No, your eyes are not deceiving you. I have finally – finally – managed to get this out. Several months, lots of drafts and wasted time later, this. Finally.
Now, this chapter will be gigantic. The delay and me wanting to make up for lost time is part of that, but more to the point, there's just a lot of stuff I want to get done in one block. It's not perfect, but my drive to make it perfect is the main reason I burnt through so many different drafts. So I ended up giving up, and settled for this (and "this" took a while as well). I almost got it finished back then, too... then uni started again. Let's just leave that there.
Oh well.
On the chapter itself: there are three separate plotlines running here, possibly four. Try to keep up.
CHAPTER 30. The Windcatcher: 26 – 29 March 2011
She used to sit outside for hours wrapped up in a blanket at night. Alone. Gazing at the beckoning pinpricks of light above.
Sometimes she wondered if they were her friends.
Not now. Not when the stars were so strange, yet so bright, illuminating her along with unrecognised moons she'd never grown up with. Not when they made you so easy to see.
How could you hide when you're running from-
"Found you," the voice calls out behind her. A woman's voice. Sing-song but sharp. Menacing. She gasps and tries to run even faster, but in her haste she trips. Falls. Lands face dirt on alien ground, so very, very far from home. Wherever home is for her.
She scrambles on all fours, trying to get to her feet, but it's futile. The woman catches up with her, kicks her onto her back. In the alien moonlight she finally sees her assailant – and, as the woman raises a pistol to her face from point-black range, she knows the woman will now be her murderer.
Her eyes meet the woman's.
They are green as emeralds, bright as stars, framed by shining, vibrant red hair.
The woman fires.
Kate had watched too many action movies as a teenage girl.
It was a fairly banal thing to realise, but it was the first thing on her mind as she lay groaning on the cold hospital floor. The instant the dream had ended, she'd instinctively tried to barrel-roll (or at least what she thought was a barrel-roll) out of the way of the oncoming bullet.
Then she realised that it had been in a dream. And she was in a hospital bed – rather, she used to be.
"The hell are you doing down there?" Amy peered curiously over the side of her own bed, her emerald-green eyes glimmering in the soft night light filtering through the window.
"Weird dream."
"And so you decided to get to know the floor a bit bet'r?" Amy had clearly only just woken up – having actually slept for once – so her accent was infused with drowsiness.
"I just woke up from it. If you had that dream, you'd get why." Kate replied.
"What was so weird about it?"
Kate picked herself off the floor and clambered back into the bed. "I guess weird isn't the right word. Just straight out bad, more like."
"I'm an expert on those," Amy joked. "What was it about?"
"Hard to say. Someone was chasing me, and I fell over. And then, they, um..."
"Killed you?"
"Yeah. Kinda brutal, just shot me in the face from point-blank. No idea why, but then again, it was a dream." She paused for a moment, leaving nothing but the distant noise of hospital machinery humming in the background. "Which was why I fell out of bed."
A brief silence. "Let me guess," Amy began slowly. "The person was me?"
Holy shit. "Um... yeah, it was. No keeping secrets from you, I guess. I forgot that you can read minds – remind me to change my facebook password," Kate joked.
Amy didn't answer.
"Amy?"
Still nothing. Kate sat up a bit straighter. "Amy? What's wrong?"
"Nothing," the Time Lady replied, her voice still light as usual. "Just try not to wake me up by falling out of bed again, yeah?"
"I'll make sure I keep that in mind in my next dream," Kate muttered sarcastically. "And by the way, you wouldn't actually shoot me in the face, would you? I mean, I know we aren't best pals, but..." It seemed a stupid thing to be asking, but Kate couldn't help but be a little worried.
"Make sure I get coffee every morning and I won't," Amy joked. "We're close enough to count. Not many options on my side... but don't worry about me. Get your sleep, human," she added with a humorous glint in her eyes.
Kate rolled hers. "Yes, miss. Night night."
"Night night, Katherine."
