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"Probably my Great-Aunt Mathilde, I suppose," Tegan said, once she'd mentally untangled the bit about 'matrilineal descent'. "She's my gran's sister - on Mum's side - must be at least ninety, so she's definitely the oldest woman in my family. Dunno if that makes her the 'most senior matriarch' or not. I wouldn't cross Gammy while I was in range of her walking stick, I know that much. Why d'you ask?"
And she wondered again what was wrong with Nyssa today, because she started to answer and then didn't seem to know what to say next. She looked a bit flushed, too, and Tegan put down her wine glass, ready to make a grab for her friend at the first sign of imminent keeling-over. "Look, sit down, for heaven's sake! You don't want to go fainting again."
"Yes. You're right, of course." Nyssa smoothed out her dress and perched carefully on the steps, in a way, Tegan noted with amusement, that was a lot more ladylike than her own inelegant sprawl. The pair of them must be a sight - finishing school girl led astray by an off-duty air hostess, assuming they still had air hostesses in the year 22-whatever-this-was.
They were alone, more or less, apart from the couple somewhere across the square having a furtive bit of fun behind a pillar - the woman was letting out the occasional giggle - and the robot-thing sweeping up paper streamers and bits of finger food. It seemed to give them a hard look. Tegan glared back: yes, my friend and I are getting gently drunk in St. Mark's Square at four in the morning, have you got a problem with that? It whirred and spun away.
The Doctor had said something about needing to see the Doge, and Adric had wandered off a while ago, interest caught either by the beauty of the canals in the artificial lantern-light or the distant jingle of an ice-cream gondola, so it had just been the two of them for some time. Tegan had enjoyed spending some time with Nyssa when there weren't Escher cities or plots to invade the Earth to contend with. It was like being on holiday with someone you didn't know well, but who turned out to be clever and interesting and quietly funny. It was... nice.
"I like you," Tegan said, six hours' worth of wine making her fuzzily sentimental and warm-hearted to the whole world, especially the Nyssa-shaped bit beside her on the steps. "I'm glad we're friends." Thinking over this later, she couldn't swear whether or not she reached out at this point and patted Nyssa's hair.
"I'm glad, too," Nyssa said, smiling at her, looking a little more sure of herself now. "That was why I was asking about your family."
"Ask whatever you like," she said, looking around for her glass and very much not making the leap from family to poor Auntie Vanessa. Nyssa didn't need reminding about what the Master had done to either of their families.
"I know it probably seems silly, with my people gone," Nyssa was saying, "but I don't know what the procedure is in your culture - I did look in the library but all the late-twentieth-century Earth books about romance seemed a bit... well, they didn't help - but if we were on Traken, I would go to the most senior matriarch in your family..."
"Gammy," Tegan put in, pleased to have caught up after getting lost round about 'romance'.
"Yes. I would go to Gammy and I would ask for her permission to approach you."
And somehow, Tegan still couldn't see where this was going. "Approach me," she repeated, smiling a bit, still riding the wave of alcoholic goodwill.
"Yes," Nyssa said again, her own smile fading fast. "Romantically, I mean."
After a long moment, Tegan said, "Um." A longer one before she managed, "So it's not the person's dad you go to, on your planet?"
She looked astonished. "Well, if you were a man, or you didn't have any female relatives, it would be the senior male in your family I'd need to speak to." The of course was implied. Tegan conceded that this made a certain amount of sense. As much as anything had in the last five minutes, anyway.
The colour was rising in Nyssa's cheeks again. "I did find some information on your planet's culture," she said, opening the handbag she'd been clutching all day. "It's not really part of the ceremony but on Traken the fastaiin flower is sometimes exchanged between new lovers because it's a symbol of, of, temptation, and the book I found said..." She thrust her hand out, desperately.
Tegan took the apple from her as if it was going to start ticking.
It was red, and waxy, and she almost asked where Nyssa had got it before she decided that there were other questions that should come first.
So she'd be asking any of those, any minute now, then.
"Um," she said.
Across the square, the pillar-woman squealed with delight.
