Doctor Who: Amy, Captured Ch. 13

'No,' Sander said easily, grinning. 'We're the bad guys, Mara. We lose. But the great thing about being the villain is that we also don't quit. Ever. So no, it's not over. Not for me, anyway. Will you follow me?'

'To the end of the universe, my Captain,' Mara said resolutely. Sure, it was a cheesy line-and she added a mock salute to it- but the universe had a place for dramatics, and this was probably as good a time for it as any. The two of them, standing together before a window opening out onto a vast celestial panoply, in the shadow of a giant robot... it was pure Hollywood, if that place hadn't been annihilated by solar flares along with the rest of the original Earth.

'Then we aren't done,' Sander said, kissing her. 'I can't stop now... Something inside won't let me. But I'll need time to think, and plan. We can't just go right back to it, can we?'

'Oh...' Mara grinned wickedly. 'Well then, my love, I think we should find something else to do, y'know, in the mean time...'

'You are insatiable,' Sander grunted, getting pushed back as she leaned into him and pressed her lips against his. '... And I love you for it.'

Outside, both the moon and the planet were rising, from the perspective of the asteroid.

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Hours passed, and Sander had returned to his room, after a brief stop off to his mechanist's station to inject some repair nanomachines into his arm and leg, taking Mara with him. She could sleep; he found that impossible. Images of the Doctor were still haunting him. And Amy's strange, impassive expression as she looked at him for the last time. He had seen a lot of strange things, in the last few hours...

The deep thinking, the planning, it came easily to him now, in the dark, with Mara's soft breaths purring out from the depths of his bed. He had spoken the truth, when he said that something in him wouldn't allow him to stop; when Elsa had died he'd felt something snap. Something important. He physically needed to take his revenge, now.

He had seen the Doctor again; he'd looked into his eyes and he had come out the other side of that conflict relatively unscathed. But that confrontation hadn't assuaged his anger, his failure hadn't slaked his desire for vengeance. He would continue.

He had lost count of just how long he had sat there, staring out into the darkness, but eventually the idea did come to him. It was a fragile, half-formed concept, almost ghostly and insubstantial. Sander felt that to move too suddenly would cause it to dissolve away forever. Slowly, carefully, he reached for his laptop and powered on the holographic screen. He typed rapidly, calculation after calculation, until a basic framework, a shape for his theorem spun into being.

No way... That thing was workable?

Now very excited, on the verge of a wonderful breakthrough, Sander called out over his shoulder, 'Mara! Mara, wake up!'

'Huh? What do you want?' Mara moaned from within a nest of sheets.

'Come here, I need your help,' He hissed, afraid of anything that might disrupt his concentration. 'I think I've got something.'

'Alright, alright...'

The two of them sat together, each typing furiously at a separate computer. Sander was afraid to vocalize his idea, lest Mara laugh him out of the room, but she worked unquestioningly at anything he asked even without knowing why. The math got increasingly complex and hard to follow; in the end, Mara had given up trying to understand it and had begun simply entering in the numbers as Sander called them out and letting the computer deal with them.

Finally, the flow of data narrowed to a single point, a single equation, a single number. The stream dwindled away to a single digit, and Sander gasped and stood motionless before the simple, perfect idea.

'Dear lord...' He breathed. 'That is off the fucking hook.'

'I don't get it,' Mara shrugged. 'What have we got here, Hackett? What have you done?'

Sander rubbed his chin, wondering exactly how to phrase such an impossible sounding idea. Saying it out loud seemed to negate the importance of it by making it ridiculous. To say it was just silly. Still, it needed to be said. It was madness, but it was his madness, and he was going to talk about it. He opened his mouth, preparing to form the idea:

'Time can be rewritten.'

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