Author's Note:
I really need to stop making promises about when I'm going to update. I'm always wrong.
I blame The Mandalorian. I really had some momentum built up for this story, and then I watched it, started hyper-fixating, and started two Mandalorian fics. Then I really got back into Star Wars in general and started kicking around some other plot bunnies.
Oh well. Sorry.
This chapter was originally going to be a one-chapter adventure called Planet Nine, but I was having some trouble getting it to fit the way I wanted it to. Planet Nine will show up as a later chapter.
So instead of a one chapter arc, I decided to go ahead and and start The Nightmare Paradigm arc. I have it planned as three chapters, but they're important chapters. The Nightmare Paradigm kicks a lot of stuff into gear.
I'm sorry if it feels like Buffy's character is developing too fast. I'm going to be leaving a lot of her and the Doctor's friendship up to flashbacks (namely in upcoming 24 and 25). I was going to directly fill in some of the plot points I'll be mentioning in the next three chapters, but I seriously need to get this story moving along. I lost a lot of momentum during the last couple of months, so I wanted to go ahead and start getting into some of the meatier parts of the story as a whole to keep myself interested.
These next 3 chapters can get really dark. Sorry (not really).
I had to plow through this chapter. Tell me if there are parts of it that need work.
~M
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WARNING:
DEATH. DESCRIPTION OF HANGING
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Chapter Twenty Three: The Nightmare Paradigm
Part One
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I woke up slowly, which was a rarity. Usually the Doctor would wake me up, barging loudly into my room to shake me insistently, proclaiming that I'd had more than enough sleep and that he was going to go somewhere without me if I didn't get up that instant. Even when the Doctor did sleep in my room, he was up and moving around hours before I was, and always got bored a long time before I'd had the chance to sleep for as long as I wanted.
Blinking up at the pale dawn of the holographic ceiling, I basked in deep feelings of peace. It was like waking up early on a Saturday morning when I was a kid: the sun would be up, but no one else would. Outside was still and quiet, save for the lazy droning of the odd insect and the faint titterings of nearby birds.
Unfortunately, the more I woke up, the more suspicious I became. I frowned, not trusting the silence.
I propped myself up on my elbows and gazed around the room. Unsurprisingly, I was alone. I briefly considered taking advantage of the peaceful faux-dawn and going back to sleep, but it only took a few more moments for worry to take hold. Living with the Doctor was a bit like living with a small child; if they were quiet, there was probably something wrong.
Foregoing getting dressed, I slipped on my tennis shoes and snagged my dressing gown, pulling it over my t-shirt that had holes in the armpits and pajama pants and stepping out into the corridors.
"Doctor?" I called, though I didn't expect him to necessarily be close enough to hear me.
The halls were tidier than they used to be. The metal was clean and polished, clear of dust and grime. The dark corners and dim halls were eliminated by warm light, which emanated softly from the walls.
Although I had been on my way to the console room, the corridor that had led to it the day before ended in a metal door. Unfazed, I opened it and wandered through what appeared to be the perfume department of a mall.
I sighed heavily and kept walking straight, knowing that if I stopped, I would get lost; though I did pause to sample a few of the scents. Citrus. Chocolate. Old books. Roses.
Rooms in the TARDIS were constantly shifting, moving around like dolls in a haunted playroom. Finding your way had a knack to it, which generally depended on intent. If you knew where you wanted to go, you would find yourself there in the end.
Most of the time. If the TARDIS was in a mood, you could wander for ages.
The exit to the perfume department led to the pool, which led to an empty warehouse. The warehouse then led back into itself, and I had to pass through it three times before, finally - mercifully - I walked the short stretch of corridor that precluded the console room.
"Feeling a little frisky today, are we?" I asked the ceiling snidely as I rounded the console. "Do you know where he is?"
The TARDIS made a grumbling noise, causing me to frown. Obviously, the TARDIS couldn't actually speak, but that didn't stop her from complaining. I tilted my head and listened for the idling of the engines, which would indicate we were still in flight. Hearing none, my attention was drawn to the doors, which looked no different than usual.
"Is he outside?" Wondering if I should've changed into proper clothes first, I made my way to the doors and opened them.
I was suddenly very, very, very glad that the TARDIS was sentient. If she wasn't, and thus wouldn't have thought to activate some sort of shielding, I probably would've drowned.
We were underwater. Deep underwater. Bubbles streamed up from the sides of the blue box as it sank deeper and deeper into the darkness. I could taste the salt as the water strained against the forcefield that held it fast at the doorframe.
I couldn't make out much, but it was night. I could just make out the surface of the water high above, a rippling curtain between me and a night sky. I clung tightly to the door as the little blue box twisted and swirled, tossed about as it was caught in an eddy and was sucked violently downward.
