VIP Flood for Bianca (but open)

[amata_of_kaitos]

[Amata takes a few minutes to digest the Barge Facts 101 the Admiral seems to have helpfully dumped into her head. Fortunately, while no telepath herself, she's no stranger to telepathy, or transdimensional ships, although the Barge may actually top the TARDIS for strange and fantastic.

She looks around the suite she arrived in, without poking around, even though she knows that if this is indeed Koschei's quarters, he'd shrug and say she'd be within her rights to do so.

Then she flips on the communicator. People from all over the cosmos all on one ship, huh? No way she's wasting much time making her presence known. If Koschei is remotely typical for the passengers, the next few days will be far from boring.]

Hello, Barge. I'm one of the guests for this flood. My name is Amata, and I'm human, but not Earth born and raised. I'm originally from a pretty backwater colony called Kaitos, late 34th century. The last few years I've been traveling, mostly, some of it time travel. As far as Earth goes, early 21st century is the era I've spent the most time in. [There's no accounting for the taste of renegade Time Lords, as favorite time periods go, apparently, but she elects not to say that out loud.]

How are all of you this morning?

***

Amata is cheerfully wandering around everywhere on the ship she can reach that isn't obviously private quarters, and not shying from making use of Koschei's warden item (21st-century British passport, really, Koschei? See above: no accounting for taste). She'll talk to anyone who seems to welcome company, with open curiosity and warmth. Perhaps notably, once she works out what the Enclosure does, she's not very interested in it for itself, although she doesn't mind accompanying people who want to make use of it.

Comments

[video]

[wormintheglass]

Bianca smiles, a little toothy but genuine.

"I wouldn't dream of it. I try not to disappoint Koschei. He makes that sad face, and it's utterly intolerable. Like a beaten Borzoi. I should love for you to join me."

[video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

What the fuck is a Borzoi? She adds it to the mental list of things to look up when she has a spare moment, which she is already in the habit of keeping while bouncing around time and space. She's picturing something with a long, regal face anyway, so she'll be delighted later to see she's on target.

"Oh, good. I really wanted to check out the sauna, either way." Well, she did.

Not wanting to immediately trample Koschei's privacy was all well and good, but in this context stupid, she decides. She goes through his closets and pulls out a messenger bag to pack away the journal and Bianca's file and rummages another moment before coming up with a baton with a stun setting. Of course he'd have something stashed away to loan people less keen on lethal weapons. She wouldn't be surprised if he handed them out like to newbies like candy, offer of self defense lessons included.

That goes in her jacket pocket with the passport. She heads to the wardrobe, finds a red bathing suit that fits well enough to toss into her bag, and still turns up in what she thinks in pretty good time to let Bianca in.

"I brought your file to look over later, when we're not sitting in steam," she informs Bianca. "So I guess giving you first crack at questions would be, as my great uncle would say, the sporting thing to do."

[video]

[wormintheglass]

"How adorable," says Bianca, who once used to be sporting, until the sporting injuries became too great to bear. "Is he still alive, your great-uncle? Are you close?"

Bianca is wearing a white satin bathrobe, which she sheds onto the floor the moment she enters the spa, revealing nothing underneath but smooth, pale skin and the contrasting inky hair of her head and pubic mound. She's not tall, but she holds herself as though everyone around her comes up to her shoulders, and she heads right for the sauna without waiting for Amata to get changed.

In the sauna, she lies stretched out like a lizard in the sun.

"So tell me how you met my warden. Have you travelled with him very long?"

[video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

Amata tends to walk around like a steamroller who owns everything in sight, too. It's caused some friction with the Doctor, at times.

She raises her eyebrows a little when Bianca sheds her single layer and walks off into the sauna nude - not because she's scandalized but because it doesn't fit her admittedly small sample size of Time Lord sensibilities. That is to say, a tendency towards multiple layers and pretty buttoned up in public.

If she'd known, she'd have come sans bathing suit, herself. Maybe Bianca using the public sauna at all should have been a clue. She ends up on quickly stripping and put on the suit anyway, rather than possibly giving off the impression she'd risen to some sort of dare.

