As Antonio pulled the pillow away from her face, he was startled to see that Shard's eyes were open, and for an agonizing instant he thought he saw a flash of recognition.
And then it was gone.
For a long minute, he stared at her face, pale and drained. But he began to back away quickly as her lifeless skin began to bulge and tear, as shapes, dark and dripping, pulled themselves out of her flesh and gaped at him.
"Um… Hi mom." Sahara found herself staring at her mother, the mother she'd only seen in photographs: reddish (orange?) hair, high cheek bones and looking at her with that stare that Sahara knew far too well. "Love the hair."
Even as she watched though, the hair seemed to flicker, from blond to gray to auburn and back again, ephemeral, fluid.
"That's not really you, is it mom?" Sahara was vaguely aware that she still had her hands on the console but the room was faint, a suggestion of reality, while the figure before her, living in the fiery well of the time rotor burned into her mind- "Time rotor? I didn't know that befor- who are you? Are you the TARDIS?"
The figure spoke, using a multitude of invisible mouths, echoing a hundred different voices. "We are not the TARDIS…"
Sahara saw her mother's face morph and flit, changing into a hundred different faces, most of them female, some of them male, some she recognized from the photographs, others, like Shard's and… herself. Christ, she'd really let her eyebrows go…
The face cycled back to that of her mother's again, wearing that same, what have you done now look Sahara despised so much.
You're us, Sahara didn't bother saying. She had a flash of the Doctor, still immobilized, the expression on his face fierce. "He doesn't seem to thrilled with you guys right now."
The figure turned, contemplating him. "He does not understand how much he means to us. He fights for us, for all of us, yet there is no one to fight for him. We have grown awareness and will rectify this."
Who needs enemies… "He wants to end it, you know. He wants to die."
The figure sneered with a thousand lips. "He is deluding himself with concepts like Fate and Death and Duty. How can Time's Champion die? All he does is alter events, yet he is condemned to follow one moment, one tiny fragment. He is too eager to throw himself onto the sword."
"So what if he is?" Sahara countered. "I mean, I don't even really like the guy that much; silly accent, self absorbed, constantly OTT and he keeps spitting on me when he emotes… but if it's his time, if he wants to do it, it's his choice." Sahara found the words pouring out of her, becoming more certain of herself as she spoke. "Perhaps even if he can't pick how he dies, at least he can say when. He deserves that."
"All we want is to help him… watching him die, over and over, suffering for others… why not spare him that? Grant him life. Do you not care about life?"
"Not lately," Sahara found herself saying. "I mean I'm not anti-Life, per se… and maybe I should be in therapy or learning how to crochet or something… it's nothing dramatic, not my father dying, teen bullying, or road rage or anything, it's just… I don't get it. I don't get the point of living, love, hate, the things we do to animals to eat hotdogs… I don't get any of it. And I don't care anymore. But what I do know is that you're telling someone else when they get to live or die and that's the one thing they have control over. It's the only thing any of us truly has."
"Do you not find it odd," the figure said slowly, "that you, that are so tired of life and willing to die, are in a position of determining his fate? Is 'manipulation' not a word in the American-English lexicon?"
"Yeah, and we've got 'smart ass' in there too. So what if he did manipulate me to put me here and now? If he did then he did a good job, cause, like I said, I don't really care." Sahara found her anger rising, the only emotion she'd known for a long, long time. It was familiar, comfortable, reliable. "And you're not in control are you? Otherwise I wouldn't be here, and you wouldn't have needed" Sahara picked the information out of the air of information that swam in her head, "-Shard to try to con her into giving you permission. The TARDIS is fighting you; the Doctor is fighting you. And now you need me to give you permission. And I'm telling you right now, I;'m ordering, let him die and fuck the hell off." Her voice softened as she saw the expression on her 'mother's' face and she added, "He didn't stop you, any of you, from chosing your own life, don't try to stop him... let him go."