And The Snow, a doctor who fanfic

And The Snow

By Schildkroete

He wakes up surrounded by silence. Utter, absolute silence that seems to vibrate in the still air. The sky is an endless shroud of grey, downing everything.

He wakes up knowing nothing. He doesn't know the name of this place nor his own, doesn't know how he came here. He slowly gets to his feet and looks around. The silence is nauseating.

A tree, a street, a city in the distance. Big city. The name of this planet is Earth. He doesn't belong here.

Still no name, nothing about himself. He should be more bothered about this he thinks and looks down on himself. Tall, thin, wearing a loose black shirt and tight trousers. Jeans. Doesn't know if he's chosen it himself but it feels wrong.

His pockets are empty, except for a tiny box made of bright red plastic. The colour like a warning light beneath the monochrome sky. He looks inside and finds pills. Three by number. It tells him nothing. He puts the box back in his pocket.

The utter stillness of outer space. A car passes by, bringing life back to the planet. He watches it go toward the distant city and starts walking.

Night falls. He reaches the city in the total darkness of a winter night that is disturbed by the street lamps, not lightened. The sky is still cloudy and gives away nothing.

He doesn't look for answers.

The people in the streets are wearing warm clothes, still shivering in the cold air. He isn't cold, not much. He isn't tired.

There is something scratching at the back of his skull, wanting out. It makes him feel a little sick.

His feet hurt from the long walk and he sits down on a bench in a park. Dawn takes a long time to come. He hears people speak nearby and understands their language but knows it isn't his own. He doesn't dwell on the thought.

The morning isn't much brighter than the night. He feels nervous, restless, leaves the park to walk around without a goal. The cold doesn't hurt him but something does. His head aches.

There are three tiny white pills in a box in his pocket.

Someone passing him is eating a burger. He's not hungry. By mid-day he reaches another park, falls to his knees and retches, but his stomach is empty.

The pain in his head is blinding.

He gets up and starts running but stumbles and falls down after a few meters. The thing in his head still wants out and he can't let it.

The box is in his hand. He opens it, not wondering how it got there. Three pills. He takes one, swallows it dry. It leaves a foul taste in his mouth.

For a while he feels nothing.

Then the sound rushed back. He comes to his feet again and walks away. Where to?

There is nothing for him here, but his head is empty and doesn't hurt.

The box is back in his pocket, small and red and precious.

Two pills.

He can't keep wandering the city forever but has nowhere to go. It feels familiar and he doesn't want that feeling. It makes his head spin. Makes him dizzy.

The next night is colder, but that's fine. He doesn't need a place to sleep, doesn't need warm clothes. People are giving him strange looks. He's standing out. Maybe they're waiting for him to drop dead. The thought is amusing, somehow.

He's not hungry so he doesn't need food.

The sun rises and falls again. He has one pill left.

He fears the moment it's gone.

There is no way around it. He needs money.

He doesn't need food nor clothes, nor a place to stay. But he needs the pills, badly. He knows where to get them – he could buy them anywhere, just like that, but he'd need a lot of money for it and he has nothing. That doesn't feel weird. He knows what money is but barely understands the concept.

The pain isn't back yet but it will come.

It isn't the pain he fears.

To get money he needs a job. He knows that much. So he steps into a shop searching for help and asks for work.

He tells them his name is John Smith. He knows that isn't true but it's as good a name as any.

It should be weird to have no name. It isn't.

He doesn't have any papers and so the shopkeeper doesn't want him.

The clouds do not disappear. He has yet to see the stars.

In the dead of the night he takes the last pill. He knows he should postpone it as long as possible, but the scratching feeling in his head comes back and he panics. The monster has to be kept inside.

He has looked for work all day and not found any. He has no address to give, no insurance policy number. He can't get anything because he has nothing. There's something fundamentally wrong about that, he thinks.

The ground is frozen. He is a little cold. Back at the park again because all the shops are closed anyway. The air doesn't move.

The park is almost empty but for him and one or two people passing by. One comes to him, starts a conversation he can hardly follow. There's something wrong about all the people here. They make him feel strange, slightly nervous, as if there is something missing. It's like talking to someone from another planet. He knows he's different and that they mustn't ever find out.

