Text Key

"Audible speech."

'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'

F.A.Q.

Chapter 40 - Crisis Crossover! The Death and Rebirth of Craig Phillips, Part Two

Previously in Dimensions In Time…

On route to the Great Wall of China, the TARDIS found herself - or perhaps diverted herself out of a sense of cosmic responsibility - landed in what appeared to be an ordinary and unassuming district of London… only for our intrepid team to emerge to see characters and creatures of fiction running rampant through abandoned streets, appearing and disappearing at seeming random, as the handful of human residents do their best to survive in a world gone mad!

Tracking down the source of these mysterious happenings, the Doctor and his companions attempted to confront the unassuming, professional wallflower cum nascent reality warper, Craig Phillips, only for the darling Rose Tyler and their temporary guide, Cathryn 'Cath' Lloyd, to be erased from existence at a whim of the spiraling teen, who now wishes to end the world as he knows it!

Whatever can our heroes do now to save the day? Will Miss Tyler be returned to the team? And whatever will become of Craig Phillips?

No no no no no no no no no no-

The Doctor was pacing now - prowling around like an animal. Clawing at the ground where Rose had been standing was no good, that would be too desperate, too human, but he had to do something to get the nervous energy out of him and Delaine had been quick to get between him and the boy responsible.

A tiny, tiny sliver of his mind felt bad for the child - an atom of sympathy for a kid clearly out of control of both the situation and the power he held, but… well.

Time Lords had very large brains. An atom wasn't that much, if one was speaking in percentages.

"If you can ask any question and get an answer - then I want you to ask where Rose went," the Doctor said, pitching his voice into a dangerously low growl. "Or, better, ask one that brings her and Miss Lloyd back! How about that, if you're so omnipotent!"

"Doctor-" Delaine started to say.

As if divinely inspired, Trudy opened her mouth. "That's not how it works - once someone is erased from existence, they don't come back! They're not part of the story anymore!"

She was almost gleeful about it - a sharp contrast to the boy who'd caused it going through a crisis on the ground.

"This isn't a story, Trudy!" the Doctor snarled. "Your 'friend' just erased someone very important to me from reality - that's murder. And I don't take kindly to my important people getting murdered!"

"And what are you going to do about it?" Trudy taunted. "Anything that tries to hurt Craig, he can do away with! He can erase you, turn you into a tree, and any number of other things! As soon as the idea crosses his mind, it can happen - and you better run before he decides to erase you too," Trudy added, turning to Delaine.

"What kind of asshole do you think I am, ditching a kid who needs help?" Delaine snarled.

"I-I don't need-" Craig sucked in a breath, the gasp of air painful just to listen to as it wheezed and caught in lungs partially paralyzed by panic. "I don't - I don't want…"

The atom of sympathy twitched uncomfortably in the Doctor's mind.

"Alright, everyone sit the fuck down," Delaine snapped. "We're going to play a little game - the 5-4-3-2-1 game."

"This isn't the time for-" the Doctor began to snap before psychic pressure gently but firmly brought him down to the ground.

'Well, I suppose we're going to make time.'

"First, I want you to name five things you can see," Delaine said. "Doctor, you start."

…fine. "Storm clouds, the library, the ice cream van," the Doctor listed off before gesturing mulishly towards the statue that dominated the center of the park. "Whoever that is on the horse, and you."

He couldn't help but put a slight bitter emphasis on the last one. He was rightfully upset and here his companion was, treating him like a child rather than letting him take an active role in… in… doing something, anything at all to fix the situation.

"Good," Delaine said. "Now, Craig, it's your turn. We're in no rush, but I'd like you to pick some different things than the Doctor did just now."

The boy did so, careful and sometimes hesitating between each choice, leaving the Doctor little more choice than to look around at his surroundings again if he wanted to get any stimulation.

The craters and damage from the superhero slugging match had disappeared, save for one of the thrown cars which had… simply resettled in its new position as if it had been parked there, only a few inches of tire hidden within the ground to prove that the vehicle had ever met it with force.

Wait.

The Doctor squinted at a flag above the library, hanging slack on its pole.

"Alright. Now, four things you can touch. It can be anything, so long as it's here. Doctor-"

"The wind," he said, almost as an afterthought. The flag should have been moving, with a storm this strong. "My coat. My trousers. The sonic screwdriver," the Doctor added, tapping the tool where it sat in its pocket.

