Caged
The chains. The stone cage. The diadem made of steel and blinking light that was heaviest of all, on his brow. They might have broken his mind already with their weight had the diadem not restrained and sealed away most of his thoughts.
He sat on the stone floor. Outside, through the bars of his cage, he could see the sky. He could see the end of the rock floor, past the bars, where the world--impossibly small to him now--dropped away into the blueness. Bits of grass grew just in front of him. Wild onions grew as well, and he had had just enough intellect left that he made an effort to nurture the wild onions. Replanting the bulbs, spreading them wide on any soil where they would grow. Some of them inevitably grew out of his reach, but he could still put his arms through the bars and pull the onions to eat.
Birds flew by too. He could not see the ocean, but he could smell it. He heard the crash of waves on rock. He heard the cries of seagulls. They fed and hatched somewhere nearby, somewhere he couldn't see, but they flew by the cave that caged him in noisy, messy flocks.
Long ago, he had dug and pulled out his chains from the walls. They were still attached to him, hanging from his neck and his thin wrists and ankles. He used the ends of his chains to catch sea birds. He had gotten good at throwing out the chain and using the end to stun or loop around the body of a bird flying too closely to his prison. He killed them quickly and ate their flesh. He saved their feathers and bones for when there were times he thought of uses for them.
But he couldn't do much thinking. The diadem saw to that.
He remembered the planet was Earth. The year wouldn't come to him. He couldn't think of any landmarks or people or the way they had dressed before he had been put in here. It had simply been too long for him to recall. He also didn't know how long he had been in the stone cage. Not knowing the time still frightened him, sometimes. Even after all of these years.
He knew, in the beginning, he still remembered lots of things. He was old, he knew. He looked young, but he had lived a long time. He had so many memories. There were so many faces. So many places in his mind. But they began to slip away, flowing out unevenly like clouds across the only thing he could see outside, the sky.
Using the bones of the birds he caught, he tried to write things down. He sharpened the thin, light bird bones against the jagged stones of the floor of his prison and scratched words and names on the walls and floor.
The diadem was not tech of earth, although it had been made from materials found on the planet. It was made of native steel. The blinking lights had been encased in glass bubbles once, but he had smashed most of those bubbles in an attempt to move the hellish bit of metal encircling his head. It was like the chains and the cage, but it was more. It crippled him. He was supposed to be clever. He was supposed to be brilliant, he knew that. That, he could not forget. Because it was a part of his sense of self. Had it not been for the diadem, he would have gotten out of the stone cage a long, long, long time ago.
But someone--he couldn't remember who--but someone had known he was clever. Someone had caged him. Someone, he could remember in vague outline surrounded by other vague outlines, had wanted something. He couldn't remember what.
He remembered needing to run. He remembered that, oh, so well. He knew there was supposed to be a safe place.
A box. He had drawn it with a sharpened bone and loving hands. He loved the box. The box was his home. In as legible a hand as he could managed when writing on stone, he had written TARDIS above his drawing. First in Gallifreyan and then below he had written in simple block Latin letters. He liked Latin characters. He liked the English language. So messy and imprecise, English, but there were so many wonderful words, so many ways to say all that needed to be said…
…so many words, and no thoughts to put them to use.
His TARDIS had not been there when he had needed a safe place to go. He could not remember why, only remembered the sick, sinking horror that it was not where it was supposed to be.
That was incredibly bad. Not just for the simple reasons. He was caught eventually, because he was outnumbered and boxed in the area where the TARDIS was supposed to be. He was overpowered and restrained. He was taken to a dark place, where shadows hidden behind bright lights and the thickness of drugs they kept pouring into him kept asking him things. Maybe not even back then, before the diadem, had he really understood exactly what it was that they wanted.
Bad things happened to him there. He was stripped naked early on. He was examined in a cold and cruelly efficient way, many hands that were harsh and grabbing and encased in latex. He was not dressed again, his body completely unprotected as he was beaten by the same interrogators again later.
Then there was a long time of blankness. Next he only remembered how he fought them when they were putting the diadem on. He knew what it was. Knew what it would do to him.
