Two Birds in a Cage, 7/?
Title: Two Birds in a Cage
Characters: alt!Sarah Jane, alt!Three, Section Leader Shaw, Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart, references alt!Jo
Summary: Miles below the earth, in the most secret and heavily guarded of all their prisons, they keep a man who builds them weapons that are decades and sometimes centuries ahead of their time. Reports come back of the things they bring him: books, chemicals, lab equipment. Young girls.
Notes: An AU for the Inferno-verse, which I guess makes it an AU of an AU. Basically, the Doctor we know never popped in from our universe, but their version of the Doctor has been their prisoner for as long as he has been in exile. Oh, and the world never burned up, obviously.
Warnings: Descriptions of torture (including allusions to sexual assault). A friendship with occasional Stockholm Syndrome overtones. Stockholm Syndrome.
A.N. for this chapter: A.N. As ever, Doctor Who is not my property, and neither is the play SJ tries to read in this chapter, "A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen. No comment on whether I am choosing her reading material by just picking books off my shelves and checking the copyright date.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
“Oh, honestly,” the Section Leader says. “You’d think I’d asked to borrow the centrifuge, or one of the important pieces of equipment.”
“Miss Smith is not available for lending,” the Doctor returns coldly.
SJ can only see the Doctor’s back; he had moved in front of SJ the second that Section Leader Shaw had made her demands. SJ wants to move, she wants to stand by the Doctor’s side, wants to look the Section Leader in the eye.
Her legs won’t let her move.
“We have an agreement,” the Doctor is saying. “You passed ownership on to me, and your own interests ceased. Though I can’t see what possible torment you could have forgotten the first time around.”
The Section Leader taps her foot. “This paranoia really doesn’t suit you, Doctor. I simply wish to offer your assistant a cup of tea and inquire as to how she is settling in.”
“Oh well, tea,” the Doctor says sarcastically. “That’s perfectly fine, then. You may be a sadistic monster, but certainly no one can accuse you of being a foreign agent.”
“Careful, Doctor.” Her words are a whiplash, and SJ’s feet back up a step. “Don’t forget your place.”
“Don’t forget yours either,” he returns. “Does the Brigade Leader know you’re down here playing this little game?”
A pause, then: “The Brigade Leader is a busy man. I could make this cell very comfortable for you, Doctor. Or very uncomfortable. All without him ever knowing.”
“Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?”
“We will indeed.” Shaw snaps her fingers, and the soldiers rise to open the door for her. She pauses in the entranceway. “In the meantime, consider: is she really offering value for money?”
xxxxx
The parting shot echoes in SJ’s head as the Doctor strides around the lab, muttering deprecations upon the Section Leader and slamming equipment onto the lab tables too hard. SJ tries not to jump every time he slams a piece of equipment down too hard. He’s angry at the Section Leader, not her. She knows that. She knows.
A beaker shatters, and SJ’s hands grip the countertop tight.
“Oh blast,” the Doctor snaps. “Miss Smith, have you seen the broom?”
She manages to make a gesture. She’s not sure exactly where she’s gesturing to, but maybe it’s enough, maybe he won’t notice-
“Where?”
Damn.
There is a piece of paper in front of her. She has to keep staring at the piece of paper. There are marks on the piece of paper, but she can’t read them, and she has to keeping holding tight to the counter and staring at the piece of paper and trying to read them-
“Miss Smith?”
-or he’ll realize something is wrong, and there isn’t anything wrong, she’ll be fine in just a minute if she just-
value for money
“Miss Smith?”
And his voice is so close she flinches, overbalancing, and the stool topples-clang!-and he catches her-
His arms go around her. “You’re shaking,” he says. His hand finds her cheek, tries to turn her face towards him, but her head pulls away from his grasp without her permission, pulls her head down so her chin is tucked into her chest and her shoulders are hunched tight.
“Sarah?” he says softly.
She thinks he says it softly. All she can hear is the Section Leader’s voice in her head, from just now and from before, from The Room, the scrape of the metal and slick sound of cutting flesh, any second now the Section Leader might be back, might take her back-
“Is it what I said to Beth? About ownership? That was purely for her benefit, I assure you.”
The Doctor eases her to the ground and lets go; she scuttles backwards into the rows of cupboards, metal handles digging into her back. A wall to her back and she’s at least a little safe-of course she’s safe, of course she’s not going back-
Fine, she makes herself sign. Fine go away fine please fine.
“That’s hardly up to your usual standard of prevarication.” He leans backward, spreads his hands wide, appeasing. Showing he is unarmed. As if he would need weapons. “Would you like to talk about it?”
no
A small motion, but the Doctor sees.
“All right,” the Doctor says. He stands, walks over the counter where the box of books sits. Selects a volume. Strides back, sits down, a little farther away from her than he was before, turned slightly away. He opens the book, flips a few pages with studied casualness. Adds, without looking up from the page, “They can’t do anything to you now, you know.”
He is not pursuing her, but he is still blocking her escape. No, no, that’s wrong, stop it, don’t think like that.
“I know they hurt you very badly,” he continues, still addressing the book. His voice is soft. His hands shake a little on ‘hurt.’ “But that is over now. That was-that has always been my condition. They cannot touch you. If they take you away-I stop helping them.”
Get you another one. Her hands leap from her lap, rap out their message on the floor of their own accord.
“No,” he says. He looks up from the book; tilts his head, trying to meet her eye. “I stop.”
Till they get you another one. She’s telling him too much, letting him see all her fears, but her fingers twitch and itch and tap and she can’t still them.
“No,” he says again. “If I lost you as I lost Josie-then I might simply shut down again, become dormant for a time. But if they take you from me…if they are willing to violate my one condition, if there is not one single person I can keep safe from them-then there is simply no point in my going on. With anything. Anything.” His fingers twist and curl at a corner of a page. “Do you understand, Sarah?”
She feels herself nod.
“They cannot do a thing to you.”
Without your permission, her treacherous fingers say. If I’m not good, if you get tired of me-
It hangs in the air, and she can’t take it back.
“Ah, is that it?”
He reaches out to her halfway, slowly, his hand outstretched in the space between them.
“I would not trade your company for worlds.”
The words are light, but the tone he says them in is anything but.
Why?
“Aside from not wishing so much as a cockroach to be given to their tender mercies?” he asks dryly.
She nods.
“I could never get tired of you,” he says. “Your questions, your actions, your choices-you are new to me every day.”
He raises his arm slightly, and she sees that he is offering it at an odd angle, palm first. The imprint of her teeth still stark against his skin.
“They may call you mine,” he says quietly. “And perhaps, in a certain sense, they are right. But I am yours as well. You may hate me, you may fear me, but you are still the closest thing I have to-to a ray of light in this dark place.
“Believe me, I will never let them take you.”
She lets out a long breath. She hadn’t even realized she was holding it.
You were lonely before I got here. SJ is still uncertain, but the words are hers now, she is choosing them slow and steady and careful. She is remembering how to watch, and to listen, and to breathe. You could get over being lonely again.
“No,” he says. “Not after-not again.”
I’m not Josie or Beth.
She feels her breath catch in her throat again, just for a second.
“I don’t wish you to be them,” he says. “I simply wish you to be here.”
He is still offering her his hand, palm first.
Her hand steals out, fingers not quite touching the pale scars beginning to form on his palm, a semicircle of dots and dashes.
“Yours,” he says, as if that explains everything.
SJ extends one finger, brushes his skin. Promise? she sends.
He nods.
