Chapter 7:
"Eat not the bread of an Evil Eye."
-Proverbs.
The Doctor easily slipped back into the corridors of the Feathered Sun. In minutes he was almost a kilometer away from his rooms. After a quick examination of the wall maps he realized he was better off with ignoring them. There was enough to this ship that the most surprising things about it shouldn't be trusted. Going by his innate sense of direction he nipped into the nearest lift and pressed the most interesting-looking button. If he were to judge the glyph by most 3-Z's lingua franca, it would take him to the Core Deck.
It was a common misconception that ships kept their brains in the center (the intersection of the transverse, coronal and sagittal planes) of the vessel. What was logic to a being that had evolved with its heart and brain inside the most protected parts of its body was not the same as logic for a machine.
A ship's brain had to be not only where there was decent protection…but optimum data input.
That meant the brain had to be close to any part of the ship where there was the majority of scanning and sensory mechanics.
If I'm to get some answers, I'll just have to go to the source, he shook his head at the waste of—parding the expression—time, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. His own reflection twinkled back at him in the highly polished dark glasstic of the lift. Bored, he watched himself for lack of anything better to do as he went on his merry way.
Getting greyer. It's just starting to show. How many years have I been working for them?
He knew the official answer, and if he'd not been off-planet from his own people so long he would have believed it. But the handful of years' accounting of his work didn't factor for the impressions and talents he'd collected (many of them unknowingly) as he'd lived as a fugitive.
It made him nervous to think about; in the dark privacy of his thoughts he wondered how much of a Time Lord he really was. In comparison to his people he'd never been a good Time Lord. Rassilon! He'd rarely even made a good Gallifreyan!
But he'd tried.
As he suspected, the lift dropped down, into the coronal plane of the ship.
The Doctor stepped into a half-lit, shadowy zone with just barely enough oxygen to keep up the life support. He rubbed his hands together in satisfaction to see the illumination coming from an entire wall of dials, levers and graphs. This was a portion of the ship's brain—one concentrating on "life support" but it would be more accurate to call it "ship's support".
As he'd thought. The majority of information sensors was coming from the docking portion of the ship—the front-lower portion. The pinhole had been attacking the coronal inferior—which was the least likely portion of the ship to attain damage during an attack. But the pinhole, whilst having some awareness, wasn't tactically aware. It had gone after the poor ship with intention if not strategy.
He was going to find out a few things.
He fished in his pockets, humming scraps from "The Poacher" under his breath, and found a small memory-disk next to his SSD. He frowned at the nasty little bit of Time Lord technology, but dutifully attached it to an obliging data port. The plastique-metal conductor tips molded itself to fit into the Third Zone-built computer, convincing the stupid machine it was an approved and legal piece of equipment from its own crew. The Data relay chirruped like a small bird, happy to fulfill the polite request for a data copy.
The Doctor glanced down, tapping his toe nervously to the floor, and pushed up his overlarge sleeve, checking the time on his wristwatch. Unlike the pocket-watch of his predecessor he still kept, this one worked most of the time.
A complete breakdown of the information required going back to his TARDIS. He was worried about his ability to get there without being seen. Even his luck couldn't last forever, and he was already too lucky for comfort.
CHEEP.
All present and accounted for, the now-fat and full datadisk made a sound that could have passed for a hiccup. The Doctor plucked it off the wall, noting it was a gram heavier with all the illicit information. A part of him wondered how the Time Lords would use this data for their own nefarious ends, and could only hope they wouldn't be interested enough to do so.
Still, that was a whole gram's worth of information...he hadn't thought a freighter ship could hold that much memory in its banks.
Too many mysteries.
He shook his head, flipping his thick hair from one side and then the other, and slipped the disk inside one of his many secret pockets. This one was a mirrored-pouch sewn directly behind the basted cut where a flower-stem would rest.
One of these days, he worried, Sardon would find out how easily he was hacking into the computers on Gallifrey.
Right, time to get out of here...
He walked quickly back across the dimly lit floor, but paused before his hand could manually summon the lift doors. He paused, his shoulders squaring.
