Disclaimer: Doctor Who owns my soul...
Thanks so much to the two who reviewed last chapter - MayFairy and Brownbug. Yeah, it's been a while - sorry 'bout that! Few more chapters to go, and I hope this one makes even a jot of sense... :/
Disgusted, she turned on her heel and ran, heading in the other direction down the alleyway. The monotony of the iron-grey walls, cobblestones and sky gave no promise of an end to the alleyway, but she ran on, light felt shoes scuffing on the cobblestones, the dust clinging to her robes.
She didn't even realize how much she was shaking until she was forced to stop. Hearts pounding in her throat, gasping for breath, she slumped against the cold concrete wall and buried her face in trembling hands. A dry cough forced its way from her throat – it seemed the dust, at least, was more than an illusion. It was certainly real enough to be stinging her eyes; she brushed irritably at them and drew a deep, slow breath.
Was it her imagination, or did the wall at her back have something of a curve to it now, sloping gently inwards more than she remembered from when she had last glanced upwards at the murky sky? Logically, of course, it had to be someone's imagination – this was the Matrix, she reminded herself…so whatever she imagined could quite well be real, even if it were not before she imagined it. It had been the Doctor who had taught her that kind of roundabout thinking, she remembered with a pang.
Concentrate, she scolded herself, scrunching her eyes shut and pushing back the memories of her Doctor, his face breaking out into a toothy grin and a twinkle in his blue eyes as he deciphered a puzzle that was obvious in its obscurity and illogical in its own logic. Concentrate…
When she opened her eyes again, the scenery did seem to have shifted slightly – was still shifting, its substance altering and deciding itself; not visually – Romana could not see, as such, the walls steadily resolving themselves into solid brickwork once again – it was more like becoming aware as if a powerful perception filter had been turned down. Ahead of her, the alleyway slowly widened and cobblestones gave way to loose scree, while the walls curved further and further inwards until they met in a low, sturdy archway. Romana straightened up and began to walk. It might not look like much, but she wasn't getting anywhere just waiting in the alleyway.
As she passed under the archway and into the gloom beyond, the thought crossed her mind that her surroundings rather resembled an old English railway tunnel, and kicking aside a particularly sharp stone revealed part of a rusting iron beam, one of two that emerged from oil-stained shingle some way ahead and ran parallel down the middle of the tunnel and out into the semicircle of light at the other end.
She hesitated – it was the obvious thing to do, follow the tunnel to its end…perhaps too obvious. Then again, perhaps he knew she would come to that conclusion and wait for her to seek an alternative way out. Or perhaps he knew that she would see through a double-bluff and…
She frowned. There had been a time when she would have known precisely when to call the Doctor's bluff – but now…now, she wasn't so sure she knew him as well as she thought she had.
If there was anything left of the Doctor she knew in this man, she couldn't think where she might find it.
A slight tickle on her cheek briefly distracted her; flicking absently at it, she was startled to find a large chronarachnid hanging from her fingers by a thread.
"Ugh!" Her exclamation of disgust echoed down the tunnel, answered seconds later by a skittering in the inky shadows along the edge. She shook her hand violently, flinging the fingernail-sized creature to the ground, and glanced upwards, recoiling as another – this one with a bulbous body the size of a marble – nearly descended onto her face. Again, the skittering sounded, closer this time, and its source now moved into view: several chronarachnids, at least a hand's span wide, the jagged stones visible through their translucent bodies as they scurried towards her feet. The first to reach her, she crushed beneath her foot; its delicate body crumbled like a sculpture of gossamer-thin crystal, but more had emerged from the shadows now, and she stepped back. Something stirred in her hair and she snatched at it, combing her fingers through to pull out three more marble-sized ones and then swatting frantically at her shoulder when something stirred in her peripheral vision and a long, jointed leg of one of the larger ones extended itself towards her face. All of a sudden, she could feel her whole body prickling, as though they were beneath her clothes, crawling across her skin – all in her head, she told herself, until one crawled out across the back of her hand from under her sleeve.
Crying out in horror, she was almost overcome with a wild urge to scratch and claw at her whole body, smash the chronarachnids to dust and vapours of time energy, anything – just get them off her! She clenched her hands tightly, nails digging into her palms and pressed her eyes shut, feeling her hearts racing as though they had been the first part of her to succumb to the panic that was swelling inside her.