“Partners,” he says. “Remember?”
She nods.
They both breathe out at the same time, and he smiles at her, and she nods again, feeling the weight go out of her shoulders, feeling a lightness expanding in her chest.
He is not perfect, but he is hers, and she knows him.
I don’t hate you, she says. I wanted to, but I don’t.
His lips turn up just a little; his eyes remain grave. “You will, sometimes. Close quarters like this-it can’t be helped.” I’ll try not to mind.
She scoots closer to him, ducks her head to press against his shoulder-she can’t quite do it naturally, she’s forgotten the gesture, and it’s something of a headbutt, defiant. The tips of his fingers twitch on her wrist, and she slides her hand into his. Their fingers interlace.
Sorry, she says.
What for?
For saying all those things. Thinking them. Panicking, when I’d just promised that I’d try to trust you-
He cuts her off with a gentle squeeze of her hand. “If you really still believed I was capable of such actions, you never would have let me in last night.” His voice is gruff; his thumb strokes over her knuckles. “You’ve taken a great many risks lately. I don’t know if you truly realized how many until this morning.”
It was just, the Section Leader started talking and-
It’s all right.
The fabric of his shirt is rough against her face. She can feel her heart slowing, can hear his own heart beating its strange rhythm. I hate depending on people.
I gathered as much.
They sit in silence for a bit. He is not warm, but he is solid, and he is there.
I’m sorry as well, he says after awhile. This might have all been much easier for you if I hadn’t-I used my suspicions as an excuse. It was convenient to have a reason why I shouldn’t get to know you, to keep from feeling-to let myself keep sulking, like a spoiled child.
There is a picture lurking behind his words. He’s trying to keep from sending it through, but SJ can glimpse the outline in faded sad pastels.
You miss her, she says. I’ve always known that. You don’t have to hide it.
She presses her forehead harder against his shoulder, and he lets her.
It is not terrible.
Maybe it will last a little longer.
xxxxx
The rest of the day goes smoothly after that, experiments and notes and telepathic tete-a-tetes over when to resume the sabotage; the Doctor insists he’s ready to start immediately, while SJ thinks she still spies a little stiffness in his walk, wants to delay just one more day.
And then Beth Shaw appears again like a bad dream, her heels clicking down the cold stone floor towards their cell.
The Doctor moves to shield SJ once more, but she’s determined not to let him this time. She can carry her own weight. She stands at his side with her back straight and stares, lips set, at a spot over the Section Leader’s shoulder so it will look like she’s staring her in the eyes.
“It’s really no use your coming down here.” The Doctor’s voice is tight. “Unless you’ve developed an uncharacteristic fondness for failure. At some point, Beth, you really must learn to abandon a faulty hypothesis.”
“So you continue to refuse to let me borrow her?”
But Shaw isn’t even looking at him. Her focus is on SJ, and she’s smiling, a secret pleased smile like a cat who knows exactly what hole the mouse is about to come out of.
“I do indeed.”
Shaw’s smile broadens, lips parting slowly to reveal a line of teeth. Tiger with her prey. She’s still looking right at SJ. “And what about Miss Smith’s opinion?”
The Doctor snorts. “And since when do you give a fig about Miss Smith’s opinion?”
“Oh, I don’t, Doctor. But you do. Or did you think I hadn’t been watching?” She gestures towards the camera. “It’s not the most entertaining viewing, I admit, but it’s at least a step above that insipid melodrama you played out with Miss Grant.”
Her lips twitch up a bit more with those last few words, her eyes still on SJ, and SJ feels her heart start to beat faster. She can almost hear the unspoken coda, directed right at her: And you still don’t know exactly what happened to Miss Grant, do you?
“Very well,” the Doctor says through gritted teeth, “Miss Smith, enlighten us as to whether you can resist the temptation of half an hour in the Section Leader’s company.”
He doesn’t turn to her as he says it, and SJ is briefly grateful as she brings up her hands to sign, it’s bad enough that the Section Leader keeps staring at her, she doesn’t know what she’d do with two sets of eyes on her, if she’d freeze or-
“I wouldn’t be so quick if I were you,” the Section Leader interrupts. She snaps her fingers, and a soldier steps forward. He is carrying a file.
It’s exactly the same way she used to summon an underling to bring her SJ’s file in The Room.
SJ’s hands freeze midair.
The Section Leader flips through the pages. “Yes…yes, yes…oh good, his information was a bit difficult to track down, I was beginning to think we’d never find it…” Her nails pause on one particular page, her lips curling up as she relishes this particular bit of theatre. “Oh yes, it’s all here. Of course, you can’t be tempted. You couldn’t possibly be interested. Not in the definite and final fates of Dorothea Chaplet, Audrey McShane, Jeremy Fitzoliver, Andrea Yates, and Harry Sullivan.”
“It’s a trick,” the Doctor says, and the words are out of his mouth faster than SJ can respond to the names, faster than light.
The names, she said their names...
“I could give you all this information,” the Section Leader muses. “Still, it is the kind of…delicate…account best related in private.”
The Doctor is at the door in three strides. “Go away.”
It is a snarl.
The Section Leader’s gaze flickers to him for a moment, but she remains unperturbed. Her eyes are cold. Amused, if anything at all. She looks back at SJ. “Consider what I’ve said, Miss Smith. And consider who truly has your best interests at heart… the person who is willing to give you some freedom of movement, or the man who would keep you locked up all to himself?”
She turns to the Doctor, who is now sputtering in incoherent rage. “You know how to reach me when you’ve changed your mind.”
And with a turn of her heel and the click of the door at the end of the hall, she is gone.
SJ is still hearing the names in her head, is still seeing them paint themselves in black letters on the blaring blank white of her mind: Dorothea Chaplet, Audrey McShane, Jeremy Fitzoliver, Andrea Yates, Harry Sullivan.
There is nothing in the world but those names.
“It’s a trick,” the Doctor says. He says it too loudly. “Beth playing her little games. She’s trying to drive a wedge between us. Divide and conquer. That’s all.”
Dorothea Chaplet, Audrey McShane, Jeremy F-
“Even if she does have any new information, which I highly doubt, she knows your presence here is non-negotiable.”
Andrea Yates, Harry Sulliv-
“She’s simply trying to sow dissent-Sarah, are you listening to me?”
SJ pulls herself up as though out of a well. Yes.
“And you-you understand? You believe me, don’t you?”
He is looking right at her. His eyes are very bright and very blue. Sully had blue eyes.
Yes.
“Ah, well.” He doesn’t seem to know what to do, suddenly. He scrubs at a spot on the counter with the edge of his sleeve, darts a glance up at her, looks away. “Well. Let’s get on, then.”
So they do. They go back to testing the acid-resistance of various body armor fabric swatches, and SJ takes his notes, and hands him his test tubes, and tries not to hear those names in her head.
Dottie. Audrey. Fitzoliver. Andy. Sully.
And it is only after the tenth test, when what she is writing begins to blur in front of her, that SJ realizes that she has started to cry.
“Miss Smith-oh, Sarah, please don’t. Please.” His voice is anguished, helpless. His voice is very close. His hand comes up towards the path of a tear down her cheek, falls down again before he can touch her. “You know better than anyone that Beth is utterly untrustworthy, you know I can’t let you go-”
SJ reaches out blindly for him; her hand finds his arm, the skin below the shirt cuff. Do you hear me trying to persuade you?