"Good job. Now, if you think it would help, I'd like you to play with that for a bit - focus on the textures of it for a while until it's your turn again."

"This is stupid!" Trudy snapped. "A waste of time-"

"Giving everyone the chance to calm down and get back to an even keel isn't a waste of anyone's time, Trudy," Delaine replied. "Craig?"

The Doctor tuned out the conversation as he started idling with the sonic screwdriver. The incongruities in reality had reminded him of his earlier theory in the library, so easily forgotten in the excitement of Rose's erasure.

He turned on the sonic screwdriver and started scanning his surroundings properly, going beyond simple material scans to frequencies. To expressions of code.

"Three things you can hear," Delaine said.

"You, the sonic screwdriver, my heartsbeat."

The ground was false. So was the grass, the asphalt.

"Two things you can smell."

"Plasma. My cologne."

The energy displays from earlier weren't from the rearrangement of molecules or the splitting of the fabric of reality - it was from the system adjusting to new command codes. And not particularly well, given that any system this complex would be good enough not to spark when turned on.

Not if it was fully functional as intended.

"And one thing you can taste."

The Doctor grinned. "Ice cream."

Well, fake ice cream. But it was close enough for taste buds and the digestive tract to tolerate, so why split hairs? Especially when he had better news; between the readings and the wording - 'erased', 'removal', not death -, the Doctor had no reason to believe that Rose Tyler was actually dead.

Usually, when one was sent somewhere else, they expected it to look different. Especially if that 'somewhere else' was supposed to be the afterlife.

So Rose Tyler figured that she could be forgiven for not expecting that Heaven would look like Wimbledon - not the Wimbledon they'd just been in (well, beyond the basic geography), but the proper one, with the proper amount of people around in it. She was pretty sure of that bit, even if the 'fluffy cloud' aspect was probably hyperbolic.

But then again, she hadn't exactly been there before, had she? You had to die to do that.

And… had she died? It hadn't hurt, being… un-existed.

A sharp breeze slipped across Rose's neck and she found herself shuddering.

"Guess we're still alive then," she said. Heaven wouldn't be cold - it was the whole opposite of the entire… 'nice place' concept.

"I suppose that was the keyword, wasn't it?" Miss Lloyd said, catching her breath. "Craig didn't wish for our deaths - he wished that we didn't 'exist'. And that pushed us right out of that… made-up world, because we weren't allowed to exist there anymore."

"Well, that's a comfort," Rose said dryly. While it meant that she wasn't dead or trapped, it also meant that the Doctor and Delaine were trapped in there, along with everyone else, but hey - if it all went to hell, at least she could catch a bus and be back at her mum's flat and an ordinary, boring life before nightfall.

"Do you think we can do anything to help from this side?" Rose asked.

That brought the art teacher up short. "I - I don't know, but I can certainly…" Miss Lloyd startled and then darted past Rose towards an older woman wrapped up in a scarf and heavy sweater. "Miss Baldwin! Tanya! Aren't you a sight for sore eyes-"

Miss Baldwin drew back, not a spark of recognition in her eyes. "I'm sorry? Who are you?"

"Tanya, we've worked together for years, how can you not…?" Miss Lloyd shook her head. "Forget about that - tell me, has anyone else returned? Craig? Laurie?"

"Returned from where? The Phillip's boy is still missing, like everyone else that disappeared - except for Mr. Flynn," Miss Baldwin said, shaking her head. "Poor man's still in the hospital, you know."

With that the woman wandered off, sparing only one uncomfortable glance back at Rose and Miss Lloyd before moving on with her life.

"I… I can't believe she doesn't remember me. We worked together for years - we were on the PTA committee together," Miss Lloyd said, dazed. "Craig really… really did erase me, didn't he?"

Another point for 'nobody dying' at least, even if Rose was decidedly unnerved by the idea that someone could just… be forgotten so perfectly. She hoped that her mother still remembered her, she thought as she fumbled through her pockets for a phone.

But instead of her phone, her fingers met a familiar rectangle in her pocket, all weathered leather.

And Rose Tyler had an Idea.

"Right, so if you can't talk to any of your co-workers… why don't we take this up with Craig's parents?" Rose said, holding the psychic paper up with a smile. "I'm sure they'd be more than happy to talk to a teacher and a counselor about their runaway son, right?"