Amy heard Kate pull up the blanket over herself. Within minutes, Kate was fast asleep again. Amy, however, just stared sideways, between the blinds and out into the artificial sky.
She'd lied. Kate hadn't been the reason she'd woken up, although the blonde had freaked the living daylights out of her when she'd crashed to the floor a fraction of a second later. No, she'd woken up for the same reason Kate had. And now her mind was buzzing, restless, trying to reject what had just seemed to happen... and trying to work out how the hell it could happened.
The dream itself didn't concern Amy that much. It was a variation on a regular she'd had every now and then, ever since last November. Of course she'd been the shooter, just like on that spaceship.
No, what bugged her was considerably... weirder.
How the bloody hell can we have the same dream at the same time?
It took real dedication to find a Time Lord.
They were slippery folk, able to vanish from a timezone on a whim, reappearing a million years later and a billion light years away. Finding one was an exercise in sheer frustration. For one thing, they looked exactly liked humans, and given how abundant they were throughout time and space, that meant telling them apart was... challenging.
Not to mention they were cultural chameleons – they could speak any language ever crafted perfectly, blend in to their surroundings, melt away like water through one's fingers. And if push came to shove, they were all freakishly smart and resourceful, and would probably devise some way out of their troubles without a sweat.
But above all, the hardest thing about catching a Time Lord was that there simply weren't very many of them. And one of them was decidedly off-limits – it was well-known what would happen to you if you got in the way of the Doctor.
The unlucky few who didn't know soon found out.
That left just one in all of time and space, and she was a tough customer as well. What she lacked in experience she made up for in ability. The story of how Amelia Pond had almost single-handedly disabled an armada of starships with just a few soldiers and a phone was legendary. Not to mention the confusion and fear running throughout the Dalek Empire as to how she'd brainwashed a whole platoon of elite Daleks without so much as a second glance.
That was genuinely frightening, but it only served as a reminder – catching a Time Lord was the most dangerous job in the universe.
So for the man named the Windcatcher, it was a damn good thing he was getting paid plenty to do it.
His employers were rich, that much he knew. Rich and powerful enough to secretly direct the construction an enormous artificial world, thousands upon thousands of kilometres in diameter, just to lure them in. They'd also fitted it with a quite extraordinary device that, whilst apparently designed to make life trivially easy by converting thoughts into electricity, was in reality a specialised Locate-A-Time-Lord machine,
He wasn't entirely sure why he was supposed to catch Amelia Pond. But he never did know the why, and he never needed to. A signature on a contract was good enough for him.
It was just one quality that made him the greatest bounty hunter the universe had never known. Only once had he ever tried to personally capture his quarry, always preferring to stay in the shadows, working through mercenaries, laying traps, casting bait. Only once had he lost.
He had been waiting for a signal. A little psychic blip. That was the only surefire way you could find a Time Lord, and the only way you could detect one was to have an equalizer field in place. A spike in psychic energy would lead to a spike in electricity – and anyone could find one of those given the right equipment.
He had patiently gone about his business pretending to be a completely normal person, but all the while he watched and waited.
And after two years, his dedication was finally rewarded.
It was late afternoon and he was going off-shift at the clothing shop he worked at when a soft beep told him he had mail. He twiddled his glasses, bringing up the message on one lens.
Psychic anomaly detected. Strength: Six-plus. Duration: 20 seconds. Location...
He smiled and took out his phone, entering an number memorised for this exact occasion.
"This is the Windcatcher. I have found the target..."
"Look, sir, I appreciate that this is very uncomfortable for you," the receptionist intoned in a bored voice that sounded anything but appreciative, "but we do not treat the common cold here."
"But," the short, stunted and rather blue alien whined, "the cough is terrible, and if I'm not better by this evening then my date-"
"Sir, I understand, I really do," the receptionist interjected in the same dull monotone, "but this is a hospital, so you will have to see your local physician if you want treatment. Thank you. Next!"