He starts to gesture with the arm she is holding before stilling. “But…you were-”
I’ve wanted things before, and not got them. The words pull her strength back into her. She feels it, bricks building up a wall. She wipes her tears away with her spare hand. I’ll be fine.
“I’m-” He stops, lets out a breath. Opens his mouth again, shakes his head. He doesn’t seem to know what to say. “It’s not that I’m ungrateful, but-” His brow creases. “Why aren’t you fighting this?”
She lets her head fall forward against his chest. Less of a headbutt this time; she’s making progress. Lets her breath fall out of her, long and slow. I promised, didn’t I? I promised I’d stay here with you.
The Doctor starts; she feels it, his whole body jerking back from her just for a second.
“You did,” he says. His other hand has come up to her hair; he strokes a strand over her ear. “That was the agreement. You stay with me. But-”
I keep my word. She says it fiercely. The words burn her, leave her shaking.
She hears his breath catch in his chest. “I see.”
A deep breath, and then he pulls back from her, keeping one arm around her shoulder as he draws her back towards their work; he chatters on about the experiment, reiterating the data they’ve already gathered, giving her a few moments to finish collecting herself.
xxxxx
He stays close to her for the rest of the evening, doesn’t let her out of his sight even to the other side of the bed. He keeps darting glances at her, as if trying to catch her at something. Keeps touching her, light touches on her hand or shoulder, ostensibly to catch her attention, but almost as if to check that she is still there.
SJ makes herself not flinch from him, even when the touch is sudden, unexpected. She wants to let him know that she will not abandon him. His eyes are so wide, so frightened. He has given up so much for her, will give up so much more in comfort and in health and in safety. And for what? A slip of a girl, scarred and suspicious, who has always shied from him. If it calms him to be near her, it is a little thing. She can give it to him.
Andrea Yates, Harry Sullivan-
She promised him. She promised. She did.
“Why don’t you go read for a bit?” the Doctor suggests at last. “I do believe I saw some Bronte at the bottom of the pile.”
He wants her to smile. Is that what he wants? She can’t seem to make her face move.
She promised.
She goes to the box, picks up a book, and sits down on the armchair to stare at the pages.
xxxxx
The Doctor sits down beside her and she starts, realizing simultaneously that she hadn’t heard him approach and that she can’t remember anything that happened on the last thirty pages. She has a brief irrational terror that he will ask her about the plot. She glances up at him quickly, then back down at the book: My little songbird mustn’t ever do that again. She has no idea who is saying it, or why.
“Any good?”
She shrugs. Her shoulder brushes his. The armchair is not large, and with both of them sitting there her legs are pressed firmly together, her left thigh against his, her right squashed against the armrest so that she can feel the wooden support through the thick cushion.
“How are you feeling?”
She shrugs again.
He lets his breath out slowly, through his teeth. Then:
“I always liked Ibsen. Contrary devil, but a charming fellow. One of the few of his time who really knew how to write a heroine.”
He reaches out, and touches her head. The tips of his fingers brush lightly over her hair.
“What am I going to do with you, Miss Smith?”
He cups her cheek, and turns her face upward, towards him.
“No ideas today?”
She is not afraid of him in this moment. She has nothing left to give him, not even anger or fear.
What do you want me to do?
“Something, dammit!” The force of his words propels him up out of the chair. His shoulders tighten, and he whirls to face her again. “Hit me! Knock over a row of beakers! Shut yourself up in your bed scribbling an escape plan in your notebook! Don’t just sit there like a doll, like you’re already dead-”
The Doctor is shaking now, his face and his shoulders and his knees and his hands. He sinks to his knees in front of her, and she reaches out to touch his face. There is a rent in her chest, and it is widening. How can she do everything he wants her to do? She is already drowning, she is already struggling so hard to keep afloat, just to keep her promise. His face is cold against her hand. How can she explain to him?
She cannot.
His eyes close when she touches his cheek. A tremor runs through his body.
They were my friends, she says. There is nothing else to say. They were my family.
“Oh, damn it all to-oh, very well!”
And he tears away from her hand as though it burns. He stomps to the counter, grabs a long iron rod, and begins to slam it against the bars of their cell. “Guard! Guard!”
A thrill of alarm runs up her spine, and she hastens to him, tugs at the arm not holding the iron bar. I wasn’t saying-I promised! I know I promised! You don’t have to-
But he’s already pulling away from her, turning towards the camera. “I know you’re watching, Beth!” he roars. “You were right again, weren’t you? They’re never grateful!”
He throws the rod, and it arcs through the air, smashes into the wall and sends chips of stones flying.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
He is a man possessed.
He turns to SJ, chest heaving with the force of his exertion, his fury. But his eyes… they are only…
“You may change your mind at any moment,” the Doctor says quietly, “and I will send her away. I don’t give a damn if she’s got the handcuffs on and she’s hauling you out the door, you say one word and the deal’s off.”
His words are trickling into her consciousness like slow-settling rain. Her hands are starting to shake, her thoughts jumbling helplessly, her heart is turning inside out. The Section Leader-but Sully-but The Room-but Andy-to know, to really know-but she promised and oh God the Room but to know-
A tear slips from her eye.
“Oh, oh, don’t. Please, Miss Smith.” He takes her wrist, his grip tight, his fingers curled over her pulse. He bends his head to catch her eye. “Have you changed your mind? Shall I tell Beth to go away?”
She shakes her head, nods, shakes her head again. Her fingers clench tight around his wrist of their own volition; she can feel her fingernails digging into his skin. She does not want him to release his grip. It’s only-when I leave the cell? What can I do if I change my mind then?
“Tell me. I will, of course, be coming with you.”
Her head jerks up, startled. How-
“It is my condition, and on this there will be no compromise.” He leans down, presses his forehead against hers. The sound of his breathing is ragged. “As I am always reminding you, you are not allowed to leave me.”
Why are you doing this for me?
“What choice do I have?” A bitter laugh, a choking sound. “I can’t lose you.”
I promised-
“You were already going away from me. Inside yourself.” A pause. “As Josie did. Before she…”
She squeezes his wrist to cut him off. She cannot hear this now. Thank you.
Another tear slips down her cheek. He uses the fingers of his other hand to wipe it away. They were your friends.
She catches that faint pastel outline from him again, that secondhand ache.
And then he puts that arm around her and pulls her close to him, her head against his chest, his head in the crook of her shoulder. Repeats one more time, whispering, in her ear:
“You are not allowed to leave me.”
xxxxx
The Section Leader is not enamored of the Doctor’s plan.
“The entire point of this endeavor was to secure a private interview,” she snaps. “Not to have you hovering about in the background, censoring any information she may wish to give about her general welfare.”
“Your concern is touching.”
“This is unacceptable-”
The Doctor folds his arms. “Then you had better change the venue of the interview, hadn’t you?”
“What on Earth are you getting at?”
“You know perfectly well. Whatever ghastly backdrop you had planned for this session, drop it. You will interview Miss Smith in your office, and I will be in the adjacent room behind the one-way mirror the Brigade Leader installed after that…unpleasantness…with the Duchess. You can cut the intercom if you like, but I will be watching to ensure Miss Smith’s safety.”
The Section Leader’s lips thin, and she taps her heel three times against the ground. “Oh, very well. If you insist. But you had better not fall behind on your schematics for the war satellites.”
She signals the guards, and they open the door, moving towards SJ-her heart hammers, they are holding handcuffs, they are reaching for her-
The Doctor steps in front of her.
“What now?” the Section Leader sighs, impatient.
“They will not touch her.”