He was crippled. That was the only word for it. His cleverness gone. His thoughts slow and simple. There had once been billions of languages in his mind, and now they were all gone except for the few he had used the most. His head had been awhirl with clusters and mysteries and equations and distance and time and memory, thoughts dancing around propulsion and genetics and philosophy, his entire form and being electrified with the need for movement and an entire universe of space and time that was his playground.
Now the height of his intellect was when he finally worked out a way to sew the feathers he pulled from countless dead birds into blankets to cover himself with when the cold of winter became too much. Yes, such cleverness… He braided grass together to bind the feathers, and sometimes broke off his own hair, which was growing unchecked, to tie together the calamuses, overlapping the feathers to better trap the heat…
It would not have been enough for Rose.
He had been very, very careful not to allow himself to forget Rose. The memory of her was keeping him alive, long, long after the captors had finished with him, had caged him in a cave within a cliff with his very mind in chains and left him to die. He survived. He at first drew her face on the wall of his cave, and over the years had deepened the lines and grooves and curves of the drawing until it began to look out of the wall as a sculpture. He wrote her name. Wrote down things and places that she liked. Scraped onto the stone phrases and words he could remember her voice saying.
It was bad that he had lost the TARDIS. It was bad that he had gotten captured. It was bad he had let those people mess him up. It was bad he had been chained up in a cage for years and years.
It was bad because Rose had been in the TARDIS.
So many years ago…
As incredibly sorry as he was for all of this, he hoped, he prayed with all that he had left that she was all right. She had to be. His one point of solace was that in all this time, she should be safe. There was safety for her in the TARDIS. The TARDIS would look after her. While he sat in this cage, naked and thirsty and starving and shivering in the chill winds that blew off the sea, she would be warm and safe and dry. There were clothes and there was food for her. Books and games and gardens in the many rooms of his ship where she could get the mental stimulation that was denied to him.
She would survive, Rose would.
How long had it been since he had seen her? So very many years. She would be old now. In her late sixties, early seventies, maybe? He could not remember her family, but he remembered that she had one. She would never see them again. And she would never know what had happened to him.
This was all his fault. Why was the TARDIS not where he left her? Why was she gone when he had ran for her, toward the safety inside and Rose with it? Toward the freedom and the home that his trapped mind and shredded spirit longed for?
But it was still his fault. His fault it wasn't there. His fault he lost it. He knew that, but he couldn't remember what it was he had done wrong.
The air was getting so cold. The feather-blankets weren't always enough, and had he not been a being of temperature tolerance he would have frozen to death in winters before long ago. It had not rained in a while. He was always thirsty. In this cold, the onions slept dormant under the soil and the most of the birds departed for warmer climes. He would starve for a long time. His body would force him to sleep a lot in order to preserve what little reserves he had been able to build up during the warmer months. His body had always been slim, but now his unclothed form was sharp with knobs and angles and ribs and collarbone and spine.
He could not get out of the cage. He stubbornly held on to his life, even when the combinations of despair and loneliness and hopelessness and desolation and humiliation slipped from under the constraints of the diadem. He would scream. He would cry, tears falling with moisture he couldn't really afford to lose. He would beat his chains and sometimes his head where the diadem was against the stone bars. He would sob until he barely breathe.
But he kept breathing. He forced himself to endure the fact that another day would come.
Still, he was failing. He knew that in the slow, cumbersome way he now collected information to reach conclusions. His body was failing.
It was not because he wasn't fighting to keep himself alive. No, with little else he could do, he fought everything from his terrible thirst to the elements themselves. It was the stillness and the loneliness that was killing him. It was the fact that he was trapped, caged. His hearts were dying, his soul a trembling, shriveled thing curled up deep inside him.
He could not get free. If his body began to die, he would not regenerate. He had held on for so long, but he could not bear another two or three lifetimes in this stone cage.
He had not spoken in years, but most of what he wanted to say was written on the walls with brittle, inadequate bird bone. Sometimes the words he needed most often he touched, just before he lay down to sleep and escape the ache and the despair and the hunger and thirst and weakness. Most often, his long, grimy fingers touched the words, "I'm sorry, Rose." The words were written only in English, and they were beside the sculpture of her face in the cold stone wall.
He was sorry. So sorry. But he just couldn't free himself.