Doctor Who Fic: Burnt Toast, Chapter One
“You don’t have to do this,” he said, his voice buzzing through the speakers.
She adjusted her microphone and strapped into the pod. “Yes, I do. Besides, I’m gonna die anyway.”
“We don’t know what being at the heart of the Moment will do. Our deaths might last for centuries. If you stay on Gallifrey, it will be quick. Well, quicker, anyway.”
“I’m not leaving you. Never have, never will. Besides, it needs two people to fire it. You need me, and you know it.”
“I just don’t want you to suffer.”
She’d seen him cold and manipulative, using other people like pawns. Why couldn’t he be that way now? Why was he choosing now, of all times, to have a conscience?
“I’d suffer more, standing down there and watching you go into battle without me. No more arguing, or we’ll miss our chance.”
She wasn’t sure what the pod had been made for, before he had commandeered it to carry the Moment, but it certainly didn’t leave much room to move. It was better that way, she thought. Shut up in this tiny space, she had no choice but to focus on the task at hand. She flipped the temporal voidance switch, and tried to forget that she had failed her class on timecraft piloting.
The engine-it wasn’t actually called an engine, but its technical name took much longer to say-emitted a steady hum, punctuated by a series of bleeps. She felt the telepathic circuits attempting to interface with her brain. “Sorry, not Time Lord enough for that,” she told the pod as she took the manual controls. “I’m setting the coordinates now,” she said into the microphone.
“Make sure you’re precisely at the edge of the time lock.” He was trying to be calm, she could tell. Calm didn’t agree with him. “A deviation of so much as a nanosecond will cause a misfire. We only get one chance at this.”
“I know.” The coordinates were set. “It’s been an honor working with you, Professor.”
“And you. Good-bye, Ace.”
“Good-bye.” She slid her hand down the ignition panel and pulled the spatial propulsion lever. On the tiny viewscreen beside her left ear, Gallifrey fell away. She could almost smell the artron energy in the air as the pod hurtled through space and time to its destination. She reached up and switched off the microphone.
“I love you,” she said to no one, and everything dissolved into fire.
***
The students of Mrs. Merrill’s astronomy class were the ones to discover the alien, as every one of them boasted to their friends for years after. On a late-night field trip to the quarry outside Meltser Colony Six, their telescope spied a streak of red-gold light, plummeting down to the planet in a fashion that was definitely not that of a falling star. It fell to the ground so close that they could see the flames.
Mira Clarke, who always came in first in school races, set off at a dead run with her classmates racing behind her, while Mrs. Merrill shouted at them to stop that nonsense at once. Mira skidded to a halt so quickly at the edge of the burning pit that Tom Bowen and Ruthie Dylan both ran into her. “Watch it,” Mira growled as she tried to detangle herself from Tom’s rucksack. “You’ll give me a percussion.” If anyone noticed Mira’s incorrect vocabulary, they didn’t mention it.
“Sorry,” both Tom and Ruthie mumbled, nursing their own wounds.
Once Mira was satisfied that she had not received a percussion (or a concussion, for that matter), she led five of the braver students down into the smoking crater. They did their best to avoid the small flames that had not yet died out, although Neil Kelly did scorch the hem of his trousers.
Mrs. Merrill had arrived at the edge of the pit, out of breath. “Clarke! Bowen! Dylan! Kelly! Knox! Carlton! Get back here, this instant! Let security handle this!”
“If we don’t answer her,” said Ruthie, “we can say we didn’t hear.” They all agreed that this was the best course of action, and kept picking their way down the slope.
At the very bottom of the pit was a blackened husk of metal, as big as the tilling drone that worked the fields at the edge of the colony. Mira held out her arms to keep the others back. “It’s probably hot,” she announced, with all the authority she could muster.
Without warning, a loud clanging sound came from inside the Thing. The children let out a collective shriek, and Jessica Carlton started running back to the edge. Mira and the others watched as a panel on the side of the Thing swung violently open and fell off its hinges with a loud crash. Smoke came pouring out of the hole, along with bits of swirling golden light that faded as fast as it appeared. And behind the smoke, and the light, came a woman.