"Ah, no, Great-Uncle Galen died two decades ago," she says, when she's caught up, and flops comfortably. "Although he passed on a little before the purges that wiped out a lot of my extended family." His funeral had been the last time she's seen many of her kin, actually.

"Planetary civil war. Koschei turned up in the middle of all that. And was instrumental in ending it. But I didn't start traveling with him until, oh, 4 years ago, from my perspective. With him, in the loosest of senses. Sometimes it's together. Mostly we stay in touch."

Re: [video]

[wormintheglass]

Tactical nudity is a habit she formed in her Iris days, and Bianca hs retained it because it's often startlingly effective. In this case she deployed it on the offchance that it might put Amata on the back foot, but she finds herself not surprised that it didn't. No one survives four years adventuring with a Time Lord and stays easily scandalised, even when the Time Lord is far more carefully kind than the Doctor.

She imagines Koschei in the midst of the raging incivility of a civil war and smiles thinly. "He's very good at - encouraging the sensible option, isn't he? I haven't stabbed anyone since we met."

She's joking, of course, but not entirely. There are people here Bianca would really enjoy stabbing, and perhaps one day the mood will strike her when she's in a position to do so. She thinks of the sensation of a sharp point puncturing the pleural cavity and thinks she may do it - after he's returned, of course. Not in front of his friend. Koschei has always shown her exquisite courtesy and she appreciates it enormously. But he needn't think she's a pushover, either.

Re: [video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

Amata, who is well aware of Koschei's love of pointy things and has seen him in a rage that she's certain would have been homicidal if she hasn't been there to object, manages not to let her expression dissolve from pleasantly intent to baffled at Bianca's description of him. But it takes some effort.

She can't tell if Bianca has put her warden on a bit of a pedestal, or if Bianca assumes the poor dumb human has, and is screwing with her.

Maybe that's not fair, and it's neither. Koschei is very good at encouraging the sensible option - on his better days. Amata has not seen Koschei at his worst, she knows, but she has seen him in a wider range of moods and mental states than most.

"He can be," she agrees, fairly smoothly. "He was. It did take months of alternating between fighting and running for our lives before enough of the right people people were willing to listen."

[video]

[wormintheglass]

It's not that Bianca isn't aware of a side of Koschei he rarely lets show. Rather, she's proud of how well he has it under control - far better, she knows, than she does.

She would, she reflects, have liked to have seen him in a war, by turns compassionate and fierce, and she has a moment of bitterly resenting this girl, who she doubts has the wherewithal to have properly appreciated it.

"He's going to get me out of here," she says, and because Bianca has taught herself patience, she doesn't scream or fly at the girl with her teeth and fingernails, or beat herself against the wall. She barely even tenses up.

"There's a half-bottle of tequila in my robe. Would you mind passing it over?"

[video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

She doesn't move immediately, but says quietly, with conviction, "I've never known him to break his word. Whatever promises he's made you, he'll do everything in his power to keep. Even if it breaks him."

Maybe she shouldn't have added that last part. Getting killed in any way that sticks here apparently isn't a concern. Emotional and mental toll, however-

Koschei is entirely capable of backing himself into a corner where he disregards his own limits and boundaries. Amata knows this from experience. Bianca, as an inmate, may be the only with less nominal power than Koschei, here, but Amata's sure she has emotional power over him, nonetheless. So far Bianca doesn't seem inclined to egregiously abuse it. Amata can only hope that holds.

That moment of seriousness passed, Amata says amiably, "Sure thing." And reaches for the bottle as asked.

[video]

[wormintheglass]

Bianca takes the bottle, removes the cap and swigs it. The fierce spirit burns in her throat and she makes a small noise of satisfaction.

"I won't break him. He's magnificent. He's everything I should have been. A proper aristocrat."

She grins, suddenly, a wild urchin grin, entirely unsuited to her face and yet perfectly at home.

"Proper aristocrats never die. They never quite pick up the habit. They're like standing stones. Rooted right into reality. I've spent my life hoping to hitch to a star like that one. Which isn't what I'm doing here, my darling, don't worry. I'm building my own legitimacy instead. It's very frightening."

