wants far more than that, and he wants to give it. He could push her up against the far wall, her body warm and pliant against his, all supple, yielding flesh. He could pleasure her right there and then, with his lips on her neck and his fingers under her skirt, and she would moan and sob and clutch at him, would cry his name under the painted gaze of Manet’s timeless demimondaine. And then, when Romana was sweet and slow with release, he could lead her upstairs to his bed, and keep her there until he had fulfilled every fantasy that he has painstakingly catalogued in a thousand years of wanting.

There will be a hundred new fantasies if he keeps on wanting just another week more.

“Paris is waiting,” he says, and lifts his hand between them, palm up. “Shall we?”

She swallows, and he watches her struggle to regain her control. His predominant emotion shifts suddenly to pride, at everything she is, everything she will become. It takes a moment for the paternal shadings of that sentiment to occur to him, a further moment for them to become uncomfortable, a moment after that for him to banish that discomfort. Senseless, primitive taboos have no value in his life, and ought to form no basis of his thinking.

“It’s against my better judgment,” she says, clearly fighting to sound unaffected, “but what’s the good of being alive if one declines to live?”

“A very sound philosophy.”

She slides her hand into his, and curls her fingers around his palm. “Take me to Paris, then, my Lord Braxiatel.”

“As you command, my Lady,” he says, smiling, and leads her in the direction of his TARDIS.

*

“But surely, it is an impossibility that I should not paint her,” Édouard protests. “Surely, you could not have brought her to me for any other reason but this.”

“She wished to meet the great genius Manet,” says Brax, pursing his lips in a smile. “How was I to say no?”

“And now that she has met me, you wish that I should paint her, and I insist that I will paint her.”

“It is not to me to wish any such thing, my friend,” Brax protests. “I could not ask so much of her.”

“To be immortalized forever by my brush? This you could not ask?”

“The young lady makes her own decisions,” says Brax, “and may do precisely as she pleases. It is she you must ask.”

“I have no need to ask her,” says Édouard. “She knows full well that youth is fleeting, that what I offer her is the one sure net to catch it as it flies. She knows that I can make her beauty sing to all the ages yet to come. Her eyes are older than she is; they tell me that she sees the truth. We need no words, she and I, to know each other’s souls. Is that not so, mademoiselle?”

“Your work is captivating, monsieur,” she says.

“Your beauty is captivating, mademoiselle.”

Romana looks to Brax. “You commissioned the painting,” she says. “I suppose you must have had some subject in mind.”

“I trust Monsieur Manet to know his own work better than I could,” he says, smiling.

Édouard waves a dismissive hand, a perfectly Gallic gesture. “Of course he wishes that it is you I should paint,” he says. “What man would not wish for such a thing? To see his mistress captured at the height of her beauty, to have the best of her yet to hold even long after love has faded—how could he fail to want this?”

“I believe, Monsieur Manet, that you misunderstand the relationship between Mademoiselle Romana and myself.”

“I believe, Monsieur Braxiatel, that I do not.”

Brax allows his smile to play around the corners of his mouth, deliberately not looking at Romana. There is a rustle of fabric, and then he does look, cannot help it, as she twines herself around him. “Please, Irving,” she says, gazing imploringly up at him with the definite hint of a pout, “say that you don’t object to me sitting for Monsieur Manet’s painting. I do so want to.”

If Édouard Manet were not standing a scant few feet away, Brax thinks it entirely likely that a lifetime’s iron self-control would crack right there and then. But of course, if Manet were not here, none of this would be happening at all. Brax is well aware that this little comedy is directed at the painter, Romana playing up to Édouard’s expectations of what the wealthy art collector’s lovely young inamorata should be. As much as the very notion of her acting such a role veers on the absurd, as much as he could never want Romana truly simpering and submissive, Braxiatel’s reaction to this game is instantaneous, and mortifyingly, uncharacteristically physical. The strongest, most indomitable woman he has ever met playing the sweet little coquette for his benefit, deferring to his whim, attendant on his desire... It all leaves him very nearly shaking with need. Every wish he has ever entertained in his lives, no matter how strongly, has been a mere preference compared to how entirely he wants her in this moment.

He must do something. He must touch her somehow. Fortunately, he is an actor in this scene as much as she. A single curl of her hair lies nestled against her cheek, and he twines it around his finger—casually proprietorial, condescendingly affectionate. “Do you?” he asks. “All you had to do was say. How could I deny you anything, my pet?”

She smiles with an absolutely indecent degree of pleasure, and tips up on her toes to kiss him quickly on the cheek. “You are so very dear,” she says. “Thank you, darling.” She settles back on her heels. “Now run along. Monsieur Manet and I have work to do.”

“I am being dismissed?” he asks.

She flutters her lashes at him. “It doesn’t do to come between an artist and his muse,” she says. “You’d only be in the way. And don’t you want the finished painting to be a surprise?”

Brax turns to Manet. “You see how it is,” he says, sadly.

“Les femmes,” agrees Édouard, in a philosophical sigh. “They let us believe we have such power...”

“...and yet ses petits doigts are strong enough to tug us in any direction they wish us to go,” says Brax, twirling his little finger in illustration. “Very well, I know when I’m not wanted! And when Monsieur Manet and his genius steal you away from me for good, my dove, and I waste away of a broken heart, perhaps you will be sweet enough to shed a tear over my grave.”

“I’ll consider it,” she says, “but crying does have such a very bad effect on my complexion.”

Brax and Manet both laugh. “You need have no fear of me, Monsieur Braxiatel,” Édouard assures. “If you had any other lover, mademoiselle, you must believe I would not rest until I had won you from him, but I have a wife and son to support, and Monsieur Braxiatel has an endearing habit of paying his bills on time.”

“With that assurance,” says Brax, and kisses Romana’s hand. “How long am I to expect you to take her from me?”

“Two hours today, perhaps three. And the same again five, perhaps six times more, as the painting demands.”

“I’ll leave a time corridor open for you,” he tells Romana. “All you need do is walk through that door,” he gestures to a closet on the far side of Manet’s studio, “and you will be back on the Collection. I’ll seal it with your bioprint, but just as a precaution, don’t let anyone else touch that door until you’re through.”

She nods, and for a moment gives him a smile that is truly Romana, not the exaggerated part she is playing. He returns it with a smile of his own, and then turns away from her.

“Monsieur,” he says, shaking Manet’s hand, and pressing an envelope into it as he does. “Be careful how you open that.

“Mademoiselle Romana,” says Manet, “if you would sit there, please—yes, by the window, in the light. Today, I think, just sketches, to help us both decide what will be best. However is most comfortable for you, mademoiselle.”

Romana complies, and Édouard opens the envelope while she is busy settling herself in. He nearly drops it when he sees its contents. He reads the note written on the inner flap and looks back up at Braxiatel.

Brax raises his eyebrows. Manet nods, somewhat dazed.

Brax smiles back in return, and slips into his TARDIS where it stands in the corner of the studio, thinking of another scheme gone perfectly to plan. Certainly, there has been a cost to this particular adventure; the diamonds in that envelope could finance the purchase of half of Paris in Manet’s day and age. But it will be worth it, entirely worth it, if the painter follows the instructions Brax provided.

You may keep precisely as many of them, Monsieur, as you can persuade her to wear in her hair.

*

“It’s such a beautiful city,” says Romana, her eyes bright and eager. “Édouard took me walking in the park today—he said that nothing would put the light of love on my face like Paris.”

They stroll towards the Mansionhouse along the Grand Canal, heading from the semi-permanent time corridor to 1864 Paris now housed in the Petit Trianon. She has just returned from her fourth sitting with Manet—one per day from her perspective, though for the painter the separations have been of a somewhat longer duration.

“And is that how he’s decided to paint you?” Brax asks. “Agleam with ‘the light of love?’”

“It’s a secret,” says Romana, airily. “You aren’t allowed to know.”

“Oh, but Romana,” he says, feigning a deeply wounded expression, “I have a terrible passion for secrets.”

She looks back at him over her shoulder. “And that’s why it’s such fun keeping one from you.”

He shakes his head sadly. “I’ve created a monster.”

She raises a haughty brow. “If you mean me, Monsieur Braxiatel, I really must protest. I am my own Time Lady. You haven’t created me.”

It is an uncomfortable reminder, though whether because of its truth or its falsity he cannot quite determine. He does not permit her to notice in either case. “Quite so, of course,” he says. “And as you are so terribly independent, my Lady, I can hardly assume out of hand that you will wish to spend your evening in my company. Just how ardently, pray, will I be required to beg for such a favor?”

She bites her lip. “How ardently do you want me to say yes?”

“With all my hearts.”

“I should hardly wish to do any harm to those.”

“If I tempt you with all manner of sensory pleasures, would that convince you?”

“Tell me more.”

“As you know, KS-159 is a collection not simply of visual art, but of all culture. Our Culinary Wing is devoted largely to the preservation of recipes and to the cultivation of edible species from across the universe, but occasionally we also play host to various culinary virtuosos. This week we have a visiting chef on-hand from the pleasure world Midnight, an exceptionally talented Venusian gentleman, and I was hoping you might join me for a tasting. I promise you, the experience will in itself be inherently enjoyable. The only hardship you will be required to endure is the tedium of my company.”

“In that case,” she says, pure gaminerie in every line of her face, “wouldn’t the gentlemanly thing be to bow out, and permit me to enjoy the delights of the Culinary Wing all on my own?”

“Oh, Romana,” he says, and catches her teasingly around the waist, pulling her close, “I like to consider myself a generous man, but I’m not nearly so selfless as that.”

“Mmm,” she says, resting her hands on his chest. “In that case, I suppose I shall have to resign myself to sharing the evening with you, though on the strict understanding that the only attraction is the promise of such extraordinary cuisine.”

“What other reason could you have?”