"Better?" I asked Craig.

The storm had settled from the earlier tumult, though the clouds were still relatively thick in the sky, they at least weren't gray and crackling with lightning and thunder now.

The boy took in a rattling breath, but it was less painful sounding than the ones before. "Better. Thanks."

"Hey, I know that I would have appreciated someone helping me through that sort of meltdown in my past. Least I can do is use my experience to your benefit."

That got a smile out of the kid. Small and surprised - as if he'd forgotten he could make the expression at all -, but genuine.

"And the Doctor's meltdown?" Trudy asked, not particularly kindly. "Are you good at working through his drama?"

"I'll admit; he's got his own brand of wonk. Sometimes you gotta work around it, sometimes you get run over by it," I said before sighing. "I'm just glad that it was that easy to wind him down this time."

Craig winced, rubbing at his neck, probably remembering that, not that long ago, the Doctor had been quite literally at his throat. "It's usually not?"

"The Doctor's a bit like a hurricane once he gets properly going - you're either in the eye of the storm or part of the debris field." And the Tenth was an easy Category Five compared to the rest. "That I can get him to listen to me is… well, mostly cause I know how to force the conversation. Doesn't always work out well for me, but hey."

"Why be friends with him then? If he's so bad?" Craig asked.

"...cause he's more than the bad parts - a lot more. He likes learning things and having fun and he doesn't have a real concept of 'weird things are automatically scary and bad', which admittedly backfires sometimes when he gets excited about something that is hurting people… but, I guess the biggest part that he's the closest person to being like me that there is in all of existence," I admitted, watching the Doctor fiddle around with the sonic screwdriver pointed squarely at the ground, mumbling technobabble as he went. "And believe me, when you spend enough time trying and failing to find connections like that, it makes you… desperate for it to work out at least once."

And desperation could inspire just as many bad calls as it could great ones.

"Does he ever… stop talking?" Craig asked, watching the Doctor mumble his way around the yard.

I couldn't help but crack a smile. "Pretty much never. Unless he's unconscious. Or gagged. Even then I wouldn't guarantee it. If he does stop talking, it's usually a bad sign." Even my Zeke was a chatterbox most of the time.

"I bet Craig could glue his mouth shut if he wanted," Trudy said, sulking. "And yours too, maybe."

"Because I'm not letting anyone specific take over the conversation?" I asked. "If you didn't notice, I stopped the Doctor much more firmly than I stopped you. I've been nothing but equal opportunity here and you know it."

The girl looked away from me, grumbling but no longer protesting as the Doctor returned.

"Figure out anything interesting?" I asked.

"Oh, plenty. First off - this isn't Wimbledon, it's a simulation of Wimbledon that Craig here has control over," the Doctor said. "Which, I don't know why you'd keep it Wimbledon, but I suppose that if you didn't know you could make it something else, that's fair enough."

Craig startled. "Wait, so none of this is real? None of the people-"

"Oh no. All of the humans that aren't space barbarians or- or superhero business are real… well, possibly with one exception," the Doctor said. "Despite multiple people being sucked into this place, none of them knew who Trudy was despite being familiar with Craig - and they were local people. If not the school teacher, then the librarian would know her, because the librarian would know just about any bookworm in the area, especially if there's a comic section to be read in the library. But no. Not even a blip on the radar."

Trudy rose to her feet. "Are you trying to say that I'm not important, Doctor?" she snapped. "Craig-"

"Trudy's absolutely important!" Craig agreed, rising up. "She's my best friend!"

"Mmhmm. Best friend that calls you an idiot and tells everyone to leave you alone if they try to help you. Very best friend-y behavior, that." The Time Lord turned around. "You two are some sort of… psychic dyad, right?" the Doctor asked, before frowning and lowering his voice to talk to himself. "No, that's not quite right. If that were the case, he'd be affecting her as much as the other way around. Instead, it's almost like-"

"And there you go again, talking about us like we're not even here - like we're something to be studied! What if you shut up for once?" Craig commanded, eyes flashing.

The Doctor's mouth kept moving, but there wasn't any sound coming out of it.

Alright, so 'What if' was his initiation phrase for deliberate power use. Good to know this kid was an adherent of Uatu the Watcher.

"That was a bit rude," I said, even as the Doctor continued on with his silent lecture, complete with gestures, apparently completely ignorant of what had just happened. He probably was, still caught up in chewing over the puzzle in front of him.

