oOo Doctor, oOo
At most, seven days to live, and you feel five of them fall like sand between your fingers. There are new agonies with every new dawn. Physical torture - until your body gives up healing and lets its surface succumb to livid, ugly shades without a patch of natural colour left - and mental. River, the Ponds, even the Healer, they all visit you, tear you apart inside. You wall up your mind, but the visions always slip through.
Your one comfort? You can't remember Theta.
.
They're digging, digging, in your mind and in your skin. Your breathing comes in fits and starts. Patches on your forehead, attached to wires, take a viscously short time to install - electric conductors stick through your skin, through bone, poking past your skull.
With every effort they make, every pulse they send, you need a fresh mountain of willpower to not let the memory float up, to shove something else out instead. Something meaningless.
Why hasn't it changed? Dear, dear, how very disturbing.
Not what they want, of course. Something thin, cold, metal, sliding further inside your forehead. Farther, farther. Real, this time. Painfully real. They're coming back. Here th-
Alons-y, Alonso!
That makes you sick on its own. He hated you before you were even born. Like your mother.
And still not good enough, because they want Theta. They want Theta. (And they want something else, too.)
The two things they are never going to get.
.
Even when, at the end of days, days, your mind is turned over, wrung out, details scraped from the corners - even when it turns to a grey blur and thoughts wander without registering - even then, they don't find him. You can't find him, they can't, no one in the universe could, right now.
And when they yank the wires out and you're finally alone again, you're proud.
.
Life has become a constant struggle to keep two things safe: your baby and your name.
What does it matter what they do to your body?
oOo
The door swings open.
You look up from where you were bent over your fingers, back to the wall of your usual white cell. For all the blood the torturers have drawn from you, your missing fingernails present the most morbid fascination, and you've taken to staring at them through the long hours of nothing.
Amy comes in. She moves cautiously, staring down at the place you're curled against the wall. You look at her from under a tangled twist of your bloody-damp hair, hating, hating, hating.
"Doctor?" There are a few tears hanging onto the edge of her eye. Every detail is vivid in your mind as you search for clues, clues that you can deny. Inconsistencies, glitches in the details. But they've done a good job, this time, even better than even the last simulation (which you actually let yourself believe was real for a full two minutes before you had to let it go, and slap yourself back into reality). You can see human make-up outlining Amy's eyelashes as she steps toward you.
Damn you for being so good at this. Whoever's here. Damn you.
"Doctor?" she repeats, touching your hunched shoulder in a real-enough gesture of compassion.
You curl in tighter, breathing in, filling your body with air. "Leave me alone," you try to say, but your voice is too quiet, and she doesn't hear.
"We've come to take you away," she says. "Doctor, what's wrong? Are you all right?"
Someone else comes in. Usually you can tell who it is, in these dreams, before you see their faces, but this time, you can't tell it's Rory until he speaks. "Is he okay?"
"I don't know," Amy says. "He won't talk to me." Her eyes move over your body. "What's happened to him?"
"Don't answer," you say to Rory. Even in a simulation, you don't want them figuring out what they've been doing.
"Doctor! You're with us," Amy says.
She takes you in her arms, but you keep yourself stiff. "Leave me, leave me alone, please don't … touch me."
"Doctor. What have they done to you?" Amy repeats, and Rory feels your forehead. For the first time you look at his hands, and see that in one arm he's carrying a small, grey-wrapped shape. Oh, no.
"He's burning up," Rory says.
You lean forward, burying your face in Amy's hair - unable to help yourself. You need some kind of comfort, even if it's only an illusion. And you begin laughing.
"Doctor!"
"Pond!"
"What is going on?"
The hysterical laughter turns into a choked struggle for breath.
"Doctor! Get a grip!" Amy shakes you.
"She would say that," you say, pushing her arms away.
"Come here," she says, voice worried.
"Stop," you say.
Amy presses something against your chest. The bundle that Rory was holding before. No. No. No. No.
"Don't do this," you cry. "Just kill me!"
"Doctor." Amy runs a finger over your cheek, blinking back tears. "Please, what's wrong? What's wrong?"
You give a dry, tearless sob that sears your lungs, and wrap your arms around the shape that Amy is still holding to you. A tiny arm moves against your frayed robe, five fragile fingers poke through a hole - skin meets skin, the contact pinching the surface of your body into goosebumps.
The baby turns his eyes up to yours.
He's real. He's real. You kept Theta, you would know if they had stolen him from your mind.
There is no way any Time Lord could have done this. Could have made this.
"Theta. Amy. Rory." You reach out and touch them. They're real. They're real.
"Doctor." Amy takes your hand. "What did they do to you?"
"You're real," you say, out loud this time. "How did you get here? Tell me they haven't got you, too."
"No, no, we've come to rescue you!" Amy's on the verge of tears.
You pull her forward and don't let her go. She smells like home. Earth. Amelia. How are you here?
She puts her arms around you again. You rock in her embrace ever-so-slightly, breathing hard. Safe for the first time in a week.
Finally, you pull away, eyes searching her face again.
