Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who.
The Doctor blinked.
Now that was wrong.
He shouldn't have been able to do anything at all. He was dead. He blinked again, the murkiness pressing his vision lifted a little. Maybe this is where past lives went when they died, continuing on tucked away in some dark corner of a Time Lord's brain. He shuddered. He was past. He was dead. He hadn't thought much about the regeneration process when he was younger, or what might lie beyond for the burned-out lives. It hadn't seemed like death then.
He extended a hand in front of his face. Through the gloom, he saw four absurdly long fingers waving in front of his eyes. Four fingers and one thumb. It was the same with the other hand. Tousling his hair, he felt the wild brush that he'd had since before Martha. And though he couldn't see it, he wagered it still wasn't ginger.
He was still him, was still the Doctor.
Pursing his lips together, he paused. Well, he was always the Doctor even when he wasn't him. When he died he'd still have been the Doctor, he just wouldn't have been him.
Wibeldy-wobbedly pronouns, he thought as his mind lost the burning sensation. Tenth, I'm the tenth one. He mentally checked off where this body fell in the succession of his lives. How strange that ten different, brilliant men—for despite what he'd told Rose, they were different in a way—should all share the same name and then be relegated to a number because of it. You die and you cease being the Doctor, he thought vaguely. You become a number…I'm a number. Ten.
Pushing off from the ground, he placed his hands over his hearts. They were beating. Erratic and rapid, but they were beating.
"I'm alive," he whispered. He clasped his throat. Still his voice. "Alive! Love that!" A smile spread across his face. He sank back to the ground and pulled his long knees into his chest. Maybe he wasn't just a number after all. Slow, steady drops darkened the cold ground and splashed across the brown and blue of his suit. He sat in the dark and the silence, and listened to his hearts.
Drawing in a shaking breath, he pulled his hands across his face, wiping them on his pant leg. He was sure he looked a fright, all red eyed and blotchy. Not his finest moment. But it didn't seem to matter since he was alone.
The TARDIS was gone, physically and psychically. An odd numbness lurked in his mind where she should have been; numb, like a wound so deep the body hadn't felt the pain. Yet, he thought, gritting his teeth.
Half-light and darkness encircled him, stretching into nothingness. There was a kind of ground beneath his feet, but it was neither organic nor artificial. It simply was.
For a panicked moment he wondered if perhaps he really was dead and this was some black recess of his mind.
"Are you lost too?" asked a voice.
Smiling in relief, the Doctor turned toward the voice. It carried a female cadence, a young one. This was no strange afterlife for his past selves. He had been many things, but a girl was not one of them.
"I suppose I am," he said, scanning the gloom. "If by lost, you mean not exactly sure where I am." He should be able to see the girl, her voice sounded close. "Where are you?"
"Here." The voice came again. The Doctor could just make out a shape at the edge of the shadows. "Did you follow them? The drums?"
He stiffened. "No. I don't know how I managed to get here."
A pale shadow detached from the darkness. The Doctor looked down into wary eyes as a girl slid forward. Her sallow skin gleamed through smudges of grime and filth. Knobs of scabby knees poked out from beneath the tattered edges of her grubby smock. The hem had been ripped away from the rotting fabric to make a belt, the twist of cloth wrapped three times around the girl's waist.
The Doctor smiled. " 'ello."
"Hello," mumbled the girl, her quick eyes following his movements from behind snarls of sweat slick hair. It could have been a kind of pale blonde, but dirt and ash deadened its true color.
"You're not dead are you?" he asked suddenly. " 'cause me, well, I think I might be. Don't want to be of course, but when you're supposed to be dead and you realize you're not," he clicked his tongue, "it raises some questions."
Stepping back, the girl wrapped her boney arms about herself. Raw, fire blasted fingers clenched dirty elbows.
The Doctor tried to smile again. "Aw, don't mind me. I just like to talk. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk—I'm a first rate rambler." The corner of the girl's lips twitched. It could have been the start of a smile, but it sat in her starved cheeks like a grimace. "I'm the Doctor by the way. And you are?"
The girl glanced away. She kicked at the ground with her bare feet.
"Right then. Do you know where we are?"
The girl nodded.
