Title: Message
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: All ages
Length: 450
Content notes: n/a
Author notes: For reasons totally beyond me I can't make the italics stop, and I've tried both my own coding and LJ's automatic coding. Sorry about that!
Summary: With the Time war raging the High Council are forced to call in all Time Lords, not everyone is keen on going.

The announcement had been playing through every available device in The Rani’s Tardis on a loop for about a day now.

This is a message from the High Council of Gallifrey. All Time Lords must return to Gallifrey at once to join in the war against the Daleks. Repeat all Time Lords must return to Gallifrey, this includes those previous exiled. All crimes against Gallifrey will be pardoned provided you return immediately.

She wondered exactly how many Time Lords those last comments applied to. The Doctor had run, but was that a crime? Was he there? No, the man was a coward, always had been always would be. But then he was the annoying kind of coward that seemed fixated on always doing the right thing. So perhaps he would be there. It might be interesting to see him again, it had been a few hundred years after all. Then of course there was the Master, he was long past his allotted regenerations and had been when she’d last seen him, but really that meant nothing if the High Council decided to grant him more. He would be good in a war, he was reckless enough to be foolishly brave and it seemed they were getting desperate so why would they not have brought him back?

She owed them nothing though. Not a single one of them. Gallifrey could stand to be destroyed, ideally starting with the High Council themselves. If she were to go back she wasn’t sure she’d be on their side anyway, and that was a very big if. The message would follow her to the end of time and space itself, of course, the Time Lords had that power, it was the only way the message would reach any of those it was aimed at, after all, but she’d find a way around that even if it meant making herself deaf. The Rani was not only on her third regeneration by risking her life for others, particularly not the very people that had sent her away over a stupid accident. No she would not return, not after what they done to her, not for anything.

Returning to the console room she pulled a lever as the column in the middle began to pick up speed, moving up and down as the pressed buttons and turned knobs to get as far away from Gallifrey as she could.

“Good luck, boys,” she said as she slipped through the time vortex. She didn’t care for the Time Lords, not as a group, but the Doctor and the Master, well it would be such a boring universe without the possibility of ever bumping into them again.