In the end the man offers him money and a warm place for the night in exchange for his body. He doesn't quite understand, but the man offers money. Enough money for another few pills. He accepts.

The man takes him to a cheap hotel nearby. He makes him take off his clothes, laughs when it becomes clear he doesn't know what to do. The man shows him – makes him lie on the bed, caresses his body. His hands play with his nipples until they are hard, then wander lower, come to rest between his legs. It makes him fells nervous, sick. He wants to leave, but the man has promised money so he stays and says nothing. Spreads his legs when he's told to. Closes his eyes when the man enters him and thinks of nothing. It hurts quite a lot, and the man grunts and moans above him, rocking in and out, mumbling something about him being far too tight. It hurts. He bites his lips and wishes he was somewhere else.

The man leaves him money, as promised. He thinks it's quite a lot but it only gets him two more pills and he has to take the first one shortly after the sun sets the next time, invisible behind the endless clouds. It doesn't snow.

He doesn't want to repeat the experience of the night, but when someone makes a similar offer he accepts. In a dirty backyard he learns how to suck cocks and it's disgusting, but at least it doesn't hurt.

He still spends his days at the park two weeks later. After a few days he's gotten a little tired but something warns him to sleep so he doesn't. He's soon found out that he can fight the fatigue but after a while it's gotten harder.

The clouds never disappear but still the snow does not fall. He's hungry. Not very much, but it's not as easy to ignore now. For two weeks he's swallowed nothing but water and other people's semen. One time a man has tried to get him drunk but it didn't work. In the end the man has fallen off the chair himself and he's left in silence.

Sometimes he finds magazines and books others have left behind in the park. He enjoys reading, but has to stop himself from reading too fast.

He's learned by now that he knows at least a dozen different languages. None of them sounds like his own.

From time to time he talks to other people passing by but not often. Most of them stare at him but only a few dare to approach him in daylight. He doesn't think about it much. Most of the time he tries not to think at all.

Talking is fun. When he talks he doesn't have to think.

The pills don't stop him from thinking, only keep the darkness inside.

In the third week one of the men that come to him gives him a new set of clothes. He is grateful for that, for his own clothes are torn and dirty by now. The shirt is a little too tight for his taste but he doesn't complain. He could do with a jacket, he thinks. It's gotten colder every day. The cold begins creeping though his clothes, under his skin.

And the snow doesn't fall.

He considers, briefly, to use some of the money he earns for a coat. But then he'd have to work more, or risk running out of pills. He does get a lot of work that night, so much he feels exhausted and sick in the morning, but then he thinks that he might not always find someone willing to pay for him – and why anyone does is still beyond him – and decides to buy more pills instead, just in case. He never has more than six at once.

By the fourth week the thought of food begins to haunt him.

Whenever he decides to go and buy some food something stops him. He knows a better use for the money. He has to keep running; if he starves to death in the process that's okay.

Once he runs out of pills none the less.

The colder it gets the less people cone to the park, or anywhere at all. For four days no-one comes for him and a part of him is glad. When he takes the last pill, though, the fear takes over. That night the first snow falls and wind begins to blow, getting steadily stronger. He spends the storm sitting miserably and wet beneath a leafless tree and can think of nothing but the pain in his head and where it is leading. Tries to concentrate on freezing instead because that doesn't hurt nearly as much.

Morning comes and he is still alive, a shivering ball of misery covered in snow. Salvation comes that evening in form of a man who is drunk and brutal and doesn't care if he is a wreck.

He has come to carve the sex even though he doesn't like it. In his mind sex equals money and money equals pills and pills equals peace of mind. So sex equals peace. It is that simple.

He has learned to send his mind elsewhere and let his body act on his own.

Some of his customers complain that he is so cold but blame it on all the time he spends out in the open. He wonders how anyone can be so hot without burning.

The snow doesn't stop falling. It wouldn't bother him if it wasn't for his clothes that are constantly wet and cling to his skin even more. Still, he likes to lie on his back in the park and stare up at the clouds, let the snowflakes fall on his face. It feels a little bit like home.

He drifts to sleep like that, one day, in the snow, and wakes up screaming.

The snow doesn't stop falling for weeks.

One day he sits on a bench in the cold and a man approaches him. Through the thick curtain of snow he can barely make out his silhouette but he's coming for him. He knows he's coming for him. He's running out of pills again and is in desperate need for money but every fibre of his body screams 'Run!'

