nine.
"entremet"
?
The TARDIS
Consciousness crept back to Ace slowly. She was warm and comfortable and felt... all right, actually. That in itself felt strange, although she couldn't quite pinpoint why. She opened her eyes, blinking the sleep away, and squinted at the ceiling first, trying to work out where exactly she was.
She was in bed – her bed, in her room in the TARDIS – head propped up on pillows and covered by several blankets, tucked up around her shoulders.
Noticing something, she slid her right hand up from where it had been buried by her side, and fingered the quilt that had been laid on top of her. Big, soft, and a very familiar shade of blue. They had found it on some market planet or other a few years ago, and somehow managed to bring it back to the TARDIS despite having to overthrow the government while they were there – twice. (That had been a very busy day.) It usually stayed in the games room, where regular arguments over who deserved to have it for the duration of their current chess match would occur. She couldn't think why the Doctor would bring it to her room.
The door was open a crack, and she could see the stark white corridors of the rest of the timeship outside, but the lighting out there seemed darker than usual too. Something was wrong, she thought; although she didn't feel unsafe in the least. That was also pretty strange, come to think of it.
She directed her attention, finally, to the rest of her room. The bedside light was on, but it was dim and tilted away from her. She could see – could see that her room was far cleaner than it had any business being. Someone (no prizes for guessing who) had been in here, tidying up and sorting away all of the junk she had chucked onto the floor. She internally grumbled, and resolved to give him a piece of her mind the next time she saw him. Which –
– oh.
Her gaze had swept past him the first few times, apparently; which was honestly understandable. He was sitting on a chair tucked into the shadows, so still that he could have been carved from stone, with his hands folded over his chest and his face tilted downwards. He wasn't wearing his hat.
Something had happened, she knew. Something bad, otherwise he wouldn't be here; watching over her in her sleep. Probably something to do with why she felt almost pleasantly numb; almost certainly due to some sort of alien drug. There was a dull pain throbbing just beneath her skin, not really tangible but there nonetheless. Just waiting for the right moment to burst out; envelop her whole.
Ace tried to sit up, but it just wasn't happening. She fell back against the bed with a faint groan.
"Ace," said the Professor, stirring immediately. His gaze fixed on her, and he sighed; a sigh colored with all shades of relief and worry. "You're awake." Even in the half-twilight of her room, she could see he looked exhausted, like he hadn't slept for days.
"I," she tried, and only managed a rusty kind of half-croak before she broke out into a coughing fit that shook her entire body and jarred her ribs painfully. The Professor stood up, coming over to sit on the edge of her bed as the coughing abated, and helped her up into a seated position. He reached over and slid a glass of water with a straw in it off her bedside table, offering it to her.
She drank gratefully, aware of how dry her throat was. He pulled it back after a second or two, and she rested her head against the backboard of her bed briefly. "Not to go straight for the cliche," she said, voice still strained and harsh despite her best efforts, "but what the hell happened?"
"I take it you don't remember," he said. He sounded worried and a bit sad, which... didn't make much sense at all.
"I don't –" she said, casting her mind back, and – oh. Oh no. She felt her posture stiffening as she remembered everything – arriving at Hannibal's house, him inviting her in for breakfast, talking and laughing in the kitchen, and then – the meat. 'Running would be most unwise, Miss McShane', he had said, and then – the knives. He had been brandishing knives, and she had let out the cheetah, but he had caught up to her, and – "oh my god," she said out loud, shivering involuntarily, "oh my god, I'm such a fucking idiot, why didn't I – he was being so obvious about it, too; how did I not realize –"
"If it's any consolation, Doctor Lecter had me fooled too," the Professor said, his eyes dark. "His facade was – most convincing. Up until the moment he let it drop; upon which I saw it was nothing more than a carefully crafted veneer."
"He stabbed me," Ace whispered.
A breath, and then, reluctantly, "yes."
Several times was not said aloud, but she already knew that; could remember. Once in her right hand, several times in the chest. He had broken her arm too, and there was something else too because although she couldn't remember him doing anything to her left hand, it felt strangely numb and distant in only the way localized painkillers could. She frowned at the realization, and moved to pull it out from under the covers.
"Don't," he said before she could, and she didn't, mostly out of surprise. She looked up at him, and noticed that he already looked like he regretted speaking.
"What is it?" she asked. Panic sprung up in her chest; took root and didn't let go.
He didn't reply at first, and just shook his head.