"But how did you break in?"
"That isn't important," Amy says. "What matters is that you haven't been honest with us."
You laugh in disbelief. "What? How is that -"
"Doctor." Amy squeezes your hand. "Listen. I need to know why you're here."
"To heal Theta," you say, shaking your head distractedly. "Just get me out."
"We can't," Rory speaks up. "There's a nasty looking guard-type that goes past every fifteen minutes. We have to wait -" he checks his watch - "Six more."
Six minutes. Way too much time to spend here.
You put your head back against the wall, gaze fixed on the glorious Ponds, arms firm around the baby. Your baby. The one you're scared to look at, in case he's not real.
But he is.
Amy looks close to tears. She leans in, intense. "Please, tell me why the Time Lords have you locked up. We heard something about a name. Doctor."
Because she was the one that you told your secrets to. Well, except all of them. And Amy Pond can't go without knowing you trust her like she trusts you.
Not even for a fistful of seconds.
"Okay. Okay." You sigh, feeling all the air deflate from your chest. "We're safe for six minutes?"
"Should be," Rory says.
"How do I …" You look from one to the other, then decide on the truth, because good boys don't lie to their parents. (Well. Not often.)
"Look … d'you think I'm a nice person?" you say. "Honestly?" when they nod. You laugh a bit, close your eyes - shut hard against the light that you're letting in. You don't know if you're starting in the right place, or even saying the right thing, but talking feels absolutely glorious, so you plough on. "It's not … I … the truth is, I want them all dead. The Daleks, the Cybermen, the Silence. Any monster that's touched our lives."
You stop. To properly explain, you should go on, tell them about all the filth that goes past righteous anger and into sadism, pride, hatred. But you don't. How could you? How could you say any of that out loud? So instead you swallow and say, "Right," then keep going. "So what do you think would happen if the Time Lords released my name?"
They still look blank.
"Boom," you say. "My name, growing for a thousand years, that angry, that much time energy? Look, it's not like a name. It's more - it's like - an identity. The Time Lords, a long time ago, poured themselves into the vortex. Time poured right back, putting power behind their personalities. Power they stored in their names. It was dangerous, but it became a part of us, like regeneration. Another thing Time gave us. So - see - the older I get, the more it grows. Do you understand?"
They shake their heads. "Look," you say, "It would be a weapon. Time Lord names aren't normally allowed to mature. I was an idiot when I was younger, and by the time I was old enough to see that my name's not a blessing, it was to dangerous to use it and release it and get rid of it. That much energy - it would do things to time - it has enough power to - to make me into a - to put me in control of - and that's not - that's not what the universe needs."
You end it, stuttering and hoping they understand.
"So, the Time Lords could use this … name … to hurt the Daleks?" Rory says.
"And everything else they're fighting," you say. "Yes. But mostly the Daleks. They don't mind destroying time, which is what the Name would do, if it all came out. That's what they want to do, tear it all apart. And … ascend, or something. They think they can live without bodies. The only beings in the - but there wouldn't be a universe."
"Thanks," Amy says. Leans back. You give her a little smile, because it feels so free, to let that secret, black like coal-dirt, go.
Amy returns the smile.
And then suddenly, inexplicably …
It's all turning to wax again.
The ginger torturer steps through, as, with a ripple, everyone vanishes. Instinct presses you against the wall, hunches your shoulders, draws up your knees to protect your raw fingers.
"It's morning," he announces.
You look around the plain white room, dazed. You're alone. No sign of the Ponds, or Theta.
So it was a hallucination.
How did they get Theta so exactly right?
"What's going on?" you say.
"Well," he says, moving from one foot to the other, "I'm sorry. That was - that was my work."
You know what he means.
"But - thank you." He continues. "You told me about it, back there. So - so, now I know what I'm doing. What the Time Lords are doing."
You gape. That little plea, from you, about not knowing what he was doing, the night he ruined your hands - that actually shook him enough to make him shake you right back, shake you like an apple tree, dropping ripe secrets to bruise on the grass?
"What else do you want?" You say.
"I wanted to tell you that there's no need to hurt you anymore," he replies. "We've found out who Theta is."
"No, you haven't." You deny it, electricity live in your stomach. Rub your hands together - a habit that has formed out of the pain from your fingers.
"We found it all," he says. "The humans, the child. The Healer was keeping them."
You run your right index finger over the smarting red depression on the top of your left ring finger, feeling some kind of jackknife ripping, ragged, through your organs.
"I want you to know you're safe now," he says, kneeling down to your level (an action you despise). "We don't need to torture you anymore. We didn't exactly need to before, but the council wanted to know why you were back on Gallifrey. They know, now, so you can rest easy."
"Get out," you say.
"Sorry sir, of course, sir," he says, and backs through the door. Closes it behind him.
You inspect your fingers in the silence. Straightening, flattening, bending.
Wondering quietly when the insanity will kick in. Wondering if it already has.
I know it's un-classy of me to ask for reviews, but what can I say? I'm a starving artist and I eat my reader's opinions. So I kindly entreat you to provide me some noms.