He doesn't.

The stranger (friend?) speaks to him in a language that makes him want to cry, and takes his hand. He's trembling when he follows him to hotel, one of the good ones he's never seen from the inside. On the large, soft, comfortable bed he takes him in a way that isn't rough, but sends a pain through his body, through his soul, that's more than he can bear (like being stabbed in the back, like falling off a radio tower) and he flinches away from is touch that connects with something inside him, things he's tried to hide from scratching at the edge of his awareness. Everything he was, the person he should be, is waiting for him behind the curtain and he turns away, frightened, from the horror hovering just out of reach. For he is miserable and useless but he knows, with terrifying certainty he knows, that going back there would be so much worse.

The man laughs, above him, in a way that isn't insane at all.

He pats his head and kisses away his tears and holds his until he falls asleep.

He fills his dreams with a dozen different faces and in his dreams they both have a name and then the world burns away.

He wakes up alone and can still smell the smoke. The man hasn't left any money and he distantly thinks that that technically makes it rape, but it was much worse anyway. He stays curled up in bed, trembling and crying, until someone comes and asks him to leave.

He considers jumping off the balcony.

Shortly after he takes the last pill and tries to drown in the numbness it brings.

The snow keeps falling, on and on, covering the world in things that aren't there.

Jack needs a whole freaking month to find the Doctor and when he does he just can not believe it.

In the end it's due to one of Torchwood's informants that he gets an idea where to look. I think that guy is an alien, the man has said. A prostitute. Really cold skin, and a wired heartbeat, and it feels funny when you fuck him, you know? Jack has punched him in the face then and gone to look.

One month before the Master has done something to the Doctor and Jack couldn't for the life of him say what exactly it was. Right in front of hi eyes he's gone down screaming, and then the Master has had him taken away and Jack hasn't seen him again.

The effect of it all, though, has been clear to the former time-agent, if only because the Master's explained it to him. Erase the Doctor's memory, completely. Set him free somewhere on earth and then see what happens. It is a game, and the Master is having fun.

Jack suspects that letting him go has been part of the game as well, as escaping has been surprisingly easy in the end. He got back to the ground, gathered his team and then started looking for the Doctor. Everywhere. Anywhere. And has found him, finally, in a park in Dublin, selling himself to anyone willing to pay.

And a part of Jack says: Pay, then. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

He kills it with a stone.

It isn't easy convincing the Doctor to come with him. He seems to suspect something bad, and the words I'm going to help you don't have the desired effect. So Jack tell him who he is and how he's found him, mentions the guy who lead him here but not the guy's broken nose. Mentions Torchwood and its resources. I can give you your life back, he concluded when he is done and the Doctor looks at him and says I don't want it.

He looks fragile and tired and pale and sick and determined to stay exactly where he is.

Giving up for the moment Jack leaves and comes back later with Owen and Gwen. Together they drag the Doctor to their car and he's fighting them every step of the way. In the end they have to sedate him.

Jack lets Owen do the driving and holds the Doctor in his arms the whole ride back to Cardiff stroking his hair and wondering how many people have had him during that month.

When the Doctor wakes up he's strapped to a bed in the hub. They've found a little box of pills in his pocket, literally everything he owns. A chemical analysis has shown that the pills are nothing else but a common, if expensive medicament available at every pharmacy. It is a light tranquilizer for humans, but what it does to the psyche of a Time Lord is another matter. Under normal circumstances it probably won't have any effect at all, but it goes along with what the Master did earlier and helps the Doctor suppress any memories of the Before.

It also has had him addicted from the beginning and the withdrawal is painful. Jack can only watch for days while the Time Lord fights against his restraints, screams and begs and curses and finally falls still. He never leaves his side and never answers the questions of his team.

Somewhere in the sky he can imagine the Master's insane laughter.

A week passes before the Doctor finally comes to his senses. He thanks Jack and the others for their effort before dragging them off to safe the world, but Jack thinks he sees a hint of accusation in his tired eyes as they step out into the cold, cold air.

When the Doctor pretends not to remember anything that happened during the past month Jack pretends to believe him.

Around them, the snow is falling in silence.

-End

July 14, 2007