"Craig doesn't like people talking at him. Or about him like he's not there," Trudy said.

"Well, yeah, fair enough but… taking away someone's voice because they're sort of annoying? That's just cruel and unusual."

It took the Time Lord near a minute to realize what had happened. He turned to me and tapped at his Adam's apple, mouthing a question…

"No, I can't hear you," I replied. As the Doctor frowned and then fell into technobabble anyway, too fast to lipread accurately, I rolled my eyes and initiated psychic contact.

'Hey,' I said, tapping on his psychic boundary line because anything less was rude. 'Try this.'

'Oh, hello,' the Doctor replied. There was an edge of surprise to that sending, tinged equal parts anxiety to excited pleasure. 'That was a bit unannounced.'

'That's why I knocked,' I pointed out. 'You were going a bit too fast for me to lipread. This is easier.'

'You say that as if psychic communication isn't as fast as thought, but I suppose I get the point. Well, as I was saying, whatever Craig did has muffled all outgoing sound vibrations within…' The Doctor took a moment to scuff the ground, scattering a few rocks that set off a rapidfire sequence of equations echoed through the connection as our different sensory experiences of that information were compared. '...about three centimeters from my body - anything that comes in is crystal clear though, so I can still hear you and also hear myself talk.'

A small bit of worry uncurled in my chest. 'That's something at least.'

'Mm?'

'If it was 'no vibrations at all', you wouldn't be able to feel your own heartsbeat. That's primo freakout material for anyone.'

That kind of physical disconnect was always unpleasant and only having half of the heartsbeats he was supposed to have was one of the things that always bothered Zeke - and I imagined this Doctor would be no different if put in a similar situation.

'Oh, you're right. That would be disturbing, wouldn't it?' the Doctor noted after a slight pause to appreciate the idea. 'Anyway, as I was saying before Craig pressed the mute button on me, I think that Tracy is some manner of psychic parasite.'

'Huh.'

'You had another idea?'

I tried to articulate the vibe I'd gotten into words. 'I think that she's a-'

For all the speed of psychic communication, there was still a point where even the uninitiated layman would notice that there was something weird about the silence and locked focus between two people.

"Those two are doing something!" Trudy said, immediately pointing.

Craig didn't hesitate. "What if you stopped talking about us behind our backs?"

The sensation of a psychic byline being broken and rebounding was painful - not as bad as a broken bone, but like being struck full in the face by a branch someone else had pulled back for that express purpose.

I'd taken worse - really, psychic rebound was nothing after you'd experienced second-hand death through a psychic link -, but that didn't make it fun.

"And how was I supposed to talk to the Doctor since you took his voice?" I asked as the Doctor went through the motions of a man in actual pain, scrubbing at his head silently, even as his mouth moved through the motions of possible swears. "Did you want me to just talk at him and make assumptions about his responses? Is that something you would want someone to do to you? Cause I remember you just having a thing about that."

The kid winced, the anger Trudy had stirred up going tangled for a moment as he realized his own hypocrisy. "No- no, that's not… that's not fair," he allowed.

A small crackle of energy glowed around the Doctor as his sound returned. "Thank you for that," he said, still sounding a bit pained from the psychic backlash. "I mean, you shouldn't have done it in the first place, but at least you fixed it fast enough I suppose…"

"We're on thin ice here, Doctor. Maybe a little less…" I wobbled my hand a bit in the place of a word I couldn't quite settle on. Judgmental? Exposition? Yakety yak?

The Doctor, despite not having my exact word - telepathy was still out and was likely to stay that way, nodded. "Fair enough - though you know how I get when something interesting is happening."

"Yes, all Reed Richards. I know. It's one of your charm points."

While the Doctor beamed at the compliment, there was a much less civil conversation going on between Trudy and Craig.

"-I told you, it's not fair to put in rules that punish you for following the other rules!" Craig said. "All it does-"

"Who cares about fair!" Trudy snapped. "We're the ones who make the rules here, we have the power, we can do what we want-"

"Correction," the Doctor said, cutting in. "Craig has the power. You just have an enthusiastic pointer finger and a strident voice." He reached for where he'd tucked his sonic screwdriver away in his pocket.

The girl was immediately on that. "He has a weapon!" Trudy yelled, pointing.

