Chapter 1: Hungry
"Doctor," River called, stepping carefully into the loading dock. Sixteen by thirty-two feet. No exits. Three defensible positions. "Doctor?"
"River, I'm here," the young physician said, taking the girl's hand. River pulled away from him, stretching out her fingers to catch the golden leaves floating through the air. Would float through the air. Might flight through the air. Time was becoming more confusing, less rigid. It was…what was the word…wobbling? What a strange word. Where did it come from?
"River, what's wrong?" the Doctor asked, bending down close.
"The two timelines haven't crossed over yet," River murmured. "Haven't reached the point of convergence, but the pressure is building and pulling them closer. Closer. Closer. Time-space reality crushed into a single point reverberating and…" she looked up at the Doctor and skipped ahead to the interesting bit. "Two to five days."
"What?" Her Doctor tried to sound interested, but River could tell he didn't understand. She would need to explain the whole thing to him, and they really didn't have the time.
"It takes two to five days for a leaf to die, depending on type, humidity, and temperature. Under normal space conditions—" She stopped, fascinated by the sudden sound of blue she could hear all around her. "Two by two," she said dreamily, turning away from the Doctor, spinning around on the fallen leaves and imagining them as complicated molecular snowflakes. "Two by two and so much blue."
"River," the Doctor held her shoulders gently, pulling her to the floor. River was shaking, her eyes darting around the empty room, searching for something to latch onto. They found his face and held on, boring through his skull. "River, it's just the medicine. Your system needs some time to adjust, but it will get better. I promise."
River smiled, leaned her head against the Doctor's chest, calculated his heart rate, and started to sing.
"Twinkle, twinkle, little star
How he'll wonder what you are.
Up above this world so high,
A lock, a key, a hungry eye."
Once upon a time…
No, that's not right. Not once upon a time. Because, of course, that implies that time is a straight line and you could point to part of that line and name that point 'once' and begin your story there. And that's not how stories work. Or, at least, that's not how stories work with the Doctor.
Let me try again…
Millions of years and millions of miles away, a star was dying. That in itself was no very great thing. Billions of stars across the galaxy are constantly dying, burning, exploding into galaxies of light, or imploding into eternities of nothingness. Stars die every day, but this star had been dying for ten thousand years without anyone paying any attention. The star died and died and died and after a while, most interstellar travelers, scientists, explorers, treasure hunters, and tourists got bored with the repetition. Soon, even the storytellers forgot about the dying star. The universe is full of mysteries and peculiarities and audiences are easily bored.
There was nothing particularly interesting about this day, our day, not until a blue police box materialized out of thin…nothing…and parked on the edge of what some people call the event horizon and others call the edge of the storm. It had been called something else too, in a forgotten time, but that name is gone.
A slender younger man with tousled brown hair, dressed in a blue suit, a floor-length trench coat, and red converse shoes, and wearing a pair of rectangular glasses stepped out of the blue police box, keeping a tight hold of the doorframe. Almost immediately, his face changed from one of astonished wonder to delighted glee.
"There, told you I'd bring you somewhere interesting," the man said, flinging the T.A.R.D.I.S. door open wide. "Journey Price, welcome to the Eternal Dawn."
"I thought you were going to introduce me to Cleopatra," Journey said, walking up to the door and rubbing her forehead. The Doctor's most recent landing had catapulted her across the console and she'd banged her head against a row of angrily blinking red lights.
"Naaahhh, see her any old time. Anyway, I think I might technically be under sentence of death at the moment. We had a bit of a…misunderstanding after I accidentally sunk the library of Alexandria."
"Hmmm, I could see why that might be a tad annoying." Journey pushed her own glasses further up her nose, a sure sign that she was trying very hard not to laugh.
"Anyway, this…oh…this is brilliant. This is. All the wonders of the Universe and this is where the T.A.R.D.I.S. takes you. Come look."
Journey walked up to the door, grabbed hold of the doorframe and stepped out into blackness.