I looked down for the cause.
My blood turned to ice at the terribly-awesome sight. A horrified gasp forced its way into my lungs.
Below, hulking like a leviathan in the darkness, was a massive ship.
It wasn't a spaceship. Though I wished it were. It was just an ordinary, human ship, large enough to have carried hundreds of people. Grief mixed with my horror as the last few lights from within the ocean liner sputtered pitifully and blinked away. The steel, straining under the massive weight of the ocean above it, groaned like a dying animal. Its cries, muffled by the sea, echoed faintly in my ears like a sad, half-forgotten song.
Horrified chills wracked my body and I hurried to shut the doors back. I rubbed my arms, trying to soothe the goosebumps and shake off feelings of shock as I scrambled to the console and began fiddling with the monitor. There was no time to think about all of the death that I had just undoubtedly witnessed. If the TARDIS was deep in the ocean, the Doctor couldn't be far away.
I flicked a few switched and twiddled a knob, tuning the TARDIS sensors to scan for the Time Lord with practiced ease. The Doctor had insisted on teaching me some of the basic functions of the timeship, reasoning that, as a long-term resident, I should be able to care for myself and her when he wasn't around. With that said, I knew how most of the scanners worked, could reroute power from emergency energy cells, run a diagnostic, manually reshuffle the rooms, and a few other odds and ends. He was also slowly teaching me the basics of piloting, but I hadn't completely worked it out yet. What I did understand was the car equivalent of starting the engine, putting her in drive, and then back in park. Flying to unknown places was confusing as hell, but I could manage short hops so long as the coordinates were already set.
Thankfully, no more than a short hop was required. The monitor displayed the results of the scan, a light blue map on an inky black background. I could see the TARDIS, represented by a glowing green dot sinking lower and lower on the screen as we descended past nine hundred feet. Just above the line representing the ocean surface was a blinking red dot. The Doctor.
At least he wasn't still on the ship.
Recognition tickled at the back of my mind. Not quite deja vu. It wasn't a memory, but the concept seemed familiar. An episode, perhaps?
I ended up clinging to an iceberg. Wasn't half cold.
Ah.
I locked in the coordinates of the Doctor's location, which was drifting away slowly, and slammed down the dematerialization lever. The room filled with the familiar wheezing, louder and crankier than usual as the ship protested being piloted without Time Lord supervision.
"It's only a few hundred yards," I reasoned, sliding a lever. "We have to pick him up."
The TARDIS growled. The lever snapped back into place as the ship righted the mistake. I winced and flipped the one beside it - the correct one.
"Right. Sorry."
The TARDIS grumbled. The next lever in the sequence refused to budge. I tugged at it half-heartedly while gazing imploringly up at the time rotor.
"We can't just leave him there!"
Grumble.
"You saw the scan! We're a thousand feet underwater. Do you really want to sit at the bottom of the ocean for the next few millennia?"
Grumble.
"How would he even get to us? He's stuck on an iceberg."
The lever finally slid into place. The TARDIS heaved herself out of the ocean and into the vortex, only to exit it a half second later. Despite the simplicity of the hop, the ship seemed to be having trouble landing. After a moment's struggle, she settled back into the vortex, somewhat sheepish.
I blinked, trying to work out what had gone wrong. The Doctor had touched upon the topic before, but it had been part of a much longer spiel and I couldn't remember exactly what all had been said. Something about the landing site, right? Too small.
Too uneven. Too something-or-another. The point was that the landing site was no good, and there were only two ways to fix it: redistribute the outer dimensions to compensate and mold around uneven ground, or plug in new coordinates and land somewhere else.
Unfortunately, I didn't trust myself to do either.
The TARDIS resumed her complaining when I tried to land her in the exact same spot again, hoping for different results. And then again.
Geronimo the mouse poked his head out from a new crack in the wall. He twitched his whiskers, wondering what all the fuss was about.
I wondered how irritating it was for the Doctor, watching his ship fading in and out of existence, feeling her way around the iceberg like a blind dog searching for a soft spot to lay down.
On the fourth try, I finally got fed up enough to risk shifting the coordinates. Up six inches and a foot to the left. Or so I hoped. Coordinates in a TARDIS were a mess, because they dealt with time, planet, galaxy, and a whole other mess of digits. But as long as I didn't mess with the time or galaxy settings, it should be fine.
This time the TARDIS materialized without trouble. The engines kept thrumming in the background, but we seemed to be where I had hoped we would be.