More of a girl, really, thought Mira, though older than they were. She stood there for a second, glancing around at her surroundings, before tumbling out of the hole and crashing on the ground.
The boys seemed especially eager to help her, perhaps because-other than a few scraps of leather that clung to her shoulders-she was completely lacking in clothing. Mira glared at them, but she and Ruthie could hardly move the girl by themselves, so she had no choice but to accept their lecherous help.
Together, they pulled the girl away from the Thing, and laid her on a flat bit of ground a short distance away. Mira pulled off her jacket, exposing her arms to the cool autumn air, and wrapped it around the stranger. It wasn’t much for warmth, and it didn’t really fit across the girl’s shoulders, but it was something. Tom’s mother had packed a blanket in his rucksack, which helped to cover up the rest of the girl.
The girl’s lips moved, and she mumbled in a language that Mira couldn’t understand. “Erm, hello,” said Mira. “I’m Mira. What’s your name?”
“A…ce,” the girl mumbled.
Mira turned to confer with her friends, just as two grey-coated security men came dashing down into the pit. “I couldn’t really hear, but I think her name’s Alice,” she told her classmates.
“Right, step away from there, kids,” one of the men commanded.
They watched the security men lift the girl and carry her gently out of the pit, then walked back to Mrs. Merrill and the rest of the class. Mira proudly announced to her fellows, speaking over Mrs. Merrill’s lecture, that their colony was now host to an alien (of course she was an alien) named Alice.
***
She woke up in a sterile white room, the stench of burning metal still clinging to her, and a very young voice told her that her name was Alice. That didn’t seem quite right, but it would be good enough. Everything felt hot, from the air around her to her very blood. The girl who was now Alice sat up in the hospital bed. “What happened?” she asked, in the same coarse dialect that the child had used.
“We think you crashed,” said the child, who was female, and quite dirty. “Don’t you remember?”
“No…” But there was something, something very important. It was nagging away at the back of her mind, shouting at her to pay attention. If she could only remember what it was! Something she needed. Something that would make the burning in the pit of her stomach go away. “I need…I need…” A letter. It was a letter, only not a letter. Something terribly important… “TEA!” she exclaimed, so loud that the little girl jumped. “I need tea!” she repeated, before collapsing back onto her pillow.
Alice awoke to the sensation of scalding liquid sloshing into her mouth. A new energy surged through her veins as it burned her throat, fueled by chemicals she’d forgotten the names of. Yes, that was better. She smiled at the little girl, who held the now-empty cup. “Thank you,” she said, but the girl only looked at her, puzzled.
“I don’t understand you,” said the girl.
Wrong language. She’d had the right one a moment before, hadn’t she? She didn’t usually need to switch. And how did she know all these languages, anyhow? “Sorry,” she said, adjusting her internal vocabulary. “I said, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Do you remember me? I’m Mira. My friends and me, we found you.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m afraid I don’t really remember…” She paused. There was something definitely wrong about her voice. She couldn’t say exactly what it had sounded like before, but she was positive that she was not the sort of person who rolled her R’s like that. A panic that she couldn’t define ran through her. “Mirror.”
“Yeah, Mira. That’s me.”
“No, mirror. Although you have a very nice name. I need a mirror.”
“Oh.” Mira stepped out of the room for a moment, and returned with a small compact. “Here, this is my mom’s. And the doctor says there’s a bigger mirror in the bathroom, but you shouldn’t stand up yet.”
“Thank you.” She looked into the little mirror, and a girl with dark, curly hair looked back at her. Now that was wrong. The face, the hair, it was familiar, but it just wasn’t right. It wasn’t her. “I’m someone else,” she whispered to her reflection. There was a name for that, said a little piece of her brain. But that name, like her own, was locked away somewhere where she couldn’t reach it.