"Wow," she said, as her face alternated between an overjoyed grin and the somber stillness appropriate for an ancient church or gravesite. "That is—mmmm—that's—"
And it was. It really was. The dying star on the edges of the Jyranne System in the Allesian Galaxy was as red as a sunset. It had been on the verge of supernova for ten thousand years, suspended in that single moment before it would pierce a hole into the very fabric of reality. Clouds of orange and yellow dust swirled around the glowing sun, while its center burned a red so deep, it was almost black. Mesmerizing patterns of lava and flame danced across the surface of the star, consuming untold billions of particles in an eternal blaze. If Ra or Apollo or Huitzilopochtli had stepped out of their worshippers' myths and legends and adopted solar form, they would have paled next to the Jyranne Star like shadows before souls.
"That is amazing," Journey finally breathed. "What is it?"
"What, that? Well it's a synthetic anomaly anachronistic to its temporal-spatial position and emitting an unclassified radioactive field which, apparently, traps the phenomenon in a sort of…weird…bubble…thing," the Doctor finished, very fast, taking off his glasses and polishing them against his suit.
"So, basically, you have no idea what it is or how it got there," Journey suggested. She'd been traveling with the Doctor for, well, approximately six weeks of her own personal timeline, and she knew when he was dancing past his own realm of experience. Even geniuses learn a thing or two every once in a while.
"Yeah, basically, haven't a clue," the Doctor admitted, grinning as if that were the most wonderful thing in all creation. "It's a star that should have gone supernova, oh, give or take ten thousand years ago, but it just didn't. No black hole, no explosion, just an endless point in time and space. AND," he added, dodging back into the T.A.R.D.I.S. and fishing out a strange piece of equipment which seemed to be made of a lamp shade, a radio, a stethoscope, a battery, and a tangled mess of wiring, "It's not natural. Someone made that star, and it's emitting massive amounts of radioactive energy, but that energy disappears…oh…about fifty feet that way.
"You can make a star," Journey repeated, amazed.
"Oh yeah," the Doctor said casually, as if star-making were something time lords did for a third-grade science experiment, like building a volcano or growing lima beans. "Anyway, the radiation doesn't dissipate into space or weaken to the point of non-existence. It just vanishes. One instant…BAM…strong enough to make your Chernobyl look like a leaking microwave and the next instant…Gone. It's like something is eating it right out of the fabric of reality," his voice quickened, always a sure sign of the Doctor's excitement. "See, look at the anomolometer. Those readings can't exist in the physical world."
"An anomolometer?" Journey pushed her glasses up again.
"Got trapped in 1982 and had to recreate a bit of Time Lord technology. I was in Moscow…not important. The point is that star is not from this time or this galaxy or, as far as I can tell, from any galaxy. According to every test I can think of, and I can think of a lot of tests and twice as many on Fridays, it shouldn't exist. But there it is. The good old impossible."
"Do you know who made it?" Journey asked, peering over the Doctor's shoulder at the long list of numbers running across the radio's screen.
"No, that's another mystery. The nearest inhabited planet is…is…oh…three hundred and seventy million lightyears away. We're in the middle of a space desert and…"
"You're making it up," Journey scoffed, bouncing back to the door and leaning against the doorframe.
"No," the Doctor protested, pulling out a receipt for fish and chips dated London, 1942 and scribbling down a few abstract, algebraic equations he planned to deliver to the nearest observatory two weeks ago. "That's what it's called. A space desert. No stars, no planets, no asteroids for hundreds and millions of lightyears. Just us and the Dawn." Looking away from the screen, the Doctor finally noticed Journey staring off into space and walked over to stand beside her, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets.
"Do you like it?"
"I love it." Journey pulled away from the T.A.R.D.I.S. doorframe and leaned her head against the Doctor's arm. "But you've seen it before. I can tell."
"Oh, yeah, been here a couple dozen times. Once had a picnic here with Louis the 16th—that was a mistake. I keep meaning to take readings, but, each time, I just sit back and enjoy."
Journey thought back to six weeks ago, sitting in the one-bedroom New York City apartment she shared with four other would-be writers, staring up a sky so clouded with smog that you couldn't even see the moon. "It's so old," she said thoughtfully, kicking one of her legs out into empty space. "And alone. Just sits on the edge of the Universe and exists there all alone. I don't know. It's sad. And it's beautiful. It's beautiful sad. There should be a name for that."
"Yeaaaaah, well, we'll have to come up with one," the Doctor said.
