"Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face"
—"Hotel California" (Eagles)
Chapter 10: Such a Lovely Place, Such a Lovely Face
The Doctor groaned as he drifted back into consciousness. His temples throbbed horribly, pulsing in time with the quiet buzzing sound that filled the air.
He tried to raise his hands to his aching head. Something stopped him.
His brow furrowed.
'What?'
He tried to move again. Sharp metal edges dug into his upper arms and wrists.
Cracking his eyes open, he blinked in confusion at the strange, dim world around him. He slowly lifted his head, wincing at the twinges of pain in his neck and shoulders as he looked around, trying to figure out where he was.
He was lying on a jet black slab of stone that had been polished to a dull shine. His upper arms, wrists, and legs were held in place by silver restraints bolted to its surface. He dropped his head back down and let it loll to one side, then the other. The rough walls around him were carved out of solid rock.
It was a prison cell of some kind.
The Doctor's gaze flitted around the cell, hundreds of disjointed memory fragments flashing through his mind. He remembered Donna yelling at him to turn off a mauve alert in the TARDIS, and then following the trail of a massive temporal anomaly to California. After that, his more recent memories became an indistinguishable blur, clarity among the images becoming fewer and farther between.
Each fragment was as surreal and confusing as the next. Strange glowing trees, family photos that were out of focus, portals in fireplaces, and a giant sculpture of a spider in a car park...
He didn't know what any of it meant. Raising his head again, he absentmindedly tried to run a hand through his hair. He promptly winced when hard metal cut into his skin.
'Right,' he recalled, relaxing his arms, 'restraints.'
Those were going to have to go as soon as possible. So were the four security cameras with their beady little sensors trained on him. If his temples hadn't felt like they'd been repeatedly hit with a rubber mallet, the Time Lord might have cocked an eyebrow at one to see if it would elicit a response from his absent captors.
Between the stone slab, the restraints, and a truly excessive amount of cameras, they seemed to possess an odd mixture of primitive and advanced technology. Unfortunately, there were no other defining features to help him identify where he was. The lights above him remained dark, and the door he could see if he tilted his head back far enough looked rather sturdy, and lacked a visible locking mechanism. He already knew that would be annoying to deal with. It was always so much easier to escape a prison cell when there were easily accessible locks and keys involved. And his sonic screwdriver, of course, which was hopefully still in the inner pocket of his—
The Doctor froze. 'Oh. Oh no.'
He glanced down at himself again in disbelief. His coat, suit jacket, and Oxford were gone. He'd been left in his short-sleeved undershirt and pinstripe trousers. Wiggling his toes, he belatedly noticed that he was also missing his socks and favorite pair of trainers.
Oh, this day just got better and better! He had to get out of this place as soon as possible, and find Donna. Hopefully she remembered what had happened to them, or at least where they were now. (Knowing her, he had the slightest bit of doubt that that would be the case.)
The Doctor pulled experimentally at his restraints, hearts speeding up slightly when they refused to budge. He took a closer look at the cuffs around his upper arms and frowned when he noticed a faint electrical hum emanating from them. The longer he studied the silvery metal, the more he began to suspect that a small electrical current was running through it, powering whatever magnetic system held the restraints closed. If he had been in possession of his sonic, disabling the manacles and their power source would have been quite easy. It was unfortunate that his captors seemed to have discovered that possibility too.
The lights suddenly blazed to life above him, illuminating everything with harsh indifference. The Doctor squeezed his eyes shut and stifled a grimace as the pain in his temples spiked.
The door of his cell slid open. Quiet footsteps crossed the threshold. The Doctor drew in a breath, wrenching his eyes open once more as the footsteps neared the stone slab.
"Who are you?" the Time Lord demanded. "Why am I being held here?" He was surprised by the rasp of his own voice. (Just how long had he been here?)
A curt female voice answered. "I am Security Officer 14. You are in the custody of the Charter." A humanoid being from a species he didn't yet recognize came to a stop beside the stone slab. She had cropped silver hair, pale green eyes, and wore a white lab coat over a black military uniform. Her greenish-silver skin was made up of thousands of tiny, metallic scales, and large reptilian wings were folded tightly against her back.
The Doctor wasn't sure how fast her species aged, but the way Officer 14 held herself, like she had dealt with prisoners a thousand times before, suggested many years of experience.
In her hands she held a thin, transparent touchscreen tablet. She caught him staring at it and swiftly folded in half, slipping into her lab coat pocket.
"The Charter?" the Doctor asked. The name brought a handful of barely recollectable images to the forefront of his mind.
There had been a house, a very timey-wimey sort of house, and the Charter…the Charter had done something to it. Something had happened to him and Donna in that house as well, but he couldn't recall what that something had been.
He didn't like the implications of that, of any of it. His memories about that house and the Charter were unnaturally foggy at best and missing entirely at worst, and there were far too many gaps between the memories he did have. It was almost like something or someone had made a crude attempt to erase them but only partially succeeded.
Officer 14 watched passively as the Doctor scrabbled for conclusions. "Which reason for your imprisonment would you like to hear first?" she asked when he refocused on her. "You have committed crimes across hundreds of planetary systems, Doctor. Even in a parallel universe or two. We warned you not to interfere in our business. This is the consequence of ignoring that warning."
He immediately railed against her detached, clinical tone. "What do you know about me? And what have you done with my friend Donna?"
"You are more arrogant than I thought if you truly believe blunt inquiries will sway me," she scoffed. "I am loyal to the Charter alone."
