Chapter Seven
Someone… there were strange hands on his back, rubbing circles thick with alien care over his protesting muscles, other hands clutching at his body as though he would fall over if they…
"Breathe, Kusabi, breathe. We have found you. Do not open your eyes just yet…" the voices cooed, stumbling over each other, yet they were stiller, more substantial, more real than the silence he could feel all around him.
"Oo, girls girls, is this a massage? I could get used to this…" he murmured softly, blinking as he leaned sleepily into the waiting fingers of Mayu and Miyu. "Oh, yes, yes a little to the left… oh my. I thank you for retrieving me. My spawn would thank you too, but she's fast asleep in my tummy. –Sniff- reminds me of that time with the Star Whale… lovely thing… after everything that was done to it…" Tears leaked from his eyes, and he was happy to let them as the maternal hormones flowed through his system, changing him into something wonderful.
Mayu's voice lingered over his mouth; he could feel her gilly breaths mingling with his own shallow expellations. She smelled, he thought, drifting in a drowse, of seaweed crisps and Butalbian Prongfish… very tart and sour, just the way he liked that particular dish.
"Is there any of that left? I could do with a bit of a nibble…"
Old Mayu's scorching reproach flared across his face like hot air from a steam vent. "You no eat my lunch! Freeloader!" She scowled, her toad face scrunching with great difficulty into something resembling a moldy buttermilk roll; moldy in that the color of her face was anything but healthy for a good, tart sour milk dough.
"Oh well fine! Be that way. Pregnant Time Lord doesn't want your nasty fish and chips, anyway! Ho di ho ho ho!"
Miyu came up beside where he lay on some pillows and ministered, applying a cold lemon compress to his forehead with one froggy hand and pressing the other to his stomach. "You must realize it now, that your baby has grown. It is not the same moment you fell asleep in, Time Lord. Be careful, if you must go back into the Maze. My sister and I recognize the miracle of your condition, and would be distressed should anything befall your child."
He reached for his belly, touched the three-month bulge through his shirt. Gingerly he examined the deliciously tactile swell that hadn't been there what he'd thought had been a day ago, and sighed in wonder. "Temporal diffusion bubble, yes? Maintained in this dimension by a….ah, let me think, let me think… triple induction manifold release adapter? With a... oh you know, one of those little thingies that are all shiny and you put them up the exhaust pipe of a… oooh." He rubbed at his body as a twinge fluttered through his waist. "Ohh, she kicked me! That is just… well bloody amazing's what it is. Damn bloody amazing. But, ah, ladies?" He mock swooned like a thirties Earth flapper, going in for a bit of drama as the two Trinomian women stared at him, then turned in unison to shiver and shake in the direction of the door he believed they might well have hauled him in from.
"Why are you two so nervous? You saved me and my child, I owe you my thanks, but please. I need you to tell me what's happening. I can't save everyone and the time tot too if I don't have the foggiest notion as to what is taking place! Come on you two! I need numbers, pictures, facts and figures, ideas, actual verbage! Come on!" He yelled excitedly, drumming his hands on his legs as he stood up, careful to keep his green eyes shut against whatever might be streaming in from the door. Probably background spatial radiation from the temporal matrix of this big old device, he reasoned as he played pin the tail on the extraspatial portal by wobbling toward the door, barefoot and pregnant with his own strong hand over his eyes.
But the two women never answered; they only looked on, their blind white eyes cold on his back like frozen pearls in the dark. Wait… if his eyes were still closed, why could he see them?
He turned, feeling his flesh grow pale as he swore to remove his fingers before the Trinomians could react. And as he moved, ever so slowly, he felt them also move… nimble as feathers toward him… he peeled his fingers away from his brow one by trembling one, until all that was left was to open his eyes and-
"Don't go Doctor!"
"You can't go Doctor!"
"Don't leave us, Last Son of Gallifrey…"
"We can take care of you… take care of your child…"
"Let us keep you sane…"
"Let us show you…"
"Let us show you…"
"How we died…"
Then the two women ran madly toward him, hands outstretched as they shoved him out the door; all three of them vanished into the light outside that small portal, vanished into the light of an otherworldly day.
He fell and fell…
And fell.