The doctor came in then, and told Mira to give them a moment alone. Alice felt sorry to see the girl leave.
“So…Alice, is it?”
“I guess.”
“Erm, this is somewhat hard to explain. Do you…do you know what you are?”
“What? Well, I’m what you are, aren’t I?” She had the same arms and legs and head that Mira’s species did; five fingers, a nose, two eyes, and-she verified with a quick glance under the sheets-all the anatomy that she was supposed to possess. But the look in the doctor’s eyes made it clear that something was highly irregular.
He sat down on the edge of the bed. “We ran some basic tests while you were asleep, and, well…you have two hearts, for one.”
Alice put her hand on her chest, feeling the rhythms of her body through the thin fabric of the hospital gown. A steady double beat, drumming against her fingers. Wasn’t that what she was supposed to have? “How many hearts do you have?”
“Well, just the one.”
“Oh.” That wasn’t good.
“And your respiratory system…it’s nothing like I’ve ever seen before. Your entire physiology is definitely not human. Your genetic structure doesn’t even appear in the medical database!”
“Oh,” she said again.
“We’re still cataloging all the anomalies.” He sounded excited. “I’m still not sure how you were able to come out of that wreck completely unscathed-you must have an astonishing healing factor.”
“I…can still hurt.” She was quite sure of that. Still it felt like there was a fire burning just beneath her skin, scorching every cell a thousand times over. But beneath it she felt something else, a twisting, hollow feeling. “And I’m hungry.”
“Oh, yes, we’ll get you some breakfast. You’ve been asleep for a few days, I imagine you must be starving. Erm, what do you eat?”
“Well, I don’t know that!” she snapped. Where had that anger come from? “I’ll find out when I eat something, won’t I?”
“Erm, yes, just a minute, I’ll go find you something.”
It was quiet then, only it wasn’t. The beating of her double hearts echoed in her ears, and beyond it were sounds that she was supposed to remember. Screams and explosions, beautiful music and terrible disharmony, all roaring in her memory, just beyond recognition. She pulled the blankets over her head, even though the room was unbearably hot, and pressed her hands to her ears. It did nothing.
“Alice? Are you all right?” Mira had returned, carrying a plate of steaming food.
She let the blankets fall. The girl’s voice was a distraction from the noise in her head, enough that she could hear herself think again. “I’m fine. Is that for me?”
“Yep! Dr. Peters said you didn’t know what you liked, so we got you a little of everything. There’s bacon, and another kind of bacon, and sausage, and mushrooms, and a muffin, and toast, and jam, and chocolate. Chocolate’s not really for breakfast, but everyone likes chocolate, so I got you some anyway.”
Alice did indeed like chocolate. In short order, she also discovered that bacon was excellent, but the sausage was too spicy, and she liked white mushrooms, but not brown ones. Muffins were satisfying, but butter was better than jam. When she got to the toast, her hand paused for a moment.
“Sorry, it’s a little burnt…” said Mira, when she saw Alice hesitate.
One voice among the cacophony grew louder at the sight of the blackened bread. Alice’s vision grew blurry as the memory echoed in her ears.
I can't stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations. Terrible places. Full of lost luggage and lost souls…
And among the words came the warmth of a friendly arm encircling her shoulder, assuring her that things would be fine while the world fell apart around them. Then there was fire, and screaming, and sounds beyond description, and smells beyond imagination, and her hands were on cold metal controls, speeding to the end of everything. And still there was that voice, from a time when things were better than they would be.
And then there's unrequited love. And tyranny. And cruelty…
And that voice had been beautiful, and horrible, and gentle, and angry, and everything that she had wanted to be, and it wasn’t there anymore. And even though she didn’t know why, or how, she knew she had done it. Because of what she did, whatever that was, that wonderful, terrible person would never speak again. And millions and billions of other voices, too, that she had silenced.
“No!” she cried out in a language no one alive could speak. There was a crash as the plate slid out of her hands and onto the hard floor. Then there was nothing at all.