Sure enough, I flung open the doors and found the TARDIS sitting in midair. The view was impressive. The iceberg wasn't a big one, akin in size to a van. Larger at the base than at the top, it was somewhat conical, like a scale model of a jagged mountain peak rising up out of the plains. A luminescent smear of white against the darkness of the sea. The blue box was hovering about a foot away from the hunk of ice, only a few inches above the swirling grey water. Whatever triumph I felt was somewhat dampened when I lifted my gaze to stare into the face of a rather sour-looking Time Lord.
The Doctor stood a few meters away, contrasting starkly against the white of the iceberg. He had his arms folded across his chest, holding his sodden leather jacket closed and wrapped tightly around him in a vain attempt to ward off the cold. The ice reflected what little light the stars offered onto his face, illuminating the displeasure etched across his angular features. The Time Lord was higher up, well out of the reach of the water splashing against his frozen island.
"You're phasing out the engines," he snapped irately. "I've been realigning those for months. I'll be shocked if you didn't dent the century."
I thought I had done pretty well, all things considered. The comments stung and I bit my tongue to stop myself from spitting back a retort. He was cold, wet, and clearly distraught. I let the crankiness slide.
"What happened to your head?" I said instead, indicating the splash of red dribbling from his temple.
The Doctor blinked and swiped his hand across the afflicted area, seeming surprised when it came away bloody. He shrugged it off, wiping the blood on his sodden jeans.
"Dunno. Must've banged it."
"Okay. I'll take a look at it." I extended a hand in his direction. "Come on, before you get hypothermia."
"Time Lords can't get hypothermia," he scoffed, beginning to pick and slide his way down the icy shelf.
By the time he made it down, the iceberg had had the time to drift a few feet, widening the gap between TARDIS and ice. I glanced doubtfully at the water sucking ominously at the edge of the berg as the Doctor tottered unsteadily at the edge. The Time Lord didn't seem to share my concerns. He gestured for me to take a step back before leaping across. He stumbled when his boots snagged on the rough grating, but I was there to steady him.
Geronimo let out a sequel of protest at all the noise and darted back into his hole.
The Doctor briefly draped his arm across my shoulders and I winced as cold Atlantic water soaked into my thin nightshirt. Up close now, in the light of the console room, the strain on his face was perfectly clear. He was tired, his skin pale and drawn from the cold, his eyes distant and haunted. My mind snapped back to what I had seen earlier, the sinking ship. I leaned in closer and gave his hand a squeeze.
"Why don't you give me your jacket and boots, and I'll go ahead and run them through the clothes reprocessor."
The Doctor nodded wearily and started trying to strip off his jacket, but the leather was sodden and clung to his form. I had to reach over and tug the heavy material from his shoulders while he kicked off his boots.
"You go ahead to the medbay and get changed," I instructed, scooping up the jacket and boots. "I'll be there in a minute to check your head."
The Doctor agreed absently and plodded off. After a moment's thought, I deposited his things onto the jumpseat and returned my attention to the console. Hovering probably wasn't the best thing for the TARDIS, so I plugged in one of the default coordinates - a high orbit around Earth - and made sure we got there safely.
That done, I did as I'd promised and tossed his things into the reprocessor. On my way to the medbay I swung by my room to quickly change out of my pajamas before winding back through the corridors. Thankfully, the TARDIS was feeling more helpful than she had been earlier, and getting there was a breeze.
In the ten or so minutes that had passed, the Doctor had changed out of his wet clothes, which lay discarded in a puddle on the floor. The Time Lord himself sat hunched in one of the metal chairs, picking at the hem of his dry jumper and staring down at his bare feet.
I padded over to one of the cabinets and grabbed anesthetic wipes and a dermal regenerator; both old friends. Once at the Doctor's side I didn't hesitate to start dabbing gingerly at the place on his head. It turned out to be an inch long cut where the skin had split.
The Doctor stayed silent while I cleaned his head and set to knitting the gash back together. The haunted look in his eyes made me nervous, as by now I knew it to mean that his mind was in a dark place.
The Doctor had good days and bad days. Yesterday had been a very good day, but mental health could come and go in waves, and so today was a bad one.
"The Titanic?" I asked quietly, keeping my eyes on the blinking instrument that was actively reducing the bruising around his temple.
He didn't look up. "Yeah."
"Want to tell me about it?"
"No."
I tucked away the medical tool and pressed my hand against his jaw, tipping his face up to catch his gaze. When he finally managed to look me in the eye, signaling his attention was on me and not lingering on the horrors of a sinking ship, I pressed my lips to his forehead. Still clammy and cold from the sea. He leaned into the affection with a soft sigh. One of his arms wrapped around my waist, encouraging me to wrap my own around his neck and tug him into a hug.