The stubby little alien moved off, muttering mutinously to himself between blatantly exaggering coughs. The receptionist took no notice of him as he took a sip of his tenth coffee that day – the beverage was the only thing that kept him sane in this job. The next in line was a frail, wispy-white haired human lady with a walking stick shuffled up. "Hello, I'm here to visit Mr Dieritas. Is he taking visitors?"
"Certainly," the receptionist replied crisply as he found the relevant file on her screen. At least this old lady wouldn't be annoying him with stupid, pointless requests. "You'll find him in ward 94B on the second floor, and you're free to visit until two."
"Thank you kindly." The old lady shuffled away, revealing a man who was asking about a drug called Dipromizine for cold sores.
"The drug is called Dipronazine, and the pharmacy is across the road," the receptionist told him testily. Thankyou. Next!"
No one came up. He tapped his fingers on the desk impatiently – this was a hospital, time was of the essence. A wasted second could be a wasted life. "Next!"
"Oh! Sorry, did you mean me?" A hurried, frantic voice called out from somewhere to the side, and a man appeared before him so suddenly he toppled backwards off his chair in surprise. "Hello! I'm the Do–are you alright?" The man peered over the counter in concern as the receptionist picked himself off the floor.
"Yes, yes. Erm – good afternoon. How may I assist you?" Although his voice remained clear and professional, the receptionist's mood was rapidly darkening – today had not been a good day.
The man smiled warmly, as he took out a small, silver device and pointed it at his computer. "Tough gig?"
The receptionist almost fell out of his chair again. "Sorry, what-?"
"Your coffee mug is almost brand new, the patterning clearly defined, yet the stains on it are those of someone who's been drinking coffee out of it for years. Assuming, of course, normal amounts of drinking which obviously doesn't apply here." The warm, glimmered light in the man's eyes as he pocketed the device. "You, my good man, are stressed out."
Flabbergasted didn't cut it. "How the devil did you work that out?"
"Oh, just a guess. A good one, as it turned out." The man, who was dressed in some decidedly odd clothing – did people seriously wear bow-ties? – looked behind his shoulder, spotting a queue of curious and understandably impatient onlookers behind him. "Anyway, I'll let you get back to work. Toodles!"
"Wait – wait!" The receptionist cried out, as the man disappeared out of sight. He shook his head.
Just another annoying freak.
But for some reason the man was stuck in his head...
This was bad.
Very, very bad.
"Amy! Kate!" He could yell and shout all day, but Jack knew that it was useless – they were long gone. And by the looks of things, they'd been gone for several days.
Goddamnit. Those girls – those reckless, uncontrollable girls. Amy he could understand, trying to control her would be like trying to hold fire in his bare hands; impossible and probably rather painful. He was a bit miffed that she would run off – no, roll off into the unknown despite being so obviously incapacitated, but she was Amy, and a Time Lord. Self-preservation was not a massive priority of hers. Despite that, Jack wasn't especially worried about her. Even a mute, crippled Amy was not someone to be crossed.
Kate, on the other hand...
Human. Very, very mortal. Inexperienced. Cocky. On an unknown world and potentially alone. This was a recipe for something unthinkable, and precisely what he'd feared – and what Kate had brushed off. Hell, he, Rory and the blonde had even had a loud and heated row over it just days before the TARDIS had returned and woken half the village up. Kate had 'won' by virtue of being louder and impossible to budge, but they worried about her nonetheless.
Even Amy, now that he thought about it properly – yes, she was a Time Lord, but she'd been travelling with the Doctor for less than a year. A year! There was no way she could really fend for herself in an uncharted and dangerous forest, surely?
The best case would be if they had gone together to explore or do whatever, but that was surely impossible. He hadn't forgotten the resentment Amy had shown Kate the last time they'd been aboard the TARDIS together, and she hadn't seemed to have changed her mind yet. He was sure she would eventually, they had far too much in common – but not yet.
No, far more likely was that Amy had gotten bored and rolled off on her own, and Kate had run after her to try and find her once she realised the Time Lady had gone missing. Or vice versa. Either way, chances were that they were alone... and if he was being honest, they would be repticore lunch right now.