He looked down.
His hands were shaking. The hairs were standing straight up.
All the way up his arms, across his neck, and down his back. He shivered as the sensation spread to the top of his skull and, instead of diminishing, grew more powerful.
The little Time Lord didn't move at first. He controlled his breathing and rising sense of warning panic in his chest, and slowly, slowly, turned his head.
No Daleks.
He didn't know if he ought to be relieved or disappointed: Daleks could sense him as much as he could sense their icy, tangled lumps of hate. It all stemmed from that first, all-encompassing encounter on Skaro. Like a chick imprinting upon the first face as its mother, the Doctor had slowly realized that for good or ill, he would be the enemy of the Daleks, and they would be his.
His psychic abilities slowly grew after that—long-buried primitive instincts of his people, boxed up and made dormant for millions of years. When Science replaced Magic, many things went to sleep inside their bodies and minds.
Waiting.
Sardon was more right than he knew. The Doctor hadn't realized he'd changed so much from his people.
From the Daleks he grew to be aware of other things: WOTAN. Cybermen (never as well as Daleks), alien minds across the Galaxies. And the more he encountered them, the harder it was to ignore the need to interfere.
Because this prickling dread, this unique sensation in the presence of evil, was as intolerable as a warped tuning-fork. A song out of true. A wrongness.
The feeling terrified him, but he did not have it in himself to walk away from it.
Did this have something to do with the Heed? A race that must be known by another name because he'd not heard of it before. Phix had been terrified of disappointing them. And he seemed to think they would be disappointed.
He started walking to the source of the feeling.
INCOMING TRANSMISSION.
RECIEVED.
QUEUED.
PREPARE FOR BOARDING AT STATED DEADLINE.
MANIFOLD ATTACHED.
TRANSMISSION CLOSED.
RECEIVED.
QUEUED.
"That's...interesting..?" The little Time Lord commented quietly under his breath. In contrast to the better-let corridors of his earlier snooping-about, these was a polarized opposite: The halls were wrapped in profound gloom. There were no lumen available along the sides of the walls. It was all darkness, ineffectually lit by the pitiable 37+ candlelight of the lift's sensors.
But despite the visual quiet, there was plenty going on as far as the ship's command programming was concerned.
Captain's odd, half-kiltered voice was putting out the orders right and left:
"Core Deck, Codifying District A-4. Report, Engineer."
"Engineer reporting. Codifying."
"Captain awaits."
"Engineer responds. Completed."
"Captain resumes. Completed."
"Engineer awaits."
"Captain to Engineer. Codifying District A-5."
"Engineer responds. Codifying."
"Completed."
"Completed."
"Codifying…"
Captain's electronic voice blended with the harsher and less harmonic patterns of Engineer's synthetic voice. The Doctor found himself actually preferring the latter's because it was less…human. Captain's voice betrayed a more expensive program that interacted with its sentient creators more. It irritated him because it reminded him of beings who were otherwise intelligent but also falsely emotional.
Still, the ship's computer's resemblance to some sort of intergalactic salesman/con artist was less important than his irritation. He had work to do, that princkling dread was getting stronger...and he had a feeling he was running out of time.
Gallifrey:
"That's it?"
Sardon met the disbelief with a weary patience. It was all the lot of being in his post.
"It is fully functional." He said of the large, metal and glass torus now dominating the wall.
"Just how old is that thing?"
To be fair, Goth didn't seem at all offended, just fascinated. He ignored the ripples of offense by the others and studied the battered old antique of a Visualizer with an openly curious expression.
"That depends on which part of it you mean, I'm afraid." Sardon confessed. "It's been assembled from different models and different parts from across the galaxies." He took a deep, deep breath. "It is a monochromatic viewer. In the old days color spectrum recording required the use of precious crystals and a terrific output of power. That's why there are more surviving older models than the make that followed." He turned to see the technicians arriving. "Ah, just in time."