"Not on Earth I'll wager. Does this place have a name?" The Doctor raised his eyebrows.
The girl shook her head.
Running his hand through his hair so that it stuck out, the Doctor looked down at her. "So you know where we are, but it doesn't have a name? Well then, in this place that has no name, does the sun ever come up?" He hooked his thumbs in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, staring up at the swirling clouds.
"There is no sun," said the girl in little more than whisper. "But there is light." She slunk around the Doctor, keeping feet of the grey murk between them. "Follow me—Doctor."
Gathering his coat about him, the Doctor trailed after the girl. He ran a thumb down the worn fabric of the coat. I don't remember wearing this when I didn't die, he thought.
A wave of darkness washed over him, swallowing the girl's slight form. It weighed him down. The haze twisted around his feet and hung thick before him.
"This stuff is worse than the nomadic fogs of the Triclarion moons." The Doctor paused, his gaze probing. It reminded him a great deal of the living darkness in the Great Library. But, since his skin was still on his bones he doubted this was a pack of Vashta Nerada.
"Don't lose me, Doctor," came the girl's fog-muffled voice.
"I'm rather more afraid of you losing me," said the Doctor, still scanning the shadows. He glanced down. A splotch of red marred the not-ground. A little footprint. Cautious, he followed the crimson stain. The bloody smudges led into soft drifts of ash, the piles deepening about his trainers and rising in little drifting clouds with every step.
The fog began to thin. Ahead, a cold light seeped through the fog. The last shreds of darkness gave way to the misty light, and the Doctor stepped into what looked like a clearing. It was little more than an expanse of drifting ash. The dark fogs lapped at the clearing's edge, held at bay by the weak light.
A handful of skeletal trees, white flesh stripped of bark and leaves, careened out of the shadows, the mist snagged in veils between their brittle fingers. A tumbled heap of fire blackened stones scattered across the clearing; swells of grey flakes piled against their sooty sides.
"Cheery," said the Doctor, his gaze flicking around the expanse. Crouched on the far side, the girl continued to watch. "Are there other places like this? Clearings, oases, havens," his rattling list of words trailed off as he received no answer, "rest stops."
"What else could there be?" The girl's listless gaze roamed around the dim circle. "There isn't anything. Only darkness and silence."
"What makes this place so special than? There's nothing upon nothing and then suddenly this little patch of something. Where'd it come from?" he asked.
"I made it," said the girl.
"You! Made this?" asked the Doctor, stepping forward. "Clever girl."
The girl darted away and clambered up onto the rocks. She perched among the boulders, ready to throw herself into the darkness.
The Doctor paused, raising his hands in front of him. "Sorry, sorry. Didn't mean to startle you. It's lovely, really, it is. Could use some flowers or trees, though. Perhaps a patch of grass. You could put in a little shop, just there." He pointed beneath the twisted trees. "Why'd you go and choose such glooming scenery?"
The girl blinked. "There is nothing else."
The Doctor motioned toward the girl's raw feet, the skin livid beneath the blacked charcoal of dead flesh. "Right. Care to let me have a look at your feet?" he asked, watching blood ooze down the rocks. "I am a doctor after all."
Again, that wretched smile. "Not that kind."
"And how would you know that?" asked the Doctor, his voice dropping to a cautious lilt.
The girl lapsed into silence and nothing the Doctor said could elicit more than a dead-eyed stare. The ever shifting fogs swirled on. Sitting back, the Doctor's mind churned as he observed the slight figure before him. She appeared to be a little girl, but when he tried to really look at her, his mind glanced off. It was like it couldn't bear to look at the tattered husk. So there he sat, a supposed to be dead man studying a little girl that was and wasn't in a sea of substantial nothingness.
"Where's the light come from if there's no sun?" he asked, cocking his head to the side as he contemplated the shining mists above him.
Shrugging her thin shoulders, the girl looked up at the light. "It just is."
Digging about in his pockets, the Doctor searched for his sonic screwdriver. He patted down his sides and turned out his coat pockets. It wasn't there. Neither was anything else.