He needed a shower. The smell of salt lingered on his skin despite his change of clothes. I could taste it from where I'd kissed him. It wasn't pleasant, but I didn't really mind.
The Doctor hid his face in my chest for a few minutes, allowing himself a little time to rally before pulling away with a smile that was a little too wide to be genuine. He sprang to his feet and began tidying away the blood smeared wipes that I had piled up on the examination table beside the chair.
"Are you hurt anywhere else?" I asked, not trusting him to tell me unprompted.
"Nah," he said, dumping the wipes unceremoniously into the trash bin. "Slipped on deck, tha's all."
"You sure you're okay?"
"Yep! Hungry, though. Wouldn't mind some breakfast, though. How does banana crepes sound?"
Liar. He wasn't hungry. He could hardly stand the sight of food on his bad days. But on the same note he knew I knew it was an off day, and was trying to make it seem like he was fine.
It didn't work, of course. A year of TARDIS travel, and he'd pulled the same trick before. But it made him feel a little better, so I played along.
"Sounds great. Here, or do you have a place in mind?"
He beamed. "I know a spot!"
Of course he did.
~0~0~0~
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The TARDIS landed in a field, a little splash of blue standing out amongst long yellowed-green grass that hunched over in clumps, blown flat by the wind. The field was roughly the size of a football field, flanked on three sides by a deep, foreboding forest full of ancient trees with gnarled trunks. The remaining side was edged by what could be considered as a very large medieval town. The buildings were wooden and squat and the streets looked to be cobblestone. Smoke rose merrily from chimneys, the smell of woodsmoke and nearby farms sweetening the air. The sound of hooves and wooden wheels clattering on the stone streets drifted towards us on the warm breeze, mixing pleasantly with the distant hum of voices.
Violet mountains rose in every direction, placing both town and field at the bottom of a massive bowl. I gazed up wistfully at the sapphire blue oval of sky, the mountains and sweet air reminding me of home.
Home. Such an odd concept. And if not odd, conflicted. These days, I referred to the TARDIS as home. It was the closest thing I had to one. But no matter how much I told myself that it was, the word home still turned my thoughts to the small wooden house in the middle of the woods. To my brothers, parents, and pets. I hadn't seen them in nearly two and a half years, and the loss still echoed dully through my chest.
Distraction. Another odd concept. One that both the Doctor and I sought out for reasons that were both so similar and so very different. Both trying to forget pasts, but while he strove to forget a past he wanted to get away from, I needed to be distracted from a past I wanted to get back to.
The Doctor walked up beside me and offered a brilliant smile that was slightly offset by the knowing glint in his eyes.
As much as he needed me to distract him, he was more than willing to return the favor.
I returned the smile and linked my arm with his.
"Earth?" I asked as we began picking our way through the tall grass.
"Nope. Looks a lot like it, though, doesn't it?"
I nodded. The closer we got, the more Earth-like it seemed. Somewhere between the 1300s and the 1600s, developmentally speaking. The creatures pulling the carts were unmistakably horses, being driven by people that certainly looked a lot like humans. A wire-haired, black and white terrier darted about, nipping at hooves and being a general nuisance.
"A colony from Earth?" I hazarded a guess.
The Doctor's smile was a little more genuine. "You're learning. It's a little world called Tamia. Failed deep space colony about three galaxies away from Earth."
"Failed?"
We hopped the fence separating the town from the field and slipped seamlessly into the scant crowds milling about the cobblestone street.
"Yeah. Computer matrix collapsed… neuro-interlink matrix, too. Those aren't supposed to break down, but it did. Shame."
"Neuro-interlink?"
"Connects telepathically to the community, forms a sort of link between the computer and the human brains and uses them for processing power."
The little black and white terrier came dashing out from around a passing carriage, only just avoiding being crushed by the hooves of the large bay horse pulling it. It paused a few yards ahead of us with its head cocked. I couldn't imagine why it would find us so interesting.
"Cool," I said as the scraggly thing scurried off. Maybe we smelled funny. "But wouldn't that be kinda, I don't know, invasive?"
He shrugged. "The people aren't aware of it, and it doesn't access any memories and whatnot that they don't want it to."
"But when the main computer went down…"
"The society went with it. Tech, electricity, everything. They had all the stuff they needed to survive, livestock, crops, and so on. Anarchy for a few generations. Long enough for society to devolve. They did pretty well for themselves, though. By now they've spread all across the main continent. A few million, all divided up into kingdoms and duchy and whatnot."
"History repeats."
"Absolutely."
"So where are we, exactly?"