The tech was an old veteran of the Agency who had chosen to wear her third body as a mature young woman. Only an antique necklace about her throat marked her outside of the "fully functional and only functional" mentality. She had lived very sensibly, and her 25,000 years were well set upon her shoulders. Her projection was stern and sober and a little intimidating—which was comforting to the Committee. They liked assurance in their workers.
"I shall have to open up the calibrators as soon as the machine is online," she said without preamble. "It will take a few minutes but I have worked with this model before and I am familiar with its logic programs." She quickly opened the main hatch and started digging.
Jokul spoke up for the first time in many long minutes. "You are Karnack?"
She did not pause. "Yes, sir." She said calmly.
Jokul nodded but said nothing.
Sardon relaxed a bit. Most Gallifreyans did not flaunt their foreign blood. In Karnack's case it was necessary. Her mother's race had been more than a little psychic and that people considered it mannerly to warn less telepathically-gifted species.
He noted Goth was studying the necklace, doubtless reassured that the dull yellow meant her psychic intellect was properly at rest. Karnack's skills as a technician were why she was such a valuable worker; her telepathy was useful when she encountered telepathic circuits that wanted to tell their masters they were sick or injured.
And she was about 50,000 years old, which meant she was certainly and without a doubt well-assured of her place in society.
A crackling, popping snarl erupted from the TSV, and the screen struggled to life.
The Doctor's journey had taken him to the far side of the computer room and a heavy door, well sealed against casual entry. Since its discovery, he had spent his time constructively in a sincere effort to figure out what was on the other side. "Hmn." The Doctor hummed under his breath as he puttered through the manifold. "Interesting," he said quietly. "'transmission recorded and logged for Captain...'" He stroked his chin thoughtfully. "Very interesting indeed. Why all the bother?" He tinkered here and there with a few relays, frowning in concentration as he did so. "Let's just see where you came from, shall we?"
But even as he did so, a fresh wave of premonition made him shake. He dropped his screwdriver but caught it before it could clang upon the floor just in time. "Oh!" He gasped faintly, and raised up, clutching at his temples with both hands. His eyes squeezed shut, teeth baring against a terrible pressure in his mind. "Oh, dear." He mumbled through his teeth. "Oh, goodness."
Mercifully, the pressure subsided...but just as he started to drop his hands it happened again, stronger than ever. No, wait, this time it was leaving...
The Doctor held his breath, and his brain felt as though his ears were ringing. He took a deep breath. In the wake of that pressure his mind was left temporarily clear. Clear as crystal. Clear as the blue mind-prisms on Metebilis III.
He stared at the sealed door before him.
He tapped out a logic query in Third Zone lingua franca.
The computer answered him.
"The Colonist's supplies." He read aloud. "Well. So that's what all this fuss about the Fourth Charter's about, hmn?" He pressed his fingertip to his mouth in thought. "Very interesting. Very, very interesting. Now what would be so valuable that our friend Phix would be so eager to sieze possession of it? What would be worth such a large commission?"
There was only one way to find out.
Hearts pounding, the Doctor pressed the RELEASE code and leaned with all his weight. The metal protested, but his sturdy little body was the more determined and it gave way in a grinding groan of titanium and vapour-crystals. His breath puffed in the air, once, before his mind registered the deadly temperatures. Holding his breath, the Doctor clapped his silk handkerchief to his lower face and slipped into his Night Vision.
It was dark inside the vault, but the sensation of dread had never been so strong in this body. Not since WOTAN, when he looked down to find the hairs on the backs of his ancient hands standing up in a prescient horror of things to come. His eyes narrowed, searching, not yet ready to seek a light—
There. There! A glimmer of something. Some flicker of illumination, perhaps?
He glanced back, satisfied that the door was too entrenched with ice and atmospheric snow to move without another wrestle. Handkerchief over his nose and mouth, he took a cautious step. His thin leather soles crunched snow-grains, from sand-fine to glassy pebbles. The floor was uneven; too much buildup of cold. How long before its last overhaul? Why wait? Over-frosted refrigeration units made for poor machinery.