They are tucked away in one of the secluded avenues, shaded by oaks, cut off from the world, and Romana is lingering in his embrace, her eyes fixed on his. It is all nearly enough to make him do something foolishly precipitate... until there is a rustling in the undergrowth, and a weather-beaten face beneath a balding cranium emerges from behind a shrub.

“Mister Crofton,” says Brax. He keeps one arm around Romana, no jumping apart like guilty schoolchildren, but turns courteously to face the new arrival. “I was only just admiring the new lilies by the Summer-House. You’ve done an exceptional job with them. I doubted whether they would survive at all in this climate, and you have made them positively flourish.”

“Thank you, Mr. Braxiatel,” says Mr. Crofton, with modest pleasure. “It was a good suggestion of yours, this breed. They’re hardier than they look, just like you said.”

“I am pleased to hear I could be of some practical use to the Collection. I shouldn’t care to become merely ornamental; I leave that to the lilies.” He turns briefly away. “Romana, this is Mr. Crofton, the Collection’s head groundskeeper. Mr. Crofton, may I present the Lady Romanadvoratrelundar, visiting scholar from my homeworld.”

“Miss,” says Mr. Crofton, doffing his cap.

“Mr. Crofton,” says Romana, with a friendly nod in his direction. “The gardens of this world are stunningly lovely.”

“I believe I warned you how susceptible I am to compliments about my planet, Romana,” says Brax.

“It was a compliment to Mr. Crofton, not to you,” she says, with a fond glare at Brax. “It’s his dedication and skill that are responsible, none of your doing. You’re to be commended, Mr. Crofton.”

“Thank you, miss,” says Mr. Crofton.

“We shall let you get back to your work, Mr. Crofton,” says Brax.

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” adds Romana.

“And the same to you, miss. Good afternoon, Mr. Braxiatel.”

Romana leans her head against Brax’s shoulder as they stroll on, past hidden sculptures and susurrating fountains and immense formal gardens stretching off towards the horizon. “I do love it here,” she sighs.

“Do you?”

She looks up at him. “So much,” she admits.

“I always hoped you would.”

He nearly bites off his own tongue the instant the words have left his lips. No matter how warm the afternoon sun, how lazy the atmosphere, how sweet it is to have her with him, so near and so at ease, he cannot even begin to forgive himself such an egregious slip.

She is still smiling, but her brow is furrowed. “I don’t understand.”

He puts on his most charming smile, refusing to let his self-reproach show. And by way of covering up one truth, he provides her with another. “I think, Romana,” he says, “that I have been waiting for you for a very long time.”

She blushes deeply and glances away. He is afraid for a moment that he has gone too far, but all she says is, “I’m not sure what to say.”

He is struck by a terrible, wildly irresponsible thought. Stay, he thinks. Stay here and be my Romana, not the Doctor’s and not Gallifrey’s. Stay here and have a new dominion, smaller than the one you are meant to rule, but safer and more beautiful. Stay and be this Romana, happy and whole, not the aching, bitter woman you will otherwise grow to be. That is what you ought to say to me, Romana. Tell me that you will stay.

He does not say it. He cannot. She has already lived that life, and time itself might well crumble if he keeps her from it. But he wants to. He wants it to be like now, always, to live out his lives in this perpetual golden afternoon, with her.

They have reached the steps of the Mansionhouse now, the nearest door to her quarters. “Say,” he says, “that you will be ready for dinner at seven-thirty, and that I may stop by and collect you then.”

She looks up at him, clearly relieved and grateful that he has let the matter drop. “I will, and you may,” she promises.

“Perfect,” he says, and adds, with a little bow, “as ever. I shall see you then, my Lady.”

She lets him retreat several steps before calling out after him. “And Irving...”

He turns back. “Romana?”

“I wasn’t waiting,” she says, “but only because I had no idea before we met that there was anyone in the universe worth waiting for.”

She disappears inside before he can even begin to qualify his emotions, and fails to make any better progress before life puts the question out of his mind.

*

“I really don’t see why that should be necessary,” she argues.

“The point, my dear Romana, is that suppressing one of your senses will heighten the others.”

“Oh, yes, I understand the principle,” she says. “But as you’re not wearing a blindfold, I don’t see why I ought to.”

“Ah, the very simple explanation is that we haven’t a mirror in the middle of the table to point in your direction,” he says, smiling smugly. “Depriving the vision is one method of enhancing the sense of taste, but I am also certain that anything would taste better to the man fortunate enough to be looking at you at the time.”

She makes a face, trying not to smile. “My Lord Braxiatel, there is no possible excuse to be made for at least half of the things you say.”

“Please, Romana, don’t undervalue me to such a degree. It must be a bare minimum of three-quarters of the things I say.”

She laughs. “I suppose there’s nothing for it but to agree to your plan, or you’ll go on flattering me until I can’t see straight in any case.”

“That’s the spirit,” he says. “Tilt up your chin?”

She gives one last teasingly dubious sidelong glance, but does as she is told.

“Eyes closed.”

She complies. He wraps the band of black silk over her eyes and ties it behind her head, careful not to trap so much as a single strand of her hair in the process, and purposefully ignoring the tightening of his lungs, the heat already swelling in his ribcage.

“Quite comfortable?” he asks.

“Tolerably.” As he cannot look her in the eye, all his attention focuses itself on her lips, the momentary pink flash of her tongue. It occurs to him, not for the first time, how utterly tortuous this experience is likely to be on his part. The thought only makes his eyes draw a little narrower, his hearts beat a hint quicker.

Brax reaches beneath the tabletop and presses a button on the underside. On the table beside him, an exquisitely laquered panel slides back and another moves silently upwards to replace it, bearing two small glass dishes on a silver tray.

“Venusian cuisine,” he says, picking up a self-chilled spoon and filling it from one of the dishes, “uses extreme contrasts as a method of shocking the palate. These contrasts may be of many kinds—flavor, texture, acidity, spice, even down to the sounds a dish produces as it is being consumed. In this case, the focus is on temperature. You shouldn’t swallow it right away—give it a moment to develop.” He brings the spoon close to her lips. “Open your mouth, Romana.”

The spoon is so cold that she shivers slightly as it touches her lower lip. Its contents have a flaky texture not unlike shaved ice, but as it melts in the mouth the mixture coheres and takes on an almost gelatinous quality. The flavor is mild, several distinct floral notes with a hint of the deep sweetness of honey. Once Romana’s bite has disappeared—once Brax has watched the way her mouth moves around the spoon, and only just resisted shifting in his chair—he takes a spoonful for himself, and savors the delicate balance of flavors.

“That’s marvelous,” says Romana. “What’s it called?”

“The original name is almost impossible for a humanoid throat to pronounce. The nearest approximation I can manage is something like ‘rgggxsthund,’ though that’s far enough off that a true Venusian would laugh at it. On Midnight, they call it ‘iced powderberry custard,’ which is a fairly gross mistranslation in every possible respect.”

“May I have another bite?”

“Of course.” He permits himself a moment just looking at her, her mouth hanging slightly agape, expectant and still and waiting for him, before feeding her the next bite.

“Why ‘powderberry’?” she asks him, after swallowing.

“One of the major ingredients is a small, round, white berry—not, in fact, native to Venus, though it grows well there and has long been used in their cuisine. When this berry is dried the skin peels away, and the flesh inside is so delicate that at the slightest touch, it dissolves to dust. During the cooking process, the chef simply shakes a cluster of dried berries over the cooking vessel and they crumble into the custard mixture.”

“Like snowfall,” she says. “How wonderfully picturesque.”

“It is indeed,” he agrees. “Are you ready for the next course?”

“Please.”

He turns the dial on the handle of the spoon and it warms instantly in his hand, to approximately ten degrees above room temperature. The contents of the other bowl are steaming slightly, and he fills the spoon with care. “This one is very hot,” he warns her. When the spoon is just touching her mouth, she purses her lips into a perfect ‘O’ and blows gently. He thinks it very fortunate that she cannot see him; his eyes do not actually roll back into his head, but he does blink very quickly, more than once.

He tips the spoonful of rust-red soup into her waiting mouth, and her eyebrows shoot up immediately. “Oh!” she says, and coughs slightly. “I see what you mean about contrasts.”

“Extraordinary, isn’t it?” he says, after a bite of his own.

“What makes it so spicy?”

“That, my dear, is a secret so carefully-guarded than even I cannot find it out. There are a minimum of seventy-three separate spices in Venusian curry—again, a horrendous mistranslation, but the best that any standard humanoid language can manage—and several of them not only grow nowhere but Venus, they are used exclusively for this single dish. Chemists have spent their lives trying to replicate that flavor and died unsatisfied.”

She licks a drop of soup from the corner of her mouth. “That is a fate I shouldn’t wish on anyone,” she says, a little too demurely, any and all double entendres very obviously intended.

It feels as though she has just taken hold of every muscle fiber in his body and given a swift, sharp tug. “Oh, I hope not,” he says, low and deep, and her breath stutters visibly. He pauses for a beat, and then adds, in the same tone, “Are you ready for more?”

She blushes. “Entirely.”

He presses the button beneath the table again. The panel with the glass dishes slides to the left, and another glides upwards out of the table to replace it. This one contains another pair of plates, robin’s-egg blue china this time. On each of them stands a tiny tower skewered by a long-handled fork. They are layered like mille-feuilles, but the ingredients, Brax knows, are savory rather than sweet.

“This one is going to be a bit of a mouthful,” he says, but as lightly as he can, with conscious effort not to imply any further significance—there is no sense in allowing this game to grow needlessly vulgar, especially not so soon. “And unlike the others, this time you’ll have to chew.”

“I don’t think that will prove beyond my faculties,” she says, dryly.

“Nor do I,” he says, smiling, and then, “Open for me, Romana.”