The Section Leader raises an eyebrow. “I’m certainly not letting a terrorist outside her cell without proper restraints.”
“Neither you nor they will touch her. I will have your word, or we will go no further.”
The Section Leader sighs again, as though she is truly the most long-suffering soul in the universe. “You have my word, Doctor. I shall not touch a hair of your little plaything’s head.” She takes the handcuffs from the guard and dangles them towards him. “Now may we please proceed?”
The Doctor does not dignify this with a response, merely takes the handcuffs from Shaw and turns to SJ. “May I?”
Oh. Of course. He has to do it.
She holds out her hands in front of her, and the Doctor fastens the handcuffs loosely around them. The metal is cold, and heavy, and her hands tremble.
“Oh, come now, Doctor,” the Section Leader says. “A brawler would find those roomy. Her hands will slip right out.”
The Doctor tightens the handcuffs exactly one notch.
For a second the Section Leader looks tempted to continue pushing the issue, but then she nods to the guards, who spin the Doctor around and cuff him-his hands are put behind his back.
And then they are walking out of the cell.
SJ feels dizzy the second she steps through the bars, as though she is entering another world. The cell has been her only world for so long. Everything else has taken on the consistency of dreams, and it’s dreams she’s stumbling through now, nightmares of dark hallways dripping with condensation and etched with frost, echoing footsteps. Everything is blurred with unreality, impossibility, too many new things, too quickly-and yet strange details leap out at her, seize her with familiarity-that broken light, fizzing and popping-those long scratches in the stone, stained dark, as if someone had held on until their fingernails broke and bled-the last time she saw these things, they were taking her downstairs, and she was dying-
SJ stumbles, fetching up against the Doctor; she grabs at his arm. She does not fall.
Up and up and up. How far have they come? Surely not so far. Surely not so far for her to be this dizzy, this light-headed from decreasing gravity. She is a satellite spinning out of orbit, becoming lost in space. Only the Doctor’s arm beneath her hand anchors her.
The Doctor is there. The Doctor is there. The Doctor is there.
And then the Section Leader brings them to a halt before a set of doors. The Doctor shifts, squeezes SJ’s hand.
“Well, Doctor,” Shaw says, indicating the left door with a sweep of her hand. “This is your stop.”
“After you,” the Doctor replies with mock chivalry, indicating the door to the right.
“Really, Doctor, I’m beginning to think you don’t expect me to live up to my end of the bargain.”
If they start to banter now, SJ will-not scream, that’s an impossibility now. She will implode, will fracture, will lose her nerve. She cannot, not now. Not when she is so close.
“No one could malign your adherence to the letter of an agreement,” the Doctor is saying. “But you cannot deny a certain slipperiness of the spirit. It would do my hearts a world of good to know that-”
“I gave you my word,” the Section Leader says, and her voice is ice, she is not even pretending to find him amusing now. “You have called me many things today, Doctor, all without punishment, but I will not stand for being called a liar.”
SJ feels something pass between the two of them, electric and invisible.
“We’ll go through together,” he says, and then he turns to SJ.
“I’ll be right here,” he says out loud, his eyes serious, and his hands on hers are transmitting, If you need me, break something. And below that, a hum, a buzz, that doesn’t quite clarify into words, comebacktomecomebacktomecomebacktome.
And just before he pulls away, she hears, I didn’t like the way she looked at Josie.
xxxxx
“Well, you’ve cleaned up nicely,” the Section Leader says. “What a pretty little whore you make.”
The teacup rattles against the saucer in SJ’s hand.
The room is small, and dusty, and pink. Dark pink walls, the paint somewhere between fuchsia and vomit. The one-way mirror behind the Section Leader-smart, the Doctor won’t be able to read her lips. The requisite photograph of the Leader, and the other requisite photograph of her immediate superior, the Brigade Leader (slightly lower), and-and they’ve been moved recently, there are old nail holes inexpertly caulked in and a rectangle of darker, unfaded paint. Until recently, there was a third photograph…
She has been looking too long. She looks quickly back down at her hands in her lap, handcuffed in front of her, holding the saucer and the teacup and trying to hold perfectly still, don’t tremble hold perfectly still-
“It’s good to finally see your training paying off. My, it certainly took a lot to soften you up, didn’t it? Wore my poor little boys right out.”
Rough pink carpet a shade darker than the walls. Two fragile loveseats-stolen from one of the warehouses above?-with spindly legs and frayed floral cushions. SJ on one, the Section Leader across from her.
A low table between them, with a silver tea service. Probably also stolen from a dissident’s seized possessions.
“Tell me, who was your favorite? Anderson? Carter? Jones?”
And she has to bite her lip to keep from opening her mouth, Pavlovian response, confess confess confess-she has to spill lies from her lips so she will be safe, she has to say whatever it is the Section Leader wants to hear, the rising memory of The Room urging say anything say anything say anything to make it stop to please them say what they want truth lies anything.
“I think it must have been Anderson. You certainly squealed like a pig to slaughter when it was his turn. My boys do love a screamer.”
say anything say anything don’t spill the tea whatever they want hold perfectly still say anything
“What, no smart aleck replies? No scathing rejoinders? Why, Miss Smith-“
And she can hear the smile, dry and amused and on the edge of smug, in Section Leader Shaw’s voice:
“Cat got your tongue?”
Don’t look up. Looking up is a trap. Hold very still. If you hold very still, the predator may not see you. The predator already sees you. If you hold very still, the predator may become bored and let you go.
SJ’s fingers twitch on the handle of the teacup.
“In retrospect, I would have taken the entire arm,” the Section Leader says, as though she is discussing redecorating the room. “You adapted too quickly to the loss of your fingers; you didn’t give him a chance to pity you, didn’t let him help you.”
She looks SJ up and down again, nods, and takes a sip of her tea. “Yes, less damage to the face but I’d have taken the arm. Still, no point in crying over spilt milk.”
The predator sees you. There is no point pretending. Look up.
Look up.
SJ looks up.
The Section Leader’s eyes are flecks of diamond.
“Curiosity finally won out, has it?” The Section Leader wags a finger, lips curling. “Patience, Miss Smith. I have a few things I wish to discuss first.”
She leans forward, and SJ flinches.
The Section Leader raises an eyebrow. “Oh ye of little faith. Didn’t you believe what I told the Doctor? I gave my word.” She slides the swagger stick from the loop on her belt. “What was it I said now? Oh yes, I promised not to touch you. Not a hair of your head. Didn’t I?” Her eyes harden. “You may nod, Miss Smith.”
Her head jerks down like a puppet’s on a string.
“Of course-” Shaw’s hand slides down the length of the swagger stick. “There is touching, and there is touching, isn’t there?”
The swagger stick rises. SJ holds perfectly still as its end presses into the couch cushion, barely an inch from her shoulder.
“I’m not touching you now, am I?” The rod presses deeper into the fabric, makes a hissing sound as it slides down the velvet. “I’m not touching you at all.” The wood scratches against the cloth as it skirts SJ’s knee. “He’s watching right now. What do you think is going through that mind of his, Miss Smith?” The tip traces around the edges of her bare feet, slides up through the air, barely a hair’s breadth from the fabric of her trousers. “What do you think your Doctor’s thinking, as he watches me…” up and up the swagger sticks climbs “…so very carefully…” SJ must hold perfectly still “…not touching you?”
The swagger stick pauses in its progress.