There it was again. The glimmer was green, like a firefly's cold chemical lumenscence. Something else glittered here and there, but it looked like the dim reflections of ice-crystals on a lumpy surface. He stepped closer, listening with all his ears for the telltale hum of the Computer's coolant system, but everything was dulled in a coating of ice and snow.
The Doctor paused and knocked on a blocky sheet of ice. The wall. Too lumpy, too uneven. Too many thawing and freezing shifts. This was an intolerable example of shoddy thermodynamic engineering! Whoever was responsible for this—
Aha. He blinked down at the flickering green light. It was small, barely the size of his thumb-nail, and it looked like some sort of glyph.
He brushed his hand across the snow over it, and scowled to see he'd only cleared the snow that was hiding the thick plate of ice beneath. Or glass? Too cold to tell, and he didn't want to tell by tasting… He rapped the ice with the rim of his metal wristwatch, satisfied at the lack of an echo. Ice. That might possibly make it easier to work with…
He lowered himself on one knee so he could examine what he could of the glyph. Some sort of timing device. Small, though. Most Third Zoning Technology was not only built on triangles, it was a bit…well, pretentious. Probably a sad relic of their close-cultural ties with Gallifrey. Hmph. Well, he needed to figure out what this little fellow was; it would help him orient on where to go in this frozen maze!
Over his head a compressor kicked in, and a thick, fine rain of white snow glittered down.
"Oh, my giddy aunt." He grumbled under his breath. "If it isn't raining, it's snowing." Or something like that. He fished his predecessor's dignified old pocket-watch out of his pocket and snapped the lid open. A touch here and there, and the crystal lens was before his eye. Using the slight magnification, he frowned at the slowly-sharpening blur of glowing shape.
"Numerals, but not to this Time Zone…" He whispered. "Not even in this galactic zone." He held his breath and pressed his ear to the sheet of ice, eyes closed, straining to listen. He had to slow his hearts, which took too long, but he finally managed to pick out the lace-delicate thrum and throb of a timepiece assembled by a crystal that owed its birth to the Horsehead Nebulae.
"Wrong part of Mutter's Spiral. Altinak's crystal… there's no sense in using an incompatibly-charged time-piece in a ship…" The Doctor scowled, flipping the snow out of his dark hair angrily. "No sense. Unless this isn't part of the ship at all…"
He found another treasure in his pocket: The delightfully dangerous hydrogen smoking-lighter the Old Doctor carried (for defense more than for actual need). He found the settings by fingers and memory, and tipped the gauge up, ground his thumb deeply into the tiny flintlock wheel, and struck sparks into flame, flooding the frozen cavern into a single moment of clarity.
The numbers were not a Ship's Time-Piece.
They were a personal Time-piece designed for a humanoid wrist.
And the wrist was still with the Time-piece.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
Despite his exhaustion, the Brigadier had managed to keep up with the indefatigable alien through the labyrinthine twists and turns of the ice caverns. This was no small feat; the Doctor's body was bigger this time around, and his legs longer: a roaring giant who used his stride and coordination to good advantage. And he seemed as tireless in this bigger body as he had been in the first form the soldier had learned.
But the Doctor stopped without warning, and the Brig had damned near hit his shoulderblades with his face from the suddenness. A 'what is it?' almost escaped his teeth before his soldier's instincts kicked in: the Doctor was frozen stiffer than one of the icicles upon the cavern walls.
The Brigadier waited a moment, listening around the pounding of his heart as steam boiled off his warmer body but the other man was still not moving, not speaking, not doing anything. He was just standing there with his torch beaming off into the violet-blue space of the ice cave.
In the freezing mists, the Brig hesitated, his instincts honed keen for trouble. At least he slipped his weight to his right and leaned forward, peering over the taller shoulder. They were close enough in the darkness that he could smell the alien: ions after a storm, and late English roses blooming in the smoky twilight of autumn before the first frost.