Despite his warning, there’s a moment of fumbling as she tries to wrap her mouth around the over-sized forkful without the benefit of sight. She brings her napkin up to her mouth the moment he pulls the fork away, but her eyebrows incline in surprised pleasure.

“That’s delicious,” she says, once her mouth is empty. “Is that Giduvian marsh duck?”

“Layers of both the flesh and the crispy skin,” he says, approvingly. “Along with flash-fried sea greens, several varieties of exotic firm-fleshed mushrooms cooked in the duck fat, a thin layer of a fermented bean paste called miso that originated on Earth, and on the bottom, to catch the juices, a savory cake made of a coarse-ground native Venusian grain called ‘trlyxyl.’”

“No wonder it made for such a mouthful,” she laughs. “The mix of flavors and textures was exquisite.”

“I’m glad you think so,” he says, smiling. “Shall we go on?”

They spend the next ten courses in much the same way, teasing and showing off and finding excuses for the odd flirtatious remark. The acts of watching her without reciprocal observation and of feeding her while she sits calmly and waits for him don’t lose their charm; on the contrary, the humming in his veins only grows louder as the evening progresses. Once, he dares to swipe a finger across the corner of her mouth in pursuit of a missed drop of sauce, and her cheeks flush to a more perfect pink than he has ever seen them before.

The last course arrives on a polished-copper salver. “I am very much hoping that this course is lighter,” says Romana. “I fear I’ll burst at the seams otherwise.”

“I consider myself to have a vested interest in seeing you walk out this room in one piece,” he replies. “I believe you can trust me to look out for your well-being, at least while you aren’t doing any looking yourself.”

“There’s that word again.”

“Which word?”

“Trust,” she says, the sibilant hissing lazily through her lips.

“Have I ever yet steered you wrong?”

“That, my Lord Braxiatel, is a matter of debate. Some would argue that you have been immersing me in a life of sensory bliss that will make my existence after I leave your world seem terribly bleak and forlorn.”

“I have been accustoming you to the life you deserve,” he says, “the one you were born to enjoy.” He pauses for a beat, and adds, his tone darker and more suggestive, “Bliss suits you, Romana.”

“Then I suppose I shall simply have to surfeit myself on it while I can.”

“And that is why I am here,” he says. “To see to it that you are thoroughly... surfeited.”

Her breathing has grown terribly uneven. In a night of culinary delights, it is the most delicious thing he has seen all evening.

“Well, then,” she says, “go ahead.” She parts her lips slightly, holding her mouth open. Visually, there is a hint of the ridiculous about the pose, but in a sense more charming than otherwise.

The bounty on the last tray consists of a pair of bright yellow-orange fruits, smooth-skinned and shiny, perfectly spherical and about the size of a curled finger. Each is topped with a stem and a ruff of inedible leaves, and each shows a small puncture mark on its side where it has been piped full of sweet cream, thick and speckled with spices. He lifts one, careful not to squeeze too tightly, and presses it gently into Romana’s mouth, until his index and middle fingers brush up against her lips.

“Bite,” he instructs, and her lips close with the very tips of his two fingers trapped between them. She pauses for a beat, and then flicks her tongue beneath his fingers. Her ostensible goal is to lick the cream from her lips, but when her tongue swipes across the pad of his thumb, it isn’t a coincidence.

They both sit unmoving for a moment. He slides his index finger out from between her lips and rests it beneath her chin, dropping the stem fragment of fruit into his free hand, but he leaves his thumb where it is. She chews her mouthful of fruit, clearly moving her jaw as subtly as she can in the meanwhile, and he doesn’t move until after she has swallowed. And then he stays still for a few seconds longer, drawing out the tension, before tugging down ever-so-gently with his thumb. He runs it along her lower lip, and then the upper, tracing them, caressing them, pulling them just slightly out of their natural shape.

The only move she makes is to shudder as he touches her, her breath stuttering through her parted lips, fast and unsteady. Her brows are as expressive as her eyes cannot be, raised high as she trembles. Oh, how many centuries has he wanted her like this? Her hearts racing, her mouth dry, trembling and tentative and nervous but so willing, and for him. He runs his fingers along the line of her jaw, delicately, so delicately, tilting her chin up to bare her throat to him in an intoxicatingly bestial display of submission. And the dozen relentless fantasies he has only just been keeping at bay surge to the forefront of his brain, so violent in their onrush that he bites the inside of his cheek against them, retaining his self-control by the narrowest of margins.

He nudges his thumb between her lips, pressing up against her teeth in instruction. She hesitates, exhales, considers for a moment before opening her mouth to let his thumb slide inside as far as the first knuckle, wrapping her lips around it as she does. Her tongue is wet silk as it slides across his fingertip, tracing, teasing. It swirls upwards to describe the line of his cuticle, swipe over his nail. And then she hollows her cheeks, breathes in tightly, and sucks.

He is unbearably glad that she cannot see him just now. He can’t take it. He can’t, not without something for the pressure. He grinds the heel of his hand into his lap, uncomfortably hard, but it does nothing to diminish his erection. It isn’t enough. He has to stop this. He has to stop this now, or before he can think he will have her bent over that table and begging—and the image in his mind, how clearly he sees that, feels it, her skirt bunched up dark around her waist, his hands clutching purple on her white white hips, and from her breathing he knows how wet she is, he swears he can nearly smell her, he knows how much she wants this, how she would moan and whimper and writhe, and the blood is pounding in his ears, and if he just opened his trousers, he wonders, would she let him trace those perfect swollen lips with his cock instead of his finger, would she enact in reality the pantomime she is giving him now, would she...

He exerts one last enormous act of will, and whites his mind out completely. None of this is a part of the plan. He is better than this. He is above a crass surrender to the last shreds of animal hidden a million lies below his surface. He is Irving Braxiatel, and this night has already strayed far too far out of his hand. He will not permit it to stray any further.

He stands, breathes, once, twice. He slips his thumb out of Romana’s mouth, and rests it flush with his other fingers, beside her ear.

“Irving?” she murmurs, unsure.

He tilts her face up towards him and leans down, brushing his nose against hers. “Romana,” he says, soft but confident.

She is absolutely still, a centimeter shy of a kiss, breathing his breath. And he slides his fingers up, and pulls off her blindfold, and slips it calmly into his pocket, and sits quietly back down in his own chair.

She does not open her eyes for the first moment, does not move. When she does, it is to find him biting into a piece of cream-filled Venusian fruit without an apparent concern in all the universe.

“It’s called gllingan,” he informs her, as he discards the stem back on the copper tray. “Delectable, isn’t it?”

“Delectable,” she repeats, so dazed he is not sure she even knows what she’s saying.

“Did you enjoy our little feast, my dear?”

She blinks. “Yes, I... yes, of course.”

“As did I,” he says, “and infinitely more for your company.”

She frowns. “Irving...”

“You’re looking a bit tired, Romana, are you feeling entirely well? I haven’t truly pushed you to eat more than you wanted, have I? I would never forgive myself.”

“No,” she says, and swallows. “No, nothing of that sort. I’m perfectly all right.”

“Perhaps I should walk you back to your rooms.”

She opens her mouth to speak, and then presses her lips closed again, looking away from him. “Yes,” she says. “I suppose you should.”

A few minutes later, he is bidding her goodnight in front of her quarters. As he kisses her cheek, he feels the skin beneath his lips tug against him as her mouth tightens, but when the kiss is ended she turns away before he can catch more than a fleeting glance at her face.

“Goodnight, Irving,” she says, without looking back at him, and vanishes through the door.

*

After that, he does not see her for nearly three days. He has judged that this is one of those moments when the best thing is to wait for her to come to him, no matter how arduous that waiting may prove. Running his Collection is a great deal of work, and he has been neglecting it recently; there is more than enough to fill his hours in the meanwhile. But he has begun to grow nervous that he may have committed a worse misstep than he realized, until the moment when she turns up at his office in the dwindling hours of the afternoon.

“May I come in?” Romana asks, lingering in his doorway.

He looks up at her, and does not have to even begin to exaggerate his reaction. “Romana,” he breathes, crossing the room to her as quickly as he can. “Oh, my dear, you have outdone yourself. Every time I think I may perhaps grow used to the sight of you, you contrive through some new sorcery to grow even lovelier than before.” He takes her hand, raises it above her head and spins her in a circle, taking in the full picture. “I fear that if the words have yet been coined to capture you, they remain beyond my reach.”

In truth, she is looking exceptionally beautiful, even for herself. Her dress is petal-pink, the skirt wide, draped into a myriad of elegant tucks. Her silk shawl is softest cream, and she is wearing pearls at her ears, around her wrist, twined into the wide braid of hair that frames her face. It is absolutely feminine and perfectly elegant in every detail.

“I’m sure you’ll make the best of the vocabulary at your disposal,” she says, with a teasing, close-lipped smile.

“Radiant,” he decides. “If there is a sun in the universe which you could not outshine, I’ve never seen it yet.”

“I’m afraid I can’t capture you quite so efficiently,” she says. “You managed it in one word, whereas ‘egregious flatterer’ is two.”

He presses his hands to his chest. “Broken-hearted egregious flatterer, now.”

She covers them with her own hands. “If I’ve broken them, I suppose it’s my responsibility to fix them.”

“Oh, how I wish you would.”

“Then come here and let me try,” she says, pulling him backwards, out of his office. “I have a surprise for you.”

“Do you indeed?”

The waiting room outside his office proper—the last room of the Braxiatel Collection itself before stepping over the threshold into Brax’s TARDIS—is empty, deserted. The doors are closed, which is unusual for this time of day, and an instant’s glimpse at them in his peripheral vision informs Brax that they have been locked as well. He might spend more time contemplating that interesting fact were it not for the presence, on the other side of the room, of a finely-crafted display easel holding a painting covered by a velvet cloth.

“Édouard finished the painting today!” she says, lingering close to him as he stops to look. “Would you like to see it?”

“I’d be honored.”

