No matter what long-winded rot the Doctor told his more gullible Companions, the Medusa Cascade was as dull as a Dalek crossword puzzle. This bruise on the skin of space, such a source of wonder for him as a child of ninety, had atrophied into a voided smear best left alone in favor of, for example, one's own navel lint, the inspection of which would offer a far more satisfying experience than the Medusa Cascade.
Unless that person was the Doctor, who, strictly speaking, only had a belly-button in certain dimensions, and he knew with perfect certainty that it was a color somewhere between eggshell and robin's egg. He'd had plenty of time to become acquainted with lint since becoming quite alone for over thirty years; with no companions, no loved ones capable of talking back, and nobody to remind him that the Multiverse did not exist for the sole purpose of amusing him, the Doctor had well and truly inhabited the role of a madman with a box. And even the box wasn't talking anymore.
As utterly solitary as a whisper in the Cascade, the edges of which the TARDIS was at present skirting with a soft grinding whine, The Doctor yelped with joy upon seeing the old black wound.
"Oh, you're there. Still there, of course you are, you big beautiful nothing. I've missed you."
Not for the first time, the Doctor felt a kinship with the space-fabric nuzzling his machine. Once an electric slash dressed in fire and ice, the Cascade might as well have had a lopsided bow-tie and braces for all the resemblance it bore the broken Time Lord who stood admiring it.
"Haven't changed at all, have you? Well. I mean, since the last time I saw you. When was that? Oh, yes. Yes, I'd just finished watching the execution of Vanzetti and Sacco, I think, yeah. Terrible, terrible things, fixed points, but they don't always-"
A pinpoint of red dotted the black Cascade, small as a blemish.
"Well, now, what are you? Where did you-"
More dots quickly freckled the thick empty space. The Doctor ran to the control panel to see if the TARDIS could identify any possible explanation, any historical example of a rash forming on the face of a dead Cascade.
The dots moved. The TARDIS readouts noticed and offered a quick explanation to the Doctor, which translated roughly to "There are tiny red dots and they're moving, what exactly do you want me to tell you, you daft little man? I'm a machine and I can't talk to you and this is made up entirely in your own dizzy head."
Red congealed into red, forming a sinew that stretched and pulled itself across the black as it reached toward the TARDIS.
The Doctor scrambled to flip the defenses on, but as his bony fingers twiddled the knobs, all he was able to trigger was the extractor fan within the control room, serving only to pull the steadily-growing red cloud further inward. He was unsure about whether he did this on purpose. It was so hard to know one's own intentions, sometimes.
Everything inside the TARDIS was flecked with red, and it appeared to the Doctor as though he was merely looking through an illuminated eyelid at the scene before him. Blind and bright, his vision finally made out a silhouette within the fog. A pretty silhouette and rather curvy, if he wasn't mistaken, which was becoming increasingly likely as of late, the mistaken bit, but even if-
Rose. Rose Tyler. Impossible, but there she was, the red slowly ebbing from the room like oil from an uphill driveway.
"You. This can't. Rose?" the Doctor asked, his voice so fragile it was in danger of splintering in the air and seeping back into the floor panels.
Her big brown eyes washed over the Doctor from his toes to his wild hair. She raised an eyebrow and stepped forward.
"Rose," he said, her name like a lead weight on his lips, "Rose Tyler. If there isn't anything more impossible. But this is impossible, obviously, and please be Rose. Please."
As she opened her mouth to speak, the unmistakably sober eyes of Martha Jones began to push their way between the full lips, scanning the room with the intense curiosity that had made the Doctor snatch her up all those years ago. They gazed inquisitively at the thick brown hair of Sarah Jane Smith as it began to sprout underneath the fingernails, and as it raised its hands to try and push the brown eyes inward, its face fell away to reveal K-9's chrome-snouted finish.
"Oh, Rose would never go in for this," the Doctor said, stepping back and producing his sonic screwdriver to scan whatever was in front of him.
The metal face parted to reveal the no-nonsense mouth of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and on either side of it the shining eyes of Tegan Jovanka gazed their judgment upon the Doctor. The Composite spoke.
"You did this. You, Doctor, because nobody else could so universally leave us all to die. To forget us. To leave us as babes in the woods of a vast universe that wanted more than anything to hurt us," it said, pausing as Astrid Perth's cheekbones formed a new mouth to pronounce its imprecations. "We thought you loved us. That you loved us. That you loved us."
With a speed that the Doctor wouldn't have expected from a shambling mass of limbs and organs, the Composite swatted the sonic screwdriver from his shaking hands before knocking him to the floor of the TARDIS and standing over him, a leg on each side of his body. Rory's mouth yawned out from the elbow.
"How many times did we have to die to make you love us, Doctor? When you scraped us through hell itself and dropped us off at home afterward, who was going to keep us safe from the things that came for us as we slept? Every shadow in your room becomes a Racnoss and every shirt draped over a chair moves as silently as an Angel. You left us alone and forgot us."