"Doctor?" The Brigadier whispered. His eyes narrowed, peering into the gloaming, analyzing the landscape of ice-clad stones and boulders and Pleistocene-swallowed trees. A time capsule beneath the earth, nothing they hadn't seen before—
Something different about the lumps under the ice.
Different and wrong.
The human held his breath. Something glinted on the other side of the ice. Something shiny. Metal.
He gasped.
The Doctor was freed from the sound. He shook his head, unaware of the killing frost trying to settle into his wild, white thistledown hair. "Oh, dear." He whispered. "Dear, oh, dear, oh dear."
"Doctor!" The human grabbed his torch-free arm. "There must be hundreds of bodies!"
"Thousands, Brigadier." The Doctor corrected dully. "Humans. Silurians. Sea-Devils. Even some proto-Humans."
"But to what purpose?" The Brig hissed. He couldn't remember being so unnerved in his entire life, and that made him want to hit something. "Why all of these bodies brought here so carefully? Is it a tomb?"
"I wish it were, Brigadier." The Doctor was still using that horrid, flat, soulless voice. The Brig dearly wanted to shake him out of it.
And then he realized what the Doctor was saying.
Bodies in ice. If it wasn't a tomb, then they were in a cryovault of some sort, and if they weren't in a cryovault of some sort…
…they were in a larder.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
The Doctor flinched, almost dropping the deadly wire clenched in each hand. Before him Sarah and Harry stared, wide-eyed and battered.
"Doctor?"
Sarah.
"What are you waiting for?"
Images of dead Kaleds and Kaled mutants swarmed over his head like the mist the Time Lords had trapped him in.
Mist. Cold, just degrees from freezing.
Frozen men and women of Skaro, piled like firewood.
"Just touch these two strands together and the Daleks are finished. Have I that right?"
"To destroy the Daleks?" Sarah's small body shivered. "You can't doubt it."
Somewhere Time and Space:
The Doctor stares at the flaccid corpses, the ruin, the desolation. His memory is not something he always consults, but ever since Borusa's Game in the Death Zone, he seems to remember more about his past lives than he really ought.
Death looms in his memory—his collective memory—Silurans, Cybermen, Daleks, Kaleds, Rutans, Ice Warriors…over and over and over, a chain that stretches backwards in his personal chronology, but there's something terrible about the chill bodies before him, a glimmer of something terrible that he knows he must not remember, something too terrible and damaging.
"Did I succeed?" He whispers, trying to acknowledge the poor snuffed-out life of Vorshak.
"Yes." Tegan chokes.
"They're all dead, you know." Turlough is less irrepressible. The weight of the room—the gravity of the dead has stifled even his alien ethics.
"There should have been another way." The Doctor whispers.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
The Doctor hears Peri trying not to be sick, and for all of his cleverness, his infinite wit and saeva indignato, he has to admit that anything he could say at this moment would be altiloquence at its most offensive.
The dead of Miasmia Goria give no opinion as to how the newcomers are impressed. On a planet such as this, the only intruders are the living, unconsciously disturbing the dead.
And yet the most terrible fact is it seems somehow…that…impossible that it would be…he's seen this before. This endless vista of life-shattered skeletons, broken trees, the eternal churning of mindless factories, powered to last until the planet's resources are stripped to the last chemical reaction. The effluum of said reactions gently snow white, chilly ashes upon a bitterly cold landscape.
"Great sorrows cannot speak," The Doctor whispers, appalled at himself as much as what he sees. Why can't he react? Why can't he do more?
But there are no answers in this cold, barren corpse of a planet. Just snow and false precipitation and a psychic bitterness that empties itself into one's very soul.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
Ace is surprised into a shriek as the Doctor stumbles in mid-step over the dead of S'rax.
"I'm all right, Ace," He says wearily, but his voice is suddenly off.
"What happened there, Professor?" The girl worries about him, but there's nothing for it.