“Well, you can’t,” she says, grinning impishly. “Not until I say so.”

“I’m beginning to fear that I’ve spoilt you,” he laughs. “I feel certain you were much better behaved when we met. What has put you in such a mood this afternoon, my Lady?”

“Édouard gave me champagne. To celebrate the painting being finished. Though not enough to have any really significant effect, of course. I could hardly tell him that my metabolism functions twelve times more quickly than his because I was loomed a million light years further from Earth than any star he’s ever seen.”

“You might have,” he says, “but he would neither have understood nor believed you.”

“Mmm,” she says. “I think I had rather enough in any case. One wouldn’t like to think of oneself as overdoing such things.” She still has not moved away from him. In fact, she is curling closer, pressing into him. “Irving,” she asks, “would you dance with me again?”

He looks down at her, sharp in his surprise. “Not the tango again this time,” she says. “Something simpler. Slower.” She grasps him by the cuffs, pulls his arms around her waist, slides hers around his neck. “Closer,” she murmurs.

His mind stutters to a halt. He has not planned for this. This is not in his calculations, has not been factored for, been analyzed. He does not grasp the subtleties. He does not know the risks. “Of course,” he says, automatically, because it seems safer to give her what she asks for, “if you like.”

Her head is on his shoulder. He can feel her breath, just along the line of his collar, barely grazing the thinnest possible line of his skin. It might be pleasant, except for the persistent sense of wrongness that this whole scene provokes.

She moves one of her hands away from his head, far enough not to deafen him when she snaps her fingers. The computer embedded in the walls begins piping in music, a piece he does not recognize, though the style clearly pegs it as originating in the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. The music is wordless, but the tempo is that of a ballad, measured and lilting.

“I am fairly certain I didn’t program that,” he observes, as she replaces her arm to drape over his shoulder once more.

“No,” she agrees, glancing up at him. “You gave me access to your servers three days ago. I added one or two minor features.”

“How minor?” he asks, as they gently sway to tempo. “Just so that I can avoid any self-destruct protocols, should you happen to have added them.”

It is a fairly feeble attempt at wit, but she breathes a hint of a laugh all the same. “Just the music,” she says, “and this.”

Two of her fingers slide together in a deliberate gesture—he feels rather than sees it, against the fabric of his jacket—and the lights dim. And the world is just Romana and her breathing, the brush of their two bodies as they move.

“Irving,” she says, tentatively.

“Romana?”

“I’m leaving for home in only a little more than a week.”

He is not entirely sure where this conversation is going, but he knows for certain that he is not steering it. That is cause for a very great deal of concern. “Twelve days.”

“Yes.”

“Will you miss it here?” he tries.

She smiles against his chest. “Very much.”

“You must know that you will always be welcome on the Collection. You needn’t wait for another invitation; the doors here will never be closed to you.”

“That’s kind of you, and I’m very glad,” she says, “but it’s not what I was thinking of.”

He hates being forced to ask. “And what were you thinking?”

She looks up into his eyes. “That with so little time left,” she says, “I haven’t any more to waste.”

She could mean either of two things. He thinks he knows which, is not prepared for either, and chooses the less likely of the pair. “And you consider the time you’ve been spending with me to be wasted?”

Her eyes widen. “No!” Her cheeks redden in obvious mortification. “How could I possibly? You’re...” She pauses. “You’ve been so very good to me. I haven’t thanked you properly, for everything, and I ought to have done.”

“You don’t ever need to thank me, Romana,” he says, softly.

“I think possibly,” she bites her lip, “possibly that’s the trouble, really. You’ve been such a perfect gentleman, and... well, of course I am younger than you are, and I think... I think perhaps you’ve been trying not to pressure me.”

He has been trying to shape her, mold her, manipulate her, influence her—those things, yes. But those are not quite the same as pressure, and given Braxiatel’s complex relationship with the truth, he is comfortable drawing a distinction that fine. “I would like to believe that was true,” he says.

She nods. “After the last time we danced, you said that you owed me a favor.”

“Even unto half my kingdom.”

“I’ve decided what I want.”

“You need only name it.”

“I think,” she says, leaning up until they are nearly nose-to-nose, her eyes earnestly locked on his, “that I would like for you to pressure me just a little bit more.”

He freezes. “Romana...”

She kisses him.

It is perfectly satisfactory, as these things go. Romana’s lips are soft on his, precise and breathless. For nearly a thousand years Brax has wanted to do this, and now she is kissing him, a kiss with no technical flaw that he can place. Her breath is sweet, her body yielding, with no overeager thrusting of tongues or adolescent groping to spoil the effect.

He feels nothing.

It was not meant to be like this. It was not meant to be now. There were meant to be fireworks—literal fireworks, and metaphorical ones as well. It was meant to be the Garden of Whispers, at twilight, three nights from tonight, and she was meant to be watching the colors in the sky. She was meant to be surprised for a moment when he pulled her into his arms, to be left blinking after the first gentle brush of his lips. And then she was going to look at him, and close her eyes, and lean into him, and let him kiss her and kiss her until the world was fully dark, and the bellow of explosions had faded, and only the night birds singing in the orange trees could remind them that there was life in the universe apart from themselves.

Romana pulls back. And they are standing in an ordinary room, being serenaded by an acceptable but unexceptional set of recorded strings, in the gloomy half-light. The expression on Romana’s face is tentative, unsure.

“Have I...” she begins, and stops. “I thought...”

He kisses her to shut her up, and to make the best of it, and to buy himself time to think, and because perhaps it will get better. It doesn’t. It is still just a kiss, uninspiring and impersonal, with no rush in it for him of any kind. Something in the pretense is enough to deceive her, however, because this time when they break apart, she smiles.

“Oh,” she says, blushing. “Good, then.”

He tries to smile back. He thinks it is quite a serviceable piece of acting, on the whole. “Romana?”

“Yes?” she asks.

“May I see your painting?”

“The painting?” she asks, slightly thrown. “Yes, of course, if you like.”

“I would, very much.”

“All right,” she agrees, and gives him a hesitant smile. She slides from his arms as gracefully as a dancer, and only then do admiration and desire spark in him, watching her as she walks away. Even as he thinks as much, the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach goes on growing stronger.

She spreads her fingers wide as she walks, and the lights brighten again. “Are you quite ready?” she asks, when she is standing beside the painting. She is bright and eager, exactly as she has been since the moment she arrived on this world, and it is wrong.

“Dazzle me,” he proclaims, theatrically.

She pulls the green velvet cloth away from the painting with a flourish, and stands back.

The composition of the painting is extraordinarily and perfectly simple, the brushwork and color flawless. The backdrop is a typical sitting room for Paris 1864, most likely Manet’s own. Brax appreciates the contrast to be drawn between the domesticity of the setting and the exoticism of the theme. The chair in the center of the painting faces away from the viewer, but even from the back it is obscenely ornate, an extravagant monstrosity of gilt and inlaid stones. The woman sitting in that chair is wrapped in furs, enveloped in ermine, but a bare ankle and exquisitely arched foot trail artfully from beneath, and, with the same obvious guile, she has left one pale shoulder uncovered. She is neither fully in profile nor turned entirely away; the slope of her nose is visible, the dark sweep of sensually lowered lashes, the cruel red corner of a mouth that smirks and simpers at once.

Her hair flows freely down her back, sparkling with a hundred winking diamonds.

“It isn’t really my painting, you know. It was always yours.” She bites her lip for a moment. “Do you like it?”

An hour ago he would have destroyed planets to possess such a thing. He quietly calculates which gallery would be best to hide it in, so he will never have to look at it again.

“My dear Romana, how could I possibly not? You are astonishing.”

“Don’t you mean ‘it is astonishing?’”

“You know perfectly well that I do not.” The words are there, but the joy is gone. No, he does not like the painting. He knows, now, the portrait it ought to have been. He wants her painted challenging the viewer, looking straight ahead, head high and eyes direct, strength in every single sinew. He wants her dressed all in black, no adornments, no distractions, aristocracy not in her trappings but in her.

None of this is her fault. This painting is exactly what he thought he needed from her, exactly the self he asked for her to show him. He has that Romana in the palm of his hand.

What has he done?

“I think,” he says, and it does not sound distant; it sounds precisely like himself, and that is more worrying than all the rest, “that this calls for a celebration. Anywhere in time and space that you would possibly care to go, only say the word. How does that suit you?”

She beams. “It sounds perfect,” she says. “Can we visit...”

He holds up a peremptory finger. “Ah, no, don’t tell me just yet. I have one or two very minor matters that must be dealt with before I can leave the Collection, but they shouldn’t require more than an hour of my attention. Take that time, think it over, and meet me back here?”

“All right,” she agrees. He lifts her hand and kisses it, absently, his mind already elsewhere. But she raises an eyebrow at him, and he stops.

Swallowing against the bitterness in his throat, he slides his arms around her as she willingly presses into him. If he is going to do this, he may as well make a proper show of it, and perhaps he owes her that much. He owes her much more, but as this is the best he can manage for her, he will certainly take the time to do it.

Aesthetically, it is flawless. Any outsider would declare it the sort of kiss worth waiting lifetimes for. Every angle is carefully calculated, every proportion balanced. It is the kiss he meant to give her beneath the light of exploding rockets, the kiss he might have given her at the end of their tango, or after the opera, or in the painting gallery, or in Manet’s studio, or in a shaded walk of the gardens, or as she sat blindfolded, waiting for just this. All the passion he might have given her honestly then, he counterfeits now with such consummate skill that he wonders, for a moment, whether any of his doubts truly matter. He wonders whether he cannot convince himself of this one last fabrication, transform this travesty into a victory, and, ultimately, attain the happiness that must, at some point, have been the point of this great game.

They break apart. She smiles at him as though everything in the universe is right. And he knows then, beyond any possibility of doubting, that even he cannot tell so vast a lie as that.