"Professor, what is it. What happened – what did he – what did you –"
"Ace," he said helplessly. The look on his face was sad, dizzyingly full of sorrow; like he had just watched a planet burn and could do absolutely nothing about it. That familiar guilt of his. There was something raw, unguarded, to it. The Professor put on a lot of masks a lot of the time, wore them and changed them regularly like you'd change a pair of socks. He wasn't wearing a single one of them now, and that terrified her more than anything else. "Oh, Ace..."
She didn't want his pity, didn't want his sadness or that despairing worried look he was giving her. He knew that already; which was probably why he didn't move to stop her as she tugged her left arm out from where it had been buried under the covers, and stared at her hand.
No, not her hand – her lack of hand.
"Oh," she breathed, the tiniest horrified breath of realization. She felt the Professor's hand on her shoulder, felt him squeeze it briefly; but it didn't stop that cold blank feeling that was creeping up inside her.
He had bandaged her wrist tightly, carefully, and it didn't hurt in the least. But that was all that was left – a wrist; just a stump where her hand had been. She tried to flex her missing fingers, and realized that she could feel their movement even if she couldn't see it. Phantom sensation. Huh. All right.
"I wasn't fast enough to stop him," he said quietly. His hand was still on her shoulder, and she was ridiculously, stupidly grateful for that. Physical contact was all that was keeping her from breaking down completely at the moment, from letting the cold feeling overwhelm her. "I did all that I could, but..." He audibly swallowed, and when he spoke again, he sounded furious at himself. "– the damage had already been done."
"H – how long?" Ace couldn't hide the stutter that had crept into her voice; the sob that she had to force back.
"A little over a week, relative time. You've been asleep for most of it." Another beat of silence. "It was... harrowing."
She could easily picture it, that was the worst bit. Him, silent and sorrow-wracked, working endlessly over her – never sleeping, never eating; not that he did that much anyway. Her, silent, pale, cold as the grave. From the look of things, he hadn't moved from his vigil by her bedside for quite some time. She wondered how much of the week had been made up of him mending her, trying to put her back together; and how much had been just endless waiting. She wanted to tell him that it wasn't his fault, because he sounded like he was blaming himself and that just wasn't okay on any level, but she couldn't think of how to say it.
Her eyes were burning. She bowed her head, lowered her hand, and stared at the quilt that he had laid over her. She tried to remember what had happened after she he had caught up to her in the kitchen, stabbed her in the chest. She remembered the Doctor arriving, or, more accurately; remembered his voice, steely-sharp and dangerous in a way that no earthly being could ever manage. Using it like Hannibal had used the knife; to cut and stab and parry and fight for her sake. And then there was a blank in her memory, and then the snatch of white that indicated she had been in the TARDIS – and nothing else.
She turned her head; found that he was watching her intently. At some point when she wasn't paying attention, he had removed his hand from her shoulder; but he was still sitting on the edge of the bed. She swallowed. "How did you," she began to ask, and then switched abruptly to a more important question – "Hannibal. Is he–?"
"As far as I know, Hannibal Lecter is still alive," the Professor told her. "My main priority was getting you out of that place. You were dying. I didn't have the time to..." He trailed off, and fell silent.
She wasn't sure what he had been going to say, and wasn't sure if she wanted to know. Would it make her feel better, she wondered, if she knew that he was willing to kill for her? Or was she being too presumptuous, assuming that he would?
"As for your other question," he said quietly, cutting smoothly through her thoughts. "Desperation, I think, is the answer to that. I couldn't properly tell you how I accomplished it; only that I did."
Ace looked down at her bandaged left wrist-stump again and felt that same helpless horror welling up inside her again. Her hand was gone. Gone permanently, courtesy of a psychopath with a ridiculously sharp knife and a taste for human flesh, and there wasn't a single thing that she could do about it.
She realized she was crying, then – silent tears rolling down her face and dripping into the sheets. She drew her knees up and buried her face in the covers, not wanting to look at the Professor or her hand or any of it. It all felt so wrong. None of this was supposed to happen. It was just supposed to be her and him; tumbling through time and space, fighting evil and injustice and always pulling through whole, intact. But it never seemed to work out that way, did it?
She felt the bed move as he shifted – moving up so he was right next to her, and then carefully, slowly laying an arm around her shoulder. She endured this for a moment or two, and then turned to him, hugging him back – wrapping her arms around him as tightly as she could without injuring herself further, burying her face into the fabric of his jacket as she continued to cry silently. He reciprocated the gesture, and although his embrace was loose and light, it was immensely firm.
