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Sometimes she wishes that he was messing things up on purpose. Her words would not leave such a droning echo in her mind that way. She knows she must have yelled at him for almost a minute. Accusing him, pouring her pent-up frustrations out like a bucket full of rainwater, right over his head.

"Tegan," the Doctor begins, but pauses and sighs.

Outside the TARDIS, the sky slowly changes from black into purple.

"I'm sorry, Doc. Lord knows that you've tried," she finally says. Hopefully this will be a way of handing the olive branch without bending the truth too much. For as long as she can remember, Tegan Jovanka has always felt that lying was simply beneath her. No, she won't sink so low as to tell the Doctor that it wasn't his fault they are lost.

"Do you have any idea if the atmosphere is breathable?"

"According to the readings, it should be. Oxygen's slightly lower than on Earth, but nothing to worry about, really."

"How low?"

"Imagine you are standing on top of Mount Townsend."

If Nyssa were still among them, he probably would have given the exact percentage.

"And you really trust the sensors?"

"Tegan, this is certainly no moment to discuss…"

She bites her lip, turns round on her heels. As she leaves the control room, she throws a quick glance over her shoulder. Out of the corner of her eyes, she can see the Doctor standing in front of the console, his arms still tighly folded.

Half an hour later, when a knock on her door makes her raise from her bed, there is little doubt that it's him and not Turlough. No, Turlough, the weasel would never knock like that, she assures herself; the sound is just too impatient. Soft little knocks, quick and insistent, so Tegan shouts "Come in!" and the white door slides open.

Relieved, she notices that the Doctor's cheeks have regained their colour. In his hand he is holding a space helmet, which he offers to her with an outstretched arm, as if it were a bouquet of flowers.

"You were right to be so sceptical about the atmosphere," he says. "Care for a walk? Now that the sun is up, the rock formations actually look quite pretty."

Pushed aside by his enthusiasm lies the one admission Tegan would have wanted to hear and fears she will never get. How silly of me to keep trusting the sensor readings, when the TARDIS apparently is out of her mind. All the Doctor had wanted was to take her to a Tennis game between young King Henry and some English noble, and now they were stranded on some dire planet as far from 16th century Earth as could possibly be.

She swallows. "A walk sounds just fine," she answers after a moment of hesitation.

Once she has closed the helmet's visor and taken her first steps outside, she too can feel the landscape's power. Greenish, coppery, oddly Dover-esque cliffs stretching against a now crimson sky.

"Thank you for making me see this," she says.

The Doctor just smiles.