Re: [video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

Amata can't help but be a little suspicious - is Bianca talking in such terms because she knows more about her and she immediately let on, or just because she's a Time Lady, so it's a vocabulary they have somewhat in common? Where the cultures of Kaitos and Gallifrey overlap has certainly been a double edge sword regarding communication with the Master.

"And here I'd ridden off into the sunset in an attempt to shed some of those sorts of habits," she says, lightly. "Admittedly, the carefree, itinerant citizen of the universe shtick hasn't entirely taken." Of course it can't, unless she spends the rest of her life entirely avoiding Koschei, too. "What's legitimacy mean, for you?"

[video]

[wormintheglass]

Bianca stares: she's too polite to say anything out loud, but it's there on her face. She wasn't alluding to anything in Amata's culture because she'd forgotten humans have one, beyond the England that's been a backdrop to so many adventures. It's not a mark of any legitimacy she ever hopes to have, only of her own self-absorption, and she's a little ashamed of it.

She speaks quietly.

"For me, it'll be to stop hiding. I don't want to be an adventuress any more. It's too hard on the joints and the hearts. I've never actually felt entitled to the time and space I take up, you know. I spent millennia charming and baffling people into letting me live in it, or running and hiding too well to be caught, covering my tracks. I've never actually existed on Gallifrey, either - the years I was there have been erased from the record. I was erased, too, when the Doctor caught up with me."

She downs another swallow of tequila, and holds the bottle out in case Amata would like some.

"I've no intention of going back there. I just want the right to exist in the universe, as I see fit. No more, not these days."

And then she tilts her head.

"I hadn't picked up that you were also an aristocrat, dear heart. I should have realised when you referenced the great-uncle. What does it mean to you?"

[video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

Her eyes narrow at the mention of the Doctor, and then she reaches for the bottle to take a long sip of the tequila, contemplating the impression you give other people versus how you perceive yourself. She knows some of Koschei's doubts about his sense of self. In some ways, he had hitched his own star to Amata's near the beginning of his current life. He even has the uniform of her House stashed away in his closet her in the Barge; she'd seen it rummaging around before she came to meet up with Bianca. She wonders if he'd put it on, when he's needed something to feel more stable in the midst of the Barge's rapid changes, or if just having it helps.

"I'm ex-royalty, actually. Born into a cadet branch of the Imperial House of Kaitos, but then succession broke down while I was off world doing graduate work at university. I scrambled to the top of the heap to end the civil war and gave the social order another sharp kick so I could climb back down. The Houses aren't dismantled, just organized into part of a parliamentary system without an inherited monarchy. That was the sensible compromise," she says, wryly. She hasn't gone looking for confirmation during her travels, but she imagines there will be more reforms over the next few generations before Kaitos fully integrates with galactic society.

"As far as legitimacy goes in that context, there were other people with claims as good as mine. I'd had the temerity to marry some foreigner of no particular political note, which was fine when I was so far from the throne and planning on mostly staying off world as a diplomat, but harder to ignore as a potential Empress. But I knew we couldn't go backward, to the social rigidity that made sense when we were a resource-poor planet out of contact with the rest of the galaxy. I'd seen the technological wonders the rest of humanity had. Keeping those from our people would be cruel. And futile in the long run. I guess I saw myself as rooted in a wider reality. And that made my responsibility something different from everything I'd been taught as a child. Which makes legitimacy a...process, I suppose. Of working out what that responsibility is. But then I oh so conveniently gave most of those responsibilities away. So I could live a life less bound by tradition, out of the public eye. They do say the grass is always greener on the other side," she concludes, ruefully.

[video]

[wormintheglass]

Bianca listens, not so much politely as avidly. Amata's story reminds her of the Doctor, who also claimed to have turned his back on his position.

"And do you, in fact, live that life? Have they wanted you back, since you left? What would you do if they did?"

The Doctor has taught her that one cannot walk easily away from responsibilities written into one's bone marrow. He may call himself outcast, but he still polices time travel with the unthinking, reflexive Gallifreyan authority that wiped her unhesitatingly out of existence. She makes a mental note to discuss this with Koschei, after the flood, because it makes her feel sharply murderous.