The Doctor dislodged himself from my arm and strode out into the street. The Doctor ignored the mumbled complaints and curses thrown his way as the stream of horse-drawn traffic was forced to go around. I smiled apologetically but didn't hesitate to scurry to his side. The Doctor tucked me into his side once more and lifted his arm, pointing above the treeline to the nearest purple mountain that looked on the other side of the town. My eyes flickered back and forth, drinking in the sight before me.
Carved into the side of the mountain, two large buildings looked over the town like disinterested gods pondering whether or not they should grind it under heel. One of them resembled a mansion, neat and tidy with impressively vague stone carvings and spiraling gardens leaking out from the edges where the stone of the house met the mostly cleared foliage of the mountain.
The second building was a little smaller, significantly more odd and somehow much more impressive. Most of it resembled a large metal egg that had been driven halfway into the side of the mountain at a peculiar angle. Large chunks of the egg seemed to have fallen away and the gaps left behind had been haphazardly patches with lumps of stone - similar in kind to the rock forming the neighboring house. A stone building had been built around three sides of the egg like mushrooms growing up around the base of a tree trunk. The egg's curved peak protruded proudly from the pale stone, giving the impression that the building was a scarf for a very large silver entity that was simply peeking its head out of the ground to take a look at the town below.
I ignored the crude comment a man in a cart tossed in my general direction and grinned.
"Was that the ship?" I asked, referencing the egg. "The one the original colonizers came in?"
"Good," the Doctor conceded. "This is Tamial, where the first colonizers landed and started building. Now it's a religious site, cos no one really remembers what happened. See the building around the base? That's a cathedral. Exterreri Cathedral."
We'd been to much more interesting places with much more extravagant architecture, but I nodded along, deeply fascinated. Not that it was hard to keep me entertained. We could land at a gas station in Ohio to collect discarded change in the parking lot and I would be happy simply because it was someplace different.
"What about the other building?" I inquired, indicating the more homogeneous structure.
"Duke's estate," the Doctor explained with a dismissive wave. "Let's get a shift on. We're holding up traffic."
"Are we going to the cathedral?" My heart fluttered pleasantly when the Doctor twined our fingers together and tugged me back through the loose crowd of people dribbling down the sides of the road.
"Course not," he scoffed. "We're here for crepes, remember? Don't let the climate fool you. The bananas they grow here are fantastic."
"But after…?"
"You really think we'd come all this way and not go sightseeing?"
~0~0~0~
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~0~0~0~
The bananas were fantastic. And very, very yellow. Unnaturally yellow. When I pointed this out to the Doctor he responded with a very long, in depth explanation about biodiversity and the evolution of the banana throughout history, not at all hindered by the crepe he continuously shoveled into his mouth.
I chewed at my own food more slowly, savoring it while I listened to him talk. I was pretty good at following along, though it had taken a good deal of practice to keep up with his train of thought as it jumped tracks at random. The history of bananas might not have been the most interesting topic, but I enjoyed it well enough. Especially since the Doctor mostly seemed to have shaken off his previous gloom.
The restaurant the Doctor had led me to was a simple, dainty little business in the center square of the town. Apparently the Doctor had been here before, as he was greeted warmly by the owner, a jolly rotund man with a scraggly beard and rosy cheeks. He sat us down at a table outside so we could enjoy the nice weather and view of the cathedral.
It was a beautiful day. A steady flow of people tricked up and down the street, shopping and bartering and eating, their voices humming together lazily like bees droning lazily in the early summer breeze.
When the Doctor seemed to lose interest in banana history, talk turned to the comparison of Jacobean England and current Tamia when I remarked on how much cleaner this town was than Earth had been during the handful of times I'd visited the 1600s.
The Doctor explained that, while the society had devolved, the people hadn't lost the inherent expectation of bathing regularly and maintaining body hair and odor. There was also a pretty efficient waste disposal system, which kept the public from tossing out chamber pots into the streets - all for which I was grateful. Walking around a densely populated area that had yet to develop indoor plumbing was always an unpleasant experience.
The Doctor was halfway through a particularly graphic, yet hilarious story about the construction of a Roman aqueduct when the pleasant atmosphere was shattered by distant shouts and the thunder of hooves.
The Time Lord immediately turned in his seat and peered down the street with sharp eyes, going from effortlessly charming to alert within an instant. I leaned all the way out to be able to see around his leather-clad shoulder, only to jerk back when three massive horses thundered past.
They were huge, gorgeous beasts. Their nostrils flared wildly as they tossed their neatly braided manes. They rode shoulder to shoulder, taking up almost the entire width of the street. The sound of their hooves on the stone ground was terrifying, and if that wasn't enough to send everyone in the street skittering out of the way, then their riders finished the job.
The riders were guards of some kind, or perhaps soldiers. They wore striking red uniforms with shining buttons of polished silver. On their heads perched tall hats of long silky black fur that waved and shimmered in the mid-morning sun.
