Chapter Text
How she even managed to get into this sort of situation, Rodageitarynxmososa didn’t know. But ever since her run-in with the Time Agency and her exile from Gallifrey, misadventures like this one just seemed to keep. On. Happening.
It had been a couple of years since the time she’d spent in Sherwood Forest on Sol-3, and Roda had finally been beginning to feel as if she was back on her feet again. She had made peace (enough) with her exile, and the fact that she would not be going home anytime soon – if ever. The name of ‘the Redjay’ was one that she didn’t quite yet own, but which she had learned to make her own; finding strength in the way that Robin, Will and the others said it with fondness, instead of the way the Time Agent had said it with malice. How it would become synonymous with a wanted criminal she didn’t yet know, but she had decided that agonizing over it would only make her want to tear her hair out.
It was either going to happen, eventually, and the things for which she had been named ‘traitor’ would come to pass, or… it wouldn’t. And in a way, the idea of her life – and such a pivotal moment of it – becoming a paradox was scarier than the way it had turned out so far. She may never have been the model student Rassilon had wanted of her, despite all her efforts, but she’d paid enough attention at the Academy to know that she wasn’t willing to risk her existence on something like that.
That she had escaped the Oubliette of Eternity for her ‘crimes’ was one too many chances already to cease to be….
Since she had left Nottingham, things had come passably smoothly. Sometimes she ran into a wanted poster, and took it as a sign to leave a planet as quickly as possible. Sometimes, it had the face that she had now. Taller than before, pale skin, blonde braids, and a face that reminded her a little of one of her tutors, from her childhood. Robin Hood had once said she put him in mind of ‘one of the Northmen of old’, which she had eventually learned meant people from another island on Sol-3 who had come to England by sea. He had asked if she was descended from them, at least until he’d learned that she wasn’t of Sol-3, at all.
Other times, she only recognized the name ‘Redjay’. On those occasions, she felt less threatened at least. It was easier to slide under the radar when you weren’t recognizable, so long as whoever had put up the posters didn’t know that her face had changed. All the same, she tried not to look too closely at those ones; both in fear of knowing her own future, and because it reminded her of the game of Eighth Man Bound she had played in the Academy, in a way that gave her the beginning of a migraine every time…
On one or two planets, she had found herself wrapped up in local events, which was where ‘this sort of situation’ tended to happen. Either she heard about something and felt like she had to help, if she wanted to live with herself, or she arrived at precisely the right time to get wrapped up in the wrong sort of thing. Or the wrong time and the right sort of thing, depending on how you looked at it. (She blamed her TARDIS; it had to be playing a part in it, she was certain, but just why it was determined to get her involved in things she couldn’t say…)
However it happened, once she was there Roda couldn’t just… leave. Not if there was something that she could do to help. Sometimes helping was as simple as creating a distraction at the right time, and other times she found herself having to learn a new skill on the fly. As it turned out, hacking wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it was, when she’d first been accused of it in the Peninsula… not that she had escalated to widescale robbing of banks, mind you. But for better or worse, she’d begun to pick up on some of the things that ‘the Redjay’ had been accused of what felt like so long ago and…
Well, she had some feelings about that. But if she was doing the right thing, wasn’t that what really mattered? After all, Robin Hood was an exile in his own country, too, and look at what he did. Robbing from the rich to feed the power. He was noble, and sometimes reckless, and despite what people said about meeting your heroes, Roda couldn’t help but feel as though she’d lucked out, there.
Noble and sometimes reckless was what she was turning out to be, as well.
And of course, there were also times where helping wasn’t simple or complicated so much as difficult. Maybe even impossible. Those were the times when things tended to go wrong; Roda had left planets licking her wounds, more than once, or relieved not to have ended up regenerating.
Today felt like it was going to be one of those days. No, in fact – it was already one of those days. It had been one of those days since the moment she had set foot on Tridal 9-12.
Roda wasn’t sure how long she’d been running for, but her lungs were starting to burn. And if she was starting to get out of breath, then it had to be worse for the other people who were in the miles-long coliseum arena with her. She was a Time Lord; she could switch to respiratory bypass when she couldn’t run any longer, and conserve her energy a bit (even if she was hoping she’d have somewhere to hide by then, and work out a plan). They, on the other hand, were not. Or at least, not the ones she’d had a chance to talk to, but it seemed incredibly unlikely that there was another of her own people about.
A blue-skinned woman who she’d started out with – Andor’a, she’d said her name was – was from an amphibious species that she had told Roda the name of, but which she’d forgotten. The other two runners in their small group were small and furry, and their language had been too complicated for her translation matrix. Intelligent, but full of metaphors that were too culturally-bound to follow. What limited their run, though, was the fact that they barely pushed three feet tall.
Roda had lost track of all three of them almost immediately, in the resulting panic. She’d done her best to keep an eye on the people who had been thrown into this death game along with her; at least the ones who had been ‘released’ from the same gate that she had been. She’d not gotten a good enough look at the others, and frankly, she had no idea who was innocent and who was not. But in the chaos of being hunted for sport, that priority had fallen more by the wayside by the second.
As Roda gulped in a few quick breaths, she realised that she couldn’t hear more feet, or hounds. Tentatively, she slowed her run to a jog, scanning for somewhere that she could hunker down and recover. Had she managed to lose her pursuers, for now? The hunt must have cornered somebody else first; somebody with less stamina, or experience. It seemed too true – and a part of her felt awful for being relieved about it – as she laid eyes on a copse of overgrown plants, perhaps luck was smiling on her after all. Checking behind her a second and third time, she slipped into the overgrowth, and allowed herself to sink to her haunches.