*

Brax sits in his office and stares at the walls. With a little interspatial engineering, he could have had real windows looking out on his planet. Instead, he has paintings of that same planet—charming, changeless, carefully-crafted falsehoods, to stand in the place of the truth.

He stares at his hands instead.

“I could have told you,” says a voice from his mirror, “but would you really have wanted to know?”

*

Romana,

I must beg of you a thousand pardons, and another thousand again. I have been called off-world on an urgent and unavoidable matter of Collection security, and with the safety of so many at stake, yourself included, I must reluctantly abandon the pursuit of personal pleasure for the sake of the greater good. Instructions have been left in all the relevant quarters—in my absence, you are to treat KS-159 as absolutely your own. Anything you desire, anywhere you wish to go, anything you wish to see or do, you need only ask. You deserve to be treated like a queen, my dear, and I have done my best to ensure that you will be, even if I cannot be there myself.

Should I be unable to return before your departure, please know how much I enjoyed every moment of our time together. You have made my life these past weeks very bright, Romanadvoratrelundar, and for that, you have my most sincere thanks.

Wishing you the best in all things,

Irving Braxiatel

*

In the dull, sandy landscape of the planet Dido, Brax’s TARDIS cannot find anything more inspiring to adopt as a disguise than a heap of dusty-brown stones. He is sure that there must be a metaphor there, somewhere, but cannot be bothered to dig it out just now.

Bernice Summerfield is all too familiar with the sound of materialization. She is out of her tent, dusting dirty hands on the already-filthy edges of her chinos, by the time Brax steps through his own door.

“Brax,” she says, surprised. “It’s not like you to come check up on a dig.” She narrows her eyes. “Is the planet about to explode?”

“I am afraid the situation is nearly as dire,” he says, trying to smile. “I realized this morning that an entire crate of my best Napoleon Brandy reached the peak of its flavor last month, and that the fact went shamefully unnoticed at the time. Now every passing moment degrades it further from the perfection it once knew, and the longer it goes unconsumed, the greater the crime against art.”

“And you thought of me.”

“My dear Bernice, who else?”

She is looking at him far too closely for comfort. “And while we’re drinking your brandy, so I know, do you want me to interrogate you about the fact that you look like hell? Just asking, always better to know these things in advance.”

He isn't sure he could stop his face from darkening, and he doesn’t try. “I beg that you do not.”

“Right,” she says. “I can do getting drunk with my boss on the very best booze at two in the afternoon by way of keeping you company while you drown your sorrows. What are friends for?”

“You do have such a precise way of putting things.”

“Oi, you lot!” Benny shouts over her shoulder at the dozen archaeological students scrabbling in the dust. “Mister Braxiatel just stopped by to tell me what a bang-up job he thinks you’re doing, and how he thinks you all deserve an afternoon off. Go enjoy yourselves, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Which doesn’t really limit you very much, does it, so no excuses for getting yourselves into trouble. Off you go, then, eat, drink and be merry! And just ignore any undignified giggling you might hear coming from Mr. Braxiatel’s ship, that’s all just an optical illusion. Or. Er. An auditory illusion. Aural illusion? Whatever it’s called when you hear it, that’s what it is.”

Brax finally manages to shepherd Bernice into his TARDIS, and shuts the door behind them.

*

Half a dozen bottles stand empty on the sideboard and the best salon of Brax’s TARDIS is swirling blue, thick with cigar smoke, before he starts talking.

“Has it ever been anything to do with her at all?” he asks. “Or was it only ever a self-aggrandizing fantasy that happened to wear her face? Am I capable of feeling anything at all for anyone other than myself?”

“‘Course you are,” drawls Bernice, from the chaise across the room. “Don’t be daft.”

“She was everything I thought I wanted,” he says. “Everything I ever meant for her to be. Except, perhaps, unattainable. Is that all it ever was? The ultimate challenge? The thrill of the chase? Did I want her only just so long as she didn’t want me?”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Benny yawns.

“I might have had her within two days of her setting foot on the Collection,” he says, realizing the truth as he speaks it. “A week, at the most. I chose a younger version because I thought I couldn’t win her at any other time, but that was ridiculous. What I really chose was the easiest possible moment, a time when she was vulnerable, putty in my hands. And then I treated her as though she were running away, and had no idea how to react when she proved that the opposite was true.”

“Mmm,” Benny mumbles.

“Because she wasn’t Romana,” he says, and now it’s all clear, finally, there and complete in his mind. “Not yet. Of course she didn’t act as I expected. She didn’t know who I was. She didn’t even call me by the proper name. She wasn’t her. All the history, all the living that made her worth catching, everything she’d ever done, everything we’d done together, it wasn’t there. Oh, but she was such a charming copy, oh, yes, so sweet, so pliable, so superficially desirable. What a pretty, pretty little toy I made of her, and how disappointing to discover that none of the things I could give her were the parts that really mattered.”

There is a long silence. “I have just admitted to playing with a young woman’s life like Woolsey with a mouse,” he says, bitterly. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

Bernice snores.

Brax laughs, and chokes on it, and tosses back the last of his brandy, and buries his head in his hands.

*

He programs his arrival back on the Collection for as late as he can justify. He has just time to walk from his TARDIS and to the Mansionhouse’s nearest window, not two feet from a certain portrait, still sitting on its easel. The shuttle bays are in sight near the horizon, a small crowd of academics milling on the lawn as they wait for their transport home.

She stands apart, quiet and still. She is overly pale, and every time her eyes catch on some part of the scenery, a flicker of pain crosses her face. But her chin is held high, resolute, determined. Not a line in her body so much as acknowledges the possibility that she could be retreating in defeat.

For the first and only time since her arrival, he is looking at Romana.

He turns away, and doesn’t watch her go.

*

For fifty-six days, the sun rises and sets on the Braxiatel Collection. He feels it in his bones, the turning of the universe, the clock ticking forwards, his days disappearing one after the other in the tremendous vanishing act called life. He feels time flowing through him, as he has always done, and will always do.

For fifty-six days, he feels time, and nothing else.

The Collection keeps on breathing. Bernice returns from her dig just in time to hear Peter learn his newest word, though no matter how many times she tells him the story, Braxiatel cannot seem to care which word it happens to be. Adrian Wall and his team finish the atrium of the Grand Trianon—with the very best marble, naturally—but Braxiatel does not go to see it. An unfortunate collision in the corridors leaves Ms. Jones with a broken arm and Joseph with a broken circuit board; Braxiatel sends chocolates and technicians, and copes with the disturbance to his routine with the calm of a man who simply does not care.

On the fifty-seventh day, a call is put through to his office.

“Mister Braxiatel,” says the security officer on the other end, “I think you should see this.”

“I’m certain you can cope with...”

“An unidentified person just materialized in the gardens, sir.”

Brax pauses for a beat. “Transmatting onto this planetoid is impossible.”

“Tell that to her, sir.”

“Send me the security feed.”

“Yes, sir.”

There are not one but two people in the garden when the security feed springs to life before Brax’s eyes. On the left side of the screen, Braxiatel’s head groundskeeper stands staring in amazement. And the intruder, a blonde woman in cream and gold robes, stands turned away from the camera. Braxiatel does not need to see her face to know her, or to be sure before she speaks that hearing her voice is likely to freeze the blood in his veins for the forseeable future.

“Mister Crofton,” Romana says, turning to gift the gardener with one of her rare smiles just as half-a-dozen guards rush up and fall into position around her. “We may not even have met yet, and you wouldn’t recognize me in any case, but you ought to know that your roses are even more glorious than I remembered.”

*

“Romana,” he says, helplessly, as she strides through his door large as life and twice as real. “What an unexpected pleasure.”

“I beg your pardon for calling without an invitation, Braxiatel,” she says, as he waves away the dubious guards who escorted her to his office, “but inter-universal hops without a TARDIS take a bit of managing, and it was easier to aim here than for the wider universe. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Romana lowers herself into one of Brax’s leather armchairs, with all her usual grace but with a weariness that suggests her journey was anything but easy. She is at least six hundred years older than she was fifty-seven days ago, and he cannot help thinking how much it shows.

In fact, she may be significantly older than that. From his perspective, it has been nearly two centuries since this Romana, the one from his proper timeline, fell out of his reach. More accurately, of course, it was he who did the falling, tumbling helplessly through the Vortex, lost between worlds and times, only saved from complete annihilation by pure good fortune. Following that ordeal he managed to make his way here, home, to the Collection, and after a brief pause to lick his wounds, his first priority became finding Romana again. But with all the time and space in all the multiverse to search, his hope had long since begun to dwindle, and his future selves refused to offer any insight. His despair of ever seeing this Romana again played no small part in his decision to bring her first regeneration here. Had he possessed scarcely three months more patience, how different everything might have been.

“I don’t mind in the slightest, of course, though I cannot imagine why KS-159 should have been easier for you to find,” he says. “This universe is tiny in comparison with the one that contains it.”

“True, but my trouble wasn’t an inability to locate the walls between particular universes; it was an inability to choose where in those walls I happened to breach. I was able to guarantee that I wouldn’t materialize inside anything solid, but beyond that my aim within universes was spotty at best. If I’d chosen to transport myself into our universe at large, I would almost certainly have dropped into the vacuum of space, light years from anything. But this little pocket universe you’ve created is so small that I was fairly certain I’d end up in the environs of the planetoid itself.”

“I am astonished that you managed the trip at all,” he says, examining the device strapped to her arm. Physically, it is very far from elegant, but technically it is a work of genius. “Unshielded spacetime transport is bad enough, but hopping between universes...”

“Was easier, actually. There was no need to expose myself to the harsh environment of the Vortex, given that I wasn’t jumping through time or aiming for a particular point in space. All this gadget had to do was find the weakest point in the barrier between our two universes and squeeze me through.” She glances down at the tangle of circuitry stretching from her wrist to her elbow and tugs it off of her, to the accompaniment of snapping wires and crunching components. “It’s quite useless now, of course. Drumming up even enough power for one trip was a stretch in the universe I came from.”