The thing was, Tegan had thought she had their little group dynamic all figured out. Just one happy-slash-dysfunctional time-travelling family, with a bratty genius of a kid brother and a sweet scientist sister and a youngish-looking uncle roped into babysitting despite not being great with kids. She'd quite liked that idea, not that she'd ever have said a word to any of them. Call it only child syndrome or something. Playing the bossy big sister had suited her.
Except Nyssa hadn't been thinking along the same lines, had she?
Nyssa... fancied her, or had a little crush...
Back in Venice Tegan had thought, looking at her friend's huge-eyed, miserable expression: oh. That's why it's called a 'crush'.
"Look, this is just all a bit sudden," she'd tried, but Nyssa was already falling over herself apologising.
"I'm awfully sorry."
"I don't know what to say..."
"I've never done anything like this before."
"Maybe you're drunk!"
"I haven't had any alcohol."
"Maybe I'm drunk."
"Yes, you are. Oh, that makes it worse, doesn't it, I was all wrong about when to say something..."
"I just had no clue you felt like this."
"I thought you might feel the same way..."
"Adric's coming," they both said at once, and smiled awkwardly at each other.
"I'm sorry," Nyssa said again, and Tegan said, "No, I am. I wish..."
Adric had caught up to them before she could finish that thought. Lucky, really, because she hadn't the first clue what was going to come out of her mouth next. What was it she'd almost wished?
She couldn't remember later what had happened to the apple.
That was nearly the beginning and end of it, all at once.
"The TARDIS is getting bigger all the time," Nyssa said the next day, a day they'd spent tiptoeing around more than just Tegan's colossal, crippling hangover. "I'm sure I could find a different room if you'd like some more space." As if that was the only reason; there was nothing but the tiniest worried edge to her tone to suggest they'd spoken about anything unusual last night.
"We're fine as we are," Tegan groaned into her pillow. "If you start hauling furniture around the place while my head's like this, I won't be responsible for my actions."
"I couldn't understand most of that," Nyssa told her kindly, but she went and fetched a glass of water and some kind of miracle hangover-be-gone pill she'd talked out of the Doctor.
"You," Tegan told her, draining the glass, "are an angel. And don't go anywhere, please. Me and you, we're friends, right?"
Nyssa probably didn't know what an angel was, but she shone at the compliment, and she agreed that yes, they were friends, and everything was fine between them again. Business as usual. Just like it had been before.
But.
There was a second or two, while she was lying across her bed enjoying being suddenly headache-free and Nyssa was looking through a book at her desk, when Nyssa reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear. And Tegan caught herself looking at the pale sweep of her neck, the soft waves of her hair, her lips.
"Tegan?" She was sure she only groaned very softly but it got Nyssa out of her chair and sitting down beside her on the bed in a second. "I could get you some more medicine."
"No," Tegan told her, rolling onto her back to look fixedly at the nice, uncomplicated ceiling. "It's all right. Just my head."
The ceiling had grown circles overnight, white indentations that looked well on their way to becoming roundels. You couldn't even trust the architecture in this place. You thought it was one thing and then it started turning into something else, and maybe it was a good something else, but you just wished someone had bothered to warn you...
"Tegan?"
"The TARDIS is being metaphorical at me," she complained, and after a hesitation she only spotted because she was looking for it, Nyssa gave her a comforting pat on the hand.
Tegan had no idea how Adric had got wind of this Nyssa-epic-lesbian-romance business. The Doctor knew, she was sure he did, because the TARDIS was still regrowing and in some places the walls were very thin, and she'd inadvertently - very inadvertently - heard part of a post-Venice conversation between him and Nyssa that had made her ears burn. Oh, nothing very scandalous; more like an anthropology lecture from a professor who was dying inside of embarrassment but was determined to see the thing through anyway, but still.
Nyssa's side of the discussion had consisted mostly of "Oh" and a differently inflected "Oh" and "I didn't realise" and "I see".
"I didn't understand about your culture," she'd told Tegan in their room later. "I'd never considered that your species might have a preference for opposite-gender relationships. I'm sorry. It should have occurred to me."
