Sahara, now fully dressed, stalked into the console room, rubbing her aching skull. "Did you know that there's a room back there filled with chemical weapons?" Oddly, Sahara found that this was one of the least weird questions she'd asked the Doctor today.
"Mmmmm," the Doctor mmmmed as he frowned at a console display. "Don't worry, I'm sure the TARDIS will find somewhere safe to put them once she digests a bit, now…why can't I see?" He fluttered some fingers at the screen and sighed. "Let's try a new perspective… if I can bounce a standing wave off a satellite and get an outside view of the signal… and I'm not suicidal by the way," he snapped, turning to Sahara. "I may be trying to die, but I'm certainly not trying to kill myself."
As usual, it was hard to out-weird the Doctor on bizarre sentences. Sahara paused for a moment, searching for words, but only came up with, "But you-"
"I've been trying to leave this planet and this time for some time now, but my ship keeps bringing me back-" he grumbled between thumps. "Oh no..." The Doctor stared up at the oscillating central console column, his face pale with horror. "My dear girl, what are you doing?"
Sahara took an involuntary step backwards from the pulsing heart of the ship, dread filling her as the Doctor began to frantically pound and elbow the many controls.
"Then why don't you help save us-"
"Because that's precisely what I mustn't do." His voice broke up, unable to contain the pent-up frustration within him. "Don't you understand yet? The spatio-temporal mass that's about to smash apart the temporal nexus is this ship! She's trying to prevent it from happening!"
"What 'it'?" Assaulted by the Doctor's yelling, Sahara felt her head begin to throb again.
"My death…" He paused in his thrashing, watching the console rise and fall with wonder. "An enemy once showed me how I die… soon… alone… I've known for sometime. I didn't know where and when, but the TARDIS has extracted that memory and apparently deduced the correct coordinates… I know I have to go, to kill myself if you will by arriving at that final point, but she won't let me. She's has managed to generate a series of anomalies in order to alter the course of events so that I don't die!"
Sahara was following, but only barely. "Why would it do that?"
The Doctor's tone shifted, lower, more caring. "I doubt she's even aware that she's doing it, let alone why. It's completely contrary to her nature. She's probably spent too much time around my companions…" he growled. "No doubt she keeps returning me to this cataclysmic period of Earth's history in the misguided hopes that I will interfere, even though that is exactly what I mustn't do. So you see, I'm not trying to kill myself- I am about to die quite unwillingly, in order to maintain a stable timeline, not only for the rest of the universe but for humanity…" His gaze was lost in the inner light of his ship. "I'm not particularly thrilled about dying…" His eyes flitted to Sahara and burned into her. "Why are you so keen to die?"
Sahara recoiled at his sharp tone. Because I honestly think the world would be better off without us? That I've seen such cruelty and the horrible consequences of our daily lives causes that I don't see why you bother to keep risking your life for us. Because I'm tired and I don't see the point of any of this… But she stayed silent and found somewhere else to look, avoiding the Doctor's withering gaze. She found she was too much of a coward to say out loud that she'd long ago given up caring whether she lived or died.
Shard watched the images float past, ghostly, fluorescent.
An old man crumbled at the foot of the console, convulsing as his friends tried to supporting him. Collapsing and breathing a last, weary sigh.
Lives flitted by, so fast, so quick, so rich, Shard felt heady with the spirit of it all. All ending so soon.
Watched another pilot stagger through the doors, screaming in pain, curling up into a foetal position on the floor as death ravaged him.
On and on it went, pilot after pilot, melting from within, lying broken on the earth, poisoned or battered, the all died. And the Ship watched, helpless.
Whapp!
Whapp!
Fwapp!
Chest, heart, shoulder.
Shard could see him clearly now, could watch the form in the alleyway collapse onto the asphalt, cold and wet. The night sky was starless, clouded by the orange city lights. Could see the blood soaking into his sweater. Not Bryce- it was the Doctor. Alone, wounded and gasping at the foot of his ship, that stood tall, towering and helpless. Watching him be carried off; tended to by doctors, all blue and gleaming metal; watched them poison him on the operating table with a foreign gas.
There was the sad sound of jazz, scratchy and faint, trailing off into the nothingness around her. Sad, lonely, forgotten.
Shard felt the Ship's pain, and the outrage and confusion welled up within her once more.
She knew she could stop this. She must.
"She's receiving instructions from someone else…" the Doctor typed furiously away.
"Huh?" Sahara was still lost within her own thoughts, only vaguely aware of what was going on.
"She's still a ship," the Doctor balled up his hands into fists. "Minor, unconscious changes are one thing, but to smash open a nexus point, she needs to be instructed, she needs permission."
Antonio awoke with a start.
His hand was held tight within Shard's unconscious grasp.
Still blinking awake, Antonio watched, fascinated, as her soft and tender skin on her neck and shoulders began to twitch and jerk from within.
He glanced to the door, still welded shut. They were too high up to jump out of the window. He snapped up the silver device and began frantically trying to melt the door again.
Behind him, he heard her begin moan in pain.
Shard was about to Bloom.
"I can't cut the connection…" The Doctor opened a section underneath the console and rammed his hands into the mass of wires and hairy roots. "Through these telepathic circuits," he tapped two circular pads atop the console with a free hand, "I'd normally be able to route a command, but she's found another user who's initiating the access codes."
On the screen above Shard's head, she saw the bouncing ball of fire skid across the screen, on collision course with the temporal nexus point that symbolized Earth, December 31st,1999.
Then the Doctor said something even more peculiar.
"I hope I've thought of something else."
Shard held a twisting orb in her hands. If she looked at it close enough, she could see numbers, sometimes faces, giggles, colors, smells, hues and tears.
She held Life. Potential life.
Distantly, she could feel the pains and changes in her own body- she knew then that it was too late for her.
She held the sphere in her hands and laughed at the wonder of it, raising her arms to unleash its bounty-
The door frame glowed amber with the residual heat, giving the room an orange, ghastly smoke-filled tint as Antonio bent over Shard's body and removed the gas mask. The anesthetic that had temporarily held off the birth of her parasites hissed into the gloomy air.
Tenderly, he kissed her lips once before pressing the pillow firmly down onto her face.
Shard felt the orb vanish, her black surroundings dim and fade as she gasped and gasped and her vision pulsed with blues and whites, feelings –stabbing, visceral- screamed at her mind as she tried to move her arms, her legs, her anything and at last her eyes snapped open and she saw eyes, wet and sad, look into hers before…
The Doctor yelped as sparks flew off from the panel and scattered into his eyebrows. "Broken!" he lunged for the controls, ramming his hands onto the telepathic circuits. "If I can just re-direct the-"
Sahara watched, dumbfounded as the TARDIS console spat out a beam of light that pinned the Doctor to the far wall, immobile, unconscious. On the screen above her, the ball of fire continued relentlessly towards earth.
Sahara looked from the Doctor to the screen and to the console. Then back to the Doctor.
Console. Screen. Doctor.
Nothing was happening. She was going to either be stuck here forever or watch her entire world and timeline vanish forever.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," Sahara sighed and rammed her hands onto the telepathic circuits.