“Is that why Narvin and Leela aren’t with you?”

Romana turns several shades paler. “No,” she says, softly. “No, Leela found another version of Andred in that universe, one who had turned out surprisingly like ours—except that he had the advantage over his counterpart of being, well, alive. She told me that he made her ‘feel like a lion again.’” Brax knows what Romana looks like when she is trying to keep the sadness from a smile. “She’s very happy, I believe. And I for her, of course.”

“Of course,” he says, carefully neutral. “And Narvin? I can’t imagine he’d have permitted his President to risk her personal safety in such a way if he might have taken that risk himself.”

Romana swallows. “Might I trouble you for a cup of tea?” she asks.

“I do beg your pardon; I ought to have offered first thing. I can’t imagine what’s become of my manners. You must be hungry as well. Shall I have something sent up?”

“Nothing fancy, please, but I would be grateful for some sandwiches.”

Brax relays the order for a proper high tea with all the trimmings into his communicator, and within moments the dumbwaiter on the other side of his office is brimming with eatables. A requisite few minutes vanish in pouring and stirring and passing of plates. When the fuss has died down, Brax carefully avoids mentioning Narvin again. If Romana feels compelled to so obviously change the subject, far be it from him to prod that particular sleeping dragon.

“You went to a great deal of trouble to leave the universe where you’ve been staying,” says Brax, sipping his Earl Grey. “I don’t dare hope that your only aim was to visit the Collection.” And me, he does not need to add.

“No,” she agrees. “I need to commandeer one of your shuttles, Brax.”

After everything they have been through, it rubs him very far wrong. “Ever the Lady President, Romana. ‘May I borrow one of your shuttles’ would have done a great deal better, you know. I would give you one of them, gladly, and never care whether it was returned, if you asked instead of demanding.”

She purses her lips and sets down her cucumber sandwich. “Forgive me if I’m more concerned with substance than style.”

“You always have been.”

“You never have been.”

He wants to fight her on that point, but he is not at all certain he would win—against anyone else, certainly, but not against her. He has no idea where they are now, relative to each other, what the proper tack to take with her may be. He does not know what game they are playing now, but he knows that he needs to find out, and quickly. “And where, if I may ask, are you planning on taking my ‘commandeered’ shuttle?”

“Home,” she says. “Back to Gallifrey.”

It has been a long time—centuries, quite possibly—since he has felt genuine fear. He almost fails to recognize it as it is happening. “Tell me you aren’t serious.”

“I’m perfectly serious.”

“Why would you do such a thing?”

“Why wouldn’t I do such a thing?”

“Because you’ll be putting yourself in an absurd degree of danger!”

“My entire species is in an absurd degree of danger. If there’s any help I can give, I owe it to them to try.”

The words I forbid it hover perilously near to his lips. I will lock you up and keep you here before I allow you to throw your life away remains a more distant idea, but as thoughts go, it is present enough for him to be conscious of it. “Then I can do no less myself,” he says. “Let me accompany you.”

“I’m not sure that’s wise,” says Romana. “With so much chaos on Gallifrey, we can’t have any idea what might become of the sliver of Pandora in your head. Your presence might make an already bad situation worse.”

“By which you mean that you don’t want me there with you,” he says, with more bitterness than he intends.

Romana’s eyes flash as she looks at him. “By which I mean that you have a world of your own here, full of people who depend on you, and as someone who has led a planet, I know that it would be wrong of you to abandon that kind of responsibility.”

“And that is exactly what you are doing in returning to Gallifrey now, isn’t it? Assuaging your own guilt for leaving in the first place by committing yourself to an act of suicidal...”

“I didn’t choose to leave Gallifrey, as you may recall. That was all part of someone else’s masterplan.”

“Guilty as charged, my Lady. I did save your lives by seeing to it you were off-world before the entire planet fell apart. I would do the same again. I happen to consider your life to be worthy of preservation.” This is not how this is meant to be. He does not want to fight with her. That will never convince her to stay, and he knows now that convincing her to stay is the aim of this conversation. But fear and uncertainty are rendering him unwontedly clumsy, and Romana can at times be a very difficult woman not to fight with.

“I am perfectly capable of ‘preserving’ my own life, thank you,” she says, with a familiar irked expression. “The most recent alternate Gallifrey where I’ve been staying stunted its own growth as a temporal power through its obsessive focus on munitions. The weapons technology there was horrific, but also extraordinary. I’m carrying the plans for a superweapon the mere threat of which ought to be enough to avert the invasion of Gallifrey, if I can get home at the proper relative time.”

“Oh, ‘should’ and ‘if,’ how very reassuring.” He is not shouting, not quite that far out-of-control, but his voice is admittedly raised. “And what are your plans for the Dogma virus, my Lady? Do you expect that if you point your doomsday device in its direction, it will scamper off back to the pigrats before you or any more of Gallifrey can be infected? Have you even considered the fact that a win in the scenario you’ve just presented me would still almost certainly result in the sacrifice of the rest of your lives?”

There is a knock on the door, and Bernice makes her way inside without waiting to be invited. “Mister Crofton said you were the right one this time,” she says, beaming. “Hello, Romana!”

“Benny,” says Romana, in a tone more surprised than enthusiastic. The abrupt change of mood in the room leaves her blinking for a moment, but she is soon out of her chair and striding in Benny’s direction. “How lovely to see you.”

“And you,” says Bernice, bounding across the room. “I hear you’ve been up to all sorts since last I saw you—President of Gallifrey, no less! Well done you.”

“I can’t claim that title any longer, I’m afraid,” says Romana, with a self-deprecating quirk of the lip, “but thank you all the same. Have you been well?”

“Oh, wonderfully, thank you! I...” Benny stops, looks from Brax to Romana, takes in the mutual tension in their postures, the fact that neither of them can maintain an entirely believable smile. “I’ve interrupted something.”

“No, of course not, don’t be silly. Won’t you stay and take some tea?” Romana asks.

Brax slopes an eyebrow at Bernice, in a way meant to imply that if she accepts the offer, it is doubtful whether she’ll still have a job tomorrow.

“Thanks, Romana, but I know when I’m barging in—hardly be the first time in my life. Look, when you’re done here, come find me and we’ll have a good chat, all right? I’m sure you have all kinds of stories, and I may just have one or two to tell myself.”

“Thank you,” says Romana, with a real smile this time. “I look forward to it.”

“Great,” says Benny, already on her way to the door.

“And Benny?”

“Yes?”

“What did you mean, ‘the right one this time?’”

Brax freezes.

“Oh!” Benny laughs. “That must have been ages ago for you, wasn’t it? You were just here, you know, except it was another you, an earlier one, and you didn’t know me yet. About two months ago, I think, for us, but I can only imagine how much water has passed under your bridges since then. If it were me, I’d be three-quarters of the way to forgetting it had ever happened.”

There is silence for a moment. “I see,” says Romana, tightly controlled, dangerous. “I wasn’t certain where this moment was in Brax’s timeline. He can be so very hard to read.” Something twitches in her cheek. She is looking neither at Bernice nor at Brax, now, but somewhere in-between. “I wish that my memory were as forgiving as yours, Benny. I remember everything about that visit.”

Benny looks to Brax. He gives her his stoniest expression, and hopes desperately that she really does remember nothing of their conversation that night on Dido, as he has always previously supposed.

“Right,” says Benny, and Brax does not blame her for retreating from the increasingly icy atmosphere in the office. “Well, I’ll just be... going. I’ll see you later, Romana.”

“Goodbye, Benny,” says Romana, and Brax fights to brace himself as Bernice disappears.

The door shuts with a deafening thump that rings through the silence for far too many seconds afterwards.

“I always wondered,” says Romana, not turning around to look at Brax, “precisely when in your life that experience fell. I could tell from the first time I saw you afterwards that it hadn’t happened yet for you. I’ve been waiting ever since I came home from E-Space—since long before then, really. There were so many things I thought I’d want to say to you, once you’d actually know why I was saying them. But oddly enough, now it comes to it, only the one thing occurs to me.”

He is quite certain he doesn’t actually want to know. But he is an actor, and she has given him his cue. “And what is that?”

She spins on her heel, her arm upraised, and slaps him across the cheek so hard it leaves his ear ringing.

He does not flinch, but his eyes close for a moment. It stings his self-image far more than his face. He refuses to consider himself as the sort of man who could ever put himself in the way of such indignities, and yet here he is. “I probably deserved that,” he says, excessively quietly, a growling undertone.

“Oh, you entirely deserved that,” she spits, and the fire in her eyes is breathtaking. He wants it, and her, and this, this angry passion so missing in the girl she used to be. He aches to be burned by the touch of her skin.

“If you would permit me to explain...”

“Explain? What precisely do you believe there is to explain?”

“Why I brought you here at all. Why I treated you as I did. Why I left.”

“I know those answers, or I can guess them,” she says, “and none of them makes the whole business any less vile.”

“Now, that is unfair,” he argues. “If you will recall, I stopped short of...”

“And that’s meant to make it better?” she snaps. “I still can’t decide which is worse—what you meant to do with me, or what you actually did. Bringing my younger self here to act out some... some twisted power fantasy... I don’t know whether actually taking me to bed in the end would have made it all more deplorable, or less. Oh, true, this way you can’t be accused of luring a girl barely out of the Academy into your clutches and playing out an elaborate seduction purely to satisfy your own lust. Well done there, how very moral of you. No, all you did was bring me here as young and inexperienced as you could find me, turn my head so far I couldn’t see straight, and then leave me feeling for centuries that I’d done something wrong, and that’s why you’d left without even bothering to say goodbye.”