"Why would it?" Tegan tried to imagine how she would have reacted if she'd ended up on this ship with some sexy Adonis of an alien, who looked just like a human man and shared her bedroom and was her best friend, and who backed off at a rate of knots when she put the moves on him because in his society mating with a brunette was right out. "Anyway, some people - lots of people, actually - in my species do like their own sex. Or both. Or neither one, probably..."
"Oh, I know," Nyssa said earnestly. Tegan knew she knew. She'd fled to another room when the Doctor had started talking about the Kinsey report. "But you're heterosexual." She didn't say it quite right, the stress on the wrong syllable. Tegan didn't bother correcting her.
In bed, looking up at the new, solid roundels in the dark, she thought about the boys and men she'd gone out with, and the girl with soft dark hair who'd worked on her dad's farm in the summer, and her friend Alice, whose boyfriends she'd always detested without really knowing why.
It didn't seem like the Doctor to have gone gossiping, but maybe Adric had been accidentally eavesdropping, too. Anyway, it didn't matter how he'd found out, what mattered was Tegan's important discovery, which was this:
Adric trying to be helpful was at least a thousand times worse than Adric being a pain. At least.
"You see," he said, pressing the button so that the image on his bedroom wall changed from the TRAKEN: A BRIEF HISTORY title screen to a doodle of a crowd of people standing in some sort of garden, "on Traken, starting a romantic relationship involves the families of all parties."
"Yes, I got that bit," Tegan said, fuming at having been tricked in here under false pretences. She might have known there wasn't such a book as 'Beginner's Guide to Navigating a TARDIS (Airport Edition)'. "Where the hell did you find a slide projector, anyway?"
"I thought using a primitive level of technology would make you feel more comfortable."
His room was unnaturally tidy. There was nothing easily throwable within arm's length.
"But if you already know," Adric went on, oblivious, "then Nyssa must have made her declaration." He shrugged. "Congratulations, I suppose."
"Wait, you knew this was going to happen? Oh, thanks for warning me!"
"I did warn you!" Hurt, he gestured at his screen. "I warned you with slides!"
She pulled a random slide out of the projector and held it up to the light. "Do I want to know why this woman's got a spear?"
"It's a representation of Earth people and their essentially primitive culture."
"She's wearing an air hostess uniform!"
"Well, you're the only specimen I've got."
Tegan folded her arms. "Adric," she said, "you've been working out the rate of growth of the TARDIS, haven't you?"
He looked understandably wary at this sudden interest in his beloved maths. "Ye-es. Not that you could possibly understand the complexities of sixteen-dimensional..."
She waved him quiet. "But it's big, isn't it? It's growing fast, new rooms every time we turn around, right?" Tegan wasn't tall, but neither was Adric, and she could loom when she wanted to. "Now, imagine how many different places I could hide your badge for mathematical excellence."
"I don't know what Nyssa sees in you," he announced huffily, clicking off the projector.
Yeah. I'm having problems with that one myself.
"Anyway," he added, his voice more conciliatory, "I only heard them talking last night. I wasn't to know Nyssa was going to ask you straight away."
Tegan pressed her fingers to her eyes. "No, you've got it all wrong, that's not what they were talking ab..." A thought struck her. "So, what, in your head the Doctor's the most senior woman in my family?" That was marvellous. The thought of Great Auntie Doctor almost saved this whole situation for her.
Adric rolled his eyes at the stupidity of the whole world. "If there are no female family members available then the senior male assumes the responsibility," he said, sounding like he was quoting something. "Your family's on Earth, and Nyssa's are all dead, so I assumed the Doctor was the only possible choice."
"They are, aren't they?" she said quietly, only grasping the enormity of it now someone else had said it so bluntly. "Nyssa's family. Everybody she ever met. We're all she's got, now."
"The book didn't say what happens if someone doesn't have any family at all."
"I can't imagine what that must be like," Tegan said to herself. Then: "What book?"