The guards barked orders to clear the road! from their mounts as they sped past. It was extremely effective, of course, as a person would be hard pressed to try to argue with a man while he was on a horse nearly twice as tall as he was.
But this approach also drew a lot of attention. People were running out of shops and streaming in from side streets, where they crowded along the edge of the main road. The relaxed hum of voices rose into a raucous chatter as they babbled their excitement to each other like jays.
"What's going on?" I asked the Doctor, who suddenly looked grim.
He kept his eyes fixed on something a little ways down the road. As the taller friend, he could see a lot further than I could.
"Look."
Another guard came trotting down the road on another fearsome horse. The pair moved more slowly than the others, but no less proud. Behind them came a sturdy black draft horse, much more worn than the stallions. It pulled a wagon, on which sat a large wooden cage.
Inside sat a dirty woman dressed in rags. Dried blood splattered across her forehead like a horrible crown. As she was wheeled by, I caught a glimpse of her face, of her young features and wide, frightened eyes.
"Doctor, what are they going to do with her?"
The Doctor stayed silent, signaling that he knew exactly what was happening and didn't like it. My answer came through the mouths of the people surrounding us.
"Hang the witch!"
"Murderer!"
"Hang 'er!"
"Witch!"
My stomach churned unpleasantly, making me wish I hadn't eaten as much breakfast as I had. I tried to swallow the feeling, but my mouth was dry.
A witch hanging.
The Doctor watched as the procession rattled off on the cobblestones, around the bend, and out of sight before turning back to me.
"Oh, my god," I breathed. My horror was replaced by disgust as the crowd filed in behind the cart. They continued shouting and jeering, tossing bits of spoiled fruit and garbage at the cage.
"You said it earlier," the Doctor growled. "History repeats. Just so happens that human history is about as blood-soaked as they come."
"Is there anything we can do?"
The Doctor pressed his lips into a thin line. "Dunno. But whatever you do, don't use the medallion. They've got one witch. They'll be quick to string you up too if they see anything unusual. Got it?"
I nodded grimly, remembering what had happened the last time I was careless with it. Vanishing into thin air around certain people could frighten them. I'd been shot at and nearly drowned enough times, thanks. The medallion was tucked securely against my chest. I rubbed it through the fabric, finding comfort in the familiar contours of the metal.
"Come on."
The Time Lord strode fearlessly into the crowd. I scrambled after him despite my trepidation. He was right, human history was drenched in blood. I knew public executions had been popular on Earth. Parents would take their kids and make a day of it. It was horrible. Barbaric. I had seen a lot of death after traveling through time and space for over a year, but this sort would be a first for me, one that I would really rather avoid.
But the Doctor seemed to think that we should investigate, so I didn't have much choice but to follow. And anyway, if there was anything we could do to help, we would have to be there. In the crowd.
~0~0~0~
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~0~0~0~
The crowd followed the cart through the town and up the nearest mountain. The destination was clear. Exterreri Cathedral. It loomed over us, threatening to roll free of the building keeping it tethered and crush us all like a boulder. The metal dome towered over the treetops, weather-polished silver reflecting the light of the sun onto the terraced gardens.
Despite the vibrant flowers and over abundance of green, I found myself shivering in the warm air. At first I thought it was in horrified anticipation of what we were about to witness, but then turned into something deeper. Sinister.
The Doctor noticed and took my hand. He gave it a comforting squeeze.
"Got some needlework to do?" He asked softly, keeping the statement normal enough for the blood-thirsty crowd swarming around us to not notice.
"Maybe," I said quietly. I could feel something fizzing, but it felt feverish in a way I couldn't really explain. Like it was sick. "But something's wrong. Everything feels…"
The Doctor gave my hand a warning squeeze, reminding me to mind my words. "We'll talk about it later."
I nodded and focused on putting one foot in front of the other. The feeling intensified the closer we came to the Cathedral. My understanding of the Otherside had grown in recent months. If I concentrated, I could sense the difference between the vibrations a rift gave off and those from a chronomite. There was a rift in the Cathedral, of that much I was sure. Nothing special about it, as far as I could tell. But something else was shifting around nearby.
Did chronomites get sick?
The gates to Exterreri Cathedral stood open, guarded by more soldiers in red. We followed the shouting crowd into a pristine courtyard full of neatly trimmed grass. Dotted amongst the elegantly shaped hedgery and beds of plump flowers were marble statues of cowering figures, their faces twisted with horror and fear.
"Exterreri."
I glanced up to see the Doctor looking at them too, wearing a slight scowl.
"Huh?"
"Exterreri," he explained. "It means nightmare in Latin."
