Title: Back Home
Author: Van Donovan
Characters: Vislor Turlough, Tegan Jovanka, Jack Harkness, Owen Harper and the rest of the Torchwood lackeys.
Pairing(s): Turlough/Owen, Turlough/Tegan, misc. others.
Rating: Hard-R, for sex and swearing.
Word Count This Chapter: 2,654.
Word Count Overall: 14,000.
Notes: Set in the three month glossed-over gap in Torchwood, somewhere probably late 2007, early 2008. Spoilers for all of the Fifth Doctor's run.
Summary: Turlough returns to Earth, but things have changed.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. I made no money from this, but if you want to hire me, I'm cheap. Betaing provided by Starkiller.
--

“Listen,” Turlough said, standing before Tegan’s now blazing fireplace. Torchwood had helped patch the windows in the front room with tarpaulin, but the sun had set and cold air now filtered through. “I wanted to apologize, for earlier.”

“Please,” Tegan said. “I hardly need apologies from you.”

He turned, looking at her in the firelight, and shook his head. “Just . . . just let me, all right? I should have stayed that night. I wanted to stay. It’s just easier to be cruel, and to run. It’s always been easier.”

Tegan crossed from him, moving to a small wine cabinet she had against one wall. She selected a bottle off the shelf and went to pop the cork. “I need a drink,” she announced.

He stood watching her, fidgeting with his hands as he did. In the soft light of the blaze, the only light since the electricity was still blown, she looked just like he remembered her last: in the shadows, running away from the Daleks. She poured two glasses and brought the second over to him. “Thanks,” he said, accepting it.

“I always thought the way you feared things was your most human quality,” she said. “And I mean that as a compliment.”

He took it as one. “It’s good to see you again, Tegan,” he said.

She smiled and when she did it touched her eyes and he knew in that moment she was truly happy. It didn’t matter what had happened that day: she was alive, and she was glad. “Who should we toast to?” she asked, holding up her glass. “To absent friends?”

“You humans and your banal traditions,” Turlough chided, raising his glass as well. He clinked them together. “To absent friends.”

They drank and he watched her and thought that perhaps this was what was so nice about being human. Not the traffic or the honking cars or the strange smells or the incomprehensible rules or the primitive technology, but sharing a drink with a friend, and maybe even enjoying that person’s company.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she snapped, pulling away to settle on her couch.

He watched her, but didn’t know of another way to look at her. Instead, he looked around her sitting room, taking in its contents for perhaps the first time. “You live alone,” he noted. It hadn’t occurred to him before that that might be uncommon.

Tegan laughed, and the noise was high and short, derisive. “Don’t you?”

“I’ve got a roommate, actually. He is a true, shining example of your planet’s ilk. His name is Robert. He’s a janitor at one of the schools I work at and personal hygiene is clearly a foreign concept to him.”

“Sounds charming.”

“Quite,” he remarked. “I could introduce you two, if you’d like.” He made himself follow her to the couch, where he sat down beside her.

“I’ll think I’ll pass, thanks,” Tegan said, shifting unnecessarily to make room for him. “So, you’re a teacher?”

He looked up from the sip he was taking. “What?”

“No? You said you work in a school?”

Turlough fidgeted with the glass he was holding and took a deep gulp of the liquid. He didn’t want to discuss Trion with Tegan, or work, or what he was banished to Earth for, again. Yet, not to, he knew, was just another form of running away. He grasped for words. “My homeworld uses your planet as a . . . place to outsource some of its juvenile liabilities.”

Tegan was staring at him with flat disbelief. “Prisoners, you mean?”

“Well, I was an exile here myself, when the Doctor found me.” He pursed his lips. “Don’t act so surprised, Tegan. It happens more than you’d expect.”

“So you’re a prisoner here?” She had that indignant tone in her voice, the one she got when she was about to start yelling about injustices.

“When I was with the Doctor,” he said, to nip her protest in the bud, “we came across a planet where my brother’s ship had crashed. He was an infant when I saw him last, but nearly the same age as me when we met again. Through the Doctor’s help, I was able to help my brother get back home. I found out that in the years between my leaving Earth and then, Trion had rescinded my exile. It was all political, Tegan, it isn’t as if I’d murdered anyone.”

“You certainly tried to,” she noted bitingly.

He scowled, but it didn’t last long. “That was different.”

“So, what happened?”

Turlough took another sip from his glass and realized he’d already drained it. He set the glass down. “Well, as it turns out, I ended up twenty-some years into my own future. When I disappeared from Earth, they put me down as an escaped convict, and after ten years I was legally declared dead. I didn’t have much to come back to.”

