Leela of the Sevateem

888

He could smell it, the stench of death. He grimaced as he walked the halls, down stairs and around great antechambers. He wished he could've gotten there sooner. The TARDIS was damaged though, and there weren't any parts left. He'd done his best to cobble together a functioning console, but it was unreliable at best, it would take months to work out the kinks.

The reports said the plague spread like wildfire. The entire species had been wiped out in days. The halls were littered with the dead. Some evidently had died as they fled, some collapsing from sickness and exhaustion and left where they lay, no one willing to touch their bodies. He tried to look away but there was nowhere to escape it. He could hear, inside his head, the screams, the shouts of hatred and terror, the voices of the accumulated wronged. He had to stop; his head was pounding, with the shrill screeches of Daleks and the embittered curses of Time Lords. He put his hands to his ears and knelt down. The mental pain was becoming physical now, it roared angrily as it washed over him. Flashes of people he'd killed, flashes of worlds burning, it twisted in his mind overlaid on top of reality, replacing it. He struggled trying to grab some fragment of the real, to free him from the past.

And that's when he heard it, softly, weakly in the distance, a wafting, wispy voice. He clung to it, walking towards it like a light at the end of a tunnel. The voice was ancient, the wispiness of it melted away as he got closer to it, revealing a crispy, crackly tone. It was talking to someone.

He inched closer, coming to a door. The handle rattled as he tried to open it. He took out his sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the handle. The blue light glowed as the tool whirred to life. There was a hollow metallic clink and the handle shifted and the door creaked open.

On the other side of the door was a horror show. Bodies chained to walls, several had been obviously tortured to death. Many had strips of flesh cut from them. The smell was overwhelming. It wafted past him like a nuclear blast and he staggered slightly unsure if he could continue forward. The memories were blazing in his mind again; he closed his eyes and listened.

"You would have liked him, Karas." The voice intoned with the sound of gravel. "I remember it all still…they tried to take it away from me but I remember…"

He walked forward, slowly opening his eyes. In the center of the room there was an operating table. An ancient woman was laying on it, strapped down to it.

"I remember one time, we were in this giant house of light….and there was this…this demon that would steal people's shape. My eyes changed color that night, of course, this was when I could still see." The old woman said clearly to someone, who was equally clearly not there.

He looked around; all he could see were corpses. He stepped forward, his foot hit a chair and it screeched angrily across the stone floor.

"Karas?! Is that you, Karas?" The old woman asked her head turning towards his position. Her eyes were long glazed over with cataracts and the orbs stared blindly outwards. Her face was carved with wrinkles, her hair was thin and white and wispy. She tried to lift her arm but a chain clung angrily to the thin stick of an appendage. A white gown covered her slight frame. The woman frowned, "This is not a joke, Karas!"

"I think, I think Karas has left." He said finally as he looked at the woman.

"No, no, impossible." The woman said shaking her head. "I've been talking to him about my friend. He couldn't have left…I'd have known. Plus, we have to wait for my friend, he will come to save us."

"I'm sorry, but there is no one here but you and me." He said, as he looked to the corpses. "You were a prisoner? I'm sorry I didn't get here sooner. I had trouble…getting my ship to cooperate."

The old woman laughed, or rather she coughed in a humored way. "You sound like a friend of mine. Always getting lost, in the fog once, we were lost in the fog. Was that when we saw the skull….no…when was it?"

"I am here to help, to free you." He said quietly as he walked closer. He looked down at the face. "Just give me a second." He drew his sonic screwdriver up and pointed it at the bindings. It whirred.

The old woman gasped her eyes pointed impossibly at his face. "It is you! I told Karas you would come. I told him you would be here! The Z'Nai would not kill us, I made sure that would not happen, I used the plague against them! But we were trapped here, but I told Karas and the others that you would come, you would save us."

"I don't know what you're talking about." He said quietly as he removed the chains from the woman's limbs.

"The Doctor…." The woman whispered. Her hands slowly reaching up to his face and touching him. She frowned slightly. "Your face you have changed…your ears are the ears of a master tracker, Old One."

He smirked quietly to himself as the woman ran her dry fingers over his features. "You've not changed."