Nightmare Cathedral.
The wagon stopped at the stairs leading up into the cathedral. I stood on my toes, trying to get a good look at the woman as she was dragged unceremoniously out of the cage. The wagon rolled away and she was frogmarched up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs, a dark archway in what once was a mighty colony ship yawned over a wooden platform. A metal bar ran across the top of the arch, from which a noose dangled.
I shivered again, but this time it had nothing to do with the chronomite.
The Doctor gestured to the platform. "The Cardinal."
Beside the arch stood a tall, weedy man with a mustache dressed in leather tinted the color of dried blood. The Cardinal stood proudly with his hands folded behind his back, surveying the crowd before him with an air of self-assured dignity.
"That's not just an archway," the Doctor whispered, low enough that only I could hear. "It's an access terminal to the ship's computer matrix.
I grimaced as an overexcited woman beside me lost her balance and stumbled into my shoulder. I rubbed at it ruefully. "It doesn't look like a terminal."
"Telepathic, remember? You don't need to press buttons to communicate with it."
I swallowed nervously as the poor woman was made to climb the platform. The Cardinal had the gall to smile at her as the executioner lifted up up to place her on a tall stool and forced her to stand still as the noose was lowered around her neck.
"Is there any way to help her?"
The Doctor was frowning, thinking. But the Cardinal stepped forward to the edge of the platform. He was speaking out to the crowd, shouting, but the amassed and bloodthirsty people only got louder. I was able to pick out a few words, like 'murder' and 'heresy'.
Maybe witch hangings happened enough in Tamia for the citizens to have the speech down to memory.
The crowd let out a road as another man strode out onto the platform. He was on the young side, perhaps in his late twenties, and decently handsome. Russet hair curled over his ears, offset nicely by the fine blue fabrics that he wore.
The newcomer strode right up to the Cardinal and began speaking to him angrily, ignoring the booes and hisses from the crowd.
"Stay out of the church, spoilsport!"
"Still wet be'ind the ears, that one is. He's got no business here."
"How can he be trusted with the title if he can't even hang a witch properly?"
Whoever he was, everyone knew him, and not everyone liked him. But despite the crowd's chagrin, he wasn't being muscled off the stage by the Cardinal's guards. He was too important for that.
The young man turned to face the crowd, which quieted enough for me to be able to make out the words.
"I'm sorry, everyone!" He held out his arms placatingly. "But this event is to be postponed indefinitely by decree of the Duchy. This woman has been charged without trial, and is therefore to be placed under royal protection."
The Cardinal nodded to the executioner.
The stool the woman stood on was kicked away.
The crowd cheered.
The woman's eyes bulged. She kicked and danced. Her face turned red, and then purple. The blood vessels in her eyes ruptured. Foam bubbled at her lips.
I could hardly think. All I could do was stare as she continued to wiggle like a worm speared on the end of a hook.
And listen to the crowd cheer.
The Doctor took my shoulder and began steering me back through the crowd. I went willingly, my heart full of anger and grief.
Charged without trial, the young man had said. In other words, innocent.
My anger boiled into blind hatred. I wanted to vomit. To scream. To plunge my knife into the nearest bastard and watch them wriggle and drown in their own blood.
Except I didn't. I walked on, not bothering to look back. Completely ready to leave this world and leave its people to deal with the chronomite on their own. It could eat as many of them as it wanted, for all I cared.
But when the Doctor risked a glance back and stopped in his tracks, I couldn't help but turn back around.
The woman was nearly gone. The only movement from her was the minute twitches in her feet and fingers as her brain expired. But that wasn't what everyone, including myself and the Doctor, was looking at.
The archway had come to life. Thin blue bolt of electricity zinged up and down the metal pillars. The hanged woman was bathed in light.
"The matrix is active," the Doctor growled. "That's not supposed to happen."
Despite being beyond consciousness, far more dead than alive, the woman's face twisted. It was the same expression worn by the statues in the courtyard. Fear.
Her fear lasted longer than her brain did. The expression stayed on her face after she otherwise stopped moving. It only vanished entirely when the archway went dark.
As soon as the computer terminal went dormant, the Doctor and I exchanged a grim look. I stamped down my feelings and locked them away tightly. There wasn't time to wallow.
Something was wrong, and we had a job to do. Team TARDIS.
The Doctor and I.
The Doctor resumed pressing me through the crowd. Before I knew it, we were halfway back down the mountain, well away from anyone else. But the Cathedral still loomed much to close for my liking.
The Doctor spun me around to face him. He stared into my eyes seriously, hands firmly on my shoulders. "You okay?"
I blinked, trying to process my thoughts and put them in some kind of order. "Yeah. You?"