The Composite leaned down to face the stunned Doctor and grinned with Rose's sharply flashing teeth.
"But we forgive you. Now give us a kiss."
It mashed its shifting face onto the Doctor's, and he could feel a thick tuft of hair poking its way into his nostrils. He gagged and managed to roll out from underneath the Composite, pulling a fingernail off his tongue.
He straightened his bowtie.
"Right. Whatever you are, you're not my friends. Do you really think that after all this time alone, I wouldn't be able to recognize the sound of my own voice? The red stuff, that's all you are, and you managed to squeak into my mind and pull yourself out of it. Well. I've been here before and I don't like the sound of my own voice, I can tell you."
The Composite smiled with many mouths, though some were upside-down and might have been grimacing. Striding over to the controls of the TARDIS, it placed the clever fingers of River Song on the panel.
"We're your Companions as surely as you're our Doctor," it said. "And you're going to suffer, dear. You're going to make your home in the same purgatory that you so thoughtfully created for all of us. And you'll be left alone at last," it said.
"Where can you possibly leave me where I'll be more alone?" the Doctor asked, slowly sidling up to the control panel with the abortive stealth of someone not used to being sneaky. "I've had all of you to keep me company all these years. It's almost nice to have a face fitting the words. Well, a sort of face."
It looked sidelong at the Doctor as its fingers expertly manipulated the TARDIS controls.
"The Time War, obviously. Only, and this is my favorite part, you'll be time-locked this time around. No scuttling away from it. The exact moment when you murdered billions will be the only thing you'll have left in a loop that will never stop. Not ever, raggedy man."
The Doctor could feel the TARDIS hum and jolt as it began to make its way through time, twisting space around the Medusa Cascade as it groped for its destination. He sprang on the Composite, trying to remember the hard-palmed chop from his younger days as an enthusiast of Venusian Aikido as he brought his arm to bear.
It lazily smacked his hand away and shoved him to the ground, never ceasing its manipulation of the controls. From his place on the floor of the TARDIS, he watched the Composite's movements and saw a fresh resentment with each flash of its hands, an accusation sounding from every tap of the controls. He deserved this, he did, and he knew this. There was no fresh abuse the Composite could lob at him that he hadn't already visited upon himself in a skull-scraping loop of his own invention.
What the Doctor deserved, however, was a matter of debate, and anyway, he would much rather have been stranded at the exact moment that Rassilon gave a dinner for the High Society of Time Lords with a smear of custard caught in his mustache the entire time. How that custard flapped and trembled in the Lord President's mustache; how it dangled madly and clung desperately to the bristles – no, right, to business. Yes.
He hoisted himself to his feet and ambled calmly over to lean against the atom accelerator.
"Donna," the Doctor said softly.
An eye poking from the Composite's neck flicked over to look lidlessly at him before glancing hurriedly back at the controls.
"Donna, do you remember Volcano Day? Of course you do, clever Donna, you remember the shouting and the ash that found its way into your nose and down your throat. You remember the children who clung to the debris and wept for mothers who'd already become part of the magma that pursued them."
The Composite's many eyes began to turn a deep red, Donna-red, blooming in copper and rust. The red of Pompeii and Racnoss flanks and the eyelids of her grandfather.
Finally the Composite stood, a madcap jumble of Donna, pawing in search of purchase for its many fingers. Weighed down by convulsions, it toppled backward.
And then it remembered. Donna remembered.
All of the things that would have made Donna Noble's brain melt like microwaved flan came flooding over the Composite and dozens of Donna's eyes looked helplessly up at the Doctor as they popped and reformed.
"You're not Donna. You're not. You're a ghost of a copy of a memory and this isn't my fault. This isn't my fault and I didn't do this because you're not Donna."
Long after the Composite should have died from its many overloads, it continued to writhe and grasp and scream imprecations and incoherent abuse at the Doctor. Long and loud and endlessly blaming. The Doctor, who'd been leaning against the console and waiting for the convulsions to cease, eventually recognized the one permanent swatch as each other part melted and reformed.
Braces. Jack Harkness' braces, stretched across the Composite and holding fast to the molten skin. Melting down and bursting back to life again and again, with just enough Jack to keep it reforming. The Composite, caught in a constant cycle of death and rebirth, forever.
The Doctor, unable to kill the Composite and unable to look on it any further, finally opened the TARDIS doors and ejected it into the merciful forgetfulness of space.
He closed the doors and sat down and finally broke, sobbing silently because he couldn't justify making any noise in light of his most recent abandonment of everybody he'd ever loved. He didn't deserve to make a sound.
"You know, for a stone-cold brilliant Time Lord, you can be such a moron sometimes," came the very real voice of Martha Jones from behind him.