The Section Leader produces a cigarette from nowhere, lights it one-handed. Leans forward and slowly, a parody of tenderness, blows the smoke towards SJ’s face. The warmth of the smoke ghosts over her cheek, a momentary caress. “Well, Miss Smith?”
SJ is trying not to cough. She is trying not to look away from the Section Leader’s face, the other woman’s eyes alight with a strange fire.
“You may answer, Miss Smith.”
Very carefully, trying not to tremble and spill her cup, SJ raises her shoulders, and lowers them.
The Section Leader lets the end of the stick drop; sinks back into her seat, a satisfied cat-that-got-the-cream smile on her face. “Drink your tea.”
It is bitter, and burns her lips as it slips past them, the tannic taste drying out her tongue even as she swallows.
“You don’t trust him fully to protect you. You are a clever girl then.” Inhale, and then exhale, that long stream of blue-grey smoke. Her eyes still alight, her mouth still smiling. Her eyes still measuring. “And that makes you worth something to me, unlike your predecessor.” Her lips twist. “That pathetic little traitor would have spread her legs for a pat on the head and a word of praise. Two words and she’d have sucked his cock into the bargain. Heaven only knows what she would’ve done for three; probably thrown herself into a volcano.”
The Section Leader’s eyes have become slightly unfocused during this monologue, gazing back into the past, and SJ dares a glance at the folder on the table between them, the slip of paper peeking out from it.
The Section Leader sees.
“All in good time, Miss Smith.” The Section Leader refills SJ’s cup, the brown liquid bubbling, the china heating in her hand. “I wasn’t consulted about her suitability, you know-never mind that I was the only one with any firsthand experience of his temperament or his inclinations. Men! They thought any little chit would do. And so they purchased him a pretty bauble that he could set on a shelf and admire. He couldn’t do anything more-he might break a fragile, fine-spun thing like her, and oh, that would never do to have on his conscience.” Her smile is hard, her smile is cold. “But with someone already broken-someone to he could take apart, always intending to fix her later-” her voice is bitter, bitter, bitter-“oh, he could have no qualms about someone like that! What projects he will have in mind for you!”
The twist of her mouth on ‘projects,’ almost a snarl, makes SJ’s stomach turn over. It must show on her face, because the Section Leader laughs. It is derisive, but somehow, also…forced?
“Yes, I’d thought you’d have that reaction.” She leans forward. “My, you can’t stand the thought of being someone’s project, can you? It makes your blood run cold, knowing you’re part of someone else’s plan, realizing that what you want isn’t the center of the universe. You and all your self-centered little friends.”
She slaps the hand with the cigarette down on the folder, the ash scattering, and SJ’s eyes dart back down to it, but Section Leader Shaw is not yet ready to divulge its contents. She is leaning forward, her eyes boring into SJ’s.
“Do you know where I grew up, Miss Smith? The banks of the Thames. You dissidents-spoiled little children, the lot of you. You never think how lucky you’ve had it.” She sneers. “Oh, poor you, growing up in a scientific labor camp, coddled and kept safe from the cold and the hunger, from the criminals and the terrorists you so romanticize. You don’t know what it’s like to have to scrounge in the garbage for a bite of moldy bread to eat, only to have it snatched from your hand by someone bigger and stronger. To know that you will live and die there, in that squalor, unless the government manages to snatch one second from tracking down troublemakers like you to implement one of its humanitarian programs!”
SJ is not going to look at the mirror. She is not going to look at the mirror. She is not going to let Section Leader Shaw know how very, very much she wants the Doctor to come get her right now.
The Section Leader’s voice is shaking now, but her frame is deadly still, a cobra poised to strike. She is hissing her words:
“We didn’t have the luxuries you did-what was it your Aunt Lavinia got for you for your ninth birthday, a purple bicycle with streamers?”
SJ starts. It had been a purple bicycle, with blue streamers, and suddenly she can see it as though it is in front of her, can feel the rubber grips beneath her hands, smell the oil-how did the Section Leader know-
Sectin Leader smirks. “Oh yes, and a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and a bag of peppermints.” Her voice drips sarcasm: “Oh, the hardship. How oppressed you were.”
She leans in further still, her voice low and swift and sharp. “Do you know what I got for my ninth birthday, Miss Smith?” Her eyes not leaving SJ’s for a second. “Far more than I ever expected. I expected nothing. What could my father afford? The factories perpetually empty, bombed by dissidents. The unemployment lines clogged with whinging freeloaders, wanting something for nothing. My father never complained. My father was a loyal citizen. He reported my mother when I was five, for seditious talk against the state. And what from his reward, from our neighbors, from the very people who should have been glad to have a traitor removed from their midst? They set fire to our shelter! The idiocy-the ingratitude-”
The Section Leader’s free hand is clenching and unclenching around the swagger stick. Smoke billows from her mouth, a lock of hair sticking to the edge of her lips, her eyes flaming, and SJ realizes with a chill that shivers up her spine and reverberates down into her hands that this woman is completely insane.
The cup and saucer rattle in her hand. If she drops it now…
But the Section Leader doesn’t notice. This time, she is firmly in the past, even as she stares SJ down as if trying to slice her through with her eyes.
“But on the banks of the Thames my father found a wounded eagle, and in the trash he found a dented birdcage, and on my ninth birthday he gave them to me. And it meant more than you will ever know.”
The chill is spreading, vibrating through SJ’s every nerve. Gooseflesh prickles. She can feel the frigid air on every centimeter of exposed skin.
“But the eagle wouldn’t eat. The eagle would not drink. After a few days, the eagle would not even lash out when we tended its wounds. It would not even scream.
“Do you know what I did then, Miss Smith?”
She is so cold. She cannot think. The cold is stabbing through the thin cotton weave of her clothes like dozens of icy knives.
Beth Shaw takes a long drag on her cigarette, and then smiles, beatific. “I found a sparrow.”
Sparrow and the sound of it echoes in her head, spirals, like the pattern of a wing, no, a feather, no, flight-
Something is wrong, when something went wrong she was supposed to-
“As long as the sparrow bobbed and fluttered in fear, the eagle sat and watched it. Was content to eat only the mice and rats I brought. But one day the sparrow sat still, and the eagle-more than full-lashed it to ribbons. It could not help it. It was a bird of prey. It was what it was made for. But do you know, that eagle mourned its little cellmate. It grew still yet again. And it died not long after.
“Do you take my meaning, Miss Smith?”
Does she? Something is-she has to hold onto the cup. It’s hard to hold onto the cup because she is shaking-if she holds onto the Section Leader’s voice-the lights, even the lights are cold, burning cold…
“If you submit, the Doctor will destroy you. Not by violence, as the eagle did. But he will destroy you nonetheless. He will take you apart, piece by piece. He will not be able to help it.”
SJ cannot look away from the Section Leader’s eyes. The Section Leader’s eyes are gleaming. They are filling her vision. They are filled with lights, and all the lights are connected, and something is-
“Oh, he has all the very best of intentions. He will always have reasons. He will always have excuses, and explanations, and soft words to erode your resolve. He has all the time in the world and you have none, do you understand? You have begun to accede to his requests, and if you do not stop, he will not stop, until every part of you belongs to him, until you are wholly his creature, until you cannot extricate any part of you from him. You will cease to struggle, and you will be destroyed, and when he sees that you are destroyed he will die, and for the good of the country I cannot not allow that to happen.”
All the lights are connected, and they spark-
If you need me--
Cold and they spark, hold onto the voice, something I was supposed to do, blue, oh they spark-
“Would you like me to save you?”