Behind them the Brigadier is coming up, heavy and patient with age—odd how the old soldier never seemed "patient" when he was young, but Time has a way of burning out the non-essentials, and this is a facet of the man the Doctor likes. He's unexpectedly clever when he has to be, and not for the first time he wishes he could have gone travelling with him just a bit longer…
Oh, right. That hasn't happened yet-
The Doctor bangs his temple with the heel of his hand, hoping to dislodge the thought. Very distracting to be able to glimpse those first eight dimensions simultaneously. Quantum thinking is really (horrors the sacrilege!) more suitable for human brains because humans (unlike Time Lords) generally know when to Stop. They have a built in "enough is enough!" failsafe that really, Gallifrey needs to examine.
"Yessss." The Doctor murmurs, each timed syllable of sound cautiously placed. His normally magnetic eyes are dark, turning inward. "Just a moment out of Time, Ace."
"What does that mean?" The girl asks with healthy and well-justified suspicion. "A moment out of Time? You're a flippin' Time Lord! How can there be a moment out of Time!"
Oh, Ace. He smiles at her, so strong and sturdy, she reminds him of another young girl of Long Ago, when he was a Doctor scarce recognizable from the Doctor he is today.
"Careful, Doctor." The Brigadier is dirty, battered, and a bit of flash-burn has given him a temporary sun-tan along one cheek. "I don't fancy walking across the field through this, but…"
"Quite all right, Brigadier." The Doctor says quickly. A bit too quickly. Ace is still too young and trusting. Not so the Brigadier, who trusts him but knows there are times in which trust has to go flying.
"Let's be careful." The big human rests his hand on the smaller people and gently presses them aside. "After all this, we needn't see either of you come to harm." He gives them both a stern look, and even Ace pauses in her quick protest. "I've survived too many friends, young lady." He says in a voice to match his demeanor. "I shan't survive two more today if I can avoid it."
"They're S'rax, not likely to keep bombs about them to explode after death. That would be dishonourable."
"Then you'll humour an old soldier on his last mission."
And the Brigadier quietly strolls forward, into the gently rolling fog. Before them lie the prostrate corpses of UNIT and S'rax alike, unified in death and freezing white chill.
"Goose on your grave, Doctor?" The Brigadier asks quietly, and absurdly, the Doctor knows somehow, that the Brig knows the Doctor is feeling this strange, suspension between Time and Worlds in this cold, white misty plain of silent dead.
"Probably a yeti," The Doctor shot back, and the old humor, the gentle pun, is a spark of warmth that blooms against the crushing cold.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
The Doctor stares at the steaming cup before his face. It crosses his mind that it is POSSIBLE that the High Priestess is waiting for a Specific Action, but he doesn't have it to give.
Really, you know, he ought to point out the silliness of the matter. He's older and wrapped heel to shin with laced-up footwear.
The smoking cup curls about his chin, and it carries the scent of utter terror with it. In the whiteness he sees half-remembered phantoms and coiling wraiths and Reality-spun webs of things long dead.
Karn is warm three months out of the year, including this portion, but a chill has leeched into his very bones. It is the chill of death, and the cup burns his hands, promising the deepest cold of all: The cold of death that makes him think of the Fields of Bone, and the crumpled, empty husks of life spent and tossed aside like carrion-dolls, side by side with the crushed ruins of Dalek shells and green spilt mutant writhing inside their metal pods.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
The War Doctor flinches backward, pulling his black woolen cloak about him against the rain. He can smell the drop in temperature. The rain will turn to sleet; then to snow.
He is not easy within his skin. His body is still fairly new…but that isn't the problem so much as what he's seeing. The freezing advection fog moves with almost a sentient intelligence, pulling at the frail warmth of torches and temple lanterns.
The dying race of the Roman Britons are unaware of this—or more likely, being Romans, they aren't going to give elementals the satisfaction of besting their morale. They are at a funeral after all, and all must be proper at a funeral.
He presses his back against the withering stone front of the Bath-house, and watches as the Funeral of Ghosts pass by: mourners clad in shrouds, beholding tall poles in their hands that support a death-mask of an ancestor to the House.
There are scores of these frozen, wax-coated faces of the dead mounted on poles, wrapped in linen shrouds as much as swirling fog.
