Cicatrice
No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
--John Donne
.
The feeling grows stronger as the TARDIS grinds to a halt. He touches a control, a frown creasing his mobile face, dark brows drawing together under untidy hair. When the viewscreen lights up, the pale walls of the console room are splashed with color and light, flowers and sunshine, butterflies russet and gold against a deep summer sky, and its alien beauty tugs at his hearts.
Five minutes before, it had barely gone midnight on another planet. Ben and the others won't wake for hours after their last adventure – this is probably the first decent rest they have taken in days. Turning off the viewscreen, the Doctor closes his eyes, disturbed by something that he cannot pinpoint.
The garden, up close, is wildly overgrown, long weedy flowers stalks disguising the shriveled bracken of their past lives, tangled vines clothing a broken forest in an illusion of growth. Great evergreens loom overhead, the noon-high sun streaming down among them, and the air is thick with a sweet clovery scent, swarming with butterflies and bees.
The Doctor closes the TARDIS door with unusual care, and the whisper of strangeness draws him on. A ripening plant sprinkles his sleeve with tiny seeds; some latch on with microscopic barbs, while others fall past his arm – or through it? He cannot tell. Halting for a bare moment, he listens to the sounds of the forest. There are no words in the birdsong, no voices in the rustling of the trees.
But if he listens carefully, there is an echo where there should be none... a distant echo of dread and regret.
.o0o.
His TARDIS rests on the crown of a hill, blessed by summer breezes. The ground is uneven as he moves further down the slope, its banks interrupted by bedrock, cleaved and folded as though by a giant hand. Dry stems crackle under his shoes. Sunlight still pools between the trees, but the air this far down is still and heated, as though the forest has forgotten to breathe.
The source is very near. His eyes almost closed, the Doctor feels his way among fallen branches that may or may not be there. His knuckles are barked by a rough-skinned tree that has turned out to be unexpectedly real. His foot sinks through what appears to be a stone.
As the evergreens close in overhead, his path is cut off by a stream whose channel cuts deeply into the broken earth. Its clear water sparkles and flirts with its pebbled banks in an impossible, eerie silence.
A man lies curled in a cranny on the opposite bank. At first the Doctor mistakes him, a tangle of denim and the matted remains of finer fabrics, for a spill of textured earth among the rocks. He steps closer, his breathing quickening as the outline becomes more clear: limbs drawn in upon one another, hands closed like claws over nothing, a Time Lord lying like the dead, his mind quiet and cold.
The Doctor takes another step and whispers, "No."
.o0o.
Whispering, as it turns out, is not necessary. The Doctor paces, scanning the far shore for tracks, ghosts, signs of the ship that must have brought the other to this place; the still, worn, distant figure sleeps on, deaf to all cries. Beyond the stones, the forest continues up the opposite bank. Scorched ground glows underneath, sunlight and shards of stone cutting through the leaves as though neither are really there.
The other is curled up like a spring that might shatter if uncoiled. His skin is dry, written over with ashes. His close-shaven head is bowed toward the ground; his lips are parted, but he does not seem to breathe.
From here, the Doctor can see his eyes.
"You're dormant, aren't you?" he murmurs. "Locked in your own little world... you can't hear me, can you? You can't hear anything."
He doesn't want to imagine what could have driven the other so deep.
For a moment, he stares at the stream, willing it to go away. Unfortunately, that never works, and he finally shucks off his shoes and socks before poking one foot into the icy water. It bites through to his ankles as he wades deeper, grumbling under his breath -- only to be brought up short at the center of the stream by air that is suddenly as thick as mud, choking him until he draws back.
"Some kind of barrier," he complains, and can't hear his own voice. The words sink into silence as though they had never been. He presses forward again, staggers as the illusion of earth leaves the water deeper than it looks.
Steeling himself, he bows his head and reaches out with his mind. His face grows darker; the forest flickers, undecided. Across the stream, his other self stares at something that is simultaneously present and far, far away.
Finally the Doctor takes a breath and squints, baffled, into the sunlight.
If he listens, he can almost hear the heartbeat of the other side, burning slowly through the beauty as the timelocked system settles into stabilization. It will take ages, of course, testing itself against what used to be, before snapping someday into place, replacing its old self with what it will have been all along. He cannot tell how far it might reach, but he will know someday, and fold himself away with the rest of the past while this little outlying world will have always been dead.
"This won't do at all."
He looks, once more, from left to right, reflexively seeking aid that does not come. Then, eyes half closing in weary determination, he raises his hands to the barrier and steps slowly forward.
A cloud of birds rises from the other side of the stream, casting no shadow upon the still, huddled form below, and the water curls around the Doctor's calves as around the legs of a statue as the deceptive light of another world's sun inches slowly across the ground.
.o0o.
"Did I just hear the doors?"
The rotor rises and falls as Ben totters in, tousled and red-faced from sleep, muffling a massive yawn with the back of one calloused hand. Somewhere else, a tall man flinches, clambering to his feet, the arid landscape around him softened by an impression of faint woodwind notes and the dust of something blue, and Ben blinks and peers across the console, taken sleepily aback by a momentary ancientness in the Doctor's pale gaze, as wild and remote as the heart of a star.
Then the light shifts, and he wonders if it was only his imagination.
"Goodness." The Doctor straightens, his expression shifting between concern and amusement, keeping one hand on the controls as the ship bucks against the timestream. "You've slept for hours -- you three must have been exhausted."
Ben shrugs, still confused but too tired to care. "After what we went through? You bet. This is when I could do with some nice hot coffee."
"Hot coffee...." There's still something pensive in the Doctor's voice, so subtle that Ben only wonders about it for a moment. "Yes... that'll do, if you want to be awake."
(Somewhere else, another man leans his head against the wooden doorframe of another ship. Slowly he lowers his hands, looking at nothing in particular, his expression shuttered but perilously sane. The sky flares above him and he stiff-arms his way through the doors, letting them snap shut behind his back as the ship shudders and frays into the desert wind.)
"Oi!" Skidding across a slick patch, Ben grabs at the console for balance. "That's the limit! You've been out playing sandcastles again, haven't you? I'm onto your little tricks -- you've tracked the surf in all over the floor!"
"There's always time for a good sandcastle," the Doctor says briskly, pulling some switches and bracing himself for the turbulence. "Go get the others, will you? I can't say for certain, but wherever we're headed, I'd guess that we've nearly arrived."
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