"Erida!" The Doctor tried to catch her, but wasn't quick enough. She hit the ground. He rolled her over and forced her eyelids open. Her eyes were blank, unseeing, but her pulse was steady and her breathing slow and even. He looked around at the families holding their relatives who had drank. They all seemed calm.
"What is this?" He caught the eye of the drink distributor and got up to meet him, grabbing the man's shirt in his fist. "What the hell have you done!? What was in that drink!?"
"I-i-it is the Cata milk!" He held his hands up defensively. "I have done nothing!"
"What is that? What is Cata milk?" He was shouting and several people were starting to stare.
"It's the ceremonial drink of our people." The winged man was approaching them. "So that the new couple may experience each other's strongest memories. Together. Your friend is not hurt."
The Doctor released his grip on the little man's shirt and turned to the winged priest. "Experience their strongest memories…? You mean the milk's a hallucinogen?'
The winged priest nodded and the people who drank began to stir. Erida sat up and looked around. Her eyes were wide and dark. Her pupils were so large that no sign of her dark brown irises could be seen.
"… Daddy?" Her voice, though distinctly adult, reminded the Doctor of a small child.
"Everything she experiences will be real for her. She won't remember drinking the milk until she awakens."
Erida looked at the ground before her, placed her hands on it. "Daddy wake up!" She shook her hands as if trying to wake someone from a deep slumber. "Daddy you're scaring me!"
The Doctor squatted down in front of her, his arms resting on his knees. "What's happening, Erida? What's wrong with your father?' He frowned at her eerie black eyes.
"He won't wake up!" She looked up at him with a face full of tears. "He fell and he won't get up!" Again, she tried to shake the floor awake. "And now he's glowing! Daddy, stop it, I'm scared!"
"Glowing?" The Doctor furrowed his brow, but then immediately he understood. "Oooh. He's regenerating. You must be very young to not know about regenerating yet." He felt a little thread of pity work its way into his hearts. He sat beside her and put an arm around her. "It's alright, Erida. It's alright. You have to give him a bit of space now."
She looked at him as if he had just sprouted another head. "I can't leave my Daddy!"
"No, we're not going to leave him, just watch. He'll be ok."
He waited as Erida watched the empty ground. Suddenly she let out a little shriek, covered her eyes with her hands, and buried her face in the Doctor's chest. He hugged her to him and quietly shushed her, protecting her from the blinding light of her father's regeneration.
After it was over, Erida peeked out through her fingers and looked around. "Where is he? Where's my Daddy?" She looked up, huddling further into the Doctor's arms. "Who are you? What have you done with my Daddy?"
There was a short pause, then: "No you're not, you look nothing like my Daddy!"
Her gaze began to lower, and the Doctor could almost imagine her father crouching down so his daughter could look into his eyes and recognize him. And she must've, because Erida's eyes grew wide and she reached out a hand to touch his invisible face. "What's… regeneration?"
Without warning, Erida's hand fell. She closed her eyes and slumped against the Doctor, apparently asleep.
The Doctor looked around at the other people lost in their memories, wondering if that was it. It wasn't. After a few seconds, Erida opened her eyes and got up. Without a word, she walked to one of the round tables, sat down, and peered into a glass of water. After turning it a few times, she picked up a spoon and wrote something down on a napkin, then began tapping it impatiently against the table. Her jaw clenched and her legs jittered impatiently.
The Doctor recognized the look on her face immediately. It was the look of someone who had long been working on a puzzle, the solution just out of reach. He sat next to her, wondering what she saw.
"Talk it out, Erida. What are you doing?"
"I'm observing the regeneration process in cells on a molecular level when exposed to an organic compound I've created."
"Really?" The Doctor's eyebrows raised in surprise. "Why?"
She sighed heavily. "So I can stop it."
"What? What for!?"
"To kill Rassilon… But it's not working! Logically it should, but it's not! I'm missing something. The cells are not reacting at all to it."
The Doctor leaned back in his chair with hardened eyes. So there it was. Mad, murderous Erida had made her appearance. He couldn't say he was surprised. And what's worse was that she was clever. She'd never intended to just stab people to death. She had wanted to do it patiently, with science. The Doctor was almost glad that she hadn't scrapped the formula and tried for something new. Who knows how many people she would've killed otherwise?
"AUGH! What does it need!?" Erida got up angrily from her chair and made a motion as if to wipe something from the air, and then write something else in its place. She stared at her invisible writing, her jaw clenching and unclenching, fork tapping impatiently against the table.
