I'm writing Who-fic. This was inevitable. This story's main roost is over at A Teaspoon and an Open Mind (where I reside under the penname TheRothwoman), the main Doctor Who fanfiction archive, but I decided to post it here too to give it a little more coverage. Fairly tame at the beginning, but gets a bit graphic with a smidge of hurt/comfort later. Enjoy!

The TARDIS landed with a rickety thud, as it was always apt to do after unexpectedly tossing its occupants around in the Time Vortex courtesy of some spatio-temporal anomaly that seemed to crop up almost as often as weeds in an unkempt garden. The Doctor wasn't sure what to wonder first: what the anomaly could be this time, or why they still surprised him at all. Traveling in time and space was always guaranteed to bring about encounters with all manners of the bizarre, but for some reason spatio-temporal anomalies seemed to favor him. Well, all in a day's-approximation's work, he supposed.

"Where are we, Doctor?" asked Nyssa, keeping her grip on the console in case anything else unexpected happened.

"I don't know," he said, almost automatically.

"I should've figured as much," said Tegan, hoisting herself up from the floor where she had fallen and dusting off her uniform indignantly. "Really, Doctor, don't you ever have any idea where this old clunker is going?"

"A…certain percentage of the time," he replied, then catching Tegan's impatient eye added with a small smile, "but it's over fifty percent, if that's what you were worried about."

"Anything more specific?" she retorted, "or do you need Adric to work those stats out for you?"

"I could do it for you, you know, Doctor," Adric piped up, taking Tegan's remark as a compliment as her sarcasm went completely over his head "if you gave me the exact number of times you've landed where you meant to as opposed to the number of…"

"We're on Earth again," Nyssa intervened, "northern hemisphere, temperate region, local atmosphere high in humidity with cooler temperatures, estimated time somewhere in the 25th century."

"Ah, thank you, Nyssa," said the Doctor, bringing up an image of their immediate surroundings on the TARDIS scanner. The screen was dark and blurry, with plumy waves of white-ish grey wafting across the landscape.

"I can't see anything," said Tegan. "Looks too misty out there."

"Or it could just be nighttime," added Adric.

"Or it could be both," said the Doctor, "more than likely. Well! Shall we go out and have a look around?"

"In that?" Tegan protested. "We'll get lost faster than you can say 'Sleepy Hollow'!"

"Which is precisely why I'm going to send Adric to get the torches from the third cupboard from the right in the second equipment room down the hall to the left," said the Doctor. "Adric, could you get the torches from the third cupboard from the right in the second equipment room down the hall to the left?" Adric nodded and trotted off to retrieve their light sources.

"But Doctor," said Nyssa, "Don't you think it would be safer to wait until morning to go out searching, or at least until the fog clears?"

"Nyssa, as much as I admire your thoughtfulness," said the Doctor, "if there's a spatio-temporal anomaly out there, the sooner we find it and fix it, the better." He patted a hand on her shoulder and unrolled his hat before Adric returned to the console room carrying a bundle of wooden sticks in his arms. Wrong torches. The Doctor sighed.

"Third cupboard from the right, Adric."

The foliage around them grew thick but not unnaturally so, as if trying to decide whether to be welcoming or not to these mysterious new strangers. With observance, a path-like narrow clearing could be made out through the tree trunks that bulged from the earth and sprawled upwards, blocking out the moon and stars. There was a pitch-darkness to it all that, for some odd reason, was not punctuated by the trill of typical wilderness noises. No rustling of squirrels scurrying through the leaves, no croaking of frogs in some nearby pond, no hooting of wise old owls, not quite complete silence but just…noiselessness. The team trundled along after Adric had experimentally quipped "Sleepy Hollow" just to prove to Tegan that they weren't going to get lost that fast and kept going for what felt like a couple hours. The torches acted as sufficient beacons, a small but welcome comfort; their cones of light swayed obediently up and down and side to side at the flick of a wrist as if to say "yessir/yes'm, just doing my job" and throwing warning shadows across the ground to keep their owners from falling over large, unintentionally obstructive tree roots.

After a while, the trees stopped abruptly and opened onto a road. It was strange after all that time in the forest, like a whole other world marching stoically through the stalwart one that was already there but grew stronger where it was instead of fighting back and taking what was its. A waxing gibbous moon shone overhead in a sky dotted with stars, obscured only from the group's point of view because of the light from the torches interfering with their eyes. If that was all that was creating any sort of light pollution, then it was doubtful that any major establishments, towns, or cities, lay nearby. The road stretched out and curved in both directions, neither one yielding its secrets of where it lead.