"Where's it all got to?" asked the Doctor. "They can't be empty, they just can't." He picked at the inverted lining. "Now this is a very strange thing; this place, my being alive, you—but the strangest of all is my pockets, my empty pockets. You see, they're not quite like regular pockets, or they're not supposed to be—bigger on the inside—but stick your hands in these and you're right to the bottom," he paused to breath, "which means that these are not my clothes. Not an illusion though, very real—just not mine."
This time the girl did smile; a hard, predatory smile. She pushed her stringy hair away from her face. Her brows furrowed over her snub of a nose. "You're quick to spot the imperfection."She darted across the space, her movements just a little too quick. Her eyes roved over the Doctor's face. "Still not quite right."
Reaching up, she could just brush her fingers along the Doctor's jaw. Her touch burned like ice. The Doctor jerked back, swallowing a groan. Pain sliced through his flesh; he was falling through the glass dome all over again. His limbs collapsed as he fell into the ash. Blood splashed across his hand, oozing from the cuts slashed across his face.
The girl's lips spread wide over little teeth, her eyes glinting in the dead light. "You took a nasty fall, Doctor." She drug her finger through one of the cuts as the Doctor looked up at her, his jaw clenched. She stuck her finger between her cracked lips and sucked it clean. "I like the look of it on you. Battle scars for the warrior of Gallifrey."
"What are you?" growled the Doctor, his brows snapping down.
"You're not going to invoke the Shadow Proclamation?" The girl pouted, her expressions twisting across her face in a mockery of humanity. "That's your back up plan isn't it? When the name of the last Time Lord doesn't strike fear." She swung her head downward, staring through her tangle of hair. "I tremble, Doctor," she said, deadpan.
The Doctor held her gaze with his own, staring into her sea grey eyes. "You know me, know that I can help. Let me help you."
"You wouldn't offer if you knew. We're already enemies, Doctor, enemies and allies." She shoved back her hair. "I'd never take help from you." Straightening, the girl's eyes rolled back in her head, the whites gleaming through her ragged lashes.
A wound in time tore open, never healing, always oozing. The perversion drove the Doctor to his knees. Knotted deep at the core of the maiming, he could feel the mutilated cords of broken timelines. The devoured possibilities of whole planets screamed. The gapping tear spat up deformed shadows and half-lives.
Raising his head, the Doctor forced himself to meet the girl's eyes. She was wrong. Looking at her drove nails through him. In the shadows of her eyes, Gallifrey burned, the red grass caught to cinder. Armies shrugged off death, twisted body and mind by the wrenching flow of time. Reality ripped open, spewing fleets of ships and never-meant creatures. He saw Hell. Hot wind scorched his face and the scent of charred flesh wormed into his mouth and nose. The Doctor tore his gaze away and focused on the ground, counting the ashy flakes.
The girl's shadow stretched long behind her, too long. It twisted and writhed. Needle-toothed horrors burst from its darkness, thrashing for an instant before the turmoil yanked them back, only to emerge as a terror with a new face. The shadow leapt into the fog.
"Do you know me now, Time Lord?" asked the girl. Her nostrils flared. "The scent of your fear. Incense for your Nightmare Child."
Bile crept into his throat as the Doctor buried his head in his shoulder. Drawing in haggard breaths, he swallowed hard, closing his eyes against the taint. Time roared. It crashed against itself, boiling away the past and the future, leaving only the charred brittle of the present.
One of his hearts seized. He dug into the ash with his long fingers. Gasping, he forced words onto a dry tongue. "Stop," he croaked, "stop, please, just stop."
"You once boasted that you looked on the Nightmare Child and laughed," said the girl, her young voice tinged with a dark echo. "Go on then Doctor, look on me and laugh—look at me!"
The Doctor crumpled to the ground, curled beneath the wrenching of time as it sliced through his body. His head rung with screams. He wrapped his hands around his ears.
"Please…please," he whispered.
The flow of time stilled and the voices in his head receded. The girl stood over him; her dark rimmed eyes once more grey glass. Her umbilical cord of darkness still stretched into the nothingness, just a shadow. The twisted horrors evaporated.
"You should have told them you laughed in despair." She watched him, unblinking. "Even the last of the Time Lords fears the Nightmare Child."
Uncurling, the Doctor staggered to his feet, absently brushing the blood from his face. He could look at her now, but his body raged with the memory of that sucking wound.