Suddenly her jet black eyes softened, the fork stopped tapping. She put her hand up as if to cover something, removed it, and then did the same in another spot in the air.
"Silver," she said. "I can't believe it. It needs to bond with silver in order to work… I need silver."
She sighed then, and dropped her head. The Doctor, fearing she might fall over, made to catch her, but she caught herself in time, clutching the table to stabilize herself.
"You alright?" He put a hand on her back, just in case she really did fall over.
Erida straightened and faced him, but she was seeing through him. He wasn't even there. She continued to clutch the fork. She appeared sad, but determined. "Don't do this, Rassilon. I've told you what is to come, and I can't let that happen. You and I are the only ones that need to die."
The Doctor took his hand off of her and backed up with fear. He knew exactly what she was reliving.
"I'll kill them all, if they try to stop me from killing you. Save them, Rassilon. Don't let them die uselessly."
The Doctor looked around frantically; making sure nobody was in her vicinity but him.
"So be it." She knelt on the ground and slashed at the Doctor's legs with the fork.
He jumped back and caught her foot as she attempted to kick him in the face. He twisted her foot and flipped her to the ground where he wrestled the fork from her hand and flung it to the side. He held her down as she flailed beneath him, reliving the day she murdered the high council members.
The Doctor was surprised how long it took for someone to stop her. It was nearly ten minutes before she let out a cry of pain and her body relaxed. When he was sure her murderous rage had passed, he got off of her.
Immediately, she got up and looked at him with absolute terror. "No, please don't! Not that!" She backed away from him, but there was something wrong with her hands. They looked like they were bound together. "You can't! You don't understand; he needs to die! He's going to destroy us all!"
The Doctor caught her just as she stumbled over a chair. She hit him on the shoulder with her bound hands and began screaming. "No! Don't do this! Don't lock me away! Please!" She thrashed about so hard that the Doctor lost his grip on her, but she didn't back up any farther.
Her breathe came in quick and rapid. She held her hands up, as if pressed against something. "Don't keep me in here," she pleaded. "Don't freeze me. Please… please…" Tears began to flow. With a shaky, grief-stricken voice, she said "The Daleks are going to kill you all."
The Doctor was in so much shock at this statement, that he almost didn't catch her in time. He lowered them both to the ground, where he held her head in the crook of his arm. Her eyes, unblinking, stared up at the ceiling. The rest of her body was totally limp. She began to sing, cold and clear and hauntingly:
"Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed, and eats you while you're sleeping..."
The Doctor recognized the song, and let her sing it alone. He gently stroked her arm, unsure if she was even aware of him. Whether she was or not, he felt the need to comfort her.
There was a coldness in the pit of the Doctor's stomach. He had no idea what memory she was reliving now, but he could guess pretty easily what memory she had relived just before. It was the day she had been frozen in time. Hearing her pleading was disturbing enough, but what froze the Doctor's insides was what she had said last. "The Daleks are going to kill you all." She had been frozen centuries before they had been aware of the Daleks. There was no way she could know about them. Unless...
Unless she had told him the truth. But how could it possibly be the truth?
Maybe not all of it is, he reasoned. But some of it must be, as impossible as it sounded. It was true that she had a sleep disorder. This was documented in the records and was studied extensively. Maybe because of this disorder, she somehow saw the future the day she was taken to the Schism. She was a child, but by then she would've heard the Legend of Zagreus. It had likely terrified her, just as it had terrified him. Put that alongside her disorder and her terrible glimpse of the future... Her actions would've been understandable. And, he realized, they had been a last resort. She had warned Rassilon before she killed the council members.
The Doctor looked down at her, his eyes full of sympathy. She was still singing.
This poor girl... he thought. This poor, damaged girl had tried to warn us all, but nobody listened to her. I didn't listen to her. They treated her like a criminal and locked her away where they could forget about her. He ran a thumb over the small green killswitch. He had left the release device in the TARDIS, otherwise he would've released her from it right then. And I did no better, submitting her to this when she hadn't held any ill will for me... Shows just what kind of bastard I am. Guilt and regret infused with his sympathy and together the emotions worked their way into his hearts, making them ache.
Erida stopped singing. The Doctor was afraid of what would be next.
Erida grabbed her head and groaned with pain.
"Are you alright?"