He picked a leather-bound volume from the desk and handed it to her. "It's all I could find in the library about Traken. If you want to borrow it, I put some sticky notes on the pages about two-person all-female mating rituals."
"The minute he gets us back to my time," Tegan murmured, leafing through the pages and trying not to look at the helpful little notes, "I'm buying you some magazines, because this can't be healthy for a boy your age. Where'd you say you got this?"
Adric's tone turned speaking-to-children patronising. "A library is a big room full of lots of books on all sorts of different subjects..." He trailed off at the look she gave him, and clapped his hand protectively over his badge.
"Do you think about your family?" she said in the dark, and the room was quiet for such a long time that she thought Nyssa must be asleep.
"Sometimes," Nyssa said, "I forget to think about them for hours."
She rolled over so she was facing Nyssa's bed, but couldn't see anything, not even the shape of her beneath the blankets. The room had never been this dark before. "You didn't light your remembrance-candle." She'd thought, before she'd started reading that book of Adric's, that the thing Nyssa lit every evening was just a night light.
"It's supposed to make the people you love come to you in your dreams." She said it so quietly the words were almost swallowed up by the dark. "It works, too. But I... think I'd prefer them to stop, now."
Tegan couldn't say anything. There was a pain in her heart, and she couldn't work out whether getting out of bed and crossing the room in the dark and putting her arms around Nyssa would make things better, or worse, or just much more complicated.
"I know I'm lucky," Nyssa said. "I'm still alive and I've got the Doctor and Adric and you, and I've seen more places than I ever dreamed. If my father," her voice faltered, "if he had seen what was coming he would have been so glad that I survived. My mother, too."
"God, Nyssa..."
"I'm very glad you're here," she said, no trace of tears in her voice. Maybe she had none left. "Every time the Doctor says he's found Heathrow, I know I should be happy for you, but I'm pleased, so pleased, when he's wrong. I'm sorry for that. I wish I was a better friend."
"Don't be stupid," Tegan said, blinking fiercely. "You're the best friend I've ever had."
She went looking for the library a few nights after the Mara, because she didn't want to sleep and if she stayed in the room Nyssa would insist on staying up with her, and Nyssa had had one of her headaches for days and looked a step away from exhaustion already. Tegan had left her curling up in bed, drifting into what she hoped was a dreamless sleep.
Big room, lots of books; it fitted Adric's description, all right. Nowhere near where he said he'd found it, but the way the TARDIS was stretching and reshaping, that wasn't a surprise.
What was unexpected was finding the Doctor there, crouched on the floor and peering down a hole in front of one of the bookcases, a dubious look on his face. "Tegan," he said. "I'm trying to find out where this leads. You didn't, by any chance, notice a hole in the ceiling on your way here?"
"I came from upstairs."
"Even so..." He shook his head at the hole as if it had disappointed him. "I'll have to cordon off Venusian Fiction until this repairs itself."
"No, not Venusian Fiction!" She grinned at the unimpressed look he shot her. "Well, if a good Venusian story's out, I'll just have to look for something about Traken. Where's that section?"
The Doctor climbed to his feet - with her help, she wasn't about to lose the only person who could half-reliably pilot this ship down a mysterious hole in the library - and dusted down his jacket. "I'm afraid there's only one book about Traken," he said. "Adric has it at the moment, but I'm sure he'll let you have it when he's finished if you ask nicely."
"Just one?" She'd been picturing miles of shelves, thousands of books about people like Nyssa. "A whole civilisation and there's only one book left?"
He nodded. "There are some galactic libraries. I hope that a few other books might survive."
A few. All Nyssa's culture and her life and her people reduced to a couple of paperbacks.
"It's horrible," Tegan said.
"Yes. I know." He brushed his hand across her shoulder, a kind, brave heart look on his face. "It's very late, Tegan. Can't you sleep?"
She shrugged, pulling a bit away from him. "Weird dreams. Since the Mara, y'know? All... mirrors and snakes and apples." She suddenly remembered Venice, Nyssa holding out that apple. "And caves," she said grimly. "Me and Nyssa in lots and lots of caves."