But he had rarely been accused of being an overly honest man, so he shelved that thought. If there was any possibility, any chance whatsoever that they were still alive and safe somehow, he had to get out there and find them.
Right. Will need a gun, then.
He turned and headed back into the bowels of the silent, immobile time machine to fetch his spare blaster. Five minutes later, he was back, racing through the console room and out into the morning bloom of the tranquil forest.
The top of the hour meant a change in shifts, which meant the receptionist was, mercifully, off for the day. He had wanted to help people, try to repay some of his debts – but he was no doctor. In fact he had no medical knowledge at all. So he got stuck at a desk job at the visitor's entrance to the hospital, directing people where they needed to go... and turning away those who clearly had no idea at all. And they numbered in the many.
He collected his coat, finished off his twelfth coffee for the day and was about to leave when he spotted something out of the corner of his eye. A flash of olive-green tweed and unruly chocolate brown hair.
What...?
His natural instinct was to ignore him. Just another irritant to add to his ever growing levels of stress. But... he'd known about that, hadn't he? Had guessed with a single look. Just one look.
Screw it.
He jogged after the strange man. "Hey – hey!"
The man, still with his navy-blue bowtie, spun on the spot to face him. "Oh! Hello. Did I drop something?"
"No."
"Oh, good. Always leaving stuff behind, me. Fortunately never anything too precious or dangerous," the man said, frowning slightly. "Although there was this one time when I was towing a space caravan through New Venezuela... anyway. How's the coffee?"
He decided to evade the question. "Did you need something back there? Because I never heard what you were actually looking for."
"Oh, no problems," the man replied airily. "I was just looking for something."
"For what?"
"Oh, just... things. A certain something."
Something about the way the man said it twigged in the receptionist's mind. "Something... or someone?"
"Well, something, a sort of listy-data-ey-thingy from your systems that might tell me..." The man stopped fidgeting and sighed. "Yes, someone."
"Oh. Someone special?"
A slow, wistful smile. "I suppose you could say that."
"I hope you find her – it must be a her, right? Oh, and what's your name?"
"Name's the Doctor. Well, I'm told it's my name, anyway. That's what people call me. That's what I call me. So I guess that makes it my name, by definition," the man replied, sidestepping the first of the two questions. The Doctor didn't want to reveal anything about Amy he didn't strictly need to – as Amy would have wanted.
The receptionist blinked. "Err... OK. Doctor... who, exactly?"
The Doctor smiled good-naturedly. "Good question."
Amy had never liked hospitals.
Strange thing too, given that her ex-fiancée was a nurse – but then again, part of the reason that had happened was so Rory could be more like 'her' Doctor. However, she'd not meant that sort of Doctor, so she went on disliking hospitals all the same. So clinical. Chillingly heartless. And full of needles to boot.
They'd always sent shivers down her spine, and did so now as she made her way through the corridors, Kate watching behind her. The girl had suddenly become very protective and concerned about Amy's welfare over the three days after that seemingly shared dream they'd had (though Kate didn't know it yet).
"Look, Kate, seriously," Amy had eventually said, with more than a little exasperation after Kate had busied herself yesterday morning getting two steaming mugs of coffee.
"You are not my mother," she grumbled. She'd never been mollycoddled in her life before and she certainly wasn't going to let it start now. But she'd taken the coffee anyway.
Perhaps Kate had taken her a bit too seriously the other night.
Mercifully, the external memory storage she'd made had worked to some degree. Since she'd made it, her dreams had become gradually more pleasant once she'd siphoned off a sizeable chunk of her past into that chunk of black thought-metal, as she called it. Sharing dreams with Kate was still weirding her out, but she could live with that. At least she could finally catch up on some desperately-needed sleep, so she was feeling a little better now as she swung her way into Iverson's office.
Maybe he'd have news on where the Doctor was...
"Afternoon, Miss Pond. Good to see you walking again, but before you start, no, Amy, I don't know where he is," he said, not even looking up from the screen on his desk.
Maybe not, then.
