x x x
Chapter 3: Nightmares
x x x
Pain ripping through her, harsh bony hands gripping her arms, burning like ice against her skin. And those eyes, full of fire and froth and rage, penetrating her very soul.
She couldn't fight, and couldn't flee. All she could do was scream.
He was hurting her. So. Very. Much.
She couldn't think, couldn't feel anything but the pain, and echoes of his rage tearing through her mind. Yet somehow she knew through this, she was nothing, she was his possession, his plaything, his slave. He could do anything he wanted to her, and she could do nothing to stop him.
And that terrified her even more than all the pain in the universe.
But then something shifted. Gentle grip on her shoulders, not the chilling grasp of her tormentor. Warm paradox replaced icy pain, and suddenly she awoke... to find Jack Harkness leaning over her with genuine concern in his eyes.
She blinked several times, and then she shivered, pushing his hands away from her.
The way he watched her felt uncomfortable, and soon she realised why. He was seeing her pain... and interpreting it correctly. Or at least, as close as a human mind could guess. She could use this to her advantage. He could clearly tell she was tortured, possibly even accurately guessing the level of trauma she felt for it. His first, very human, guess would probably be that she had been raped.
Not as far off the mark as she liked to tell herself.
But then instead of conjuring up a suitable lie to evoke the reaction she wanted out of him, she found herself telling the truth.
"My- my species, we..." she began shakily, sitting up. He seemed surprised when she leaned towards him, and let him wrap his arms around her. To be honest she was surprised by it herself, but something about him drew her in. "Our greatest form of intimacy is telepathy. And he... he tortured my mind. I- I can't... can't even- there aren't words in this language for that."
"I think there's one." he said distantly, running fingers through her hair in an oddly comforting gesture.
Comforting. That was probably the last word she would have expected to find herself associating with this individual. Still, that was definitely what it felt like.
She really hadn't meant to relive that memory. Usually she would have much greater control over her own subconscious than this. But then, there was still something very much missing from her mind, and she still wasn't sure what it was. It was maddening to sense such a loss and not be able to place it.
After several long seconds of silence, Harkness pulled back from that comforting embrace, and asked, "Want to talk about it?"
She shook her head slowly. It was difficult enough to cope with the memories as it was. Putting them into words seemed absolutely insurmountable, especially in this primitive Earth language. Besides, what Rassilon had done to her wasn't something she could easily explain, even if she wanted to.
He was still watching her, perhaps too intently. She did wonder what he thought he was seeing in her body-language, but whatever it was he seemed to accept her wishes. "Come on, then. You need to eat. I've no idea how it works, but the fridge always has something good when I'm hungry. Nothing special... just good."
She half-smiled, half-frowned at that. Puzzled by his description of it. A mystery was always appealing, even if she didn't feel entirely recovered yet.
Then she let her confusion fade, and the smile take over. It took some effort to keep that smile benign, as she spoke, "Yes, I am hungry." What was the socially acceptable human phrase? Oh yes. "I could eat a horse." ... or a human. No, she had not quite gotten past that aspect of her last life yet, either.
x x x
When she left the bedroom, it turned out this prison looked an awful lot like a normal early-twenty-first century Earth flat. There was a decent sized living room, with a couch, a small table with two chairs... and three doors. One door led to the bedroom she had woken in, another led to a small but functional bathroom, and the third to a similarly sized kitchen.
The odd thing about the kitchen was that it lacked any appliances besides a fridge and microwave. She was pretty sure Earthlings considered this far less than acceptable in a food preparation area. She certainly did.
Still, when she opened the fridge there was a particularly tasty looking sandwich sitting on a plate at eye level. Claiming this for herself, she then opened a cupboard, and found exactly one kettle, already containing water, one teacup with saucer and teaspoon, a packet of one of the better brands of Earth-grown tea, and a large jar of sugar.
This was suspiciously convenient. Still, she was not going to complain about free food. It just added to the interesting little mystery of this place.
Harkness was standing in the doorway of the kitchen as she poured the tea, and added six spoonsfuls of sugar.
"Trying to get diabetes?"
She gave him a dubious look, "Entirely aside from the fact that disease is caused by metabolic issues, not glucose consumption... my species can't get it."
And Time Lords have a spectacular sweet tooth. Most foods found on Gallifrey that were of nutritional value to the natives were also obscenely sweet by Earth standards. It wasn't actually glucose, either. It was a unique vitamin that converted solar radiation into a source of energy. Time Lords had been artificially genetically adapted to convert proteins into this energy in the absence of their native star system, but regular Gallifreyans wouldn't fare so well beyond the confines of their homeworld and its local colonies.