Journey opened her mouth answer, to say she thought she already knew what the word should be, but just then, the red console lights started blinking rapidly and an alarm blared through the silence.
"Oh nonononononono," the Doctor groaned, leaping back towards the console and jiggling a series of levers and dials to absolutely no effect. Journey gaped down at the series of numbers on the radio screen. They were moving faster now, little more than a blur of blue pixels. She picked up the machine as the Doctor rambled incoherently about time warps and paradoxes and something else that sounded a lot like an Italian dish she'd tried back on Earth. There was something mesmerizing about the stream of blue, a comforting, pulsating sensation building behind her eyes. But the stream was slowing down again, reforming into individual…not numbers…letters. The letters spelled out a phrase, repeated again and again and again. I AM HUNGRY. I AM HUNGRY. I AM HUNGRY.
"Doctor," Journey whispered as the radio started to vibrate in her hands—the plastic heating up and the lampshade spinning around and around.
"There's some sort of signal drowning out the T.A.R.D.I.S. sensors," the Doctor shouted back, hitting a few of the more recalcitrant levers with a wrench. "If I can just tune in on the right frequency, I think I can read the—"
"Doctor," Journey called again, more insistently. The radio burned so hot that she dropped it, but still the words flashed across the screen. I AM HUNGRY. I AM HUNGRY. I AM HUNGRY. And then, before she could do anything, the words were amplified a thousand times over across every one of the T.A.R.D.I.S screens and through the speakers. I AM HUNGRY. I AM HUNGRY. I AM HUNGRY.
Journey clapped her hands over her ears. "WHAT IS IT?" she screamed at the Doctor, who had taken out his sonic screwdriver and was frantically attempting to reconfigure or repolarize or re-something every single screen in the T.A.R.D.I.S. control room.
"I don't know, I don't know. Something's hacked into the T.A.R.D.I.S. central communication system. It's recalibrated all her basic func—"
"Doctor!"
"Ahhhh, something's infected the T.A.R.D.I.S. central nervous system," the Doctor amended. "She's having seizures. She's having a stroke. Something got into her—" Journey didn't hear anything after that. The screaming words increased to a high-pitched shriek and then to a mind-numbing, tortuous whine. She couldn't remember falling, but suddenly she was on the floor, head pressed against her knees, trying to block out the sound. The Doctor had stopped waving around his sonic screwdriver. He was covering his own hears now, his fingers grabbing frantically at his spiked hair. His face was screwed up in pain and he crouched on the floor.
The anomolometer, Journey thought and, without hesitation, kicked out her foot. It connected with the lampshade and sent the machine spinning out into space.
In another time stream, River screamed. The Doctor stumbled into the kitchen, grabbing at her hands to pull them away from her ears.
"River, River, calm down," he soothed, pulling her to the floor and wrapping his arms around her shoulders.
"No," River moaned. Then she screamed, "IT'S TOO LOUD. IT'S TOO LO-" Her voice dropped away again and become a sort of dazed chant. "Falling, falling, falling. When the Doctor comes to call, soaring leaves will fall and fall. Hunger comes to eat them all." Abruptly she sat up straight, eyes wide, as she tried to remember the important thing, the really important thing, but it danced away from her—lost like a leaf on the wind. "Most people can survive without food for thirty to forty days depending on fat accumulation and hydration levels," she said, frowning. She tried again, "Stars produced a combination of electromagnetic and particle radiation as a product of nuclear fusion." No, no, no. Close, but still a long way to go. Such a long way. A journey? A cost? Whose words were these? Whose journey? Whose ticket fare? Whose price to pay?
The Doctor smiled, rocking River back and forth, back and forth, like he'd done when she was a child. River knew he couldn't see the falling leaves, or hear the music of decaying radioactive particles or smell the stench of the dead planet. Dead planet. Dead star. Dead leaves. Dead Doctor.
"Were you hungry, River?" The Doctor asked when she'd calmed down, helping her to her feet. "Did you want to eat something?"
"River traced her finger through a puddle of water she'd spilled when she'd fallen. "Yes," she agreed dreamily, wondering if her Doctor had finally understood or was only pretending, as he so often did. "She was hungry. She came to eat."