[video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

She purses her lips, then shrugs slightly. "The Monarchists can take a flying leap; I'm not restoring the throne. I'm technically still the Head of my House. For historical and cultural reasons, flatly abdicating that position causes almost as many problems as it solves. But the traditional workaround for incapable or disinterested Heads of House is appointing a proxy, which I did before running off. That takes care of most of the day to day matters. Time travels means they don't have good ways to get in touch with me to try to get me to really come back."

She hesitates before adding, "But I have fallen into playing the diplomat at times. I've even asked Koschei to put on a uniform and play bodyguard, because that sort of presentation lends credibility." She almost winces at her own words. Koschei does love dressing up and playing a part, but he's also too honor bound to not take being her guard deathly seriously.

[video]

[wormintheglass]

She doesn't clench her hands when the girl talks about dressing Koschei up in her uniform and posing him as a toy soldier, because Bianca's hands are visible, resting lightly on her thighs. She runs her consciousness along every tendon and metacarpal, a meditation mantra of her own core and construction, and she breathes deep and keeps her light, thin, smile steady. Koschei, she thinks, will owe her for this.

"So you delegated all the hard work and wear the rest as a ceremonial cape when you choose, then. So modern and independent."

[video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

She nods, because yes, there's a reason she was mocking herself about convenience a moment ago. She'll accept the general thrust of Bianca's judgment, but she also thinks it's incomplete.

"I buried all of my immediate family, including my husband. After he was killed, I set aside any chance of having children, and guarded against any public hint of liaisons that might lead to children. And I stayed in that personal and political limbo of ex-monarch now equal for the other Houses, and committed widow, for nearly two decades. Long enough for a generation to grow up under the new system of government." She reaches for the bottle to take another swig.

"Might be the blink of an eye for you, but I was tired."

Re: [video]

[wormintheglass]

Bianca cuts her eyes sideways to look at Amata. The children part hits a cold place in her hearts that momentarily increases the urge to scratch Amata's eyes out, and then her face softens.

"I apologise. I shouldn't have assumed you didn't pay dearly for the privilege. Are you younger than you look, or do you have an augmented lifespan?"

Re: [video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

She blinks, then shrugs. "Good genes, 32nd century medicine. Doesn't energy flying around during time travel slow the clock down just a little?" She thinks she remembers the Doctor making a comment to that effect.

[video]

[wormintheglass]

"It does. So does this barge."

Bianca's gaze is intent and heavy.

"Could you still have children? Now?"

Re: [video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

"Yes. And of course there's various forms of surrogacy and adoption. The bigger questions are where and when and with whom I'd raise a child."

She eyes Bianca, trying to figure out if she struck a nerve. Settling down with children is certainly one way to put down roots and create a legacy.

Re: [video]

[wormintheglass]

"Of course. Those are the ones I have no satisfactory answer for, as yet."

She looks down at her hands.

"Not that one needs a partner. But a safe place."

Iris already failed that test, Bianca thinks. She's had children, but she's known nothing about them for longer than Bianca can easily remember. She'd like to hope it was done to keep them safe, but knowing Iris, she's more inclined to attribute it to pure selfishness. And you wondered why I shot you.

"My - well, my past is inclined to make me doubt the feasibility of it, as a plan. I haven't historically been very good at that level of commitment."

Understatement of the millennium, she thinks.

Re: [video]

[amata_of_kaitos]

"Maybe not a partner," Amata allows. "But I'd want some sort of support network. To help with accountability, not just the babysitting."

She doesn't follow that up with 'Maybe something to work on first?' because that's just condescending.

Re: [video]

[wormintheglass]

She's not at all sure what the younger girl means by accountability, but in Bianca's private thoughts, she has considered the effect she might have on small people who rely on her for not only survival, but for their entire concept of how the universe is meant to work.

That was the part Iris was too scared to tackle, and while Bianca still considers that to have been an irresponsible coward's choice, she has to admit she'd feel much more sanguine with someone to share that burden. She nods.

"Yes. It would be better. Ah, well. They say this is a good cruise for meeting new friends."