A.N.: This fic really only serves to explain what Eight's wings look like, and so it took a while, because I wasn't very enthusiastic about it...
Warnings: Mentions of nudity, amnesia
Series summary: The TARDIS doesn't always take the Doctor where he wants to go, but it always takes him where he needs to go; Time Lords hold a secret behind their backs, and they have a duty to follow.
Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who
Cold. He was cold.
For a few moments, that was one of the only things that he really noticed about himself and his surroundings: he was sitting up, on a hard surface, in a small room, and he was cold.
Looking down at himself, he should have known that he would be cold, if this was the kind of covering he chose for himself – especially considering that he was completely bare beneath the thin sheet that was draped over his form.
A violent shiver ran through his body, and he pulled the nearest edge of the sheet up as close to his chin as he could, balling it up in his hands as he held it against his throat. He was still cold, but he found that having his chest covered helped marginally.
He pushed himself off of the cold, metal surface that he had been lying on – he vaguely recanted the existence of beds, but he was sure that beds were normally a lot more comfortable than what he had been lying on, and so was reluctant to describe it thusly.
His left foot touched the chilled floor first, with a slap. He flexed his toes against the ground before placing his right foot next to his left, noting that the sound as his right sole touched the floor was slightly different to that of when his left sole had touched the floor; the slap was accompanied with a small clatter.
He looked down to see that there was something attached to the big toe of his right foot. A small piece of string was tied painfully around the appendage – though he supposed that the pain was at least half, if not mostly, psychological, for the cold was making it difficult for him to feel anything at that moment in time – with a long, brown label hanging off of it.
The label had some kind of writing on it, but it was too far away and the lighting in this small room was too poor for him to distinguish what the scratchy letters were supposed to mean.
Yet he was distracted from the label when he stood up fully and was assaulted by a sudden breeze at his back. He looked over his shoulder as best he could – which was made even more difficult by the presence of soft, brown curls bunched at the base of his neck, and a strange shadow stretching out from the middle of his back – to see that the sheet had only been covering his front, and, now that he was standing, it had dropped down so that the entire back of his body was uncovered.
Scrabbling with his rather numb fingers, he desperately tried to rearrange the thin sheet so that it was wrapped all around his entire body; yet the task was made challenging when the two shadows at his back suddenly became corporeal, and he realised that they were not shadows at all, but a pair of wings, stretching out either side of him in an impressive display of feathers.
His brow furrowed as he cast his gaze along the pinions, wondering if he was hallucinating. Surely these limbs couldn't be a part of him; he would have been able to feel them? Then again, the cool temperature of this tiny room was so intense that he was having difficulty feeling any of his extremities – and surely these counted as extremities.
He watched in wonder as he curled them around according to his will, as easily as he had moved his arms and legs. They really did seem to belong to him, to be a part of him, yet they still felt so unfamiliar.
He brought the feathers around to his face, squinting at them so as to see them better in the low light. He couldn't make out any real details – he couldn't, for instance, see where exactly individual feathers began and ended – but he could tell that they were a deep green; the phrase 'bottle green' came to him from the depths of his chaotic, disorganised memory.
He wondered if the wings were the reason that the thin sheet had only been draped over him rather than wrapped around him – for he was sure that he must have been placed in this room by someone else, because surely he would never go somewhere like this willingly, and thus the application of the sheet must have been the actions of whoever that other person was.
He felt a flash of anger at their laziness – surely they would have known that he would have been cold when he awoke, and would need to be wrapped up warmly rather than just covered over, no matter if his wings got in the way. There must have been a way to wrap the sheet around him, even with his wings.
He lowered the sheet from his chin, shivering slightly as more of his skin was exposed to the harsh chill of whatever this room was, and moved it so that he was holding it behind his back, outstretched behind him as he held his arms out wide at either side of him. Bringing his arms around himself once more, he drew the sheet around his body so that it was wrapped around his lower portions, taking care not to allow his wings to obstruct it in any way. Yet his chest was still uncomfortably cold, so he drew the sheet upwards again, expecting with each inch that it reached up his body to snag on the pinions protruding from his back…
But the sensation never came. The sheet glided over his sides and up to his chin with no problems. Brow furrowing slightly, he looked over his shoulder once again, his jaw dropping as he realised what had happened.
The sheet had not got caught on his wings; nor had it glided over them so that they were trapped against him – rather, they had moved through his wings, cutting through them like they were mere mirages.