“Fuck…” she murmured, as she took in deep, long breaths. This is a mess. Even for her, it was a mess.
Hunting criminals for sport. It was barbaric. In the holding cell – before she and the group of prisoners she had been sorted into had been released into the coliseum – Roda had thought of Gallifrey. At the Academy, they’d been taught about the many things that Rassilon, Omega and the Other had brought to pass, after overthrowing the Pythia. For a brief while, there had been the Death Zone, where the ‘Game of Rassilon’ had taken place to punish some of the worst criminals of their time. A bloody free-for-all against vicious aliens who enjoyed the hunt.
Rassilon had put a swift end to it, when he was the last Founder left alive. But Roda couldn’t help but think about it, from the ‘safety’ of her hiding spot. Had it been like this? Had there ever been people sentenced to the Game who didn’t deserve to be there? After all, she had been tried and sentenced for High Treason which she never committed. The idea that Gallifrey might have made other mistakes – or worse, like she suspected her sentencing had been, intentionally punished innocent people was… less inconceivable than she might have thought it was, in her youth.
She hoped it was just her own nerves today, making her think of the worst case scenario. She feared it wasn’t.
There had been no such trial for Roda on Tridal 9-12, nor had there been for Andor’a, so she’d claimed. Roda had been accused of theft; somewhat ironically, since she was now indisputably a thief, she’d done nothing of the sort. Andor’a’s husband had disappeared, and as the last one to see him she had been blamed. From the announcements Roda had half-heard from her holding cell, the other charges had a similar range from petty to severe. These death games were a sort of collective punishment where those who survived until the end earned a pardon, whether they were innocent or not. Death, or a chance at a reprieve. It was easy to choose… She wasn’t ready to die.
The overgrowth itched. Roda rubbed at her palms as she tried to stay as still as possible, carefully rolling down her sleeves to try and mitigate the worst of it. Not as far away as she would have liked, she could hear some of the ‘hunters’ who had also been released into the coliseum, as well as their hounds. She didn’t know if this was a job for them, or if they chose to be here for the thrill of it, but they repulsed her either way.
As she considered whether it was better to get moving again or stay where she was, a gut-wrenching scream interrupted her thoughts. Roda froze, hands cupped over her mouth to keep from making a sound. A moment later, there was a crackling noise, followed by a static-ridden tannoy announcement.
“T̵W̸O̴ ̷C̸R̶I̶M̷I̸N̴A̷L̵S̸ ̷H̷A̷V̸E̶ ̶B̷E̵E̵N̴ ̵J̶U̸D̸G̶E̴D̵.̸ ̷E̵I̷G̸H̴T̴E̶E̷N̷ ̸R̵E̷M̷A̴I̴N̸.̵”
Judged. Roda shuddered with unmasked disgust. Murdered was a better word. It hardly felt like an execution when they hadn’t even been given a trial. She had to make it out of here, and with as many people as she could rescue, if she could. She had no idea how she was supposed to know who had committed a crime and who had not, but this was beyond reproach. If – no, when she made it out, she would have to report Tridal 9-12 and its other colonies to the Shadow Proclamation, or whatever passed for law enforcement in this sector.
This abuse of ‘justice’ had to end.
Taking advantage of the announcement over the tannoy and the presumed chaos of whichever poor soul had been found and killed, Roda crept out of her hiding place. Twenty people in, and eighteen left. She had no idea how many people were hunting them, or how anybody else would behave if they ran into her. Would they help each other? She wanted to think so, but she’d been burned before, and by people that she knew far better.
She wanted to do as much as she could as well as escape, but as she began to look for something she could use as a weapon, or the perimeter of the coliseum, or anything else useful, she tried to talk herself into the fact that it might be everyone for themself. She knew by now that you couldn’t help everyone, and that some people didn’t want to be helped, but… well. Hopefully she could find Andor’a, at least? And the little furry guys? The people she’d begun with.
The Time Lady shook her head, and did her best not to let her nerves take over. Now that she could breathe, she could admit how scared she was. Not scared enough to let it stop her, but there was nothing adventurous or heroic about this. It was just cruel and unpleasant. Once she made it back to her TARDIS, maybe she’d just hunker down for a while, and keep her head especially low.
A branch not far from the bush caught her eye. It wouldn’t help much against a blade, but it might buy her enough time? It looked like something she could carry without tiring herself out – certainly lighter than a longbow – and in a pinch, maybe she could find a way to give it a sharp edge. It sounded like this hunt wasn’t expected to last long, if ten percent of the prey was already down. At what point would the games be ‘called’? An hour? A few hours? A day? She tried to remember the length of a solar cycle on Tridal 9-12. About eighteen hours, if her memory served. She could last without food and water that long; maybe hiding really was the best option, but could she trust that the pardon was real, and not just a carrot on a stick?
Slowly, she began to creep along in the direction she’d been heading at her run. The coliseum had to have an outer limit, a wall, a forcefield, somewhere that acted as a barrier. Getting herself cornered was a bad idea, but it would also help her narrow down what direction an attack would come from, and work out how to get past said barrier. After all, people had to get in and out some way other than the cells, surely? Hopefully the security – whatever it turned out – wouldn’t be a match for her, or any allies she found along the way.
Assuming she made it that far.