"So... why'd you want to see me, then?" Amy asked with a hint of surliness, as she plopped herself down on a chair opposite him. Kate waited outside.
"Just a chat. " He lowered the screen and looked the Time Lady straight in the eye. She was still, of course, stunning to behold, but a few things had changed since he'd first met her. Gone was the frantic concern she'd had for her friend, the welcoming warmth in her eyes as he'd tried to cure her. Now they were permanently narrowed, her chin raised slightly.
Hard. Immovable. Almost arrogant. Every bit as aloof as everything he'd read about her species had suggested.
What's happening to her?
But that was for another time. "I see you've been giving the nurses hell."
Amy tossed her hair and folded her arms. "And?"
The nurses and Amy had developed a bad relationship over the past few days. They kept wanting to treat her obvious ailment. Amy kept refusing. They suggested IV drips, spinal taps and other unpleasantness involving needles. Amy hated needles. It didn't end well for them.
The last straw was when she'd had another of those debilitating migraines... and someone had offered her aspirin. Not a smart move.
Iverson shook his head. "They're not Time Lord experts, but try not to take their heads off, will you? They're only trying to help."
Amy sighed. "Yeah, yeah, whatever. I've just been in a bad mood in the last few days, OK? I'll try better with the next lot."
Iverson doubted that that would work, but nonetheless... "Well, that's a start. Onto business, then. You know my job, right?"
"I'll have a guess. You wait here, twiddling your thumbs until an alarm goes off in the forest, then you rush off to whisk away whichever moron got stuck there before they get cut to ribbons. How am I doing?"
He had to chuckle at that. "Nothing gets past you, does it?"
"And don't you forget it."
"I'll try not to. But that's not my only job. And if I were to guess, the reason your friend the Doctor went into the wide blue yonder was to work out why your time machine had suddenly stopped working when you got here."
Amy's eyes widened briefly, but she didn't show her surprise for long. "And...?"
"And that's been the way for years, Miss Pond. Dozens upon dozens of time travellers, some by vortex manipulator, some by other means, have come here and gotten stuck. They can travel to different places on Earthsphere but they can't go anywhere beyond or travel in time. You're just the latest in a long, long line of time travellers to get stuck here. There's just something about this place which makes time travel impossible."
"I already knew that, thanks," Amy pointed out. She wasn't totally incompetent as a Time Lord, and could tell what the strangely dead temporal feel to the place meant. "What happened to the rest?"
"Oh, not much. They come to me, I send them off to the engineers. There are workarounds you can use, and most of them are sent on the way without incident. Some stuff about recalibrating the equalizer field – don't ask me, though, I'm not an engineer."
"Right. So what does this have to do with me?"
"I told my superiors about you, and asked if they're sending a team to fix it. Haven't replied yet."
"So can I go?"
"Not yet. You're still in my care, remember, and I haven't discharged the two of you yet. But besides that, I was reading about your species yesterday, and specifically about the man you travel with. The Doctor."
"Oh." Amy leaned back in her chair. "What about him?"
Iverson pulled up his screen again and clicked through to a stored page he'd found the other day, perusing it idly. "You told me the other day that you didn't know this place existed, and neither did he. Apparently he has a penchant for the unknown, it would have piqued his interest." He glanced sidelong at her. "Am I wrong?"
"No."
"And apparently, your species has always been drawn to lush, sprawling, unusual worlds, especially paradise worlds such as this one. Correct?"
Amy shifted a little in her seat. "I guess so."
"And that nothing perks you up as the prospect of some unusual aliens that weren't supposed to be there placing people in mortal danger." He paused. "Like, for example, the repticore in the forest."
Amy folded her arms. "What are you saying, this whole setup's just bait?"
Iverson sighed and folded down his screen again. "I don't have any evidence, but it's a rather unlikely coincidence, no?"
"The Doctor always tells me that the universe loves to pull these things for fun, and coincidences just happen sometimes."
He leaned forward, placing his chin on his hands. "And do you believe him?"
Amy couldn't answer that.
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