They're only chronarachnids… Willing herself to remain motionless even when a pricking at her ankle called to mind the thorny feet of chronarachnids twice as large again, she inhaled deeply – before a tickling traced its way across her face towards her nose and the breath caught in her throat, respiratory bypass system kicking in on reflex. They're only chronarachnids. They can't do anything to me – there are far more dangerous creatures in all of time and space… Gradually, her pulse slowed and she held herself stock still for an interminable pause, just feeling the hundreds of tiny legs scuttling across her skin, her stomach lurching once when the weight of what must have been the biggest chronarachnid yet descended onto her arm. Completely harmless…
Eventually, she forced her eyes open and was met with the sightless, silvery, many-eyed stare of a chronarachnid the size of a cat that hung inches from her face. Frozen, she thought for one terrifying instant that she could feel the sting of venomous fangs sinking into her face. A second later, she realized just why her fears had been unfounded. She had never before seen a chronarachnid so close up and magnified, and had all but forgotten what she had known since childhood, since before she had even heard of the spiders of Alzarius, Metebelis III, Earth…the chronarachnids of Gallifrey which fed on instances and moments had no mouthparts; nothing but a shapeless emptiness where the lower part of its head should have been, its edges indiscernible, without colour or size or time. Stubbornly averting her eyes from the creature, she raised her arm and struck it aside, feeling the side of its fragile body crumple like tissue paper. It dropped to the ground, injured but not dead, and raised itself on its remaining intact legs to limp back towards her. She tore her eyes away, moved one foot forwards, then the other – and then stopped dead in her tracks.
At the far end of the tunnel, a figure had appeared. It was the same Doctor that she had taken to be the Keeper of the Matrix, although the gold robes were gone. Dressed now in the flowing, black and white robes and angular, white-trimmed collar that she recognized as the clerical dress of a Gallifreyan court, his tall, gaunt outline was silhouetted sharply against the glaring white light at his back. A mirthless smile played about his lips as he surveyed her, dispassionately taking in her discomfort.
"Romanadvoratrelundar," he said. "Ridiculous name."
"Well what about you?" she retorted. "I rather preferred 'the Doctor'."
"Naturally." Again, that smile that didn't quite reach his cold eyes, and a tugging on the back of her robes alerted Romana to several more of the massive chronarachnids climbing her back.
"What do you want with me?" she demanded, resolutely ignoring the creatures.
"Has it occurred to you to simply go back the way you came?"
"I doubt it's possible," she replied. "You don't seem capable of looking back."
"An astute observation," he admitted. "But what's past is prologue, my dear Romana. My predecessors were fools, encumbered by their own conscience, hindered by sentimentality-"
"And my friend once. Don't you remember, Doctor?"
In an instant, he was standing less than an arm's reach from her – it was impossible to say whether he or she had moved, or whether the gap between them had merely ceased to exist.
"I am NOT the Doctor!"
At that, Romana felt as if something inside her was breaking. Looking into the grey eyes, she could see only the Doctor, the Time Lord she would have called one of her dearest friends. But those eyes, totally devoid of any of the warmth and kindliness that had always been such an enduring part of him; his bitter, vehement denial in a voice tinged with desperation beneath the anger – to see him like this…if possible, it was worse than hearing of his death. It was beyond her comprehension how he could have become this, and almost more than she could stand. She felt physically sick just meeting that steely gaze, and she wanted more than anything to reach out to him, to plead for him to remember who he once was, to know what he could possibly have been through to cause him to- …no, she wouldn't, couldn't think it – not the Doctor.
But she couldn't let him hear the sorrow in her voice, wouldn't let him see what the mere fact of his existence was doing to her. She swallowed, forcing down everything that had settled as a lump in her throat, everything that she wanted to pour out to the Doctor, and spoke with the words of the flyers from the alleyway ringing through her memory.
"Yes – the 'Valeyard', you said." For a moment, she could have sworn that something akin to confusion passed across his face – and then in a blink, he had moved back, face once again impassive, and Romana had the sense that he regretted having gotten so close to her. "Did I see all of them, then? Where are you – eleventh? Twelfth?" He narrowed his eyes, studying her face; she steadily returned the stare until with a slight shake of his head, he said,
"Maintaining your physical presence in the Matrix must be taking a greater toll on you than I anticipated."
"You mean you don't even know about-"
"As you can see," he gestured with one hand to the monstrous chronarachnids still pouring from the shadows, "unprecedented by millennia of Time Lords, I have achieved total control over the Matrix. I will come to exist between the Doctor's twelfth and final incarnations – I am unrestrained by artron energy or such limited means of manipulating this mindscape. Your mind must be weaker than I thought, Romana – there is nothing within the Matrix that I am unaware of."