"Well, then, if you really know anything about me, you should have realized I would probably ignore your warning. You can't tell someone to leave your business alone and expect them to not be a bit curious about what you're hiding. I'm a very curious person. Can't help it, it's a trait that seems to stick with me no matter what. You clearly know about me though, so I expect you already knew that. Somehow you know me, yet I can't seem to remember anything about you or the Charter. It's curious, don't you think?"
"You are not in a position to ask questions. You are our prisoner."
The Doctor clenched his hands into fists, tugging frustratedly at the restraints around his wrists even though he knew they wouldn't give. "Yes, that was quite clear the moment I woke up manacled to a bloody stone table. Very original. Did you get the idea from The Chronicles of Narnia?"
Officer 14 was not amused. "You have consorted with a dangerous criminal who knowingly defies the lawful structures of space and time. For that, justice must be done. You do not understand what being a prisoner of the Charter means yet, but you will. You will."
"Oh?" The Doctor's eyebrows rose. "What gives you any authority to pass judgement on what I've done, or what I've supposedly done? I know I haven't consorted with criminals defying the laws your Charter believes they've broken. I'm a Time Lord. I think I'd know if I helped someone break the laws my own people wrote in the first place."
"You are blinded by your own biases. This individual created herself, and thus presents a paradox the Charter cannot allow to exist any longer."
The Doctor blanched. It couldn't be…the Charter couldn't possibly know about…
Officer 14 narrowed her eyes. "You may try to hide it from me, but even now, I can see in your eyes that you know I'm talking about the Bad Wolf." She leaned closer, sneer vanishing as she studied his face with a sort of sick fascination. "Such dark eyes you have this time around. So different from the last, yet the same soul peering out every time. So full of pain and longing now, yet underlying it all, that tenacious spark that cannot be put out. Always such a bright, burning spark, setting fires alight across the universe."
The Doctor's breath caught in his throat. This Charter officer wasn't using telepathy, but her piercing gaze alone made his skin crawl in all sorts of unpleasant ways. He turned his head away, flexing his hands and wrists against the restraints, itching to escape from this cell as fast as possible.
He started to reach out to the TARDIS, seeking her familiar telepathic presence, and instantly recoiled from the frayed remnants of a badly severed bond.
'No.' He didn't want to believe it, but the damning evidence was all there. 'No, not this, this can't be-'
Officer 14 forced his head back into place, sharp nails digging into his cheeks as she held him still. "You will tell us all you know about the Bad Wolf's creation, willingly or unwillingly!" she snarled.
"I'd rather not!" He jerked out of her grasp, ignoring the blood that welled up where her nails - claws - had pierced his skin. "Tell me what you've done with my TARDIS and Donna! Donna is innocent, she knows nothing about Bad Wolf!"
The officer sneered as she stepped back from the stone slab, pressing her lips into a thin line. She would not answer.
Then, in a lightning-fast movement, she produced a small, pen-shaped cylinder from her lab coat and pressed the tapered end to the side of his neck. The Doctor pulled away as fast as he could, but not before he felt a pinprick of pain followed by the sharper, broader sting of something being injected into him. A deep, tingling burn began to spread up into his jaw and ears, and down into his chest. Officer 14 bent over him again.
"What was that?" he asked, eyes widening as the tingling continued to spread through his bloodstream.
The smug look on the officer's face was infuriating and unbearable. "A necessity," she answered.
The smoldering embers in the Doctor's veins erupted into a firestorm, nerve endings firing in waves like a rising tide of broken glass was tearing through his veins instead of a single, unidentified substance. "If you want to know about Bad Wolf, she no longer exists!" he hissed through clenched teeth. "That's it, that's the truth. She's gone forever!"
The officer simply studied him for a moment longer with a frigid hint of a smirk. Then she turned and swept out of the cell without another word. The door opened, and the Doctor tilted his head back just in time to see a grey hallway lined with armed guards through the threshold before it slid closed.
All but one of the lights above him shut off. The Doctor shifted uncomfortably, eyeing the two cameras along the far back wall. Escaping might not be as easy as he'd originally thought.
A burning bolt of pain abruptly flared behind his eyes. His breath caught, and he clenched his jaw as tightly as he could when he felt his hearts spasm.
'No, no, no, this isn't good.'
Grey began to creep into his vision. He tried to fight it, didn't dare let down his guard anymore than the Charter had forced him to already. (They had taken his bond with the last functional TARDIS in the universe and ripped it to shreds. That and Officer 14's injection told him more than enough about where their moral compass was likely pointed.) He needed to get his missing memories back, and he needed to do it now. He had to find Donna and his TARDIS as soon as possible, and determine how the Charter knew about Bad Wolf.
He blinked once, twice, trying to organize his thoughts about his current predicament into a semblance of an escape plan— and failed miserably.
The ceiling began to look fuzzy and out of focus. Had it looked that way before? He didn't think so.
The Doctor blinked again, struggling in vain against the fog enveloping his mind. Just what was the Charter trying to do to him? He was sure the answer lay in whatever was happening to him, but he couldn't quite grasp the thought long enough to puzzle it out.
Icy heat shot up and down his spine. His headache worsened. He could no longer tell if he was drawing in full breaths or not.
His control slipped. Then it slipped again, and again, and again, until it was wrenched out of his hands completely. Long-forgotten shadows began to stir in the recesses of his mind.
For a moment, the Doctor was sure he heard a distant melody drifting through the air, unfamiliar and wonderful all at once.
A cool hand brushed against his cheek. "Be strong, Doctor," a voice murmured. "Be strong, and remember."
Then the hand and melody vanished, and the Time Lord was swept away by the darkness invading his mind.