"Thank you," she whispered, voice cracking. If he hadn't arrived when he had – if Hannibal had done whatever it was he had been planning to do with her – if the Doctor had been injured when he was trying to get her out, or worse...
"No, Ace. Stop that." His voice was sad but immensely firm, brooking no argument. "Don't go there." His fingers skimmed lightly over her hair, tracing patterns from there down her back. "Please. You'll only distress yourself."
She sniffled, fingers of her sole remaining hand curling into his jacket. She tried not to think about her other hand. "...are you reading my thoughts?" she asked, because it was the sort of thing that she wouldn't put past him.
"No," he said, "but I've known you long enough to guess that your mind is currently travelling into a very dark place indeed." He withdrew, disentangling himself from the hug, and looked her evenly in the eyes before pressing a finger carefully to her nose. "Don't think on possibilities; what-could-bes and might-have-beens," he told her. "Stay with me, now. Stay in the moment. You are here, you are safe, and so am I."
She felt pathetic, like a little girl in need of reassurance – worse, because she knew that what he was saying was exactly what she had needed. She didn't want to have to meet his eyes; to see that sympathy and worry and love hidden there, because if she did she'd probably have another breakdown, this one worse than the first. She didn't deserve this. She didn't deserve him. "Thanks," she breathed again, biting back the tears, and then, again – "thanks. Um." The lights were still very dim, and they were sitting nearly shoulder-to-shoulder. Ace breathed in, trying to steady herself. "The... you said something about psychic circuits."
"I'm surprised you remember," he said, although he didn't sound very surprised. "Yes. I still haven't had a chance to repair them, and – you experienced some bad dreams, as a result of connecting with... other, psychically receptive entities."
A memory of searing pain, of impossible claws curling over the rim of an abandoned cooking pot flashed through her head. She sat absolutely still for a moment.
"Yeah," she said. "I – yeah." She closed her eyes briefly. "You did something, though. Pulled me out of it. You – we were in the library. I think."
"I did." He sounded unhappy for some reason. "It was... invasive. I shouldn't have done it without permission."
"But you did," she said. "And it's fine. Really."
"I put together a prosthetic replacement," he said after a few moments of silence, abruptly changing the subject. "For your hand. It's not perfect, but..."
She nodded, and they sat in silence for a while. She didn't know quite what to say – some variation of thank you or I'm sorry maybe, but those had both been said far too many times, and she hated it already. She wasn't supposed to be weak, not in front of him or anyone. That wasn't supposed to happen.
"I'm tired," she said, quietly. That wasn't showing weakness, was it? Everybody got tired. Even he got tired sometimes.
"Yes – you would be," the Professor agreed, and placed a hand on her shoulder briefly before helping her settle back under the covers. "Get some rest. I'll be here when you wake up." He stood up, and straightened the sheets around her.
"Yeah," she said, already drifting. "Mm – Doctor?"
He paused midway through pulling the blue quilt up around her shoulders. "Yes, Ace?"
I love you, she thought, and wasn't sure if she had said it out loud, but it was true. She loved him with that fierce, bright affection that she had always wished she could love her mum with; that she wished she could love her biological dad, wherever and whoever he was, with – she had always assumed that she'd never get to love anybody in that way, not really; that she had missed her chance as a kid because she'd done something awful by mistake and she just deserved the lot she found herself with, but now she wondered if that wasn't just another one of those things she had got wrong back then.
He finished tucking her in, and she was about halfway to falling asleep, but she still heard him say, very softly; "yes," although she still wasn't entirely sure what it was in response to – or if she had said anything out loud anyway. "Good night, Ace," he said, voice still soft. She felt the brush of cool lips across her forehead, and then a hand on her shoulder again.
She slept, and did not dream.
Ace couldn't move very far from her bed at all for the first few days, so he brought her food and kept her company. He played chess with her until she was sick of it, and then they both cheated at chess until all of the bishops on the board resigned in protest over the corrupt monarchy and the pawns overthrew the king in a vicious but highly effective coup. After that, he found a portable DVD player somewhere, as well as the complete sets of Monty Python and the Muppet Show, and set those up for her. He sat next to her and worked on the final wirings and inner workings of the prosthetic hand as she watched him with one eye and Life of Brian with the other.
"The point of giving you those movies rather was to distract you," he pointed out without looking up at her.
"Distract me?"
"I thought you might find the process unsettling."
"You could've asked," she said. "I would've told you I don't mind. And anyway," she added, "it's kind of hard to ignore it when you're messing around with my hand like that."