For a moment, he began to think that they were; was he imagining the presence of the limbs, as if the cold had affected his perception somehow? But if they were not really there, then what explanation was there for the feeling of connectedness that he was experiencing with them – for they appeared to be just as much a part of him as his arms and legs were.
Yet as a recollection of clothes came to the forefront of his confused and addled mind – and he had to wonder why he had not been provided with such things as trousers or a shirt when he had been placed into this room – he could recall no garment that he had ever encountered that had had some kind of accommodation for wings; no slits, or holes, or ways of pushing them through the fabric so that they sat comfortably outside the material. He had to conclude that the wings always did this, and that anything he tried to wear on his upper body would just slide through them as the sheet had.
Why, then, had the person (or people) who had placed him in this room wrapped him up in a sheet, he wondered again?
He found that his mind was running in circles, asking the same questions over and over again:
Who had put him in there?
Why had they put him in there?
Why hadn't he been given clothes?
What the purpose of the low temperature?
Yet he realised full well that he wasn't going to find the answers to any of the multitude of questions racing around his hyperactive mind while he was still in this room, so he began to work on achieving his next objective: leave.
He glanced around the room quickly, looking for any means of escape that might present themselves, when he found something strange about the wall directly in front of him. The corners of the room that connected with this wall were deeply engraved into the metal, as though it would be able to open.
Walking up to the wall stiffly – for his relative lack of movement since he had stood up had allowed the chill to begin seeping once again into his bones – he lifted up his palm and pressed it against the wall, applying pressure to it to see if it would budge.
He hissed slightly as the intense cold of the panel hit the sensitive skin of his hand, and he feared for a moment that – like a tongue on an ice cube – it would be stuck and he wouldn't be able to remove it.
Pulling his hand back slowly, he breathed a sigh of relief when the wall relinquished its grip on his skin, his breath dancing before him in a thick cloud before dissipating.
Realising that he would need a lot more pressure to persuade the wall to let him go free, he balled his hand into a fist and banged it against the wall, a loud metallic clang resonating throughout the tiny room.
At first, he appeared to be making no progress, but seeing as this was his only hope of getting out of the room, he persisted, until he heard something muffled on the other side.
"Who's there?"
He paused for a moment as the sound of the voice reached his ears, waiting to see if whoever it was would continue speaking. The voice, which sounded so strange, was the only proof that he had had so far that there was in fact a world outside of this cold room, so he seized the assurance that that brought him as he shuddered once more, and he banged against the wall twice more, trying to convey his insistence as best he could.
The two bangs were answered by neither the wall releasing him nor the voice sounding once more, so he continued with his assault, pounding his fist against the metal until he saw with delight that his efforts were beginning to reap reward: fist-shaped dents were being made in the wall, carved out with his strength. Soon, the wall gave way entirely, falling to the ground before him with a loud crash.
He brought his hand back up to the folds of the sheet as they sat beneath his chin; his entire arm from the elbow down had gone painfully numb from the distance that he had put between it and the rest of his body during his attack on the wall, so he held it as close to his chest as he could so as to try and transfer the little heat held in his torso to the limb.
As the heat of the outside world reached the cold of the inside of the room, steam began to erupt from the walls, blinding him to what awaited him beyond the confines of the room as he blearily stepped out onto the fallen wall.
Blinking against the haze that greeted him outside the tiny room, he saw someone standing just a few feet away from him – presumably the man who had spoken before. The man was rather portly, wearing light blue clothing and a shocked expression on his face.
"Oh, my god!" he declared, fear creeping into his voice.
He began to shake slightly, the drastic change in temperature wreaking havoc on his body. He brought his wings around him again, wrapping them tightly around his body in an attempt to allow the feathers to begin to regulate his body temperature.
With some confusion, he noted that the shocked man before him was not in possession of a pair of pinions as he was. Was that why they had placed him in that room: because he was some kind of monster?
"God, no!" the man exclaimed, backing away from him. He wondered what he could have possibly done that would strike such fear into the hearts of another.
He wished that he could remember.
He was about to ask the man if he could possibly enlighten him as to what was going on, but he didn't get the chance to before the man's eyes rolled back and he fell backwards onto the floor.
He regarded the unconscious man for a few moments, waiting to see if he would wake up. When it became clear that he was going to be out for a while and that he certainly wasn't patient enough to wait for him to recover from his current state, he decided that, if he was to find any answers, he would have to keep searching.