The Doctor nodded, jumping straight to business. "There's a lot going on here. Something's wrong with the matrix, it's not supposed to do that. You said you sensed a fissure earlier. Do you think that's got something to do with it?"
"Maybe," I mused. "There's a fissure and a chronomite here. I think the fissure is just a fissure, but the chronomite…" I shook my head to clear it. "Something's wrong with it."
"Wrong how?"
I shrugged. "Can't explain it. But the fissure is definitely in the old ship. Do you think that might make it do… whatever it did?"
"Not sure." The Doctor shoves his hands in his pockets and stared up at the silver egg-shaped structure. "But best leave it for now. I want to know more about what we're up against first. And like I said before, stay in this dimension. If someone here sees you reappear ..."
He didn't need to finish the sentence.
"I'll be careful," I promised, thinking about all the times I'd said that, and then wasn't.
~0~0~0~
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Responses to Comments:
sophiewhettingsteel: It does sound ominous. Its a nice little story that I'm eager to share with you. But I'm afraid it didn't really belong as ch 23. It's coming soon though! Thanks for reading!
bored411: I am so freaking excited to show you guys what happens with Rose. I really think you'll like it. Only a few chapters to go!
savethemadscientist: Your reviews always make me so happy. I had a lot of fun writing the Dirt Dauber bit and I'm glad you enjoyed it too. Hope you enjoy what's coming up next!
Emzy2k11: Tooth-rotting fluff gives me serotonin. Rose is coming soon, but there's more to it than that ;) It's going to be great!
CrystalAris: Bed time with Doctor is best time. I'm thrilled you like them together, I've been low-key worried that people wouldn't ship her with him. Thanks for commenting!
C. S. Stars: Oof, indeed. 9 deserves the universe. Through fanfiction we give it to him.
Alikai: Updated twice in one week, and then not until almost five months later. oops. Thanks for being patient!
oODaniJadeOo: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Guest: I'm glad!
The TimeKeeper's Screwdriver: I'm glad you like her name. I kinda go through stages where I really like it and other stages when I think it's super cheesy, so it's nice to know people like it. I'm having fun exploring the Doctor's unstable parts, I'll really start digging into those soon. Hope you enjoy it!
ShirleyMallery: I'm looking forward to all the stuff that goes on when Rose joins the team. Though I am willing to go ahead and say that Buffy's fear of losing the Doctor goes farther to complicate things than Rose herself does. I personally have a lot of mixed feelings about Rose. She's cool in season 1 but then in season 2 I feel like the writers were so obsessed with pairing her with the Doctor that they started ignoring her other character traits. I'm hoping to find a nice balance. Let me know how I do when we get there!
MamaDrama: I'm happy to hear it was good enough for a binge! Sorry about taking so long to update. Hope you stick with it!
riotgirl777: Thank you for the validation on the pacing. Hopefully all the stuff that's happening in coming chapters will still be good.
Eviline: Reading your comment made me smile. I've really been trying to make it seem like a natural development and I love to read fics that deal with dark topics. It only gets darker from here. Especially this arc. Rose is going to be joining in soon, and so are the episodes. I've used the last couple months to really work out how I want the episodes to go, so I hope you'll enjoy it too. Thanks for you kind words :)
Sam2357: The episodes will start up soon, but I'm planning on mostly using original chapters. And the canon chapters that I do write should hopefully be done in such a way that it minimizes the canon script. If you're over here reading fanfiction, you probably already know exactly what happens in episode by heart. Hope you enjoy!
drmsqnc: It's been a long time since I've gotten comments for my earlier chapters. It really made me happy to get to read the responses of someone who reading it for the first time. Chunks of the story are cheesy as hell, so reading your comments gave me a huge confidence boost. Thank you for your kind words!
MystiYew: I'm glad you like my original stories! I am both determined to and scared of changing canon... so we'll see how that goes :)
SuperWhoLock1408: This story is one of my babies. Even when it takes me for-freaking-ever to update, I'll come back to it eventually. Thanks for sticking with it!
: Hope you keep on enjoying it!
deathb4beauty: DRAGONCON. DRAGONCON. I've only gone for the past two years, so I'm still a bit of a newbie. I got to visit the Freema Agyeman and Catherine Tate panel, which was super cool. I was hoping to get to go again this year, but with the way things are now, I wouldn't be surprised if they cancel it this year. At least Corona can't take away fanfiction. Glad you like the slowmance. Thanks for reviewing!
: I've been having some trouble finding fics with a lot of original content lately, so I do my best to make sure what I write is different enough to be interesting. I'm glad Buffy comes off as palpable, I really want her to be her own character! Thanks for taking the time to review!