Doctor Who fan fiction.
Ace, former companion to the Seventh Doctor but currently a mercenary for hire, finds herself trapped on a squalid colony planet, waiting four days for her ship to depart. Bored, she heads out into the streets to incite a mugging, hoping for a brief adrenalin rush. When she accidentally cripples her attacker, she steals his ID card. Out of curiosity, she visits his family, posing as a hiker. During the one night she spends with them, she confronts them with some unpleasant truths about their family life, but doesn't reveal that the son of whom they are so proud is a homeless drug addict and not, as they believe, a successful naval recruit. Then she returns to her period of waiting, but this time with only two days before the ship's departure.
This story takes place during the continuity of the New Adventures novels, rather the television series. It fits somewhere between the point where Ace, finally frustrated by the Doctor's manipulative tendencies, leaves the TARDIS to fight the Daleks as a mercenary (in Paul Cornell's 1992 New Adventures novel Love and War) and the time when, three years later, she rejoins the Doctor and his new companion, Bernice Summerfield (in Peter Darvill-Evans's 1993 New Adventures novel Deceit).