Turning away from the prone body, he shuffled into another small room adjacent to the one where the man was now lying. It was probably not that much larger than the one in which he had awoken, but it was clearly designed for more comfortable living.
His gaze passed quickly over the bowl full of some kind of foodstuff that the unlocked part of his vocabulary informed him was usually referred to as 'popcorn', instead falling on a strange box that was sat atop a shelf so that it was at a comfortable height for viewing. Light and sound were emitting from the box, though both were constantly changing, and it kept his attention as he longed to see what they would do next.
Yet suddenly, an awful, high-pitched sound screeched from the box, and he jumped back; the sound had been most unexpected and was certainly unwelcome, so he decided to move on – he didn't feel as though any answers could be gleaned from that strange box.
A few minutes later, he was out of rooms altogether. Rather, he was in a corridor: a dark, cold and empty corridor. He hadn't seen anyone else since he had left that small room, and a part of him was glad for that; he wondered how someone who had recovered more quickly to the obvious shock and fear that he had inspired within the now unconscious man would have reacted – for all he knew, he might have a price over his head.
The thoughts that raced through his mind as he padded down the dark corridor were less than comforting; he found that his rather over-active imagination was providing him with all number of possible answers to the questions that he had, and none of those possibilities seemed very desirable. Deciding to put his brain to a much more useful purpose, he dragged a tune from its depths and began humming; he didn't remember what the tune was that he was humming, but the action itself served to sooth his strained nerves somewhat, even though his voice was shaking slightly.
The corridor was lined with windows which gave him a viewpoint to the world outside of this building. The sky was dark and cloudy, and water was falling from it quite heavily. A loud rumble sounded from the general direction of the outside as a flash of light seared against his eyes. It almost made him jump, but his attention was quickly diverted from the weather as he turned towards the window and his gaze fell on a clock hanging from the wall.
Something in the back of his mind jerked: a piece of information that was longing to be retrieved but that he couldn't quite reach. It appeared blurry to him as he tried to make out what it was, but eventually he gave up trying to force it to fall into his outstretched hand; he had faith that it would come to the forefront of his mind ultimately.
As he carried on down the corridor, he soon found another room into which he could wander. This room was the biggest that he had seen since he had awoken – yet he had the feeling that it was not the biggest room that he had ever seen, for there was something buried in his memory that was bigger, so big, but so small…
The room was filled with beds – though they were damaged and had been arranged rather haphazardly. The windows were covered with blinds which were rattling loudly as the rain pounded against the windows across which they were pulled, and the sound so distracted him that he nearly walked into a wall; he stumbled back from it and continued further into the room, only to be doused with freezing water from a broken pipe overhead.
"Ugh!" he exclaimed, as the water soaked through the sheet wrapped around him and dripped uncomfortably down his back.
He frowned at the voice that reached his ears; for although it sounded as though it had come from him, and the time that the sound had reached his ears was compatible with the time that he had felt the distinctive vibration of his vocal cords within his throat, it didn't sound like him. He remembered hearing his voice before, but it hadn't sounded like that.
His befuddlement stole the majority of his concentration as he stumbled back from the steady stream of water flowing from the pipe overhead, so that he didn't see the box that he was moving towards, which clattered to the floor as he collided with it.
A sob ripped from his throat at the confusion and calamity that seemed to surround his existence, and for a moment he almost wished that he was back in the little room, for he felt that it was becoming painfully obvious that he had been put in there for his own protection – at least until he was able to retrieve that ever-elusive piece of information in the back of his mind.
He lifted his gaze, more than ready to turn on his heel and race back the way that he had come, to seek refuge with the unconscious man who was the only other being that he had seen since he had awoken, when he was suddenly faced with another face.
The sudden sight was so unexpected and his nerves were already so fraught that he screamed as the visage entered his field of vision.
He was faced with a mirror, and he remembered what mirrors did; but surely he didn't look like that? He didn't remember looking like that. His face seemed too young, and he certainly had had shorter hair last he remembered – not these long, wavy locks that reached down past his chin.
The notion of priorities was provided to him by his cluttered mind, ordering the questions that he had and placing just one at the top of the pyramid of queries: the most important one of all being:
"Who am I?"
UPDATE 20/09/14: Part fifteen of the Angel!Verse, Parked on Pluto, is up now.