"It's a scanning device - hell, you saw him use it earlier and it didn't do anything harmful," I said flatly. "He can use it on me first if you want to see it in action before he does anything else with it. But thanks for proving our point about your pointer finger."

"Then how did it hurt Venom?" Craig asked.

"Well, it turns out that when you put a sonic device next to a microphone, the feedback is really something-" the Doctor began to explain.

"Why should we trust you?" Trudy asked, cutting the Time Lord off. "There hasn't been anyone alive that's cared about Craig except if he was around to be bullied and pushed around - why shouldn't we be proactive about potential threats? He could just… just point that at you and pretend to use it and then use it on us!"

…I couldn't believe she just admitted that she didn't care about Craig while also considering them a double-act in terms of preemptive defense against literally everything.

Either that or she straight up admitted she wasn't 'alive' in a meaningful sense, but still.

"Is that the logic you used when Mr. Flynn was 'removed'?" the Doctor asked. "Because there's a difference between 'stopping someone' and doing something that slowly dissolves them to nothing while they scream - and then the screaming hanging on for hours after the body is gone."

Craig paled. "It-it couldn't have been that…"

"What should we care?" Trudy said, cutting him off. "Mr. Flynn was horrible - always talking about how bullying was 'character building' and how you had to 'man up' if you wanted to get anywhere in the world - and it wasn't even our fault he's gone! He's the one that walked into the boundary! He should have-"

"-known about the invisible box around the area? How could anyone - it's fucking invisible. It's in the name," I said, waving at the world around us. "And even if Mr. Flynn was an asshole, does that mean that he deserved to be tortured? Can you imagine how awful that was, not just for him, but everyone that was watching? Listening? And don't get me started about the tree kids - they're still aware in there, you know?" I sighed. "You're not a 90's Anti-Hero, Trudy. There's no Freudian excuse that says 'yes, I know you were bullied and had a shit time, so you get this little card that says you can torture and kill your classmates and teachers and other random passersby carte blanche'. Life isn't some tit-for-tat escalating revenge fantasy, as tempting as it may be in terms of immediate emotional satisfaction. It's about accounta-fucking-bility."

I'd know - I'd done many a personal study on revenge. On where the line was and how monstrous you could become when you crossed it, how blinding the immediate satisfaction and power in harming someone that harmed you, on how easy it was for it all to turn into crater of collateral damage far beyond even what the initial injury could justify. I'd slipped, gotten back up again, and stayed aware of the monster inside.

It was a creature that I came by honestly, not the Rider or the product of any other power - just my own vindictive streak bolstered by the combined high of self-righteousness and a good ol' fashioned power trip.

Sometimes, I even indulged in it on purpose. Taking notes from John Mulaney's 'The One Thing You Can't Replace' bit and going to each Verses' version of my father's house to take everything - right down to the carpets, the light fixtures, and even a few of the goddamn doors - was still a petty sort of entertainment, even after the hundredth time in a row.

"R-right," Craig said. "With great power, comes great- great…" he trailed off, holding his head as if the world's worst headache had just set in.

Me and the Doctor exchanged a Look.

Alright, there was absolutely something going on between Craig's brain and Trudy's entire asshole being if a comic fan couldn't complete that line.

"Doctor, why don't you and Trudy get some ice cream while I keep talking Craig through some breathing exercises?" I suggested. "I'm sure she knows what he likes - and that way, nobody gets jumpy and decides that the pavement needs a snack more than the rest of us."

"Great idea - and who knows, maybe I'll get the swirl right this time," the Doctor said, pulling a slightly peevish Trudy along behind him as he went to the ice cream truck.

I waited for them to get there and get focused on the task of dessert prep before I switched to my true objective.

"Tell me," I asked, dropping my voice as I spoke to Craig. "How long have you known Trudy for?"

"I…years? Forever? I don't…it feels like she's always been there, but I don't remember her ever being at school," Craig said, holding his head. "I'm so useless, I can't even remember something as simple as that."

"Hey. I get it. Stress is rough on memory. I spent my entire… well, not even my teens. I spent so much of my childhood so stressed out that it took until I was an adult to have a functional brain again. Until then? I was just limping through the day, doing the bare minimum because it was all I could do… and nobody gave me any help. Just shit, because they 'expected more from me'," I said, doing the finger quotes. "And that doesn't exactly help when you start internalizing that voice, does it?"

