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Drifting through the inky blackness of space, the exterior bulkheads of the ancient space-station creaked and groaned like eerie, oddly-syncopated music. Lying on the thin, hard pallet that served as her bed, Ailla listened restlessly to the haunting song. After four months of living on board the Zenobia, it was as familiar to her as the sound of her own breathing. At times, it seemed like mere days since she had woken from her cryogenic slumber to find herself aboard the dilapidated station that had once been the pride and joy of the Celestial Intervention Agency – at others, it seemed like eons.

Beneath her blanket, she wrapped her arms around herself, cradled her wrists closely to her chest, each one heavy with a bracelet. Each of them was utterly different...yet each was beautiful, in its own way. And neither was an ornament.

The one that clung tightly to her left wrist was formed of what appeared to be black onyx, with delicate gold tracery patterned around it in an intricate filigree. It was a CIA recall bracelet, bonded to her skin at a cellular level. Ailla hated it with a savage passion. To her, it represented servitude. While ever she wore it, she could be traced and summoned by anyone in possession of the recall technology, no matter how far she ran across time and space. While she wore it, she was effectively a slave.

The other, encircling her right wrist, was different matter altogether. A gleaming golden ring, unadorned and unembellished, it dangled loosely, as if it had been made for someone with a much sturdier build than her fragile figure. This was a Time Ring – a small device created by her people, the Time Lords, to enable emergency travel through the Time Vortex. She had found it during one of her exploratory forays across the Zenobia, clasped to the wrist of a dead man, mouldering inside one of the defunct cryo-pods. Her hearts racing with excitement, she had taken it without qualm and hidden it in her pocket. Because, unlike the recall device, this golden bracelet represented freedom. Freedom from her old life. Freedom from the dying hulk that the Zenobia had become.

Her eyes slid across the room towards the man occupying the other bed, the leaping fire between them, blazing in the improvised hearth.

Freedom from Co-ordinator Vansell.

He lay unmoving, his eyes tightly closed, the flickering firelight playing across his pale, tired face. He appeared to be asleep, but even using her highly-attuned empathic senses, she was unable to be sure. Not without touching him, at least. His innate wariness was so much a part of him that it remained dominant even while he slumbered.

Ailla's fingers closed more tightly around the Time Ring as she gazed across at him. Together, during the last few months, they had managed to carve out a dwelling of sorts, situated in what had once been the quarters of the station commander, cobbled together from the detritus they had found scattered around the decaying space-station.

Vansell had taken command of the situation with cool authority, his manner still reflecting his old position as Co-ordinator of the Celestial Intervention Agency, issuing Ailla with orders and expecting them to be promptly carried out. He had organised foraging sweeps of the ship, to locate food and fuel and other necessities, while Ailla had made use of her technical knowledge to engineer some energy cells into a generator, to provide them with light and general life-support. To all outward appearances, he was as determined and focused as he had always been. But Ailla knew differently. She had watched something die in his eyes in the moment when he realised that Gallifrey was gone forever, something deep and fundamental and agonised. That moment when he was forced to accept the stunning, unbelievable truth that, of their most powerful and ancient race, they were most likely the only two left. Unable to cope with the enormity of that loss, he was going through the motions, clinging to the strict notions of duty that had guided him all his life. Trying desperately to find a reason for them to carry on, when the rest of their people were dead. Ignoring the fact that he was screaming in grief and bewilderment inside.

She should hate him. In many ways, she did hate him. He was the Co-ordinator of the Celestial Intervention Agency, the figurehead and representative of the organisation that had stolen her as a child and had destroyed her life before it even began. His predecessor, Sentris, had damaged and scarred her in ways she didn't yet understand. Vansell himself had looked at her with contempt in his clear green eyes, called her traitor and renegade and malcontent, threatened to have her locked away. Oh yes, when she had miraculously found the Time Ring, she should have used it immediately and vanished from the Zenobia, never to return. Leaving him behind without a second thought.