"Nearly done," he said distractedly, and connected some exposed wires, neatly fusing them together with his sonic screwdriver before replacing the remarkably realistic skin-like covering. It looked like he was still working on it. Ace turned her attention back to the screen.
"Hold out your arm," he told her after a minute or two. She did so, deciding not to follow his advice and not look.
On-screen, Brian gained a large amount of unwanted disciples. There was a sharp sting, and then deeply unpleasant tingling sensation that ran all the way through her arm and down to her non-existent fingertips.
"Ow," she said, mostly out of surprise, and clenched her fingers together out of instinct – and this time, she actually felt the contact. Not like skin against skin, not really, but the awareness of pressure was there.
She looked over to her newly-replaced hand, and saw that the Professor had fit it perfectly over the stump of flesh that had been left behind. At a distance, it probably could pass for a real one. She gingerly tried to open and shut her fingers, and the mechanical digits slowly mimicked the motion.
"How is it?" he asked, sitting back.
"...good." She rotated her wrist, and then tried picking up the DVD player, which was still running Life of Brian on its screen. She managed to lift it clumsily, but had to put it down after a second. "You made this? From scratch?"
He nodded, still watching her carefully. "I did."
She grinned at him, and said, "all right, then where's the built-in rocket launcher? Come on, I thought you'd know me by this point."
This got a surprised but delighted laugh from him. "You'll need to get used to it first," he said. "But I won't deny that a concealed rocket launcher might be useful in future, although somewhat difficult to install..."
"No hurry, then," Ace said, experimentally folding down one finger after another. She grinned again, cheerful despite everything. "I trust you to get it right."
He fell silent, and after a few minutes, made his excuses and left, after giving her brief but detailed instructions on how to maintain and take care of the prosthetic hand. He was polite about it, and not once was he snappy or curt with her, but she really did get the distinct impression that he was trying to get away from her somehow.
Later that day, she managed to get herself out of her room of her own accord, and found her way to the kitchen. There was toast and eggs on the table, as well as orange juice and a note from the Doctor.
I'm glad you're feeling better, it said. We are in the vortex currently, drifting. Take as much time as you need.
She did not see him at all that day, or the day after that, and on the third day of silence, she was fairly certain that he was avoiding her intentionally.
Several days of this later, Ace caught the Professor in the console room, standing before the screens and watching the diagrams and words that were flickering across them with a strange, distant expression on his face. His hand was resting lightly but firmly on what she recognized as the dematerialization switch, although the ship hadn't moved at all yet – she would have definitely noticed if they had begun to materialize. Somehow, she already knew what he was planning.
"You're going back, aren't you," she said, and watched him flinch ever-so-slightly, hand lifting off the switch to hover in the air uncertainly. More guilt. There was far too much of that around, lately.
"That was the intention, yes," he told her, turning around to face her. Well, at least he was being honest about it – that was something, at least.
"Right." She studied him for a moment. He was wearing his hat; had his umbrella looped neatly over one arm. "So. Were you planning on telling me, or..."
A brief hesitation, and then he shook his head. "No," he said. "I had hoped to be back before you even knew I was gone. I would have told you later, of course, but..." and here he trailed off into silence.
She tried to be mad at him, but couldn't quite manage it. A younger, more naive version of her would have exploded at him, raged endlessly about keeping secrets and laying schemes like bear traps. He probably would have stood there and took it, even; silent and understanding, because he knew that she would have been entirely justified in her anger. But she didn't do any of that, because they had both suffered enough over the last few weeks, and she was pretty sure that she would be doing the same thing, in his place. She understood, and from the look in his eyes, he already knew that she understood.
That didn't mean that she was going to go along with it, of course (and honestly, he probably was aware of that too), but she appreciated the fact that he had been trying to protect her; to shield her. Really, she did, even if it was completely unnecessary.
"You can't go up against him without me," she said, instead of voicing any of these thoughts.
He smiled slightly, sadly. "No," he agreed with some amount of reluctance. "I don't suppose I can, can I?" His fingers tapped absently over the surface of the console. "Ace up my sleeve..."
She nodded, knowing that this was as good as she was going to get as far as permission to come went. Not that she needed his permission, anyway – even if he had said 'no' straight-up and locked the TARDIS doors behind him on the way out, she would've probably found some way out to follow him. "I'll get my gear," she told him, and left the console room. He wouldn't leave without her, she knew. Not if he knew what was good for him.
The hallways were kind to her today; the TARDIS maybe sensing that she wanted to get this done as quickly as possible. She came across her room pretty much right away and patted the wall in a brief thank you before entering.