Even as she wondered when the Doctor had ever been quite so arrogant, his words brought an unexpected comfort to her. A potential entity, a living paradox – while it was unsettling to think that whatever the Valeyard was had been drawn out of her old friend, it was some reassurance to discover that in fact, the Doctor might never become the man who stood before her. And with that revelation came a new and horrifying realization.
"You're completely dependent on the Matrix, aren't you?" Her mind was racing now, pieces quickly falling into place. I will come to exist, he had said – his existence must still be unstable, but removed from the ripples and eddies of the time continuum, the world of mental energy that formed the Matrix would be able to maintain him as a conscious being. "What kind of a life is that?"
"Life?" His eyes flashed with anger. "I am no more alive than a passing thought."
So time had somehow granted the Valeyard sentience without life. There was still so much that Romana felt that she didn't understand, but one thought came clear to her mind, and she boldly voiced it:
"The Doctor would pity you."
"The Doctor fears me." Romana almost shuddered at the pride in the icy voice. "Above all else, the Doctor fears me. He has spent so many lifetimes running from me. Soon, he will have to face me…" Now, he was drifting further away again, the space between the two seeming to stretch and warp. Massive chronarachnids the height of Romana's shoulders stepped out to fill the gap, turning to advance on her.
"So I'm a hostage?" she guessed, forcing herself to keep her eyes on the Valeyard. A dense, grey fog was beginning to build, rolling in from the tunnel mouth, rising at his back, making his form appear hazy. "You're going to trap me here and use me to lure the Doctor back to Gallifrey?"
"Oh, no." Through the thickening fog, she could make out something stirring at his back – an impossibly huge chronarachnid, drawing itself up on legs like blades of glass scythes to reach half a head taller again than the pseudo Time Lord, stepping out from behind him as if it had emerged through an invisible door. Another followed, standing on his other side; flanked by the two monsters, he raised one hand to point directly at Romana. "You have no purpose in my schemes, Romana. You mean nothing to me now."
And then he was gone, vanished without even a ripple in the fog, as though he had never been there. The two chronarachnids tilted their crystalline heads back for a moment, before moving forwards in unison, straight towards her as though guided by some sense other than sight. A smaller, closer creature also raised its head, and as it directed its gaping maw towards her, the thought struck her that they were honing in on her own time energy. She was a living Time Lady – artron energy simmered in her body, she existed on a stable timeline with a past stretching behind her and a future awaiting her, wrapping her in potential time energy – and while the tiny chronarachnids that made their homes in nooks and crannies around the Citadel were harmless enough, feeding on stray passing seconds and spinning their webs in the history of the ancient walls, it wasn't hard to imagine that these abominations closing in on her might seek a more substantial prey.
With a gasp, she spun around, only to find the way behind her blocked by just as many chronarachnids as approached from ahead. Relentless, they pressed forwards, forcing her back step by step until she felt her heel come up hard against the rough brickwork of the tunnel wall. Searching frantically beyond the looming wall of swollen bodies swaying on spindly, angular legs, she briefly caught a glimpse of a deepening in the veil of shadows that covered the opposite wall – a hole, a recess just wide and high enough for a person to duck into, like those built into the walls of railway tunnels on Earth for anyone caught unawares by an oncoming train, only deeper.
Before she could even take a step forwards, though, the gap was filled by another chronarachnid dropping from the ceiling – and another, and another, descending on their invisible threads of time. They towered over her, an impassable throng, and translucent legs waved before her eyes as one lowered itself nearly onto her head.
"I deny this reality!" she cried out desperately, throwing up her arms to shield herself from the dangling chronarachnid. "It's all an illusion! I deny it!" Still, it hung there, inching downwards. She couldn't help imagining its thread snapping, sending it dropping directly onto her face – and everyone knew how fragile timelines could be – it was a wonder any thread of time could support the massive creature at all…
Just as one of the two biggest chronarachnids reared up before her, its two front legs planting themselves on the wall either side of her head, something dawned on her.
"Of course…" she breathed. It was as though a light had been switched on and the answer had been revealed standing before her – it should have been so obvious… Chronarachnids fed on time, spun their webs in time, even their bodies were made up of time energy that their unique metabolic processes had solidified into their glassy, fragile exoskeletons – but in the Matrix, there was no time. The chronarachnids apparently descending on threads above her head simply could not exist here.
Lowering her hands, Romana closed her eyes and walked forwards, straight through the impossible chronarachnids and through the doorway in the opposite wall.