Craig sighed. "No. No, it doesn't."

"So we're going to work on removing undeserved talking down from our internal vocabulary here - you don't have to do it all at once," I said, raising my hands to ward off the complaint of 'that's easy for you to say' that so often came in response to overly simple seeming mental health advice. "But you need to grab that little voice that says 'I'm no good' by the mouth and tell it to mind its own business. You get enough of that crap from the outside; you don't need those calls coming from inside the house, right?"

Craig managed to crack a very, very small smile. "Right. We're not pulling a Scream."

"The trope is older than that, but yeah, that shit's carbon-dated and fossilized - no need to enshrine it in your own mind. But back to the first point about the memory stuff. We're going to try again, but stick with the small stuff. Sometimes it's the little details that make the whole case come together, y'know? Now, if Trudy never was at school with you, did she visit you at your house instead?" I prodded, poking a little bit of my own power through the boy.

Nothing major, but just a little something to make the memories come back a little easier and, more importantly, clearer. An old speciality and one that required a bit of a delicate touch to make the most out of, but for something like this, where Craig was already reaching for the memory?

Barely any effort.

"I… yes. Trudy… was at my house - on the staircase, and in the backyard. She…" Realization sparked. First surprise, then shock, a flicker of sadness… and then rage.

Not exactly what I'd been aiming for when I started helping the kid.

"You! You pushed me down the stairs!" Craig snapped, pointing at Trudy, who was on her way back, holding two cones in her hands.

Immediately the ice cream was thrown to the side. "What! What did that bitch say-?"

"She didn't say anything! She just asked a question and I finally found the answer- you're not my friend! You've never been my friend! You tried to kill me! All those different times with the stairs and the tree!" Pink-purple energy began to spark around Craig again as he rose to his feet, pointing at Trudy. "And now you use me to hurt other people?! What if you didn't-"

"Wait-wait-wait-wait, let's not be too hasty," the Doctor said, stepping between the pair. "Y'see, I finally figured out the frequencies of this place - and you can't unmake Trudy here! Because…"

He pointed the sonic screwdriver at Trudy and turned it on.

The girl shouted, but her voice turned to garbled static as her form shuddered like a poorly tuned tv image, wobbling and shorting out as her colors abruptly bleached, leaving her a pink-purple mass of energy vaguely in the shape of a person screaming in impotent rage for a moment before the Doctor switched his sonic off and she went back to 'normal'.

"She's not even real to begin with!" he finished. "So who knows what would even happen if you sent her away! Though," the Doctor added, checking the sonic screwdriver. "Who knows what will happen if we stay here - this place is destabilizing as we speak…"

Yeah. I'd noticed. The storm that I'd managed to calm earlier was back with a vengeance, wind howling around us as electricity charged the air, this time accompanied by a few patches of properly glitched 'reality' manifesting - cars clipping through the ground at slightly odd angles as the grass beneath my feet rotated on axes that went far beyond what a mere windstorm could manage.

"Might not have been built for running a constantly changing simulation for a month straight," I pointed out. "Add in a mental and emotional meltdown…"

"And this. You're probably right," the Doctor said, checking the readings with an unhappy expression. "Which means that we need to get out of here-"

"No! Why would I even want to leave? Trudy already said it - there's no reason for me to go back out there!" Craig snapped, pulling at his hair. "Everything hurts and nothing good ever happens! I have no friends, nobody cares about me being gone-"

"Now, that's not right, I'm sure someone misses you-" the Doctor started to say.

"-and I don't want to go back to people telling me what I should do and what I should feel!" Craig finished, energy sparking off of him as he pointed at the Doctor and Trudy. "And I didn't ask for you two to start in on that again here!"

A cage sprang into existence around the pair, mounted on wheels.

"Why are you doing this to me, Craig! I didn't-"

"Oh, but you did, 'Trudy'. If that's even your actual name," Craig hissed as the nearby statue creaked to life and descended from its plinth. "You're just some sort of… of mind parasite, aren't you? Some sort of alien that's taken over part of my brain or something and wants to use me to get out into the world. Well, that's not going to happen! Nobody is getting out of here alive! At least I can get that part right for once in my life!"

"And what about me, Craig?" I asked, standing firm. "Is killing me the right thing to do?"