It makes him feel colder than he ever wants to feel.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
The Doctor is confused.
He is about to step out of the TARDIS into the beckoning snowfall.
But something stops him.
Is it the cold, the whiteness?
The way the alien moons shine upon the endless plains of thousand-year glaciers?
He isn't sure.
But he listens to his instincts, and unlike some of his younger and less-responsible incarnations, he can admit when he's out of his depth.
He listens now. He steps back inside his TARDIS, and soon after goes to sleep because he's still utterly, fantastically exhausted from the after-shocks of the Time War. It took him centuries to attune to the resonation of his people's minds…and now there's nothing.
So…he sleeps. And he dreams of dead faces, frozen and mute and still asking for help under miles of pale blue ice. They look like humans, Silurians, Denisovians, Minyans…and Time Lords. Lots of Time Lords. Children.
The next day when he wakes up, it's to poke his head out of the TARDIS and find that the Illusion Field the Moroks threw over the TARDIS has cracked under the strain of the cold. There must be at least three thousand bodies lying in the bottom of the chasm just below the doorway of his Timeship. A mass grave for one of their more contemptible wars.
"FAN-tastic," he scowls down at the horror.
Resolve tightens his face. He glares at the cold tin-metal sky. The Moroks are going to be very, very sorry. He just laid genocide upon his own people and his oldest of foes. He isn't going to hesitate to place the law over the Moroks.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
The Doctor does not ever want to return to Midnight ever again, but he knows he must.
It's what the entity said, you know.
"Oh, it was so cold."
The Doctor is fundamentally terrified of going back, but someday he will.
He's waited so long.
In the dark.
And the cold.
"Bodies so hot…" The Doctor whispers to himself, and he hopes to Rassilon that Donna is not having one of her rare insomnia moments because this is not a good time to come in on him. She's too good and seeing through him, too sharp at knowing what he's really feeling as opposed to what he's saying.
"Bodies so hot," he whispers again, burning every terrible second to his memory, as well as the name of the Hostess who gave her life to save all of them—to save him. He must not forget this…not ever, not ever.
"Bodies so hot. With blood. And pain. The starlight waits. And the emptiness."
But despite his noble intentions, a Noble finds him. Donna has always known him better than he lets himself know himself. And when she sees him bowed up on the floor by the Console, she doesn't have to speak. Speaking is ridiculous at times. She just kneels down and hugs him, warmth to warmth and friend to friend.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
The Doctor pauses in the middle of his strategic tactical advance in reverse.
What is it about those carnivorous snowmen?
Oh, but there's no time. Whenever he thinks about it, there's something about the cold and the snow and death at night that BURNS his memory. It makes him want to stop…and REMEMBER.
But he doesn't have time to remember.
So he keeps running.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
He's still running sporadic fevers from his recent regeneration and Clara's confusion is matching his own.
But his bewildered brain is telling him that waiting out here at night under the snowfall is an historically Bad Idea. A very, very Bad Idea.
He likes the snow. He remembers that.
But right now (wherever now is), it's not a good idea.
He listens to that part of his brain.
He returns to the warmth and the light.
Especially the warmth.
"Rheumatism," he mutters. "The cold always brings a touch of it out…" He stops, and remembers something…odd. Something…
A Museum. Being frozen. Awake and conscious in his brain, but to all appearances dead and inert of the body.
The Doctor shivers.
And seeks the warmth.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
Jamie McCrimmon yelps in shock and leaps forward, grabbing the solid little body before him. The Doctor is a dead weight, his snapping green eyes glassed-over and dulled, like the shade of apple leaves plucked and left to wither dead under the sun. He knows it is a risky thing, but he lowers the clever wee chappie to the frozen earth under the monoliths.
"Doctair?" The old Piper makes a rune of his name, prays that God enfold them into the Three, and cradles the limp body to his chest. Oh, Doctair.
Jamie's aged heart thumps in its chest. He doesn't feel like an old man tho' he looks it, and this is like those terrible days of yore when some deadly, unsainly thing was slavering after his friend.