The Doctor cleared his throat. "Well, those are all aspects of your culture's folklore and mythology thrown up by your mind," he said. "Nothing to worry about, I'm sure."
Tegan, who knew damn well what a yonic symbol was and was quite sure the Doctor did too, realised he'd rather be dropped off another radio telescope than have this conversation, and let him change the subject.
"We can have another go at getting you to Heathrow tomorrow," he said brightly. "Why don't you pack a few things?"
This time they really did get to Heathrow.
In 1666.
There were Terileptils.
Nyssa sat on her own bed while Tegan unpacked, and she was trying so hard to look sympathetic instead of pleased that eventually Tegan came over and hugged her and said, "Yes, all right, I'm not completely sorry to be staying."
Nyssa was soft and pleasant against her.
"But don't say a word to the Doctor."
The stupid frock they'd given her kept catching on the branches. She was thinking of just tearing the damn skirt off, but that would mean slowing down. At least the shoes had flat heels.
Once again, this was distinctly not Heathrow, though she hadn't mentioned anything about going home for a few trips, now.
A hunting horn blared out across the forest. It was still far off and she must be almost at the TARDIS now, she...
A figure careened into her, one of the soldiers in red and silver, and Tegan yelped in surprise. He bore her into a clump of trees and she whirled around with her fists ready to swing, because if she was about to die then she could at least give him a broken nose to remember her by and -
"Tegan!"
Nyssa's hair was wild around her dirt-streaked face. The armour-plate was too big for her, and she was clutching the heavy sword two-handed, the point almost trailing on the ground.
"What the hell are you doing?" Tegan gasped.
"I was coming to rescue you," Nyssa said, and then Tegan started to laugh, weakly, helplessly, and that set Nyssa off, and in another minute they were holding each other up.
Tegan would tell herself, later: we were giddy and exhausted and she had that weird, gorgeous
Joan of Arc thing going. Of course I kissed her.
She would try to pretend that when she'd leaned in and pressed her lips against Nyssa's she was moving on some sort of instinct, not thinking anything at all, definitely not you're amazing and I might love you.
And she wouldn't be entirely sure if Nyssa might have been kissing her back, because a second later Adric stumbled into them.
"They've still got the Doctor," he panted.
In the labyrinth of dungeons beneath the castle, the three of them squeezed into the small tunnel Adric had used to escape, Tegan tried to concentrate on everyone getting out of this alive, and not on other things. Nyssa's thigh pressed against hers in the confined space. How Nyssa had felt, flush and open under her mouth.
"You two aren't going to do more kissing, are you?" Adric whispered suspiciously.
"No!" they hissed back at the same time, and even in the near darkness, Tegan saw her own expression on Nyssa's face: do you mean 'no, not while we're stuck down here' or 'no, not ever?' I know what I mean, what do you mean?
They rescued the Doctor before the High Priestess could get him to the altar. Back at the TARDIS, Tegan waited for Nyssa to say something, and when she didn't, waited to get up the nerve to bring up the topic herself. And waited. And waited.
So - Tegan was prepared to admit that she might like women. Some women, anyway. That High Priestess hadn't been much to write home about. It was a part of herself she hadn't known was there, but now she did, and it was all fine. This thing with Nyssa, which they hadn't said a word about in weeks, it was okay. They were best friends, and they lived together, and anybody who'd ever shared a flat knew it was suicidal to get involved with someone you lived with.
Especially if you couldn't bear to lose them.
It was a purely physical attraction to the woman, brought on by their closeness. And they were friends as well, so it was natural enough to confuse that combination of attraction and affection with something... else.
They'd just never talk about it for the rest of their lives. That was a plan.
Then it was 1925, and they watched the Doctor play cricket and went for tea at Cranleigh Hall. "This is more like it," Tegan told Nyssa as they strolled around the beautiful grounds, not arm in arm but not distant, either. "This is my idea of time travelling, all this Brideshead stuff."
"It's lovely," Nyssa agreed. "What's a brideshead?"
