-Repetition-
It takes roughly five hours, twenty minutes, and forty-eight seconds for the Entity to destroy the population of the Leisure Palace.
Oh, it doesn't get everyone. The director of facilities enables an emergency protocol and a fair number of guests are able to escape via shuttles, screaming and pushing their way past the hundreds of people already taken by the Entity. But more importantly—yes, the Doctor will acknowledge how selfish he is in prioritizing her safety above the others, and no, he doesn't care—Donna is safe. Donna and the several dozen people she manages to coax into the TARDIS seventeen minutes and forty-six seconds into the slaughter. Donna and the people who tried to kill the Doctor. He knows Donna is not happy that they number among the survivors. She hates them. He can see it in her face when she ushers them in through the open doors, one hand extended to the Doctor in wait. Tears stream from her eyes as she alternately pleads with and shouts insults at him.
Oi what are you doing just standing there get in here get in here now Doctor please why won't you move just move move move
The Doctor repeats her words exactly as she says them. He can't stop himself. His voice is a slave to someone or something else. His words are no longer his.
He wants to tell her to go without him. It's too late for him anyway. He can't save her or the rest of them; can't even save himself. But he just stands there, rooted to the spot, his body unable to obey the electrical signals shooting from his brain, his mouth unable to give voice to his words. Something stops him. Hijacks the signals. Shorts the fuse. Breaks the circuit. His neural transmitters flicker like the broken lights blinking above, alternately casting the landing bay in light and dark. Synapses fire uselessly, and his treacherous body is silent. All he can do is watch her, and tremble, and hope.
The tourbus passengers pull Donna away from the TARDIS doors. She doesn't make it easy for them. Kicking and screaming until her face flushes red and purple. Jethro, Biff, and the professor latch to her arms and legs and shoulders and bodily drag her back. If the doors were made of wood, Donna's fingernails would leave ten tiny jagged gashes in them. Ten tiny wounds bleeding chips of blue paint.
What are you doing get off me get your bloody hands off can't you see it's got him I've got to help him
The Doctor echoes Donna and feels his legs start to move. Muscles pulling taut, pistons pumping, blood thundering. Plimsolls slapping loudly against marble floor, propelling him forward at 38.2 kilometers per hour. Apparently the thing inside him wants inside the TARDIS after all. He begs his body. Stay still. Don't go. Keep her safe. His limbs don't listen.
His hand reaches out. He sees Donna inside, three men still holding her back. She reaches back to him as the distance closes between them, as Dee Dee and the hostess lunge for the doors. The Doctor's fingers outstretch toward Donna in increments, his motion made choppy by seizure lights flashing overhead. He is almost inside, and she's still screaming at him.
I'll save you Doctor don't worry I'll come back they both shout.
The TARDIS doors slam shut when his hand is just centimeters away.
His hand mashes against the doors and his body slams after, Newton's first law hard at work. It takes approximately two and a half seconds for the hurt to blossom through him. Four minor contusions on his face and forearm, two broken fingernails, three minute fractures in his distal and middle phalanges. The Doctor feels the pain from miles away.
He hears Donna beating on the other side of the door, fists pummeling, throat shrieking. His own hand reaches up like a marionette on a string, fumbles clumsily for the TARDIS doors. Pain lances through him when his wounded fingers grasp the handles. He wonders if the Entity can feel it. If the Entity likes it. If that is the whole point of this. Feel. Hurt. Fear.
The TARDIS doors do not budge. If he could, the Doctor would breathe a sigh of relief. He gives silent thanks to his wonderful ship. She understands. She can feel the thing inside him. Can sense it, even if he can't, even if all he feels is a great black hole where his frontal and parietal lobes should be.
A tiny flame of hope sparks up in his chest. The TARDIS will keep Donna and the others safe. And eventually, someone will come to rescue him and the rest of the Leisure Palace. Someone always does, even if "someone" isn't him. Someone, somehow.
Five hours, three minutes, and two seconds later, the rest of the Leisure Palace is dead.