“If you think for a moment that I ever intended to hurt you, you don’t know me at all.”

“Shall I tell you how well I know you?” she asks him, and oh, how he wishes she wouldn’t. “Look around you. Look at this place. Look at this planet: your perfect little world, the one you built yourself with your own two hands. Look at all your perfect treasures, assembled just the way you want them. And look at you, the perfect Irving Braxiatel—perfectly suave, perfectly charming, perfectly in control of himself and everyone around him, the perfect king of his perfect hill. I was meant to be the last piece, wasn’t I? Your perfect woman, and like all the rest, designed to your exact specifications.”

He does not answer. He cannot. After a beat, she laughs, sharp and humorless. “Oh, I know you think you were doing me a favor by singling me out. I couldn’t have been just anyone, after all. For starters, you’re a Gallifreyan, and so I had to be a Gallifreyan too. And high-born, and intelligent, and beautiful—oh, yes, it was a compliment, wasn’t it, that I was the one you chose? I’ll even do you the credit of believing that none of this was your plan when I was a child, that you weren’t quite twisted enough to begin hand-tailoring me at that stage for your own personal use. You simply realized one day that here I was, a Time Lady you had been shaping since I was old enough for it to matter, and after that, well, who else could you have chosen? Who else could appeal to your ego in quite the same way?”

His composure breaks, then. “And none of this has anything to do with your ego, Romana?” he asks, harsh and angry. “When you’ve just been touting yourself as my ideal of perfection, it is difficult to take accusations of my narcissism very seriously.”

“But that’s just it,” Romana says, and suddenly there is a hint of pain, buried inside the anger. “I never was the ideal you were chasing. I couldn’t be. No one could. You wanted me strong enough to shape the destinies of worlds, to juggle with the fates of a billion sentient beings at a time and not crack under the pressure. You wanted your Lady President, your supreme example of grace under fire, all the insight you’ve always had around a core of self-sacrifice that isn’t anything like you at all.”

“And you don’t think you achieved that?”

“Oh, I most certainly did. It cost me everything, but that is the woman I’ve become, and I’m proud of it. I’ll gladly thank you for the part you played in helping me grow into that Romana. But that wasn’t all you wanted, was it? Because everything around you, everything you touch, you have to be able to control. I might rule the universe—and how could I ever be enough for you if I didn’t?—but what was the good of that if you couldn’t rule me?”

“I’ve never tried to...” He cannot even pretend to believe the words long enough to speak them.

“You’ve always tried to,” she snaps, her chin jutting upwards. “You’re trying right now— trying to stop me going home, to stop me following the path I’ve chosen. I don’t think you know how not to manipulate the people around you, Brax. I think it’s become so much a part of what you are, these games you play with time, with people’s lives, this need to shape everything around you, that you can’t even see why it’s a problem anymore. You’re a black hole, Braxiatel: gravitational pull so strong that you warp the entire fabric of the universe around you. Enormously attractive, yes, and in every possible way, but anyone who strays too near loses themselves, becomes a character in the story you tell. It’s impossible to see beyond your horizon. There’s no light left in the world, too close to you.”

He cannot quite look at her anymore, not now. He can’t listen to this. He made her the one person who could see beyond his lies. He had forgotten how many lies he tells himself, and how desperately unprepared he is to confront them. He sits down on the sofa, and keeps his eyes averted. “Out of curiosity,” he says, hollowly, “do you believe, black hole that I am, that there is nothing left in me alive enough for you to hurt?”

The pained look on her face grows stronger. “I don’t know,” she says, hoarsely. “That’s the trouble. I can’t ever know what’s real when I’m with you. And it’s too late to ever go back. I won’t ever know who I could have been without you.”

“You are yourself,” he says. “You are Romana, always. I could not have changed that, even had I tried.”

“In the most important senses, yes, I am. No matter how young and stupid I was, I would never, never have let you take that from me.” She sinks onto the sofa beside him. The set of her jaw makes him swallow hard, painfully familiar. “But your imprinting did work, in a way. I wouldn’t be this angry if it hadn’t. You are so infinitely talented an actor, Braxiatel, and it was such a good act. That absolute gentleman who swept me off my feet when I was young enough not to begin to know better—you did make me want him. You did fix him in my mind as the paragon he was meant to be. You did catch me at my most impressionable, and make sure the impression I was left with wore your face. You painted us the most beautiful pair of masks, Brax, and I was as taken with yours as you ever were with mine.” Her face pinches. “And after that, how could either of us ever hope to be happy with anyone real?”

They sit beside each other, silently, lost, separately and together.

“You took that from me, Brax,” she says, more hollow than angry. “You took my best chance of actual happiness with another person. Do you really expect me to forgive you for that?”

He feels dissociated, out-of-touch. He suspects that the words that present themselves to him are a last resort long-since composed. He has no conscious memory of planning for a moment like this one, when it seems likely that Romana will never speak to him again, but he knows himself. He always has a backup plan, and the speech he feels compelled to give seems more complete, more formed, than the hollow shell he is at this moment could possibly have written. “You are forgetting one thing.”

She does not look at him. “Go on.”

“Neither of us is a mask,” he says, “no matter how much we may both like to pretend. We are people, Romana. Everything we do is for a reason. You are here, and you are saying these things to me. You know me well enough to look at me and see me for what I am. You care enough to try. And I care enough to listen from you to what I would not consent to hear from anyone else.”

She turns to face him, her expression wary and worn. “You do have a right to be angry, Romana. You may indeed never forgive me. Perhaps you truly won’t ever be happy with someone else. For my part, I most assuredly will not. But that does not mean that either of us is incapable of genuine emotion.” He takes her chin in his hand, delicately, the way he would touch a crumbling manuscript. “Yes, the word is overly simplistic, and yes, it fails to capture everything that is wrong between us, and no, it does not heal anything that I have done, or justify any of it, or make any of it better. But you must know I am in love with you. That much was never a manipulation. If you believe me capable of feeling anything, believe me capable of this. I am in love with the woman you are, Romana, not the fable. And the truth is, you would not be sitting here if you were not just as much in love with me.”

The look on her face is unfamiliar, but that does not make it difficult to classify. It is the unaffected emptiness of pure misery. “I suppose we are,” she says, simply, without passion, without accusation, “but what has that ever mattered to anything?”

He is wrung-out, and finished. His last card is played. He resorts to honesty not from any desire for it—on the contrary, ‘honest’ has always been the worst feeling he can fathom—but because there simply is not anything else left in him anymore. He pulls Romana quietly into his arms, and he holds her. It is not for the sake of any plan, and not to provoke a reaction, and not even having thought it through at all. He does it as other people do things: because it is what he would and wants to do, and because the voice that tells him never to descend to being like other people has drained out of him like everything else.

She does not move at first. She remains absolutely still, clearly fighting within herself. And then, quite suddenly, she is clutching him fiercely, and he tightens his arms in response, his fingers burying themselves in her hair. If this is the only thing he can do to protect her from several lifetimes of the mistakes—mostly his—that have left them both so unmendable inside, then the only thing for it is to pretend that this can ever be enough.

They cling to each other for a long time, anger and pain and heartache draining through the too-hard press of their bodies. Once his mind begins to turn again, once their arms begin to loosen around each other a fraction of an inch at a time, it occurs to him to be surprised that she is allowing this at all. He has never touched this Romana, not like this, not with meaning. He never thought he would have the chance. He certainly should not have that chance now. It is a rather charming irony, almost, that this is his only through a mistake. Only because everything went wrong with the Romana he tried to chase is he now holding the one he always wanted to catch. His real, fully-formed Romana, her hair a thousand strands of satin against his fingertips, trusting him in her grief the way she never would with her joy, exhaling an almost-sigh against his chest...

And in the space of an instant, he knows.

It is the most perfect moment of revelation in his lives. It is a blinding, glorious epiphany, a religious vision unrivaled by any prophet who has ever lived. He has never gone wrong at all. Never once, not for a second. Oh, how blind has he been—or has he always known? Has he kept this even from himself, his greatest trick of all? Oh, maestro, oh, bravissimo, oh, exquisite, exquisite; his genius is his alone, but only he is fit to appreciate it. It is perfect. It is perfect. The last pages, the final act, written, proofed, scripted in his mind—all the previous acts edited to fit, smoothed into the shape that they always should have taken. It is exactly the work of art that it was always meant to be, except a thousand thousand times better than he ever could have imagined. He fears for a moment that he may die of the sheer beauty of it.

For the first time since the last Romana kissed him, he knows exactly what to do. He has missed this, this certainty, this knowing. He has missed the sense of identity it gives. If he were anyone but himself, he would not dare to kiss her forehead now—gentle, slow, as though they have nothing but time. She does not protest or move away, only goes painfully still again, just as he knew she would. He inclines his neck still further, drags his lips downwards to kiss the tip of her nose (that sweet little nose that is at times the only softness about her). He lingers there to feel the heat of her breath brush upwards against his lips, to count the rhythm of those exhalations and find them ragged, too-quick, as he knows they will be. And there—a stutter—proof of thoughts she would rather not be thinking—he sees them spinning there inside her head—and he ghosts three fingers under her chin, the most precise, delicate touch—and just tilts her mouth up to his—and then...

It is everything that kissing Romana was ever meant to be. This is pure vertigo, endless falling, his consciousness distilled pinprick-pure to this. It should never have been a spectacle, he knows that now; it could never have felt this way if it were vulgarly theatrical, staged as though for an audience. Thinking of anyone, anything else now, however peripherally, would be a travesty, a sin. The only idea worth considering is this: the softness of her mouth, and the hiccough of a suppressed whimper in the back of her throat when she pulls away.

Every single emotion he has ever seen on her face is there now. Her eyes are accusing, angry, frightened, but also needy, passionate, affected, and every one of those is for him. She is skittish as a hunted animal, but she is not running, not yet. And she is not going to. He knows that. He knows.