"You… you haven't…" the boy buckled, squeezing his head again. "I- I don't…"

"Craig, don't be stupid!" Trudy cried out, arm stretching out from between the bars. "She's just using you-"

"Just like you would?" Craig snapped back. "No! What if the cage was covered so I didn't have to look at you or hear your lies?"

Immediately, a tarp materialized and covered the cage, muffling all the noise inside.

"Mmm, that went well, didn't it?" the Doctor said mildly as the cart began to move. "Really, calling him dumb right as he realizes that you've been a malign influence on him his entire life? And that right on the heels of you establishing that he's not only emotionally unstable but willing to lash out and harm everyone in reach? A bit excessive for a power play… and just look where's gone and got you."

"Us, actually, if you'd remember that you're also in this cage," Trudy snapped. "And what if it is my fault? At least I told him the truth; he's no good on his own, utterly useless-"

"Because you tell him so? Because you can wind him up and beat him down with words?" the Doctor scoffed. "I've seen proper manipulators, you know. Been one when circumstances called for it. Compared to that, you're as subtle as a car wreck."

"Who needs 'subtle'? I'm the only one that can calm him."

And the only one that could wind him up as well. "But that isn't true, is it? Delaine did it. Without insulting or trying to get him killed, even. What a wonder."

Trudy flushed. "She- she cheated!"

Oh, possibly. Psychic empaths were awfully good at matching frequencies and then reducing the extremes of negative emotions manually - a subtle form of mind control, only a touch more invasive than a perception filter. On the other hand, Delaine was almost scrupulously ethical and reserved with her powers.

"Mmm. And what do you call what you were doing? 'Punching the insecurity button, firing off some PTSD response, and then redirecting his aim to someone you don't like' isn't exactly honest work now, is it?"

"Craig knows what I mean," she said. "He knows that I'm the only one that cares about him."

"Oh, I think he's starting to get an inkling that that isn't quite as kosher as you make it out to be, given the whole matter of, you know, attempted murder on your part," the Doctor said, nodding at the canvas that had covered their cage. "That's why he's gone and put us on 'mute', after all - he's figured out that you're best left on mute. Otherwise you wouldn't keep going on about how everyone hates and will never understand him and how even you think he's worthless."

Like Craig's previous 'muting', he could still hear what was going on outside of the bubble - right now, Delaine and Craig were having a rather involved conversation about comics and cultural depictions of criminality. He'd have to get her talking about literature and themes more often if she was that enthusiastic about the subject…

'Really, so many people only look at the surface level of a text.'

But more interesting were the family references, particularly the brother, so quickly corrected to 'step-brother' before getting pushed out of the conversation all together. Another display of emotional intimacy and care immediately pushed aside because it was somehow wrong for her to get that close to someone else without explicit permission?

As always with Delaine, there were such interesting patterns moving under the surface. It really brought out his old scheme-y tendencies, these sort of tempting analyses. Ol' Question Mark Brolly would have had a field day with her, back in the day.

'I'm having one now, by proxy,' Seven shot back, still sulking a bit. The distrust had eased up a bit - that incarnation had always had a soft spot for Delaine's type, particularly when they showed vulnerability - but Seven had always kept a healthy amount of caution when presented with an unknown, stewing over odd coincidences for ages until an answer finally manifested… and Delaine was very much an unknown still.

The Doctor's current face may have had a minor tendency towards the same prying nature, but he at least knew how to redirect his energy towards 'current issues', and since there probably wasn't going to be much out there he could work with, it was best to get back to picking at the more immediate problem child, if only to make sure that she stayed off-balance.

"You don't have any direct input over this, do you? The simulation, I mean." the Doctor said. It was more of a rhetorical question than anything that was meant to get an honest answer. "That's why you push Craig around like that. Because it's his world, and you're just living in it. So much as you can, being a virtual construct of an old imaginary friend. And once you lose even that… you're not much of anything at all, are you? It's a wonder where you even came from. Some sort of psychic parasite? A pervasive sense of personal insecurity? Some conglomerate of his dating anxiety? Teenagers are rarely short on that. Because you really aren't anything like what an imaginary friend should be."

Not just in the sense of malice, but independent motives and thoughts from her 'creator'... and the ability to lie to and manipulate Craig rather than the other way around didn't bode well.

'I do so hate dealing with tulpas,' his Second face sighed. 'You never quite know when you're grabbing the head or the tail or the thing. If they even have one in the first place.'