"Och, Doctair." Jamie counts the steady, slow pulse beneath the skin of the throat, but the eyes are still open and flat, and the face slack. Even the Doctor's hair, that glorious, snow-white mane has tarnished under the shock of the alien light-beam.
His hearts are beating. That means much.
The Piper waits, clocking Time with his one single heartbeat. About them in the cold sere dawn of the planet, the Monoliths of Eternity loom about them.
Finally, a spark lights deep within those sea-jade depths, and the Doctor stirs with a groan.
"Oh…" The Doctor grabs at him. Holds him tight. "Oh, Jamie…" He breathes, and to the Piper's surprise, cradles him like a father to a son. "Jamie, I thought you were dead." He gasped.
"Aye, well, not just yet." Jamie makes light of it. "What happened, Doctor? Where did ye get tae?"
"Defense mechanism." The Doctor explains faintly. "A random program. You don't know what horrid memory it's going to pull out of you—you just know it's going to be a bad one!" He shivered all over. "Oh, that was a bad one. I wouldn't be surprised if my otherselves felt an echo!"
The old Piper waits, but no more explanations come from the Time Lord.
The cold wind blows about them, two men, both alien to each other's species, small and old and white-haired. Against the monstrousness of the monoliths, they look like ridiculous contenders to the ancient evil inside it…and yet they are the ones who have gotten further than anyone else in the Universes.
And they have the best chance of defeating this particular brand of evil.
"We should keep going." The Doctor says at last.
"Aye." Jamie nods in relief. He may be older, but inaction has never gotten less uncomfortable for him. The nocturnal winds kick up, smelling of spice and death and old hunger. He grips the Time Lord's shoulder, feeling the warmth sleeping deep under the layers of battered old coat. Time Lord. The Doctor doesn't like to be called a Time Lord any more. But Jamie hopes that can be reconciled someday. Even if being declared a True Exile means being with Jamie, there's nothing as painful as being excommunicated from your people, and he doesn't want the Doctor to wear that scar.
The Doctor catches his breath, and puts his small hand over Jamie's. Arthritis wears their joints now, slows their reflexes. This is all down to a fight of mind and will. The Piper can hear the storm, oncoming.
They step together through the Gate to the Monolith.
Somewhere in Time and Space:
The Doctor's body is wearing thin.
He is cold.
Very cold.
It is difficult to hold on to himself, but he needs to; the TARDIS is calling him so strongly he can't disobey. She's never done this before...he's heard of this phenomenon, and a part of him is surprised and pleased at the proof of their bond. He hasn't treated her as well as he could; that sabotage with the mercury...hiding in primitive times where the technology wasn't there to help her repair and heal. Not to mention his body. He doesn't have the dexterity of his youth, can't perform the complex maintenance repairs she deserves.
But she doesn't hate him for it.
She's calling him, helping him, and he won't be going through his first regeneration alone. An awful relief swamps his soul and he strumbles in the ice and the snow. The storm is howling like Grim Death over his head, and the bitter snows cut at his flesh.
The dead rest below him, under his hands. Frozen still, ice-bleached of blood and white but not clean; never clean. Should the Cybermen have won...
He falls to his knees, gasping in pain.
Oh, this poor, poor body.
But if he's to be the Doctor, he must keep going.
He keeps going.
Back in Time and Space:
The Doctor slams the door of the freezer with all his power. His chest burns from the pressure of the extreme cold. It's nothing compared to the cold inside his hearts.
He hasn't been this terrified since he summoned the Time Lords. His legs are even shaking. The panic threatens to swamp him. He swallows hard, and frantically re-seals the lock on the door, then thinks twice and re-works the coding so the computer can't register that anyone ever looked inside it.
He's going to have to be very, very, very, very, very careful.
There's a very slight chance that these poor Colonists are actually salvageable. Slight—but there. That means he has to concentrate not on the obvious maneuver of exposing this terrible crime to the Galaxies, but on rescuing them.
He doesn't dare get caught.
There's plenty of room for one more in that freezer.