"Hit my head... hard." Her black eyes told him she was still hallucinating. The Doctor looked around at the other drinkers. All but the newlyweds had already come out of their hallucinatory state. But, then again, Erida had lived longer than most of the people in the room. She had more memories than most.
She suddenly seemed to realize where she was, wherever she was. She leaped up and stumbled towards the nearby table muttering "No, no, no..." She ran around the table, turning glasses, flipping invisible switches, pulling invisible levers until she reached her destination.
She stared at something in the air. A look of horror overtook her face and she covered her mouth.
"No!" She cried. "I can't believe he did it. He actually did it. Our people... our home..." With a sudden rage, she picked up a glass and threw it. It shattered against another table, the force of which sent several other glasses toppling over.
"That bastard!" She screamed. "Damn it! Damn him!" She kicked the table, sending a few more items flying off, but her anger was quickly ebbing.
Erida turned her back on the table and put her head in her hands, sobbing. She slid down until she finally plopped onto the ground. "How could you? HOW!?"
The Doctor realized that, though she didn't know he was there, she was still talking to him. He knelt down in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders.
"I had no choice." He told her.
"Our people! All of them – gone!"
"They were insane. You know what they were planning."
"It wasn't their fault. It wasn't... It was my fault. I tried to warn them, protect them, save them. But I couldn't..." Her entire body shook as she wept. "I couldn't save them. I failed..."
The Doctor took her in his arms, shushing her. Tears threatened their way out, but he blinked them back. "It's not your fault." He whispered into her hair. "It's not. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
He held her as she cried for a minute longer, until she suddenly stopped and looked directly at him.
"... Doctor?" Her dark brown irises began to show as her pupils returned to their normal size.
"Coming back, are we? How many fingers?"
It took Erida a while to focus on his hand. It was like trying to see through a fog. "Three, I think. Did I go somewhere?"
"You could say that. Come on, up you get."
Erida allowed him to help her up, then wiped her face with her hand.
"I've been crying," she said with a bit of surprise. "Why have I been crying?"
"You don't remember?"
"I remember... the drink? Yes. There was a toast. And then the couple fell over." She looked with concern at the newlyweds, but they were in no danger. Just coming out of their memories themselves, they sat on the floor disengaging their hands from one another.
"They're fine," he reassured her. "And then what happened? To you?"
"I fell... I fell and..." She rubbed her forehead, frowning. "It's so weird. It's like I went back into my own head and..." The realization dawned on her. "I was remembering. Not everything, but some things."
The Doctor nodded. "Apparently it's the custom of the people here to drink a hallucinogen at weddings. It makes them relive their memories together. Suppose it strengthens the bond for the new couple. Not quite sure what it's supposed to do for the guests that drink it."
Erida looked around them. There were chairs toppled over, glass and water on the floor. She was sure she knew which memory had resulted in the mess.
"Did I hurt anyone?"
"No, don't worry. Nobody got hurt. Though you did give it a good hard try. Which reminds me, you're no longer allowed near forks."
He couldn't help laughing at the look Erida gave him.
"Kidding! Just kidding. Though, you and I need to have a serious talk when we're back in the TARDIS." He brushed her hair aside to reveal the killswitch again. "I'm taking it off. You're not mad. I'm sorry I put it on you to begin with." He paused, considering his last words carefully. "I believe you."
Erida was too stunned to respond.
END PART 2
Author's note: Hello again! I hope you're enjoying my story. Please tell me if you're not and what I could do differently so that you will enjoy it. :) Tipping my hat at you, Denise. I hope I've cleared everything up that needs to be?
This will be the last of Erida's backstory, so don't worry, they'll be fighting monsters soon enough!
Also, the song Erida is singing is taken from the audio play entitled "Zagreus." It's a wonderful audio drama that I suggest you all go listen to, and sparked the idea for this fanfic. The entire song is as follows:
"Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed, And eats you when you're sleeping.
Zagreus at the end of days, Zagreus lies all other ways, Zagreus comes when time's a maze, And all of history is weeping.
Zagreus taking time apart, Zagreus fears the hero heart, Zagreus seeks the final part, The reward that he is reaping.
Zagreus sings when all is lost, Zagreus takes all those he's crossed, Zagreus wins and all it cost, The hero's hearts he's keeping.
Zagreus seeks the hero's ship, Zagreus needs the web to rip, Zagreus sups time at a drip, And life aside, he's sweeping.
Zagreus waits at the end of the world, For Zagreus is the end of the world.
His time is the end of time, And his moment time's undoing."