Silence has fallen on the cavernous marble hall. Deep and dark, descending like a blanket of thick, suffocating velvet. Like a shroud. The lights still flicker above, weakly now, casting strange jagged shadows in the moonlight. The shadows form teeth-shapes on the floor, maws opening when the lights are on, gnashing closed when the lights are off.
The Doctor has not moved much from his spot in front of the TARDIS. The Entity has not allowed him. He can only guess it wants him to stand guard over his ship, to catch anyone who might try to sneak out, while it uses Sky's body to do its dirty work elsewhere in the Palace. He doesn't know—he can't access the Entity's thoughts, and it doesn't care to speak.
It has his body and he doesn't even know what it is. That hardly seems like a fair exchange.
He stares ahead, blinking much too slowly and infrequently for a member of his species. His eyelids feel gritty. And he's in fit enough shape, but he knows his legs will start to cramp soon. Pain pulses dully in his fingertips in time with his heartsbeat. Blood pumps sluggishly through his veins and cavitations form in his joints, tiny vacuum-bubbles manifesting in his synovial fluids, building up pressure that makes him long to stretch and pop his neck and elbows and non-damaged fingers. He wonders if the Entity is capable of understanding the signals his body is sending his brain right now, screaming at him to move, to sit, to lie down. Nearly five and a half hours is a long time for anybody to stand still.
His head doesn't even turn at the sound of Sky approaching. Her footfalls echo through the empty and quiet Palace. The lights stop shuddering above her as she passes under them. They blink out completely. Utter blackness approaches like a storm on slow winds. Sky's steps echo louder and louder as she nears him, and the Doctor's hearts hammer frantically in his throat. At least in that small way, his body is still his. Pounding hearts and working bypass and sweating glands.
And he can still hope. That tiny flame hasn't been extinguished just yet.
Sky stops in front of him, the cragged mountains of her face illuminated by a single beam of moonlight. She watches him, eyes unblinking. She waits.
Some time passes by. (Nine minutes and twelve seconds, to be precise. The Doctor feels each millisecond pound between them, couldn't have heard it louder if a giant clock was in their midst.) The Doctor starts to grow impatient. What is she doing? Why is she just standing there?
It dawns on him, then. The Entity, whatever or whoever it is, is a mimic. A thief. It steals the words and thoughts of others. But if it already has the only two living beings available in its possession, unable to act on their own, then there's nothing else to take. And what is a thief with nothing to steal?
If there is no one around to mimic, then what can the Entity do?
The Doctor would smile smugly if he could. Yes, it will be unpleasant to stand here until his body gives out. It will be horrible. Long and drawn-out and painful. And he doesn't much fancy looking into Sky's eyes as her body shuts down; the real Sky has been braindead for several hours now, but a body dying of starvation is never a pretty sight. But the Entity won't get to Donna, and it won't get anyone or anywhere else. Likely it will be pushed from his mind when he regenerates, thereupon he can pilot the TARDIS and take its occupants home. Though he hates to give this incarnation up, it will be worth it if it means the universe is safe from this thing.
Besides. This face only really meant anything to one person. And it's not like she'll ever see it again anyway.
He thinks it's a grim thing to hope for death, even if it's only a half-death, but it's better than no hope at all. And so he settles, prepares to retreat and wait for the end. Maybe if he's lucky, his brain will lose consciousness before things get too bad, and he'll wake up in a fresh new body with only one mind occupying it. Maybe this time he'll be ginger.
Well, might as well make the best of it, he reasons. He's got some time to kill.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/ To the last syllable of recorded time/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death
Blimey, that's a bit dark. He's very glad Martha got to see something more cheerful than that.
Out, out, brief candle!/ Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more
He blinks. He doesn't mean to; it's a reflex, his body responding on automatic to environmental stimuli. Sky has shifted. She's tilting her head now, eyes wide and trained on him, like an owl watching a mouse.
The Doctor wants to roll his eyes and ask What now? but his tongue is thick and trapped behind a cage of teeth. Until suddenly it isn't.
"The signal's coming from there," leaks from between his lips. His voice is soft, but it cuts through the quiet like a hot knife through butter.
Sky smiles, and slips back into the shadows.