She didn’t say anything, and he was glad for that. “After a few foolish attempts on my part to earn money and reclaim some of the squandered Turlough fortune, I ended up on what they loosely call probation. It isn’t prison, exactly, but I was to be monitored while I served fifteen years of . . . well, you might call it community service.”

“Fifteen years!”

“The new regime is a bit more lenient than the old,” he said with a curl of his lip. “Believe me, fifteen years is a welcomed relief to a Trion death sentence. And, I’m not exactly exiled this time. It’s a voluntary assignment. I’m one of a few solicitors in this part of the world, required to keep track of the exiled—they call them displaced, now—Trion juveniles here. It’s not a bad job really, the pay is just shit, and, well, it is Earth.”

“Do you think you’ll stay?”

Turlough set his wine glass down and settled back on the couch. “I’d like to leave. I miss traveling. Even before the Doctor, I spent a lot of time traveling. My father was an ambassador and I frequently went on trips with him. But, well, a fifteen year sentence is a fifteen year sentence, and unless the Doctor decides to look me up again, I may just be stuck here.”

“Maybe you’ll get time off for good behavior.”

Turlough smiled, but didn’t say anything. He knew he ought to ask her what she’d been doing for the past twenty-five years, but he didn’t want to. He’d never enjoyed sitting around, telling stories. The important details would come out slowly, the way they were meant to.

“It’s really not fair,” Tegan said into the silence, studying him. “It was strange enough before, when I was just a few years older than you.”

Turlough shifted on the couch toward her. “Do you want me to stay the night?”

He couldn’t remember what color her eyes even were, but they were firelight-gold right then, and he could see the answer in them, even though the words refused to leave her lips. It made him smile to think about it; her inability to say ‘yes,’ and the way things fell into place after so long.

Tegan tasted like wine and humor, like good sense and cedar, and perhaps a little like the time vortex. He could tell she hadn’t been kissed in a long time—years, at least—because she had the remarkable shy-eagerness of someone who knew what to do, but hadn’t quite remembered how to yet.

She kissed like the Doctor had, at first.

The thought made him chuckle, deep in his throat, and Tegan opened the golden eyes she’d closed. “Don’t start laughing on me now,” she scolded.

“Tegan,” he said, turning his head so he could kiss along her jaw, down her neck, “don’t you ever shut up?”

“Very funny,” she replied, but her voice was softer and there was no bite to it.

He easily divested her of her wine glass, safely putting it aside his on the nearby table, all without taking his mouth off the reedy, throbbing vein he’d begun kissing on her neck. She let out a little sigh that tousled the hair over his ears, and that was when he knew he’d changed and won, all at once.

Her small, delicate hands found his back and pulled him closer, and he didn’t have to ask questions to know what to do.

Tegan was older, but her heart was still young, and that suffused through every part of her. Her body sagged in places it hadn’t when he’d last known her, but he’d never much judged people by their looks. Naked, she was shy and uncertain in a way he’d never seen her, vulnerable almost to a fault.

He kissed fire into her, breathed in life. Her fingers tangled in his hair as he laid her back against the couch, working his mouth down her body. His tongue drew circles around the nubs of her breasts and the more she enjoyed it, the warmer she became.

By the time he had her leg drawn to his shoulder and his mouth at her inner thigh, she was hissing his name like she had a hundred times in the past, although it had never been quite like this. It made him glad, and he let his chuckle return to her, putting his mouth between the legs she was always getting in trouble on.

He found himself back in the TARDIS, wrapped in the ship’s warmth, haunting the darkened corridors with a warm blanket drawn about his shoulders, and it was Tegan he was inside, and he realized they were the same thing. Tegan smelled like the TARDIS, or the TARDIS smelled like her: freshwater and something sweet and elusive. He couldn’t compare it to anything else; it was simply Tegan. It was a warm, coming home smell, something he had always associated with returning to the TARDIS, and now he found it was Tegan, too. A feminine, human smell, and he loved it.

“Turlough,” she rasped, her fingers pawing at his hair as he worked.

He knew what that meant too, and pulled up, bending to kiss her neck once more, before sliding into her, soft and inviting. He saw sparks, and Tegan’s golden eyes, and maybe even that elusive thing called happiness.
--

Tegan drove.