The room had regained some of the comfortable messiness that she was used to, although it was still a bit too tidy for her liking. The blue quilt was still folded neatly on the end of her bed – the Professor hadn't made any sort of move to remove it from her room, and she hadn't been able to find the games room to return it herself.
She exchanged her t-shirt for a plain black tank-top, and her sweatpants for a medium-length skirt and tights. It took a moment or two to find her Doc Martens, and while she was doing so, she remembered with a sudden flash of regret that she had left her rucksack at Hannibal's house, with her last few cans of Nitro in it. For all she knew, he probably still had it. She briefly entertained the rather delightful thought of him examining her bag's contents and inadvertently blowing himself, along with half his house, to kingdom come. Unlikely, of course, but it brought a faint smile to her face nonetheless.
Ace sighed, and realized that her baseball bat wouldn't be much good to her in the situation that she was about to head into. Unfortunately, it looked like she was going into this unarmed – although she could already hear the Professor telling her that she was armed to the teeth already whether she knew it or not; her mind being the greatest weapon of them all. She still wasn't sure how she felt about that.
She laced up her boots, tying them firmly with a double knot each, and went over to her desk. There it was, draped over the back of the chair. Her jacket. She was disproportionately glad that she had not worn it to Lecter's house. She briefly wondered if she should leave it behind this time too, but decided, on balance, that she needed all the protection she could get, even if it wasn't strictly physical in nature.
She picked it up and shrugged it on. The badges clinked and clattered together. Battle armor, she thought, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Awkwardly – she still wasn't quite used to the prosthetic yet – she gathered her loose hair up behind her head and tied it into a tight, high ponytail.
There. All set.
She headed back to the console room, feeling slightly detached from reality, as if she wasn't quite controlling her own body – rather, controlling the body of some other girl that just so happened to look exactly like her.
The materialization began as she crossed the threshold in to the console room. The Professor was flitting around the controls, putting more effort into landing the ship than he usually did. Apparently he was determined to be on time – and in the right place – for once. Hearing her approach, he finished up with a flourish, and turned to look at her.
"All ready," she told him, somewhat unnecessarily.
He nodded. He looked worried, ancient somehow. "I suppose there is nothing that I could say or do that would convince you not to come with me."
"No." But you knew that already.
He sighed, just as the TARDIS landed with a faint thump. "Of course there isn't. Very well."
She watched, slightly puzzled, as he reached beneath the console and produced – her rucksack?
No, it wasn't the same one, she realized; the fabric wasn't quite the same and it looked newer, less worn. Wordlessly, he passed it to her and she took it, noting its weight. There was something – several somethings? – inside. She narrowed her eyes at him curiously, and when he didn't say anything, unzipped the rucksack to peer inside. A water bottle; a set of regular, non-sonic screwdrivers; some miscellaneous units of currency from various planets and places on Earth, all folded up and and tucked into a zip-lock plastic bag. Ace dug around further, eyes widening. Notebooks, rope ladder, can opener – it was all there. Not the exact items, but those were lost anyway. He had recreated the contents of her rucksack near-exactly. And there, under everything else, at the very bottom of the bag –
– three silver canisters, laid carefully side-by-side; each labelled in familiar, inhumanly neat copperplate handwriting.
The surprise must have shown on her face, because he said, "I followed your recipe as exactly as I could," as if he were actually worried what she would think of him for doing so.
And... yeah, she did remember scribbling out an outline from her notebook and pinning it to a wall in the TARDIS lab for reference while she was working. But she could've sworn that she took that down at some point.
She lifted one of the cans up, and turned it so that the label was facing her. Nitro-nine, it said, and beneath that: ten seconds. A quick check revealed that the other two were labelled 'thirty seconds' and 'two minutes' respectively. She suspected that the Doctor's timers were more accurate than hers would ever be; probably down to the nanosecond.
She replaced everything into her new bag, shuffling the nitro cans to the top for convenience, and zipped it up firmly before looking back at the Professor again. He looked ever-so-slightly anxious, as if he wasn't sure what she would make of the gift.
"Thank you," she told him simply, hoping he knew just how much this meant to her. "It's perfect."
He smiled. "I'm glad," he said, and checked the monitor. His expression slipped back into 'dark and determined', and she was glad (and not for the first time) that it wasn't directed at her. "Ready?" he asked her.
She hitched the rucksack up over her shoulders. Fully armed, fully armoured; prepared for anything at all. "Always," she said.
"Then let's finish this," he said, and headed straight for the TARDIS doors.