Yes, yes, she would like to be saved. But she has to-
The teacup falls from her hand, oh thank goodness, it will shatter on the floor and the Doctor will-
The Section Leader catches it.
“I’m not ready for you to take your leave just yet. I need an answer.”
The Doctor was going to…but the Section Leader caught the tea…something in the tea-even her blood is running cold through her veins, she sees all the connections now, they are spreading and multiplying and tangling and they will strangle her if she does not hold onto
(she held onto the Doctor’s arm)
the voice, the voice, any voice…
“You need my help.”
help
“Even you can’t be so blind not to see what’s happening. Oh, I’m sure you managed to justify it the first time.” Her face is swimming in SJ’s vision. Her tongue darts out over her lips. “He is so very fascinating when he’s helpless-though it can be interesting to let him take charge from time to time. But you don’t feel that way, do you? Not with your horror of being a project. And still you gave in last night, and took him to your bed. Because you are the sparrow, and you cannot keep constantly moving. You were tired. You had no choice.”
Words, and words, and words-there were words she wanted to-words she needed to-
SJ points her shaking hand towards the folder. Her fingers just touch the edge, if she could just make them bend-
The words-
“Greedy little bitch.” Her voice dispassionate again, suddenly. The Section Leader flicks the folder towards SJ and the blank white piece of paper inside flies free, twists and turns slow-motion into the air before her eyes like a taunting dove.
(‘failure’ says the piece of paper with its ripped folded mouth)
her fingers are ice
(she hears it say ‘failure’)
Andy Sully sorry Audrey Dottie Fitzoliver oh no
“There’s nothing in there. The real folder was delivered to the Doctor-” the Section Leader bends her head to check her watch, and for SJ, the whole room slides up and down like the tide-“three minutes ago.”
The Doctor was supposed to stay with me
(the doctor lies)
connect the lights
(all lies)
spark blue
“ I’m giving you something far more valuable: the knowledge of what he’ll do with that information, how much he’ll share with you, how much you’ll have to bargain for. What you’ll have to bargain with.”
she is frozen and shaking and all the colors of the room are melting, dripping pink like viscous organs, and everyone’s minds are sparking blue (the section leader and the doctor and the guards and all the lights voices too many and) and tilting tilting to fall she was never strong enough-
Aunt Lavinia it wasn’t like you said why did you leave me all alone
“And I’m still waiting for an answer, little sparrow. Would you like me to save you?”
Oh yes, please. Someone, anyone. Oh god oh god please please please…
SJ nods.
And then she is falling, falling, down into the threadbare pink carpet, her face against the rough fibers, and the lights spark blue and she hears everything all the voices everywhere and she understands and the dragons hiss and squirm through the holes in reality, and from far above her-a thousand miles away, up above her in the well in the center of the Universe from which the gods draw the waters of Time-comes the Section Leader’s voice, musing:
“Do you know some of my colleagues prefer to interrogate men? I confess I find it rather boring. Men rage and struggle and strain, and snap. They break themselves completely in one blow. But women…
“Women bend.”
Characters: alt!Sarah Jane, alt!Three, Section Leader Shaw, Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart, references alt!Jo
Summary: Miles below the earth, in the most secret and heavily guarded of all their prisons, they keep a man who builds them weapons that are decades and sometimes centuries ahead of their time. Reports come back of the things they bring him: books, chemicals, lab equipment. Young girls.
Notes: An AU for the Inferno-verse, which I guess makes it an AU of an AU. Basically, the Doctor we know never popped in from our universe, but their version of the Doctor has been their prisoner for as long as he has been in exile. Oh, and the world never burned up, obviously.
Warnings: Descriptions of torture (including allusions to sexual assault). A friendship with occasional Stockholm Syndrome overtones. Stockholm Syndrome.
A.N. for this chapter: A.N. As ever, Doctor Who is not my property, and neither is the play SJ tries to read in this chapter, "A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen. No comment on whether I am choosing her reading material by just picking books off my shelves and checking the copyright date.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
“Oh, honestly,” the Section Leader says. “You’d think I’d asked to borrow the centrifuge, or one of the important pieces of equipment.”
“Miss Smith is not available for lending,” the Doctor returns coldly.
SJ can only see the Doctor’s back; he had moved in front of SJ the second that Section Leader Shaw had made her demands. SJ wants to move, she wants to stand by the Doctor’s side, wants to look the Section Leader in the eye.
Her legs won’t let her move.
“We have an agreement,” the Doctor is saying. “You passed ownership on to me, and your own interests ceased. Though I can’t see what possible torment you could have forgotten the first time around.”
The Section Leader taps her foot. “This paranoia really doesn’t suit you, Doctor. I simply wish to offer your assistant a cup of tea and inquire as to how she is settling in.”
“Oh well, tea,” the Doctor says sarcastically. “That’s perfectly fine, then. You may be a sadistic monster, but certainly no one can accuse you of being a foreign agent.”
“Careful, Doctor.” Her words are a whiplash, and SJ’s feet back up a step. “Don’t forget your place.”
“Don’t forget yours either,” he returns. “Does the Brigade Leader know you’re down here playing this little game?”
A pause, then: “The Brigade Leader is a busy man. I could make this cell very comfortable for you, Doctor. Or very uncomfortable. All without him ever knowing.”
“Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we?”
“We will indeed.” Shaw snaps her fingers, and the soldiers rise to open the door for her. She pauses in the entranceway. “In the meantime, consider: is she really offering value for money?”
xxxxx
The parting shot echoes in SJ’s head as the Doctor strides around the lab, muttering deprecations upon the Section Leader and slamming equipment onto the lab tables too hard. SJ tries not to jump every time he slams a piece of equipment down too hard. He’s angry at the Section Leader, not her. She knows that. She knows.
A beaker shatters, and SJ’s hands grip the countertop tight.
“Oh blast,” the Doctor snaps. “Miss Smith, have you seen the broom?”
She manages to make a gesture. She’s not sure exactly where she’s gesturing to, but maybe it’s enough, maybe he won’t notice-
“Where?”
Damn.
There is a piece of paper in front of her. She has to keep staring at the piece of paper. There are marks on the piece of paper, but she can’t read them, and she has to keeping holding tight to the counter and staring at the piece of paper and trying to read them-
“Miss Smith?”
-or he’ll realize something is wrong, and there isn’t anything wrong, she’ll be fine in just a minute if she just-
value for money
“Miss Smith?”
And his voice is so close she flinches, overbalancing, and the stool topples-clang!-and he catches her-
His arms go around her. “You’re shaking,” he says. His hand finds her cheek, tries to turn her face towards him, but her head pulls away from his grasp without her permission, pulls her head down so her chin is tucked into her chest and her shoulders are hunched tight.
“Sarah?” he says softly.
She thinks he says it softly. All she can hear is the Section Leader’s voice in her head, from just now and from before, from The Room, the scrape of the metal and slick sound of cutting flesh, any second now the Section Leader might be back, might take her back-
“Is it what I said to Beth? About ownership? That was purely for her benefit, I assure you.”
The Doctor eases her to the ground and lets go; she scuttles backwards into the rows of cupboards, metal handles digging into her back. A wall to her back and she’s at least a little safe-of course she’s safe, of course she’s not going back-
Fine, she makes herself sign. Fine go away fine please fine.
“That’s hardly up to your usual standard of prevarication.” He leans backward, spreads his hands wide, appeasing. Showing he is unarmed. As if he would need weapons. “Would you like to talk about it?”
no
A small motion, but the Doctor sees.