She was right. She did frighten him—and not in the adrenaline pumping way he loved. She was bone rending terror. He couldn't forget that terror; even veiled as a little girl with deep bruised, staring eyes.
He swallowed. "This is new," he said offhand, with a vague gesture. He almost succeeded in keeping the tremor from his voice. "The whole little matchstick girl look. Very Hans Christian Anderson."
Her lips twisted. "I am how I am."
"I saw you at the Battle of the Elysium Gates," he pursed his lips together, "the Nightmare Child swallowed whole ships. A rent that blotted out the stars. You stretched across two systems."
The girl inclined her head. She twitched her hand up, fingers ratcheting closed as she examined them. "I have always had this puppet flesh." She froze and her mouth twisted. "You tried to stop me from devouring Davros' ship." A cracking, hollow sound slipped from between her lips. "What kind of warrior tries to save their enemy? Another succeeded where you failed. Dalek Khan snatched Davros away." She snarled. "Davros was meant to die in the Time War."Running her tongue along her teeth, she shuddered. "The taste of spoiled inevitability."
"I had nothing to do with that," said the Doctor, his eyebrows disappearing into his ruffled hair. "That was all Khan's doing."
Settling back on the rocks, the girl looked up at the silver light. "Tell me Doctor, whose negligence allowed the Cult of Skaro to escape Canary Warf and allowed Dalek Khan to make his mad flight through time?"
"Allowed? I tried…"
"You. Failed," the girl spat. "And your actions nearly cost the universe its existence," she scented the air. "But in the end the cost was still high. The fiery one, she burned, your mind burned her up. You did this to her, to your…friend is the word."
The Doctor drew himself up, looming over the child. The muscles in his jaw tightened. "You don't talk about her."
Flicking her gaze up, the girl met the Doctor's eyes, fires burning deep within. "Do not forget to whom you speak."
"A horror, a breathing horror," he muttered, jerking his stare away.
"I am your god." She spread her hands wide. "Kneel in worship."
At this the Doctor laughed. "A god would have compassion. A rubbish god you'd make, all stringy and cruel and stained in blood."
In that we are alike, Time Lord. The words echoed in his head as he felt a foreign presence walking in his mind. A shadow ghosted through the twisting corridors and sudden stairs of his thoughts. He couldn't stop it.
His brow furrowed as he looked at the girl. "You can't be doing that," he said. He stepped back.
"You regenerated, Doctor. You flared and you changed. I had no need for this new man. I plucked your consciousness from the inferno, copied your mind." She shrugged. "What is a person but memories?" She circled him, her eyes flicking over his form. "Memories stitched into a new body."
"Not possible," he said.
"You cried out, a psychic scream tearing across the universe. It slipped though time to ring in the past and the future. I heard it above the fading drums." She reached up and grabbed him by his jacket. The Doctor grunted in surprise as she jerked him to his knees. She pushed her lips into a mocking pout. "So desperate not to go."
She traced a hand along the Doctor's shoulders, dragging a line across his back as she circled him. "The body was more difficult. I started from nothing." Her finger paused between his shoulder blades, giving a quick tap. "Every detail, exactly as you were."
"No," the Doctor whispered as he felt the rift open behind him. He hunched up. Shivering, he clutched at his coat as nightmares boiled out of the girl's shadows. Flowing together, vanishing, and reappearing, they latched onto the Doctor, their hands hard, biting ice. A half-faced horror oozed around his shoulder. A long, barbed tongue hung from its jawless mouth. Leaning in, it curled its tongue about the Doctor's face as he jerked away.
The nightmares surged forward, throwing the Doctor to the ground. They gripped his right arm and stretched it out into the ash. The girl circled, terrors shadowing her.
"I was faithful in every aspect." She paused. She placed her foot on his wrist and began to press. "A slight weakness there."
His face twisted as she continued to press. Bone cracked.
The Doctor screamed.
Author's Note: Say hello to the Nightmare Child, everyone. Isn't she just darling? It's a shame that she remembered the Doctor had a slight weakness in the dorsal tubercle. Two more chapters to go. As always, constructive criticism is encouraged. I struggle with dialogue on a good day, and sometimes the Doctor is particularly hard to write.