The sky was the colour of darkness, yet shadows were still somehow everywhere. The Doctor walked through an endless alley as stars flickered on and off overhead.
Hesitantly, she took out her Smiling Spoon, her device that traced the shape of time and space. It wasn't smiling here, of course. The face on its head was clenched in a silent scream.
"Sorry, mate," whispered the Doctor to her spoon. "I'm not wild about being here, either. But we have to see this through, okay?"
Tentatively, the drawn-on face opened its eyes and clenched its teeth.
The Doctor waved the spoon around desperately, getting as much information as she could. It was true, she saw, what the barman had said. Here time was warped into a complex maze, with eight 'o clock bang in the centre of it all.
She was so focused on her task that she didn't notice the ray of sunset creeping past and over her, or what that beam might look like. The middle digit of an outlined hand. A literal finger of light.
There was the sound of something slamming against a wall, and the Doctor whipped around. The spoon in her hand was replaced by her scalpel as quickly as a conjurer's trick.
She jumped out of the way of the hand stretching over the alley, but soon saw that more were now arriving. Handprints of light were pressing against every surface, the walls and dirt groaning as something struggled to get through.
"Don't make me use this," she said, brandishing her SCALP(EL). It's Extra Light in more than one way. A laser this bright, it'll scour you. You might burn.
From everywhere around the Doctor, a whispering, wheezy laugh began to rise.
"Okay," she said. "Not really the reaction I was going for."
"You aren't a creature of the light," cackled the voice from somewhere. "How could you ever command it, next to us?"
"Like this, I reckon," said the Doctor, poking a tiny button on her scalpel's hilt. She screwed her eyes shut as brilliant light shot out from the blade, thinner and redder than any incision could be.
Closing your eyes wasn't enough, after you fired a SCALP(EL). Its laser could burn through almost anything, never mind your eyelids. The Doctor's world blazed hard with a red sort of pain.
"We're handprints, Doctor," said the voice in an unimpressed way. "You can't blind us. We don't have any eyes."
"You know who I am, then?" said the Doctor as she blinked away the glare, hoping the question would distract from how stupid her plan had just been.
"We know who you aren't. We watch your existence. Covet it. Yet even you are a whisper of something more."
"You covet being me?" said the Doctor, responding selectively. "You shouldn't. It's usually pretty rubbish, this time round."
"Anything is better than what we are," the whispers said, "the people never born in any worlds. We were better than anyone who really lived— but now we grow bitter, as even the best people do."
A handprint of light vanished with a whump, to be replaced by nothing at all. Not darkness, not even an absence. Just nothing, like the nothingness after death. Looking at it could drive anyone insane, so the Doctor studiously looked to the sky instead.
"Most things are real to some degree," she said. "In a place this thin, maybe even regrets."
"You only travel in space and time," spat the voice. "You haven't felt all that our hands have known. The best of us condemned to nonexistence, while this world is ruled by the worst and the realest of all."/p
"Is it, now?" said the Doctor. "Then I'm just where I thought I was."
"I don't want to hurt you," she added. "However horrendous I am."
"Even your existence hurts us," the voice now spat, "you're a darkness that should never have been. A shadow of a story in the ruin of a box. Don't think that we don't know what you really are."
"I'm the Doctor," said the Doctor. "That's the way that things have to be."
"And were you good enough in the end, Doctor?" said the voice as more handprints collapsed into nothingness. "To get to be alive? As real as anyone can be, in this place you've been called to now?"
Hand-shaped holes were punching through the walls and the greying street. It was harder to focus on the things that were still all there.
"You could just give in," said a voice, and it wasn't the voice of the hands. It was something inside her, stuck in her. A thing that should have gone away.
"No," said the Doctor in her head. "I definitely couldn't."
"Living as if there's still hope?" said the voice. "It's a long time since you really believed in that."
"True," she muttered silently. "But you know me. You are me. So you know I'm not as good as any of those hands. And one of my flaws? It's that I never know when I should stop."
The voice of the hands spoke again, as if it could hear her thoughts. Maybe they could, for all the Doctor knew. There were so many rules that were breaking.
"You weren't fit for life," said the voice. "No one who lives really is. Yet you tried so hard to be worthy. Would anyone think you were, here at the end?"
It was a mistake, to try and make her feel bad. It worked so well to remind her of once before. Where every life she'd broken came back to haunt her. She'd cast such a very long shadow, when they'd passed by.
There were creatures that fed on the wrongs that you had caused. Which made you aware of everything bad you'd been responsible for, then fed on the guilt you felt as you recoiled. Creatures of shadow, which lived a long way from here. But for a guilt as great as the Doctor's, they might just all find a way through.
"Was I good enough?" she said softly. "I'll be the judge of that."
There was a door in the Doctor's mind where all her crimes went unspoken. She took a very deep breath, and turned the key.
She flashed an awful smile, then uttered a single word. For the first time, the voice of the hands sounded puzzled.
"Pray?" it said. "Why should we do that?"
"Oh, I'm not talking to you!" said the Doctor happily. "You were right, all of it was true. I'm not worthy of people who walk in the light. I'm talking to them"—
–she pointed to something unsnaking from the sky–
—"to the things that lurk in the shadows."
She smiled, and pointed to herself with a grin.
"Prey," she said, once again. "Come and feed, why don't you? There's so much despair up in here."
Her grin fixed as the shadow slammed down into her, and all the pain she'd caused came back as well…
...she'd had so many lives, but there'd still been so many deaths. So many. From every decision; the easy ones and the impossible ones. The awful things she'd been shunned for; the worse ones that no one even knew.
"Oh Hell," she whispered as the shadow began to feed. "Oh Hell"—
She screwed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth, as though that would do anything at all. She now saw how nothing she would be enough to make up for the things she had done. She could never atone, not truly. The Doctor might be an oath that would save the universe, but it would never be enough to redeem her.
Somewhere, she knew, she'd been cleansed. Somewhere, this all fell away. That wasn't the world she lived in now, where the shadow was bursting and roaring from her, hammering against every hand of light like the sea exploding into a bath—
—the Doctor screamed, not out of fear, but in pain. A deep, raw, primal noise, frightening away the few hands that hadn't fled—
—and then there was darkness, and even the shadows were gone.
The scream turned into a sob, and she felt herself wobbling on the edge of despair. Just before she fell, she remembered she hadn't been the only one in danger—
—she panicked and scrabbled in her pockets, searching for her spoon.
"Oh God," she said as she fished it out. "I'm so sorry."
It was bent completely over and no longer had a face at all.
"Another victim of the Doctor," she said to herself. "My shadow must be even longer, now."
She'd got enough from it, though, before it died. She now knew how to navigate this place, and how to get to eight 'o clock.
The worst thing in the world would be to keep on going.
And yet, the Doctor thought, it still wouldn't be punishment enough.