I don't own Doctor Who or anything of the wonderful things therein. All rights to where they belong.
In the dark room, the walls could have been anywhere. A thousand times, he'd walked in it, and still, the size seemed to vary with the days. Today, the blackness pressed down on him, making the space shrink and the walls loom close enough for his breath to touch them. It weighed on him. Heavy, claustrophobic, he reached out in front of him to grasp at whatever lay in his path before he tripped on it. Hands hit the freezing control panel and he stopped, working out what switch to use. His clammy fingers stuck to the metal. He peeled them off censoriously.
It was like that, now. His head, constantly spinning. In the old days, he would have known the space of the room without groping for the walls. He would have been able to operate the system blind, he would have been able to twist it to his own use, but his memory failed him increasingly anymore. His lips twisted in disgust. A teal light burst around the edges of the room, revealing the secrets of the far corners. Another switch illuminated the control panel. And the third—his arm stopped above it, twitching.
Why? Not all that long ago, he'd do it….No, he'd delight in it. Seek it out. His arm started to shake with the effort of extending it out and he couldn't stop it. His muscles tensed and convulsed. Frustration roared up inside him and he slammed down the switch, nearly snapping it off. He jerked back his arm.
The teal swirled upward behind him in a column that extended like fire, bursting into the heavens, a whirl of colors and forms, the chaotic landscape, crackling, shifting, straining against its bonds, beyond the darkness above them, and the green-blue light that washed out the room never reached the ceiling. He wasn't sure there was one. Her limp form hung suspended in the middle and he spun to see. The hunger in his eyes devoured her every detail.
The reflex time, always a little slow at first, left her dangling like a corpse. It felt like ages, but then she finally gasped, she breathed, her head broke back, as if she was coming up for air from under an ocean's swell. The rest of her body didn't move much, arms and legs hanging uselessly. Her low shoulders and tilted face. Her eyes regained focus, then consciousness, and her mouth worked as if a scream might accidentally spill out. But she stayed silent and at last, glanced at him.
"We're alone," he said, looking upward, like he didn't mean to address her.
A long quiet followed, filled only by the dazzling, dancing lights about her. She frowned, a tight little moue he hadn't seen in ages. She caught his gaze and kept it, her air of authority making it hard to look away, even as wretched as she was.
"I recognized you," she replied in a whisper. "You've changed, but I know who you are." She clenched her teeth. She breathed in and out with short, struggling waves. He assured himself that her lungs were going. They would give out soon.
He ran a hand through his shaggy bleached hair and shrugged indifferently. "What of it?"
"I want to know why…. Why you came back and what you're doing and why you're…here. How dare you."
He rocked back and forth uncomfortably on the soles of his feet. Where was his suaveness, his eloquence? "Don't you know why they're doing this to you?"
She barked a harsh and bitter laugh that turned into a fit of coughing. Her features crinkled, afraid, but just for a moment. "Because I've been deposed. Don't patronize me."
"I didn't know it was you at first," he answered, turning back to the control panel, unable to meet her gaze. "You've changed too."
"So, what's the plan?"
Beneath his hands, a thousand tiny lights played out rhythms in greens, and reds, and yellows. Switches, knobs, buttons, all perfectly calibrated. He stared at them, past them. His pulses vibrated through him, strung out like fine wire. His muscles turned taut. Oh, the things he could do. The pain he could inflict on those who had put the numbers in his head. He counted under his breath.
"There is no plan. The plan's to wait to die," he paused. "Or…if you like, I was the plan. Nobody ever told me, of course. All those years, all those years and I could've lived, but they put me in hell for their own desperation and look where it got us—" Rage ripped his throat. He screamed. His hands trembled, changed, blasted at the door, he could feel the heat, the burn, the sharpness of the light. The wall didn't show a scorch. They knew him too well for that. He composed himself, shaking his head, and turned back to her.
If his slow death shocked her, she didn't show it. Her tired face watched, endlessly patient, focused more on shuffling air through her lungs than on him. The effort. So much effort. He laughed, almost feeling like his old self again and continued, "But of course, that little prince had to interfere. So now, they're really desperate." He fiddled with one of the dials on the panel. "And you're nothing to them. Just a body."
"What are they going to...?"
He dropped his eyes, incapable of looking at her. "Something terrible," he muttered.
Footfalls outside of the room made him stop. He froze, the source of the sounds calculated on his face—his eyes picked out numbers from the air as if he could see them; the length of stride, the heaviness of the step, the pace. And he started to swear under his breath. He glanced at the panel, the panels all around, auxiliary and secondary and primary all forming a giant ring around the column of blue fire.
"Do it," she whispered hoarsely, at last. His wild eyes snapped onto her and he shook his head. Was she asking him to….? The footsteps paused, and others joined them, shortening the distance to the door. They would find him there. They would know. "Do it," she repeated, like she was reading his thoughts. "They're going to kill me anyway."
So many buttons. Such perfect harmony. He held out his hands and the quivering stopped. Over his shoulder, he nodded at her. She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. His hands slammed down onto the metal and he started to yanked at every knob, force every switch, shove every button, every lever, every piece of every machine. The lights flickered off. The system shuddered with a hiss, and a warning alarm started to shriek. He tore his way around the room, the noise pounding against his skull. The column of teal extinguished itself and then with a terrible creaking, the life-support shut down section by section. Impenetrable darkness descended, blacker than black; unreal blindness tricked his eyes. He halted, rigid. The locks on the door thudded; the tumblers shifted, pushed out of place. The door swung open.
She began to glow. Her fingertips shone. It spread across her palms. Gold. The universe. Sheer ephemera. The light slipped up with ease around the corner of her face, teasing out the edges of her hair.
He turned one last knob, gently, and the power suspending her vanished. She dropped in a grateful heap to the floor and he followed her to his knees, wrapping his arms around her slender frame, daring any one of them to come near him while she burned.
"Thank you," she breathed.
"Go find him," he answered.
Her eyes shut and her head lolled back. They yanked him away with tight grips on his arms; he let out a laugh, high-pitched and insane. Some plan, he thought.
Some plan, indeed.
Her first breath of air was filled with smoke. The inside of her lungs burned—she had lungs!—and her first living reaction was to cough. Hacking racked her body. She writhed on the icy table. She smashed against the metal and pain surged through her bare skin.
"Somebody get her air now!" came a command. She couldn't make sense of the words. Then a mask was shoved down over her mouth and nose. She took a deep, arching breath. She shuddered with the clean air. New sensations. She'd never breathed before, and now, the strange taste filled her mouth. Her skin felt cold and clammy on the metal.
Lights danced before her eyes, shapes blurred around her, far too large. Her tongue wriggled, an impetuous fish. She could taste the white of her teeth, the pulse of blood in her body, hear the strange whistle of air in through her nostrils. A buzzing crawled through her ears, drowning out her thoughts, their words. Was this how they heard things, these people, through all this din? What ignorance.
And then the glaring light, and the pricks on her new skin. Beautiful new skin, clean of old scars, but so very tight, so very binding... and it hurt. Was she supposed to feel the lights making bumps on her arms crawl and shiver? Two men loomed into view, dark outlines in the shine. One of them brandished a cylinder of glinting silver. His mouth moved as he raised his eyebrows at the needle, running a hand through his wild blond-bleached hair. He tilted his head and looked down, distracted, but something old and reminiscent flashed across his eyes. Then he plunged the needle into her arm. And her vision went totally white.