The Sacred Garden

Chapter One

After a week under the artificial light, the boxed flowers were wilting. Their dark green feathery blossoms, with fascinating jewel-blue veins and a cunning way of smelling like happy memories, were curling and graying. The two plants, which had entwined their leaves together, were falling away from each other now, unhugging.

The gift had been only the latest surprise in a relationship founded on surprises. Leela had been outside the enclosed Capitol City and seen Gallifrey as an almost utterly barren wasteland. But Andred had taken her to his home colony in the mountains south of the Capitol and had married her under the sunlight and among the greenery of the Arcalian Historical Gardens project. The mountains of the southern continent had a more hospitable environment, and although Alpha Arcalis was also fully enclosed, its most wondrous feature was a great glass dome on its south face in which the Arcalian Historical Society had constructed an extraordinary park of recovered species from a more fertile period of Gallifrey's history. The wedding rose – the entwining flower – had been painstakingly recreated from fossilized DNA. Andred's family had given it to Leela as a gift.

"It looks like a lost cause," Andred told her. He had come out of their bedroom dressed in his uniform: he was going back to work for the first time since the Doctor had left her here with him.

Leela, leaning against the table, fiddled with the lamp she had been assured was every bit the equivalent of natural sunlight. She poked the soil and wondered if there was too much water, or too little. Horticulture was a new area for her.

"It is my only project," she said, with a hint of fretfulness in her voice. "I'll put K9 on it."

She turned around and looked at him; their eyes met, and she felt a sudden panic. "I wish you didn't have to go," she said suddenly.

"This is not like you ... I guess," he said, smiling with what he hoped was assurance without patronization. They were still at this stage of circling each other, almost, like strangers meeting at the truce fire, sizing each other up, making sure there were no bogies in the shadows.

Leela searched for the explaining words. "I have this feeling. It's too soon for you to go back – to your own people. You're not fully mine, yet."

Andred couldn't obfuscate if he wanted to; it was not in his training, and it was not part of their relationship, which to this point had been breathtakingly to the point. "I know what you mean," he said blankly. "The great romance meets the tedium of the almighty routine. And here I am –."

"You will have trouble because of me."

He shrugged. "At first."

She held his eyes for a long moment, trying to discern the future ... but she had no particular powers to discern even what was in his mind. She could sense moods, but he was difficult. He had been trained to guard his emotions, and at most times he kept his guard up, even with her.

"Kelner's hearing is today," she said, blinking, and moving away from the table so that he could get to the food replicator.

"There's something for you to do."

"For today."

"We'll think of something," he assured her, for the hundredth time. He wanted to ask her if she was already bored, already regretting her decision to stay here with him – but he dreaded the answer. One day it would inevitably be 'yes.'

"Commander. ..."

Andred had had a leave of absence from work for nearly three weeks, and it was a jolt to hear his true and natural title spoken again. He wasn't the hospital patient with a stubborn arm wound ... or the troublesome citizen untying miles of tape to marry an Outworlder ... or the disappointing son who couldn't find a nice, sensible Gallifreyan girl to bring home to mum. Or even, for a moment, the exciting but faintly alarming "My Husband," as Leela - whom he had met and wooed (or been wooed by – it was hard to say) in one quick, hazy, breath of time - whispered to him every morning. Commander. Andred-coraun of Gallifrey, graduate of Arcalian College, Time Lord, Captain of the Chancellery Guards.