"I have grown ancient." The woman said, embarrassed. "The Z'nai stole my years, my sight, tried to take secrets from me, secrets I didn't have, secrets about my life during the war." The woman frowned and shook her head. "I do not know what war though. I know there was a life, a great sadness, but it's all….fuzzy." She turned her head to him. "Except I remember you, always you, nothing could steal my memories of the Old One…of the Doctor…you still smell the same. Cinnamon…Kuva berries…orange jelly babies." The woman frowned again. "The last time I found you, the last time I saw you…there was…something wrong." Her eyebrows knitted together as she thought. "You were you but…not you." She pushed away from him. "Evil One you were the Evil One!"

Old as she was she was still somewhat nimble and she slid off the table and shuffled away from him. She knelt very slowly and reached down her hands searching from something, anything. Her hands found an old scalpel and her fingers tightened around it and she lifted it up.

"Now, just wait…" He put his hands up in a meaningless display. "Things are different now. The war is over…"

"Yes, the war is over…I remember more now…how did it end?" The woman growled, the scalpel's ancient rusty blade pointed at him. "Did you complete your magic? Did you kill them all?"

He frowned, he could hear them still in his head screaming in hatred, and now he was faced with the same hatred, ancient and fossilized as it was.

"I couldn't….I tried everything…" He said pleadingly. He was backing away and the woman simply stepped forward, more menace with each creaking and crackling step. "They would've killed everyone. I had to stop them before there was nothing left to save. You have to understand, Leela! You said it yourself, the war was not one of honor. It was madness."

"My Doctor would not have done what you did!" Leela growled, as she stalked, anciently forward, the muscles pulsing. "He would have done something, anything, else!"

"You're right." He said staring at the woman as she prowled closer to him. "I was overwhelmed. I did horrific things when we last met. I was not the Doctor. I should've died!"

"Then allow me to rectify that!" Leela said as she brought the old blade up.

"Fine." He took a step forward. "Kill me. Strike me dead."

Leela's hands stopped in midair. "What trick is this?"

"No trick." He said quietly, he took another step forward, towards her. He grasped her hands as they grasped the scalpel. "Maybe this is what I've been waiting for. My whole history was waiting to catch back up to you. You're the only one left who could possibly pass judgment over me, and my crimes against the entire universe." He brought the blade down to his chest. "Here, a jab here would puncture my left heart. I would be dead in only a matter of seconds, no regeneration, no escape."

Leela frowned quietly, she pulled away from him and dropped the scalpel. "No."

"I'm the Evil One, you vowed to kill me." He said, his eyes looking quizzically at her. "Is the vow of a Sevateem warrior of no value anymore!?"

"I am ancient, I am no longer a warrior, and you are not the Evil One." Leela said as she slumped back against the operating table. "The Evil One would not partake of his own justice. Only the Doctor would do such a thing." She turned her head and her visionless eyes pierced into his heart. "Your punishment is not to die, Doctor. I can hear it in your voice, and feel it in your flesh. Whatever you did in the war, it has burned out of you. Whatever demon possessed you is now gone. You must live with the consequences."

She coughed slightly, little bits of blood crested on her lips.

"Leela…" He stepped forward.

"It is, I think, time." Leela said quietly. She winced. "I lived a very long time, Doctor. Far longer than this body was meant to live. The Z'nai did things to me, when they tried to force me to answer their questions. And without your tribe's magic to help me, my body withered. I have kept myself alive all this time, the others…Karas…died months ago of starvation. I lived on, knowing I would find you again. I have found you, Old One, now there is no more reason to live on."

"I can help you, I can get you to a medical facility…" He said as he moved towards the old woman. "I can…"

Leela mustered her strength and strained to lift herself up. She moved towards the Doctor and put her arms around him. "Old One, there is one battle no warrior ever wins." She lifted her head to the Doctor's face. "You made my life important. So many of the people you meet become great heroes, great warriors. Remember that, Old One, you have always been a force for good in the universe. The Doctor has always been the hope of the worlds out there."

The Doctor placed his arms around the old woman. He felt her body slump slightly against his. He held her for a long time, his eyes tearing up as he felt the warmth fade from her. After a time he slowly laid her down. Over the days he laid all of the victims of the Z'nai around her. He shrouded them in what shrouds he could find, and in an ancient tongue lost to the universe he intoned a peaceful repose upon them.

The fire burned for many days. He watched it from the TARDIS. One last funeral pyre for the last warrior of the Time War. Leela of the Sevateem was now at rest.