Title: The Nightmare Child
Author: TardisIsTheOnlyWaytoTravel
Setting: After series four, before the End of Time, but references EoT.
Summary: One of the horrors of the Time War has resurfaced, dangerous, amoral, and vicious. The Doctor needs to stop it before it can wield its destruction upon the earth. But can he do that against one who, while one of the War's greatest horrors, is also one of its greatest victims - and only a child?
Author notes:
This prologue was originally a chapter of "Tales From the Barman" begun by Methos over on Twisting the Hellmouth. It's been altered a little. There are some apparent inconsistencies here, with the series; bear with me, because they'll be explained.
Why did I write this? Twice now we've heard references to 'The Nightmare Child,'
(End of Time, and in the series four finale – "I saw your command ship flying into the jaws of the Nightmare Child. I tried to save you...")
and I thought, what kind of creatures would thrive in the last great Time War? And then I thought about what the Time Lords did to the Master in EoT, and how they'd brought him back from death in the first place, and asked myself, 'well, what else might they have done to their own people?'
I don't know when this will next be updated, but I'll try to get it done as soon as I get all the plot details sorted out.
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The Nightmare Child
Prologue
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Xander was cleaning glasses when a figure trudged into the bar.
The torn and bedraggled robes were covered with enough grime and filth to almost completely disguise their original red color. The girl's hair was long and tangled and just as dirty, and the expression on her face was of utter weariness and remembered pain. All in all she looked like she'd spent the last month, at least, fighting a war somewhere.
Xander raised an eyebrow and putting the glass down, went forward to greet her. She looked like she was about twelve, but a glance at her eyes gave away the fact that she was much older. The look in them was ancient, and immensely tired.
Still, Xander had seen weirder stuff, with the bar sitting on a rift as it did. If nothing else, the antics of Torchwood would have been enough to inoculate him against weird occurrences. Every now and then – okay, pretty often – they were indiscreet about whatever they were doing and all the locals got a glimpse of aliens or whatever the latest crisis was.
"Hey there, what can I get you?" he asked the girl.
Eyes full of ages turned up to meet his, and the girl let out a string of fluting bell-like syllables that reminded him of wind-chimes.
"O-kaay," Xander said slowly, "Didn't quite catch that." He looked again into those eyes, and his gaze flickered over the dark patches on her ragged clothing. If anyone needed it, she sure did. "Would you like a drink? On the house."
The girl stared into his eyes in return, before a faint, grateful smile tipped her mouth up slightly.
"That would be… fantastic."
Xander got a dusty bottle of good scotch out of the cabinet and poured her a glass. The girl threw it back and drank all of it within a minute before fixing Xander with a pleading stare. Giving in he poured her a second glass.
This time she held it in both hands and sipped at it.
"You look like you've had a tough night or ten," Xander commented.
The girl gave a pealing laugh. Whatever she was, Xander could tell she wasn't human.
"More like several centuries," she replied, and stared into her drink with an intense unblinking stare.
Xander had seen that look before, and cleared his throat tactfully to try and bring her out of it.
"Sounds like you've had a bad time of it."
She blinked once, and nodded slowly.
"Long ago, and never ever, there was a war. A war bigger than any other war before or since: the last great Time War."
Xander sat on the nearest stool and listened intently as she went on.
"It was fought between two peoples; one was great, and terrible, and proud; they called themselves the Lords of Time, and they were both incredibly advanced and civilised. They didn't interfere with the rest of the universe much, except to make sure that Time itself ran smoothly. The other people was a xenophobic race full of hatred and fear, whose goal was genocide on a massive scale: the extermination of every other species in existence but themselves. They were a nuisance, but nothing more than that until somehow they discovered the secrets of Time, and sought to erase the history of all other races."
Xander's eyebrows went up. He'd done the whole save the world, get the t-shirt gig himself, but this was on a bigger scale even than anything he'd heard of or seen.
"The Lords of Time, despite their arrogance and prejudice, took their duty seriously, and so a war began, across all of Time and Space, both sides using their knowledge to alter Time as they did so until it was so twisted and torn you could step sideways from the eighteenth century into the forty-eighth, and species flickered in and out of existence more times than anyone could remember. It became clear, though, that in spite of everything at stake, and their reputation, the Time Lords were losing. So they created a weapon; one of their people, meddled with in ways that they never should have done and imbued with thing s they never should have created; and then they sent their weapon out into the universe to fight for them."
She took a gulp of her drink.
"In time the weapon became as feared as the enemy they fought, perhaps even more, and it was a day of horror if you happened to be fighting where the weapon chose to aim its destruction and terror."
The girl was silent for a moment, then took a deep breath.
"In between universes, there's a place some refer to as the Void. It's totally antithetical to anything like the kind of life that lives here, and yet there you cannot die. The Time Lords used to call it Hell. The Time Lords' weapon got caught up in a battle and somehow part of Time was so damaged that the universe opened up, tore open, and everything nearby fell into it."
Her silence lasted a lot longer this time.
"I fought for my existence, fought all the strange hellish creatures that reside in the Void, fought with everything I was to remain undestroyed, until once again a tear opened into the universe, and I fought my way out. And… and that's what happened to me."
The girl stared into her whiskey, before tossing the entire thing back like before.
She stood up, and this time when Xander met her eyes all the hair on the back of his neck stood up. The weariness had been pushed away, leaving something hard and… cruel.
"I survived though," she said in a stronger tone, "I survived, and it's not just me, someone else is out there. I'll find them, somehow."
As she turned to leave, Xander had to know.
"What's your name?"
The girl half-turned, and the smile on her face was nastier than that any demon.
"They call me the Nightmare Child."
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Barely ten minutes after she was gone a tall pinstriped shape dashed through the door and skidded to a stop. Xander had seen him in the bar a couple of times before.
He gave Xander a wild glance. His eyes were fathomless and full of repressed power, and ages old just as the girl's has been.
"There was someone here!" he exclaimed urgently, "I know, I felt them, they were here. Please, I have to know. Has there been anyone, I don't know, with… two hearts? Eyes older than they ought to be? That sort of thing?"
The brown eyes were desperately searching Xander's.
"Please," the man said again, "I was the last one left, but I felt someone else. I need to know whether I'm alone."
Xander sighed. He didn't like giving out information about other customers unless he was certain they weren't going to do any harm with it, but the guy seemed sincere enough, and the girl had been scary.
"Yeah," he admitted, "she was here."
The hope that lit the other man's eyes was almost painful to see.
"What did she look like?" he asked. "Did she give her name? Anything?"
"She said they used to call her the Nightmare Child," said Xander.
Everything else stilled in the brown eyes as they filled with pure unadulterated terror.
"Oh no," the man breathed. "Oh, no no no no no!"
The last was an exclamation, and he went sprinting from the bar without another word.
As Xander shut up the bar very late that night, he couldn't help the niggling feeling that something very bad was going to happen, and that its name was the Nightmare Child.
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End chapter