The Doctor produced a coin from his coat pocket, flipped it, pointed right, and began walking left. His companions followed suit. Tegan seemed quite relieved to finally have a solid man-made (or otherwise-made, depending on what new intelligent species had settled on Earth in the past few centuries) surface to walk on again, the Doctor prattled on about fixing an approximate date on when the road was built based on its material and its wear and tear, and Adric—growing a bit bored from the lack of excitement—leaned over to Nyssa and whispered "I just realized: we've been out here for a whole of two hours and seventeen minutes and Tegan still hasn't said a word about still not being at Heathrow. I think this might be a new record."

After enough time had passed that each companion had a chance to ask "How much further, Doctor?" at least once each (with differing levels of impatience), they finally reached something that wasn't forest or empty road. It was an archway, stone at the base and some sort of metal in the top-frame. In this frame were three words in a kind of spindly lettering that could convey whimsicalness by day and menace by night. It read: The Safe House.

"Well," said Tegan, her voice draped in a lovely silken dress of sarcasm, "This certainly doesn't look anything remotely like the kind of places we usually find with traps and monsters and mortal peril at every turn."

"Oh, come on, Tegan," Adric scoffed with a healthy dose of exasperation, both from Tegan's statement and from his own exhaustion at having walked so much, "We haven't even gone inside yet!"

"Do we even need to?" said Tegan. "Just this front gate gives me the creeps."

"We've come this far already," said Nyssa. "Besides, the spatio-temporal anomaly could be inside."

"And it could also be an actual safe house," the Doctor added, pulling out the sonic screwdriver to fiddle with the locking mechanism on the gate. "During the second World War, several million Londoners were evacuated to the British countryside to escape the bombing. Perhaps this place was built for a similar purpose. Now let's see, what wars did Britain get involved in between the twentieth and twenty-fifth centuries…" He trailed off and started theorizing to himself again before he finished with the lock. To everyone's surprise, it opened quite noiselessly instead of producing a loud rusty creaking. The Doctor gestured for his companions to follow and they all walked through together.

"I still don't understand what you're so worried about, Tegan," said Adric, speaking as much from genuine misunderstanding as he was from a desire to reassure his TARDIS-mate. "I mean, it says 'safe' right at the gate." Tegan looked about to sigh, but seemed to decide halfway through that if she was going to spend breath she might as well do so constructively.

"Adric, by any chance do you know what irony is?"

"…Something to do with iron?"

Maybe that sigh was worth breathing after all.

The house itself was reached within minutes. Had it not been for the more modern lock at the gate and the readout from the TARDIS console, the Doctor could've sworn that they'd landed in the 19th or 20th centuries and not the 25th. The architecture looked very late-Victorian but was not the least bit worn, like it was still in use. It stood a good three stories tall and was hardly large enough to be a mansion, but looked as though it could easily accommodate a larger-than-average family. A larger-than-average family that had largely isolated itself from the rest of civilization. There really wasn't anything to do but go up and investigate. After seeing that the house had no doorbell, the Doctor knocked fervently at the front door.

"Um, hello?" he called. "Is there anyone at home? I'm afraid it may be quite urgent!" Silence. Adric moved over to one of the windows and shined his torch inside. After a few moments' investigation, he turned back to the group looking puzzled.

"I can't see anything!" he said, "And it's not like the inside is empty or there's something solid blocking it, it's like the light can't even penetrate the glass! There's just…blackness on the other side, or like the window isn't even a window at all."

Returning the look of puzzlement, the Doctor tried the doorknob. Much like the gate the door opened effortlessly, even more so as it didn't even need unlocking. Treading cautiously, they all went inside. As expected, the front room was dark apart from the light of their torches. A quick sweep turned up nothing unusual, aside from the fact that it turned up nothing at all. The room contained no carpets, no rugs, no vases, no decorative flora, no ornaments, no furnishings whatsoever. The windows appeared to be covered with a kind of heavily tinted film, explaining why Adric couldn't see in. It seemed to work both ways, as the crew couldn't see out of them either.

"I don't understand," Nyssa muttered. "Why build windows in the first place if you're going to make them impervious to light?"

"Hello!" the Doctor called again. "So sorry to barge in like this, but it really is important!"

"We're looking for a spatio-temporal anomaly!" called Tegan. "Have you seen one anywhere?" Nyssa gave her a look.

"Tegan, please," she said, trying to get her friend to be reasonable, "This isn't a time to be joking." Tegan sighed again.

"I'm sorry," she sighed, with a distinct air of defeat, "But I'm just tired and exhausted and paranoid out of my wits that something's going to jump out at me any second…"

"Well then," piped the Doctor, "Perhaps we should jump out at it first? Come on, let's check the rooms." Through a small archway off to the side lay what would appear to be the parlor room, had it any sofas or chinaware cabinets or a table. The Doctor went first with Tegan following close behind. He gestured inside with a "ladies first" gesture, prompting an unappreciative raise of the eyebrow from his companion before going in.

Everything went completely black. Not as though the torches had gone out, not as though they had closed their eyes, not as though they were unconscious. It was as though there was no such thing as light anymore.

The room and the space around them had simply stopped existing.