Even after all this time he’d never bothered to learn how, and certainly couldn’t afford a car on his salary; besides, it wasn’t like they needed two. The night stretched on forever around them, black upon black upon black. The moon hadn’t yet risen, and a low layer of clouds hid the stars. Turlough’s right foot bobbed anxiously on his knee, and Tegan scowled into the darkness, picking out the road against the black.

“I swear, I’m about to turn this car around if you don’t start explaining things,” she said, her voice full of briar and thorns. “You can’t just call me up out of nowhere and take me off on a wild goose catch.”

“We’re not chasing geese. Just trust me, Tegan. You do trust me, don’t you?” He was aware his put upon sincere voice was not at all that convincing, not even after all his practice.

“About as far as I can throw you,” she retorted. “We’re in the middle of nowhere!” she exclaimed. “And it’s the middle of the night, and I’ve got to work tomorrow. I don’t see why this couldn’t wait.”

Turlough watched the blackness going by, a smirk on his lips. “I keep reminding myself not to try to surprise you.”

“I like surprises!” Tegan cried. “I just like to know what they are first.”

He rolled his eyes, but couldn’t help but smiling. “We should be getting near. It’ll be on the horizon.” He leaned forward in his seat. “Flip to your main beams.”

“But we’re in the middle of nowhere!” she protested again.

“Just flip to the brights, Tegan,” he patiently said.

She did, the road ahead was illuminated and there it was: a dormant beast, sleeping against the horizon of the sky. Its hull glittered silver from the car lights, but the form stretched on into the darkness, too large to be illuminated by such small beams. Tegan slowed the car to a halt, still far enough away that the windscreen wasn’t completely obscured by it.

“What is that thing?” she asked, her voice hushed in awe.

“A space ship,” Turlough said smugly, watching her bow her head under the rearview mirror, trying to take it all in. “Do you want to see it?”

“We should call Torchwood,” she replied, her eyebrows lost somewhere in her hair. “They’ve got to see this.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Tegan,” he said. He unbuckled and stepped out and she followed, somewhat more mechanically, her eyes still on the ship. They left the car idling, the headlights illuminating the path to the ship for them. “Torchwood wouldn’t know the first thing to do with this ship.” He walked up to it, flipped open a thin metal panel on the side, and placed his palm on it.

The ship hummed, whirling to life, and a small door slid open before them. The inside was dim, lit only by running lights.

“Is it empty?” she asked, not immediately following him inside. “Who’d leave a great big space ship out here like this?”

“Maybe it’s a gift from the Doctor,” Turlough mocked. “Come on, it’s empty, at least right now. I’ve explored the whole thing already.”

“When did you get out here!” Tegan stomped into the ship after him.

It was bigger on the outside than it was on the inside—engines took up most of the interior space. There were several living quarters, a moderate sized kitchen, three storage holds, a small recreation room, a few bathrooms and the cockpit, which was more airplane than TARDIS console.

Turlough slid into the captain’s seat and began flipping switches, powering up the ship properly. Lights flickered on around them, and the cold air began to circulate, warming to a pleasant degree within minutes. He pressed one last button, which dropped a thin monitor down. When it flickered to life, it displayed a video feed of Tegan’s car, its driver’s side door still open.

“You’re going to leave, aren’t you?”

Turlough’s smile faded and he swiveled in the chair to look at Tegan. She was hovering in the doorway to the cockpit, as if loath to enter fully. “It’s a great big space ship, Tegan! It’d be a waste to leave it here, just so the humans could dissect it!”

“I’m human, in case you’ve forgot!” she snapped. “What about the rest of your sentence? Your job?”

He knew what she was asking, what she was implying, and he shook his head. “Come with me,” he said, rising to cross to her. “It might not travel through time, but there’s still so much to see out there.”

“You’re mad,” she said, but the words were soft and weak.

“I can’t spend another ten years on this planet, and I get the feeling you don’t want to either.” He studied her face. “Tegan, come with me.”

“Won’t they come after you? The owners of this ship—and your own people, too?”

Turlough grinned almost manically. “We’ll out run them, Tegan! Think about it!”

She laughed, and he’d won, and so he kissed her. “You’re going to go on the run from your own people in a stolen space ship?” she asked, shaking her head, her eyes glittering.

“Yes. It’s worked before for others.” Turlough’s smile was infectious. “Now say you’ll come with me. I could use a navigator.”

Tegan’s laughter filled the cockpit as she put a hand to her face and stepped inside properly. She allowed a moment for it all to sink in. Then shaking her head disbelievingly, said, “Yes. All right. Of course I will.”

.. the end.