It was later, when they were getting dressed for the party, that Tegan had her revelation. Nyssa was off in another room and Ann Talbot was shimmying out of her clothes, and Tegan happened to glance at her in the dresser mirror for a moment while she was doing her make-up.
And then she put the brush down.
Ann and Nyssa were identical. Two peas in a pod, nobody in the house could tell them apart.
Except she didn't feel attracted to Ann. Oh, objectively she thought she was lovely, no question, but...
But Ann wandering around the room in a corset and stockings didn't do anything for her, when she sometimes felt a jolt just looking at Nyssa fully-clothed. So it couldn't just be a physical attraction, whatever this thing was.
It couldn't 'just' be anything.
"Rabbits," Tegan said quietly, and Ann scanned the carpet in alarm.
And when poor George Cranleigh confused Nyssa and Ann, and dragged Nyssa out onto the roof, and it looked like she was bound to go over the edge; that was the moment when things snapped into focus, and Tegan bit her lip until she tasted blood, staring up at the roof and thinking I love you, I've been an idiot but I love you, and don't you dare get yourself killed until I've managed to make a complete fool of myself telling you all this, do you hear me?
A woman screamed. Tegan's eyes slammed shut.
Someone was holding her by the arm; Adric. She clutched at him, not sure she could look. "The Doctor's got Nyssa," he told her. "She's all right, Tegan, I promise, she's all right."
It felt like the first time she'd ever breathed.
"I'm not letting you out of my sight again," she said into Nyssa's hair.
"I'd like that." Still shaken, but laughing a little, glad to be alive.
"I say, that gel's a bit familiar with Ann."
"No, that's the other one, Mother. That's Nyssa."
"Ah. Jolly good. Hot-blooded people, these Australians, what?"
"Never again," Tegan repeated, holding on to her as tight as she could.
Tegan laughed out loud when she realised. They both must have been arranging things in the room for weeks - a bedside table moved to the other side of the bed, a pile of books transferred from the floor to the desk. She hadn't known she was doing it for any particular reason, and she was sure Nyssa didn't have that sort of cunning in her.
However it had happened, subconscious accident or design, the floor between the two beds was completely clear. It'd only take a minute to push those beds together.
Nyssa put the box with their party frocks down by the wardrobe and turned to look at Tegan. "So," she said, a shy smile lighting up her face.
"So," Tegan said.
Neither of them moved.
"Oh, hell," Tegan said at last, "if we're going to do this..."
"And we are," Nyssa said firmly.
"...and we are, we might as well do it right."
"Doctor," Tegan said. "There's something I'd - well, we'd - like to speak to you about."
The Doctor looked up from the console, and flickered a glance at their clasped hands, and straightened up. He might have smiled, before his face settled into an appropriately serious expression. "Yes, Tegan? Nyssa?"
Adric snapped his book closed. "I'll go and..."
"Adric," Tegan said, "are you, or are you not, a member of this family?"
"Well, I hope this isn't going to take long," he grumbled, slinking back as if it was a great imposition on his valuable time, but she'd seen that split second of delighted, shy surprise, and she wouldn't forget it in a hurry.
"It'll only take a minute," she said, because she wasn't sure she could promise to keep her hands off Nyssa for longer than that. "Doctor, as most senior member of Nyssa's family, I'd like your blessing to become involved with her." Seemed a pretty clinical way of putting it to her mind, but that was what the book said, and with the way Nyssa was happily blushing beside her she supposed it'd do.
The Doctor rocked back on his heels. "As a matter of interest," he said, "were I to say 'no'..."
"The book didn't mention that," she said serenely, "but I think a swift kick to the shins wouldn't be out of the question."
"In that case, I'm more than happy to give you my blessing," he said, leaning in a little to let Nyssa kiss him on the cheek, and then she turned to Tegan and grinned, and kissed her properly.
When they let go of one another Adric had made his escape, and the Doctor was examining the ceiling. "I'm prepared to increase my blessing," he said, "if you'll go somewhere else and let me finish repairing the TARDIS."
"That," Tegan said, "is the best idea you've had since I got caught up in all this." And she bit cheerfully into the apple she'd been holding.