Chapter 7 is here! Fair warning, there's going to be a bit of a break between this and the next one… for which I do apologize.
Do I need to be putting disclaimers on every chapter…? Well, I still don't own Doctor Who.
He didn't know if that had come out right. It felt correct in his mouth, but he wasn't sure if it had been quite clear, so he tried repeating it. Again, he was unsure, so he went ahead and, just for good measure, said it a third time, more slowly than ever.
It was unnerving, to say the least, and a sensation—or lack thereof—that he could have gone his whole long life without.
The sound of Donna's voice had been fading for a while. He'd refused to showcase the growing terror he was truly feeling, for Donna's sake. He still did. He just hoped he'd been able to keep it out of his voice… He had no way of gauging his success in that regard.
It was just a matter of waiting till the creature sucked away his sense of touch. He wasn't sure if it would be faster since it was all that was left—indeed, he'd had no way of timing the intervals between the loss of each previous sense, so he wasn't even sure if the process had been shortening at all. No reason to believe it had been, he supposed. He and Donna were in this for the long haul.
In truth, this was the most disturbing experience he'd had in a very long time. Total silence, total blackness. He hoped they wouldn't try to feed him anything or his added inability to smell or taste it might overwhelm him.
As a result, he groped around a lot. He could no longer hear the slight creak of the bedframe whenever he shifted, but he could feel the thin softness of his covers. He could no longer hear the hustle and bustle of passing Cirulians, but he could, with Donna's assistance, swing his legs out to the side and touch his feet to the cold, hard floor. He couldn't hear Donna's voice, but he could grip her hand tight as he wanted. Every so often he'd let up though, afraid he was hurting her—he couldn't tell by her face or pick up any small cries of pain, of course, and he doubted she'd pull away from him under the circumstances.
It made him worry—not that he'd ever let on—about what she would do if he lost everything and couldn't get it back.
He didn't say much if he could help it. At one point, he couldn't stand the not knowing anymore and asked how long it had been. He articulated carefully, and said the question twice to be sure. In response, after several seconds, Donna took his hand gently and traced something onto his palm that he didn't quite catch.
"Has it been an hour yet?" he asked, still speaking carefully but not bothering this time to repeat himself. Donna seemed to be getting it. "Tap once for yes and twice for no."
Another pause. Donna's finger touched the centre of his palm two times.
He sank into the bed in despair. "Almost, though?"
One tap. Thank God.
A stretch of silence that was probably much shorter than it felt. "I take it you don't know sign language."
Two taps. He could sense how apologetic she was. Normally his sixth sense wouldn't be necessary for picking such things up—he realized it was kicking in a bit more now that he was so short in most other areas of perception.
"I'll try to tell you when I lose touch, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to feel confident that you're communicating effectively when you can't hear yourself, let alone feel the movement of your mouth" was the message he intended to impart next, but at least three separate times he thought he stumbled over a word and had to backtrack, and by the end he had no idea how much had actually gotten through. He felt an involuntary grunt of frustration in his throat—and then Donna, bless her heart, squeezed his hand. He took that as a signal that she'd understood. It was a nice thought, anyway.
Having experienced the attempt to send such a long message and having to be content with not knowing how successful he'd been left him feeling rather lethargic, and he slipped back into uncommunicativeness after that. Oh, one could say "silence," but it was all the same to him.
After a while more he felt Donna's left hand take his as her right placed something into his grasp—a bowl, it felt like. His fingers traced its rim gently. Small one, no bigger than his palm, and cleaned recently, if he were to judge by the soothing warmth of its surface.
Even as he wondered why Donna had given it to him, he gripped it tightly, and suddenly the answer was obvious.
A small toy came next. It was some type of Cirulian animal, though he wasn't so familiar with Cirulian zoology so he couldn't get much more specific. Its fur was coarse, its eyes were something like what Earth called marbles, and it had a long tail made of a thin rope. Must have come from some waiting room.
Third was a glass of water—or at least he could imagine it was water. Had the consistency of it, anyway. He was thankful to be familiar with some liquid that had no taste at all, and began to wonder why there wasn't a food like that. Donna helped him drink, and he relished in the feel of the cool liquid running down his throat. When it was gone, he ran his fingers all around the cup. Its outside surface was interestingly bumpy. He wondered if Cirulians needed the extra grip, and it occurred to him that he still didn't know what they looked like.
Donna kept the items coming. He beamed with each new toy to examine—somehow it was eye-opening (not literally of course—if only) to have only one sense to use to take in the world around him. Or, as it happened, directly before him. He noticed things he probably would never have noticed before. She handed him a couple of medical instruments—blunt, simple ones, naturally—a scrap of paper, a length of fabric, a piece of jewelry. He wasn't sure how she was getting the Cirulians to donate so many things to the "Keep the Doctor entertained" effort, but he wasn't exactly surprised—she could be mighty persuasive. At one point she handed him what he realized within moments was his screwdriver, and immediately he pointed it in her general direction and grinned.
He was trying to remain and, more important, appear as content as possible. It was the only way he could comfort her anymore.
Hours must have passed, but Donna had not wavered in her steady supply of objects for him to inspect and toy with. The experience of losing the sense of touch was much odder than hearing—the only other one he'd actually been aware was slipping from his grasp—had been. There were not typically degrees of touch. You could not muffle touch. The nearest sensation he could equate it to was the awareness that your foot was falling asleep. Only it was his entire body, and as much as he shifted around, he could not shake it. He was losing the awareness of the position of his legs on the mattress, his arms beside him, whether he was resting his head against the wall or not. When he said "Donna, I'm losing it," it was early enough to do so without mishap, but when it occurred to him maybe twenty minutes later to command, "Lay me down, make sure I'm flat on my back," he was vaguely aware that he'd bitten his tongue. The pain was fuzzy, but he really couldn't know for certain how serious it was (he had no sense of taste to rely on to alert him to the presence of blood, after all). Moments later he could barely tell whether or not Donna had done as he instructed, but something had definitely changed about his position, and he absolutely trusted her.
When he aimed to say "Catch you on the flip side" and attempted a smile, he had absolutely no idea how successful he'd been. For all he knew, rather than the smooth exit he normally went for he may have just appeared to be gargling his own saliva. He shuddered at the thought.
Mid-shudder, as if someone had flipped a switch, he realized he couldn't feel a thing. And for one profoundly terrifying moment, he was floating in nothing. Blackness stretched before, behind, above, and below him. He stared into the void, unfeeling of his own body. He couldn't feel the mild chill of the room he knew his body to be in. He couldn't feel his heartbeat. He couldn't feel the air entering and exiting his lungs.
As quickly as he could manage, in a burst of panic he could not feel the physical manifestation of, he called upon his sixth sense and pushed himself into true unconsciousness.
Where awaited the creature that had stolen everything from him.