"Yes that's it that's it right there oh my god we've found it," the Doctor says tonelessly. "Can we get in though the doors are really thick maybe we can drill we don't have time we'll just use this."
Fear prickles the Doctor's scalp and the blood drains from his face. Who is the Entity mimicking? Whose voice is the Entity stealing? It's no one from the TARDIS—her shields are too good for that—but surely no one else would try to get in here. The place is shut down, sealed off in quarantine when the director activated the emergency protocol. Why would anybody else want to get inside?
Why is Sky hiding?
He hears a door slide open at the end of the hangar; light floods in and paints the opposite wall in a glaze of yellow-white. Three shadows stand stark against the brightness and the Doctor hears three voices murmuring behind him.
"Down there. I see it. Oh my god that's him. Go get her," he says without turning to look at the intruders. He speaks just a half-pace after them. His voice begins to take form, begins to mimic the tones and intonations of the newcomers more precisely as they approach. "Jesus, it's really him," one of them says, and he repeats, and the Doctor recognizes the voice he's parroting.
It is a tale told by an idiot
He doesn't bother with the why or the how of Mickey Smith appearing in the wrong universe at just the wrong time, doesn't worry about how that's fucking impossible, doesn't even know if Mickey and his team are real or if he's hallucinating or if his brain is already dying, but he does try to shout. To wave his arms. To do something, anything, to tell Mickey and his group to stay away. His arms are lead weights and his feet are anchored and his jaw wired shut. Mickey edges ever-closer with two other people in Torchwood fatigues, people the Doctor doesn't know and can't warn.
Full of sound and fury
"Are you all right?" one of the team members asks the Doctor, and the Doctor repeats.
"Why are you doing that?" asks the other, and the Doctor echoes.
Mickey walks up close to the Doctor, peering in his eyes, searching for any hint of recognition. The Doctor's eyes do not follow him very well; it's about the only part of his body he can really control, and that shred of control is tenuous at best. Mickey hovers around the edges of his periphery like a ghost. The Doctor wishes he was happy to see Mickey, would be elated under any other circumstances, but right now, all he can think is please get out get out get out GET OUT.
"Doctor, can you hear me?" he asks. (Doctor, can you hear me? the Doctor follows syllable-for-syllable, lilt-for-lilt.)
"Of course he can hear us, he's saying everything we do," one of the team members points out ("…everything we do…" follows the Doctor). "Maybe he's traumatized by whatever happened here," the other team member reasons, and the Doctor does too.
Mickey shines his torch directly into the Doctor's eyes, and it hurts, and the Doctor doesn't flinch at all.
"I don't know," Mickey and the Doctor both say. Mickey looks worried. His eyes shift back behind the Doctor, to the fourth agent walking quickly toward them.
Signifying
"What do you think, Rose?" Mickey asks.
If there is any particle of doubt clinging in the Doctor's mind about the loss of control over his own body, it dissipates in the moment he doesn't choke on Rose's name.
He hears the plastic sound of moving leather and a soft intake of breath as she steps into his field of vision, filling his sight with blonde hair and brown eyes and questioning lips and everything quintessentially her. She is thinner than she once was, her body lean and strong, and she wears a leather jacket just like his ninth incarnation, but it's her. In the flesh. Unmistakable and real.
Rose Tyler.
Rose.
His hearts flutter painfully in his chest at the sight of her. The dread he felt upon hearing Mickey's voice was nothing compared to the terror that fills him now. He curses himself for his stupidity—how could he think that Mickey the Idiot would make it back to this universe if she wasn't with him? The Doctor thinks that what he feels should be torn out of him and submitted to Webster's as the very definition of bittersweet, emphasis on the bitter. He silently rails against the universe and any gods that would be cruel enough to send her here right now, and his last fading ember of hope dies somewhere deep inside.
Nothing
She's going to be killed right in front of him. She came all this way just to die.
Rose looks the Doctor up and down. Her expression is difficult to decipher. But she definitely doesn't look happy.
"Knock him out," she commands.
The Doctor doesn't have time to repeat it.
- to be continued -