The girl made a sour face, but didn't immediately reply, instead settling into a sulk. For a simulation, she did a very good job of imitating a moody teenager - the result from being at least partially born from the mind of one, more likely than not -, which gave the Doctor some time to work at analyzing the frequencies of the objects around him.

Simulated reality warpers were better than true ones, but unstable versions of either were complicated enemies - you had to… fix them, in some way - usually by tricking them into therapy or divesting their power willingly or walking into a trap face first - and this particular scenario wasn't being made easier by Craig's imaginary frenemy gumming up the works. But the vital difference that was on his side here was that a virtual reality could be hacked.

Which it would take a bit to figure out - oh, somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes, he wagered -, but he was working on it.

"Why do you call him stupid?" the Doctor asked as the sonic screwdriver ticked away at reading the signals around them. "I mean, there's so many different tacks you could take to get Craig to do what you want, teenagers being insecure as they are, and you pick that?"

Yes, the Doctor had seen similar tactics used to keep other beings of similar ability under the thumbs of their masters, but that involved devaluing their powers along with everything else about them - and Trudy didn't even sort of pretend that Craig's powers were nothing to worry about. If nothing else, that was the one category where she was his biggest fan - and with that, her usual formula of 'draw parallels between thing she doesn't like and some pre-existing trauma' was a winning recipe for success… so why did Trudy feel compelled to mess with it in a way that made her a potential target?

It would make sense if she was a sense of personal insecurity manifested into a coherent form, but then why would she drive so hard for control and the idea that she was the only 'good' thing in his world?

Trudy snorted. "Cause he is. He can't do anything right."

"I find that hard to believe. I mean, if you think about it, the odds of always being wrong are statistically-"

"If he could do anything right, he wouldn't have needed me, would he?" the girl snapped. "No! He'd be a happy little snot with a happy little family! Instead, Craig proved exactly what he was worth when he ruined everything just by being born."

"If he hadn't been born, you wouldn't be here either," the Doctor pointed out. "Because, in case you forgot, you only exist in his head."

Trudy laughed. "Is that what you think? Hah. But really, what has Craig Phillips ever done for the world? Given the hospital a bit of extra traffic every time he falls down the stairs or out of a tree? He can't even make his own mother happy, and it's the least he could do for ruining her life."

"Being a parent doesn't ruin someone's life," the Doctor replied, finally becoming properly annoyed. "Just because it's not always easy doesn't mean that it's not worth it."

"And you would know? What, do you have kids?" Trudy laughed again. "I bet you walked out on them too, just like Craig's da-"

She cut off as the Doctor moved into her personal space, her blue eyes going very, very wide as he loomed over her. People seemed to underestimate this face. He was still tall, still dangerous, but the Doctor supposed that 'young, pretty, and skinny' was easy to dismiss as a danger… right up until he stopped smiling.

"I would highly suggest that you drop that angle, Trudy," the Doctor hissed. "Before I forget that I put effort into being a decent person and terminate your program for everyone's convenience."

It wasn't an entirely idle threat - he'd sorted out the code supporting her physicality halfway by now -, but it was more of a bluff than he liked to use. He had a feeling that even if he did get rid of Trudy manually, Craig's belief in her would immediately bring her back. And then they really would be in trouble, once Trudy knew for sure that she was as immortal and immovable as Craig believed her to be.

Nothing was quite so persistent as a negative thought, and nothing quite so spiteful either.

To be continued…

Author's Notes

For a comic fan, sometimes dipping into that Old School Style for an aesthetic is tricky. Thankfully, research materials aren't exactly in short supply if you have a mind to go looking for them.

The Doctor gets to dip into being The Intense Guy a bit… but that's also broadly canonical to the comic this is based on, though I tried to aim for more reasonable transitions between the extreme emotions that it cycled through sometimes in the span of panels.

The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique is a legitimate tool used to help people work through panic attacks, though like any tool, it can be misused or executed in ways that make it ineffective.

A few peculiarities in what the Doctor is overhearing from the crate will be covered in the next chapter, as Delaine and Craig get to have a very involved conversation about comics and the themes of anti-heroes and their wider cultural influences and impact. This is what you get for reading a fic written by two literary minded nerds.

As for what Trudy really is? Well, that will be covered more… next chapter.

VWORP SNIKT