She must have got lost in memories of home, because the next thing she knew, Harkness' hand was on her shoulder, and she realised she was still stirring the tea. "Are you alright?" he asked.
She snorted weakly, dropping the spoon on the counter with a too-loud clatter, "Of course I'm not alright. We established that earlier."
He gestured to the living room, "Are you sure you don't want to talk? It doesn't have to be about what happened."
Her lip twitched faintly in the direction of a smile, and she nodded, "Alright then."
He picked up her sandwich - she resisted the desire to cause him physical harm for it - and brought it to the table. She followed slowly with her tea, and sat down across from him. She noted with some ambivalence that he had set the sandwich in front of her, and made no attempt to steal it. Part of her wanted that trivial excuse to get angry at him... part of her just wanted the sandwich damnit... and another part, which she very much did not like to admit to, really did want someone to talk to.
And he was right here, offering her exactly that.
After several minutes, during which she sipped her hot tea for a moment, then ate half her sandwich nice and slowly, he was the one to break the silence, "So where are you from?"
She felt strange when she heard those words. When she actually thought on how to tactfully answer. Instead of just spouting a name, she had to consider how to describe it without giving it away, and that made her really remember it. Her eyes burned, and she blinked involuntarily a few times, before finally speaking softly, "My homeworld was beautiful."
She saw the way he reacted to that. He recognised the past tense, the pain at the memories. But he didn't say anything, so she kept speaking.
"Binary star system, red and white, just outside the gravitational pull of a pulsar. Primarily orbiting the white star. About three times Earth size, and one-point-six Earth gravity." To anyone else these might sound like trivial statistics, but to her they were still a part of her home, and to any Time Lord understanding how something beautiful worked made it even more appealing. "The upper atmospheric layer was dense, tinted the sunlight to gold, but couldn't filter out the radiation of the pulsar."
He was watching her with the kind of fascination of one who really innocently just wants to know what you're telling them. She saw no suspicion in his eyes, no dots being connected. That likely meant the Doctor hadn't spoken of Gallifrey to him in any detail. The gold sky was always the first thing anyone mentioned.
"The plants grew red to resist the radiation. The wildlife, and eventually my species, evolved to incorporate the radiation into our biological makeup. It took intensive genetic engineering to make it safe for us to ever leave our home solar system. I've heard stories of ancient cults that could manipulate the radiation in our bodies into a form of 'magic', though later research shows that while that's possible, it drastically shortens our life-spans.
"My family wasn't the richest or most powerful. On Earth, owning land makes you gentry, on my world the opposite is true. Living on the edge, or worse outside, the major cities was considered outright unsafe. Nobody in their right mind would go out there, they would tell us, so who would lay claim to such unwanted territory? My father was not exactly... fond of tradition, to put it politely. We lived on the outer edge of the capital city, and owned land beyond."
She smiled faintly, remembering as she spoke, "I grew up free to go outside the official sanctuary of the city. Something most wouldn't dare dream of. Spending summers playing in fields of red grass, not a care in the universe." she sighed, feeling that burning in her eyes again, and firmly denying that it meant she was close to tears. "It's all gone now. Burned to ash. Everything outside the cities was turned to volcanic ruin, long ago now. By the time I left, it wasn't really home anymore."
She really couldn't keep talking about it anymore, so pretended she was just continuing to eat the sandwich, to hide the fact she was nearly choking on those last words.
What surprised her was his response, "I know the feeling."
She looked up, staring straight at him with shock. Really? He dared insinuate he understood the devastation that had happened to her world?
He attempted and failed a smile, "Yeah. My world was very Earth-like. A human colony a few miles from the site of an ancient Alteran ruin. Founded half for a new place to live, half for the archaeologists to get off on. I was a third-generation colonist born there. It was so beautiful, the wise-ass survey team who first landed there called the planet Eden. And for the first twelve years of my life, it certainly seemed like paradise. I've never felt safer anywhere else, since. Which, considering what happened, is a bit terrifying in itself."
She blinked in surprise at this revelation, but then just had to know, "What happened?"
He shook his head, and she could see in his expression that he did not want to talk about it. She supposed it was a fair trade for him not asking what happened to ruin her homeworld.
What did surprise her was that she couldn't sense his emotions. Usually she could tell how a person was feeling without needing to read facial expressions or body-language. Of course, she understood body-language, she just didn't usually need to resort to it... unless she was dealing with another telepath who was actively blocking her.
She was pretty sure Harkness couldn't do that. Never managed it during the year she ruled the world. Still, it warranted investigation. Was it something about him, or was she being blocked from all telepathic contact, not just that outside this prison?
x x x