His certainty makes it easy for him to wait, to speak only with his eyes. He must not speak; the scene does not call for it. Anything he says will inevitably drive her away. She is studying him, and fighting, fighting, as she is always fighting, against this and against herself and against him.

She bites the very corner of her lip, and looks to the side and down, and lets her head loll along with her eyes, and sighs. And with that last demonstration of protest completed, she looks back at Brax, and slides her fingers against his neck, and draws him in, and kisses him.

Brax’s mind doesn’t exactly go hazy, after that. It goes painfully clear, an agonizing degree of self-inflicted overstimulation as he focuses on every single detail, all at once. He has been elevated to another state of consciousness, one in which he is honestly uncertain whether or not Romana allows him to carry her to his bed, but in which the taste of her shoulder, the texture of her skin as he kisses her there, the feeling of her fingers sliding into his hair as she presses him close, become indelible impressions on his soul. It is this, it is this he has been waiting for, since he met her, since before that, all his lives—not so much the sound her robes make as they fall to the floor, not so much the sound she makes as he licks along the sharp lines of her pelvis, but for this rightness chorusing like sacred music in his veins.

He is no slave to this woman, no matter how beautiful she is as her naked body pushes his onto the mattress, no matter how impossible it is that he could feel this with anyone else. He is a slave to his art, to this drama he is staging. She has the unique honor of being enchained to their play, just as he is. That is all. That is everything. No other hands but hers could so inflame him with their touch; no other mind but hers could so overwhelm him with richness as she opens it to his; no other woman’s body, not even her own before this moment, could make every nerve in his scream for her this way in the moment when first they join.

It needed to be exactly like this. He cannot begin to imagine how he ever thought otherwise. Of course it could not have been her other self; of course she could not have been young and generous and sweet. Where would be the poetry, the commitment in that? A million men before him have worked and hoped and waited for a chance at happiness with the women they loved. There is nothing exceptional in that.

But this... oh, this, yes, this is unique. He is unique, and Romana, they two, they together. It is the pathos that makes it perfect, the missing element he had forgotten until today. He could wait for her and long for her and woo her all he liked, but after that, what would it have mattered unless he let her go? This climax had to come far too late to be in the service of anything so pedestrian as happiness; only then could their drama deserve the name of art. While other men have sacrificed as much as he to see their stories end in joy, who but he would ever give so much to live the ideal tragedy? This is the ultimate expression of aesthetic dedication, and oh, but it is beautiful, beautiful. A lifetime spent in setting his stage, in grooming his lead, in making himself worthy—and then, after and above, one final, greatest sacrifice: his happiness, and, more importantly, hers. To love her as he does, truly and entirely, and yet to break her hearts and his own to craft the perfect living narrative... it is transcendent, it is peerless, it is more than any mortal should achieve, and he has achieved it, and...

...and Romana’s mind is joined with his mind, and she has just seen his entire train of thought as it passed through his head.

He sits up abruptly. He is still inside her, physically and mentally. She is not moving, her knees pressed tight against his hips as she sits above him—sits in judgment, he thinks. Except that he knows Romana’s face in judgment, and that is not the expression there now.

“I know,” she says, pain in every syllable, in every line of her face. “Don’t you think I know how your brain works, Brax? How... how twisted it is in your skull, how far from anything honest or right? The way you look at me, it’s... it’s intoxicating, to be the focus of that kind of attention, it’s addictive, it’s thrilling, it’s unlike anybody else. But I know that there’s a price. It’s wrong, the way you think of me, it’s obsessive and terrible and frightening and I can’t ever, ever live with it, and it should stop me wanting you, it should, and it doesn’t, and I...” She squeezes her eyes shut, and he sees in her mind everything she is feeling—disgust and need and desire and hatred and love and something deep, something that is a desire for closure or a desire for revenge, depending how the light hits it. “Just give me this one thing. After everything you’ve done, I deserve this. Let me get you out of my system, let me finally forget the lie you sold me. Wear the mask for one more night, for me. Just for now, be the man I wish you could be. Please, Brax, please, I...”

He kisses her hard. She meets it, and goes on kissing him as he thrusts his hips upwards, setting a rhythm that she rolls her own hips to match. And he drinks in the taste of her, and drowns in the pleasure she is giving him, and tries not to think, for her sake, that she has only made it better, tries not to think that it is the pain that makes it perfect, tries not to think at all. But as she is coming, crying out, digging her nails into his skin, as the flood of sensation from her mind to his is dragging him along with her, he cannot help knowing this moment for what it is, cannot prevent the words that slip through his lips.

“Masterpiece, my masterpiece, my Romana, Romana, Romana...”

*

They make love again in the middle of that night, slow and sweet and half-asleep, too purely instinctive on both of their parts for either his thoughts or hers to prove a distraction; they fall back to sleep again, entangled, without saying a word. When she wakes him just before dawn, straddling his waist, kissing him and kissing him, moving in concert with his hands on her hips, she does not invite him into her mind right away. Only at the last possible moment does she open her thoughts to him, just in time for the silver blade of her pleasure to slice whitehot through his mind as she comes. But she lingers like that, their minds still joined until he is finished and after, allowing them to share in the process of descent from that high. And he knows that gesture for what it is meant to be: a method of saying goodbye.

She sits on the edge of his bed now, wrapped in a sheet that leaves one of her shoulders bare. Her hair sluices down her back, lit gold by the dawn against the cream of her skin (the colors of a President, of his President). Her face is turned partly away, the tip of a nose and the sweep of an eyelash and the corner of her mouth just visible. And he knows that for the rest of his lives, whenever he looks at the portrait that is all he will have left of her, this is what he will see: a small woman, not a tall one; light hair, not dark; unadorned, not dripping with riches; self-aware and self-contained, not preening for the benefit of the man she knows will always be watching.

“I’m going home now,” she says. They have not spoken to one another at all, not outside the heat of passion, and the words echo and bounce off the walls. “There’s a war on Gallifrey, and a worse one coming. They’ll need me.” She turns to look at him. “I’ll never see you again, I expect.”

He tries to find some response to that. The bare simplicity of it undoes him. She smiles—not a proper smile, not the one he wants, but small, and full of too many regrets. She takes his face in her hands as she kisses him, lingering and still. And after, she gives him the same smile again, and says, “Perhaps that’s better for us both. Don’t you think?”

And then she is gone, before he even knows she is going, or has time to say anything at all.

For an instant, he considers running after her. The image of himself chasing naked through the halls of his Collection, even in pursuit of Romana, is so potently horrifying that he discards it immediately. He could call security section, have them lock down all departures, prevent her leaving through sheer brute force, but that would be petty of him. She deserves better than that.

He cannot stop her, or he will not, and that amounts to the same thing. He did not compose this departure; that was entirely her doing. As it happens, the scene was rather different in his head. But she has managed it beautifully all on her own, and she deserves for him to respect that. Perhaps he ought to hate the sensation of being bested at his own game, but somehow, he feels only pride.

He stands, and glances at the disarray of his bed, and permits himself to run a hand once over the still-warm indentation where she slept. And then he crosses to his wardrobe and begins to dress, taking exceptional care.

Yes, he is proud of her, he thinks, as he unrolls stockings and chooses a tie. She is everything he ever made her to be, and one other thing besides, something he never properly anticipated: she is better than he is. The thought does not unnerve him. To have had a hand in the creation of something greater than himself is no kind of blow to his ego.

That superiority is why she cannot stay with him. He knows that. In the calm of the morning, stripped of all pretense, he understands himself that well. Glory, immortality, the urge to write his own name into the fabric of the universe: these are the forces that drive him. And to know that for all his trying, he never made her the same, never made her like him, to know that she became a person more concerned with truly improving the universe than with being seen to do so—that does not hurt him. It does not hurt that she became someone who merits better than he has ever been. Perhaps it should, perhaps it will, but not this morning. Not now.

It is time to stop shaping her, and start letting her shape him.

Brax buttons his cuffs, and tugs them straight, and slips his hands into his pockets. He strolls casually into his office. There is a mirror hanging there, because there always has been. The man in it is always himself, and today it is himself only.

He is what he has always been; about this, he cherishes no illusions. He is still the man who sees the timelines twisting, who watches many futures spin and sometimes twines them into a new shape. He was told, less than a day ago, that he does not know how to meet the world without manipulating it, and he recognizes that truth, and accepts it.

But there are futures that even he has always been afraid to challenge. There are paths that he has left unchosen, because the toll for walking them has been higher than he ever hoped to pay. He has a world made just for him, a comfortable, beautiful existence, people who think well of and respect him. He could stay here, and be Mister Irving Braxiatel, and go on nudging pieces on a temporal chessboard, and never again truly suffer for his art.

But there are other considerations, now. Brax glances at the fresco behind his desk, and thinks of gain and sacrifice. There is a war coming to Gallifrey—to the universe—to Romana. He could hide from it here. He could use his power to protect Braxiatel, Time Lord and planetoid both. But just this once, he wants, like her, to choose substance over style. And he has no intention of surrendering Romana, not after how much effort he has expended upon her. Fate or no fate, fixed point or not: nothing is certain, not once Brax sets his mind against it.

It takes a truly exceptional man to shape a world in his own image, but to shape the universe in his image—there is only one man who can do that.

The image in the mirror shifts. The face is older now, more deeply lined. “They call it ‘The Last Great Time War,’ you know,” says the older Brax. “Against that, even we can only do so much.”

“All the more reason to try.”

“You will have to give up everything,” says the other Brax. “As much as you ever thought you could lose, and more. And even I don’t know whether or not you’ll succeed.”

He nods. “I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Today,” he says, softly, “I need to be the man she wishes that I could be.”

He older self studies him. “Then you are finally ready.”

He looks into his own eyes, and hopes against hope that the weariness there is its own brand of wisdom.

“What do I need to do?”