“All right,” the Doctor says. He stands, walks over the counter where the box of books sits. Selects a volume. Strides back, sits down, a little farther away from her than he was before, turned slightly away. He opens the book, flips a few pages with studied casualness. Adds, without looking up from the page, “They can’t do anything to you now, you know.”
He is not pursuing her, but he is still blocking her escape. No, no, that’s wrong, stop it, don’t think like that.
“I know they hurt you very badly,” he continues, still addressing the book. His voice is soft. His hands shake a little on ‘hurt.’ “But that is over now. That was-that has always been my condition. They cannot touch you. If they take you away-I stop helping them.”
Get you another one. Her hands leap from her lap, rap out their message on the floor of their own accord.
“No,” he says. He looks up from the book; tilts his head, trying to meet her eye. “I stop.”
Till they get you another one. She’s telling him too much, letting him see all her fears, but her fingers twitch and itch and tap and she can’t still them.
“No,” he says again. “If I lost you as I lost Josie-then I might simply shut down again, become dormant for a time. But if they take you from me…if they are willing to violate my one condition, if there is not one single person I can keep safe from them-then there is simply no point in my going on. With anything. Anything.” His fingers twist and curl at a corner of a page. “Do you understand, Sarah?”
She feels herself nod.
“They cannot do a thing to you.”
Without your permission, her treacherous fingers say. If I’m not good, if you get tired of me-
It hangs in the air, and she can’t take it back.
“Ah, is that it?”
He reaches out to her halfway, slowly, his hand outstretched in the space between them.
“I would not trade your company for worlds.”
The words are light, but the tone he says them in is anything but.
Why?
“Aside from not wishing so much as a cockroach to be given to their tender mercies?” he asks dryly.
She nods.
“I could never get tired of you,” he says. “Your questions, your actions, your choices-you are new to me every day.”
He raises his arm slightly, and she sees that he is offering it at an odd angle, palm first. The imprint of her teeth still stark against his skin.
“They may call you mine,” he says quietly. “And perhaps, in a certain sense, they are right. But I am yours as well. You may hate me, you may fear me, but you are still the closest thing I have to-to a ray of light in this dark place.
“Believe me, I will never let them take you.”
She lets out a long breath. She hadn’t even realized she was holding it.
You were lonely before I got here. SJ is still uncertain, but the words are hers now, she is choosing them slow and steady and careful. She is remembering how to watch, and to listen, and to breathe. You could get over being lonely again.
“No,” he says. “Not after-not again.”
I’m not Josie or Beth.
She feels her breath catch in her throat again, just for a second.
“I don’t wish you to be them,” he says. “I simply wish you to be here.”
He is still offering her his hand, palm first.
Her hand steals out, fingers not quite touching the pale scars beginning to form on his palm, a semicircle of dots and dashes.
“Yours,” he says, as if that explains everything.
SJ extends one finger, brushes his skin. Promise? she sends.
He nods.
“Partners,” he says. “Remember?”
She nods.
They both breathe out at the same time, and he smiles at her, and she nods again, feeling the weight go out of her shoulders, feeling a lightness expanding in her chest.
He is not perfect, but he is hers, and she knows him.
I don’t hate you, she says. I wanted to, but I don’t.
His lips turn up just a little; his eyes remain grave. “You will, sometimes. Close quarters like this-it can’t be helped.” I’ll try not to mind.
She scoots closer to him, ducks her head to press against his shoulder-she can’t quite do it naturally, she’s forgotten the gesture, and it’s something of a headbutt, defiant. The tips of his fingers twitch on her wrist, and she slides her hand into his. Their fingers interlace.
Sorry, she says.
What for?
For saying all those things. Thinking them. Panicking, when I’d just promised that I’d try to trust you-
He cuts her off with a gentle squeeze of her hand. “If you really still believed I was capable of such actions, you never would have let me in last night.” His voice is gruff; his thumb strokes over her knuckles. “You’ve taken a great many risks lately. I don’t know if you truly realized how many until this morning.”
It was just, the Section Leader started talking and-
It’s all right.
The fabric of his shirt is rough against her face. She can feel her heart slowing, can hear his own heart beating its strange rhythm. I hate depending on people.
I gathered as much.
They sit in silence for a bit. He is not warm, but he is solid, and he is there.
I’m sorry as well, he says after awhile. This might have all been much easier for you if I hadn’t-I used my suspicions as an excuse. It was convenient to have a reason why I shouldn’t get to know you, to keep from feeling-to let myself keep sulking, like a spoiled child.
There is a picture lurking behind his words. He’s trying to keep from sending it through, but SJ can glimpse the outline in faded sad pastels.
You miss her, she says. I’ve always known that. You don’t have to hide it.
She presses her forehead harder against his shoulder, and he lets her.
It is not terrible.
Maybe it will last a little longer.
xxxxx
The rest of the day goes smoothly after that, experiments and notes and telepathic tete-a-tetes over when to resume the sabotage; the Doctor insists he’s ready to start immediately, while SJ thinks she still spies a little stiffness in his walk, wants to delay just one more day.
And then Beth Shaw appears again like a bad dream, her heels clicking down the cold stone floor towards their cell.
The Doctor moves to shield SJ once more, but she’s determined not to let him this time. She can carry her own weight. She stands at his side with her back straight and stares, lips set, at a spot over the Section Leader’s shoulder so it will look like she’s staring her in the eyes.
“It’s really no use your coming down here.” The Doctor’s voice is tight. “Unless you’ve developed an uncharacteristic fondness for failure. At some point, Beth, you really must learn to abandon a faulty hypothesis.”
“So you continue to refuse to let me borrow her?”
But Shaw isn’t even looking at him. Her focus is on SJ, and she’s smiling, a secret pleased smile like a cat who knows exactly what hole the mouse is about to come out of.
“I do indeed.”
Shaw’s smile broadens, lips parting slowly to reveal a line of teeth. Tiger with her prey. She’s still looking right at SJ. “And what about Miss Smith’s opinion?”
The Doctor snorts. “And since when do you give a fig about Miss Smith’s opinion?”
“Oh, I don’t, Doctor. But you do. Or did you think I hadn’t been watching?” She gestures towards the camera. “It’s not the most entertaining viewing, I admit, but it’s at least a step above that insipid melodrama you played out with Miss Grant.”
Her lips twitch up a bit more with those last few words, her eyes still on SJ, and SJ feels her heart start to beat faster. She can almost hear the unspoken coda, directed right at her: And you still don’t know exactly what happened to Miss Grant, do you?
“Very well,” the Doctor says through gritted teeth, “Miss Smith, enlighten us as to whether you can resist the temptation of half an hour in the Section Leader’s company.”
He doesn’t turn to her as he says it, and SJ is briefly grateful as she brings up her hands to sign, it’s bad enough that the Section Leader keeps staring at her, she doesn’t know what she’d do with two sets of eyes on her, if she’d freeze or-
“I wouldn’t be so quick if I were you,” the Section Leader interrupts. She snaps her fingers, and a soldier steps forward. He is carrying a file.
It’s exactly the same way she used to summon an underling to bring her SJ’s file in The Room.
SJ’s hands freeze midair.
The Section Leader flips through the pages. “Yes…yes, yes…oh good, his information was a bit difficult to track down, I was beginning to think we’d never find it…” Her nails pause on one particular page, her lips curling up as she relishes this particular bit of theatre. “Oh yes, it’s all here. Of course, you can’t be tempted. You couldn’t possibly be interested. Not in the definite and final fates of Dorothea Chaplet, Audrey McShane, Jeremy Fitzoliver, Andrea Yates, and Harry Sullivan.”
