I don't want to know you any more.
Sahara stared at the bird, impossibly cute, as it looked up at her from its nest, inches below her.
The voice on the phone had been quiet, hesitant.
You make me feel bad about being the person I am.
The puffin looked back at her with almost a Disney-like friendliness, not threatened by this human head that peered at it. Not at all bothered by the thousand-foot drop an inch beneath its nest, or the distant roaring of the sea at the base. Its feathers were raven black on its back and blinding white on its belly, with large, flopping orange feet: a penguin that got it right- it could fly. Just. The beak, an adorable multihued and striped, seemed to add a party atmosphere to the creature: nothing is serious, life is pointless, so why not at least look fabulous while you're living, or so it seemed to say to Sahara.
She wanted to smile. Really she did. But her heart was thousands of miles away, listening to the voice over and over.
I don't want you in my life.
That was it. Thomas died that day. Death without dying. Out of her world forever, their life together silenced with a quiet click of the receiver.
Sahara had been shocked at the time, but she knew, looking back, that she shouldn't have been. Thomas had been quiet, dependably, solidly reliable and she had been, well, working. And depending. And relying. On him.
Afterwards, Sahara had moved on with her life, carefully putting aside the odd photograph here, moving the occasional bit of furniture there. Forgetting and muffling the past; diving into her work at UNIT.
There was a little squeak to her right. Sahara craned her head around and saw a little puff ball, all downy and doe-eyed; a chick that she hadn't noticed, hungry and waiting for its mother to return. It looked at her lovingly with Bambi eyes.
Children.
The Doctor had muttered something about timelines changing, molested, altered.
Children. They had children together. In a different world. In the Doctor's world, the 'proper' world.
Looking back, Sahara wasn't surprised that Thomas had left. There was no passion between them. No passion…
How could there have been children?
Thousands of thoughts, of other personalities, choices, other Sahara's fumbled through her head in a jumbled mess.
There were the sounds of goats bleating and crunching grass as the Doctor sat down beside her, his feet dangling over the edge of the cliff. Beneath his feet innumerable sea birds cried and swirled as they darted in and out of their nests on the rocky face, sweeping and diving into the sea. Behind them two mountains of mantled with ice glowered at them, burning with golds and blues in the evening sun, their sheer mass threatening to tip the world, send them sliding towards them, to fall into their molten hearts.
Sahara heard the Doctor flick and click as he played with some handheld device, but she didn't turn round.
The Virginia UNIT HQ had fallen. She remembered seeing her coworkers change before her eyes, some exploding into nothing more than dust, others transforming into hideous shifting wet mounds of terror that stalked toward her. She remembered the Doctor grabbing her arm and pulling her into his blue box, his TARDIS.
She'd known about it of course, about what it was supposed to look like inside. Aside from the hints her mother had told her as a childhood fairy tale, the TARDIS was legendary at UNIT, tales of its vastness and dizzying technology dwarfed whatever Sahara could imagine… being pulled inside it, she remembered being vaguely disappointed. It seemed… well, old. Big, yes, obviously, but also dusty, used, weathered. Second-hand, was the first phrase that leapt to her mind.
And now they were in southern Iceland. For absolutely no reason in particular, except that the Doctor wanted a quiet place to think. That and he'd thought she'd find puffin watching relaxing.
Her mother had said he was strange, but Sahara hadn't quite conceived of exactly how strange the man could be…
Her thoughts kept drifting back to her mother worriedly, but the Doctor assured her that she was perfectly safe and Bloom free, working on a project somewhere. About Shard or Antonio, she'd failed to get an answer out of the man.
There was a bleep and a bloop and suddenly a green shaft of light shot out of the Doctor's hand that sped off to the horizon. Dropping in and out of view was a large fiery orange ball that bounced again and again against the green line, bobbing off into the distance, into the horizon where the sky met the sea.
"There it is," the Doctor muttered. "Barely touching the timeline, just nudging it… the space between each impact growing shorter and shorter, almost imperceptible at first, then hard and harder… like a pebble skimming across a pond, each skip shorter than the last… until pow. Dam busters."
Sahara stared at it, squinting to see the end of the line. "What's the orange ball?"
"Spatio-temporal mass."
Sahara rolled her eyes and stared back at the puffins. "You don't have to make up words; a simple 'I don't know' will suffice." She swore she could almost hear the Doctor frown. The birds beneath her rustled and squawked as the winds shifted.
"See the bit at the end?" The Doctor asked her patiently.
Sahara followed his bony finger, sighting along the green 'time line' as it bent and twisted beneath the bouncing orange ball, all the way along its length until it ended in the center of a large blue mass, faint against the sky.
"That is a Nexus point, a point in time that is fixed, must be fixed, a point of paramount importance to the safety of this universe… and to my people… That." He jabbed his finger at the bouncing ball again, "is about to slam straight into that Nexus point, and it has gained enough momentum to obliterate it completely."
To be honest, Sahara was too numb to comment, the obliteration of a temporal Nexus point seemed too absurd, too pointless, too impossible. "And Thomas?
And my children?"
"Merely the mass skimming the timeline, subtlety altering it, but ultimately not important. The timeline will find away to adjust, to compensate. But destroying a Nexus point will do untold damage."
'ultimately not important.' Sahara felt the words slide into her soul, a shiver, a shadow that raged and clawed at her heart, urging her to care, to be outraged, to feel passion. But she felt nothing, although she knew she should. In her mind she was still watching her coworkers tear through their own skin and feast on each other's skulls.
"What do we do?" Sahara asked, turning from the rookery.
The Doctor snapped his device shut with a slap and rammed his hat on his head. "Stop it." His voice unearthly powerful in the quiet air.
"How?"
But the Doctor was staring at her feet. In a quiet voice he merely said, "It's here." Looking down, Sahara saw the chick waddle between her shoes, its down quivering in the shifting breeze… no not quivering- Sahara screamed as the small bird burst with a wet, fleshy pop as something gray and slithering pulled itself out of the trembling meat. Behind her, Sahara heard the thousands of birds cry in anguish, and bloodied pustules dropped shuddering out of the sky around her as she followed the Doctor, running across the grass away from the cliffs, around the corpses of the fallen sheep, running desperately for the shape of the TARDIS, blue and safe that sat at the top of the cliff as the swarms, fed by the horrors of nightmares of a thousand avian species tore and clawed at their backs and arms, tearing into their hair as they pulled their way into the TARDIS doors.
With a rending cry, the TARDIS dematerialized, leaving the swirling biting mass to fall upon itself, collapsing in a movable, cannibalistic feast as the Bloom fed upon what flesh was left.