Even now, she still wasn't quite sure why she hadn't done it. She'd been trained to be ruthless, to do whatever was required to achieve her objective. The fall of Gallifrey meant little to her. She would not miss the cold, bleak CIA training Facility in which she had grown up, buried deep in the Mountains of Solace and Solitude.

But the other Time Lord had saved her life. He had reclaimed her from her long sleep, rescuing her from her cryopod, before it became her tomb, the way it had for so many others. She could sense the aching sorrow inside him, the helpless, anguished devastation at the loss of his home. And, somehow - however unwillingly - she identified with it. Those were the same emotions she felt whenever she dreamed of Koschei. Those constant, deep-rooted nightmares, seeing over and over again the horror of her lover's TARDIS being drawn into the black hole over the Dark Heart Colony, until she was too afraid to close her eyes. Vansell's grief was something she understood. It called to her, her empathy ultimately betraying her, serving only to draw her closer to him, despite her determination to remain aloof.

Quietly, she sat up, her gaze still resting on his unheeding face, her eyes suddenly bright with tears. In the end, instead of succumbing to the hatred and bitterness of the past, she had tried her hardest to reach out to him. Because the reality was, in the new order of things, there was no more Gallifrey, no more High Council, no more CIA. The distinctions of Co-ordinator and renegade Agent no longer existed. Now there was only Vansell and Ailla, a man and a woman, if only he would see it. Perhaps they were the last. Or perhaps they weren't. Perhaps, out there, in the vast sprawling wonder of the universe, there were other Gallifreyans who had survived the apocalypse of the Last Great Time War. Either way, though, they weren't alone. They had each other. As different as their lives had been to this point, they could go somewhere else, make a new start together.

She had tried to persuade him. With her words. And then, with more basic techniques, even going as far as to kiss him, offering him far more, her empathic senses starved for the simple necessity of touch. But to no avail. Every time, he had pushed her away. He was obsessed with still doing his duty for Gallifrey, determined they would both stay on board the Zenobia, the last piece of their home planet left to him, as derelict and desolate as it was. As the weeks passed, as she had inexplicably lingered, with the stolen Time Ring burning a hole in her pocket, she had eventually come to realise that he would never see her as any more than the traitor and renegade he had imagined when they first met.

Her choice had now become painfully simple. He would not come with her. So she could stay here and rot with him, on board this meaningless, drifting hulk, living out the rest of her regenerations in a hopeless, soulless parody of a world that no longer existed. Or she could use the Time Ring and leave him behind.

She hated him – oh yes, she did. That stupid, arrogant, stubborn, pig-headed, loyal, unselfish, duty-bound man. And yet, it was more complex than that. Because, in the long days since the moment she had first woken from her cryo-sleep to see his green eyes looking down at her, she had somehow learned to love him as well.

“I'm sorry for giving up on you, Vansell,” she whispered to herself. “I would have followed you anywhere, if only you had asked. I wish you had listened to me. But I can't stay here forever. I'm an empath – without touch, I'll just wither and die.”

The coordinates on the Time Ring were already pre-set. She had kept Vansell in ignorance of the existence of the device. Hopefully, without the precise temporal signature, he wouldn't be able to trace her. Twenty first century Earth. The century when everything changed for that planet, when the human race first became aware of the life teeming across the universe around them. And she would be there to see it. She had no idea what she would find on Earth – a new life, full of excitement and trepidation and possible danger. Nonetheless, she knew she had to try, despite all the risks. And despite what she was leaving behind.

She longed to cross over to Vansell, to brush his hand one last time with hers. But she knew she didn't dare. He slept so lightly, he would stir as soon as she left the bed, and her chance to escape would be lost. Tears spilled helplessly down her cheeks, knowing that when he woke and found himself alone, he would believe all his suspicions about her to have been validated. He would never know just how hard it had been for her to leave him.

“Goodbye, Coordinator.” Her voice was low and choked, full of regret. “Perhaps one day we'll meet again...and you might think better of me.”

Squaring her shoulders, and without allowing herself a chance to second-guess her choice, she activated the Time Ring, vanishing into the shimmering blue heart of the Time Vortex.