(A/N: I'm sorry for the shortness of this chapter!)
Stonehenge, 102 AD
She's at the back of the crowd. She can't bear to be closer. No, she thinks.
The Pandorica has been opened, and is waiting for its prey. There is only its light and firelight. Everything is very quiet.
She's had to curb the rather unsavoury urge that wanted to watch him be shut in. The same urge had pressed her to reveal how to contain him – she had managed to curb that one, too, thankfully. She's cold-blooded, literally, and part of this conspiracy. The Alliance is born from fear and built on fear, and she is terrified. She fears her failed experiment, she fears this Silurian body, she fears her allies, she fears the Silence, she fears the end of all things and she fears for the Doctor.
He's afraid, too. They're all so afraid. And none of them understand.
They have to drag him, which is to be expected.
She tucks her elbows close, presses her claws into her palms, hopes against hope that this is another nightmare, a nightmare she's having in another time, under another projection field. And she watches.
No, she has to stop them. He's got to have the chance to defend himself. He should have the right to speak, to explain, to… She tries to move, but she's as frozen. She tries to shout, but her tongue won't cooperate.
He's in there now, inside the Pandorica. It's almost too late. There's a terrible storm approaching, she can feel it, but none of the others seem aware; not of anything other than their fear.
Her timepiece is breaking, she can feel that, too; the cogs ceasing to move, the field losing cohesion, the manipulator giving out. Only now, when it is too late, does her puppeteer release its hold.
She remembers so many strange things now, so many times… So many trips, so many faces… The Multiform, Liz X, Daleks, van Gogh, Craig and Sophie...
It's like stepping out of quicksand onto steel. The world turns itself inside out and her mind does the same. It breaks and reshapes itself, heals, hardens. So many trips and this was the only one she needed to make.
She feels the illusion of scales slip off her like water.
She still can't move.
It's not a nightmare. It's reality, and may well be the last of it.
She has one chance to gather up all the pieces and fit them all together. This one chance. She knows that he's been doing what he's always done; that he's been running; that he's been worried. That he sat next to her in Venice, that he'd played football, that he'd broken a few laws of time. That the cracks had followed him, or vice versa.
This one chance. And then what? Their evidence concurs; hers is inconclusive. So much time, so much work and so much pain, and she still has the same questions. What if it was, will be, has always been, his fault? What if he stumbled? But he seems much the same, too much the same to make that sort of mistake… doesn't he? Much the same, and still... that terrible War, the faith of Gallifrey...
He pleads, or admonishes, or forgives, and she listens. He says it's not him and she believes.
She hasn't got any answers, but it's all brutally simple now, now when she already knows it's too late - it can't be his fault because he's here with them and the terrible event is coming now, happening now, and he can't cause it because he's here and his TARDIS isn't… it happens now, and all the time, everywhere, and they got it wrong.
He looks up, and she wonders if he can see her. Sense her. Her blood running hot again, she picks up on his anxiety; her pulses attune themselves to his. But too late.
And he shouts: "Listen to me!"
She does, oh, but she does, but it's too late - she feels it coming, the end of it, with paralysing certainty… It cuts through everything and finds every little part of her. It tears his last words from his lips and from her mind and from her hearts.
They cheer when the Pandorica closes. She hates them all.
They got it wrong.