“It’s a trick,” the Doctor says, and the words are out of his mouth faster than SJ can respond to the names, faster than light.
The names, she said their names...
“I could give you all this information,” the Section Leader muses. “Still, it is the kind of…delicate…account best related in private.”
The Doctor is at the door in three strides. “Go away.”
It is a snarl.
The Section Leader’s gaze flickers to him for a moment, but she remains unperturbed. Her eyes are cold. Amused, if anything at all. She looks back at SJ. “Consider what I’ve said, Miss Smith. And consider who truly has your best interests at heart… the person who is willing to give you some freedom of movement, or the man who would keep you locked up all to himself?”
She turns to the Doctor, who is now sputtering in incoherent rage. “You know how to reach me when you’ve changed your mind.”
And with a turn of her heel and the click of the door at the end of the hall, she is gone.
SJ is still hearing the names in her head, is still seeing them paint themselves in black letters on the blaring blank white of her mind: Dorothea Chaplet, Audrey McShane, Jeremy Fitzoliver, Andrea Yates, Harry Sullivan.
There is nothing in the world but those names.
“It’s a trick,” the Doctor says. He says it too loudly. “Beth playing her little games. She’s trying to drive a wedge between us. Divide and conquer. That’s all.”
Dorothea Chaplet, Audrey McShane, Jeremy F-
“Even if she does have any new information, which I highly doubt, she knows your presence here is non-negotiable.”
Andrea Yates, Harry Sulliv-
“She’s simply trying to sow dissent-Sarah, are you listening to me?”
SJ pulls herself up as though out of a well. Yes.
“And you-you understand? You believe me, don’t you?”
He is looking right at her. His eyes are very bright and very blue. Sully had blue eyes.
Yes.
“Ah, well.” He doesn’t seem to know what to do, suddenly. He scrubs at a spot on the counter with the edge of his sleeve, darts a glance up at her, looks away. “Well. Let’s get on, then.”
So they do. They go back to testing the acid-resistance of various body armor fabric swatches, and SJ takes his notes, and hands him his test tubes, and tries not to hear those names in her head.
Dottie. Audrey. Fitzoliver. Andy. Sully.
And it is only after the tenth test, when what she is writing begins to blur in front of her, that SJ realizes that she has started to cry.
“Miss Smith-oh, Sarah, please don’t. Please.” His voice is anguished, helpless. His voice is very close. His hand comes up towards the path of a tear down her cheek, falls down again before he can touch her. “You know better than anyone that Beth is utterly untrustworthy, you know I can’t let you go-”
SJ reaches out blindly for him; her hand finds his arm, the skin below the shirt cuff. Do you hear me trying to persuade you?
He starts to gesture with the arm she is holding before stilling. “But…you were-”
I’ve wanted things before, and not got them. The words pull her strength back into her. She feels it, bricks building up a wall. She wipes her tears away with her spare hand. I’ll be fine.
“I’m-” He stops, lets out a breath. Opens his mouth again, shakes his head. He doesn’t seem to know what to say. “It’s not that I’m ungrateful, but-” His brow creases. “Why aren’t you fighting this?”
She lets her head fall forward against his chest. Less of a headbutt this time; she’s making progress. Lets her breath fall out of her, long and slow. I promised, didn’t I? I promised I’d stay here with you.
The Doctor starts; she feels it, his whole body jerking back from her just for a second.
“You did,” he says. His other hand has come up to her hair; he strokes a strand over her ear. “That was the agreement. You stay with me. But-”
I keep my word. She says it fiercely. The words burn her, leave her shaking.
She hears his breath catch in his chest. “I see.”
A deep breath, and then he pulls back from her, keeping one arm around her shoulder as he draws her back towards their work; he chatters on about the experiment, reiterating the data they’ve already gathered, giving her a few moments to finish collecting herself.
xxxxx
He stays close to her for the rest of the evening, doesn’t let her out of his sight even to the other side of the bed. He keeps darting glances at her, as if trying to catch her at something. Keeps touching her, light touches on her hand or shoulder, ostensibly to catch her attention, but almost as if to check that she is still there.
SJ makes herself not flinch from him, even when the touch is sudden, unexpected. She wants to let him know that she will not abandon him. His eyes are so wide, so frightened. He has given up so much for her, will give up so much more in comfort and in health and in safety. And for what? A slip of a girl, scarred and suspicious, who has always shied from him. If it calms him to be near her, it is a little thing. She can give it to him.
Andrea Yates, Harry Sullivan-
She promised him. She promised. She did.
“Why don’t you go read for a bit?” the Doctor suggests at last. “I do believe I saw some Bronte at the bottom of the pile.”
He wants her to smile. Is that what he wants? She can’t seem to make her face move.
She promised.
She goes to the box, picks up a book, and sits down on the armchair to stare at the pages.
xxxxx
The Doctor sits down beside her and she starts, realizing simultaneously that she hadn’t heard him approach and that she can’t remember anything that happened on the last thirty pages. She has a brief irrational terror that he will ask her about the plot. She glances up at him quickly, then back down at the book: My little songbird mustn’t ever do that again. She has no idea who is saying it, or why.
“Any good?”
She shrugs. Her shoulder brushes his. The armchair is not large, and with both of them sitting there her legs are pressed firmly together, her left thigh against his, her right squashed against the armrest so that she can feel the wooden support through the thick cushion.
“How are you feeling?”
She shrugs again.
He lets his breath out slowly, through his teeth. Then:
“I always liked Ibsen. Contrary devil, but a charming fellow. One of the few of his time who really knew how to write a heroine.”
He reaches out, and touches her head. The tips of his fingers brush lightly over her hair.
“What am I going to do with you, Miss Smith?”
He cups her cheek, and turns her face upward, towards him.
“No ideas today?”
She is not afraid of him in this moment. She has nothing left to give him, not even anger or fear.
What do you want me to do?
“Something, dammit!” The force of his words propels him up out of the chair. His shoulders tighten, and he whirls to face her again. “Hit me! Knock over a row of beakers! Shut yourself up in your bed scribbling an escape plan in your notebook! Don’t just sit there like a doll, like you’re already dead-”
The Doctor is shaking now, his face and his shoulders and his knees and his hands. He sinks to his knees in front of her, and she reaches out to touch his face. There is a rent in her chest, and it is widening. How can she do everything he wants her to do? She is already drowning, she is already struggling so hard to keep afloat, just to keep her promise. His face is cold against her hand. How can she explain to him?
She cannot.
His eyes close when she touches his cheek. A tremor runs through his body.
They were my friends, she says. There is nothing else to say. They were my family.
“Oh, damn it all to-oh, very well!”
And he tears away from her hand as though it burns. He stomps to the counter, grabs a long iron rod, and begins to slam it against the bars of their cell. “Guard! Guard!”
A thrill of alarm runs up her spine, and she hastens to him, tugs at the arm not holding the iron bar. I wasn’t saying-I promised! I know I promised! You don’t have to-
But he’s already pulling away from her, turning towards the camera. “I know you’re watching, Beth!” he roars. “You were right again, weren’t you? They’re never grateful!”
He throws the rod, and it arcs through the air, smashes into the wall and sends chips of stones flying.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
He is a man possessed.
He turns to SJ, chest heaving with the force of his exertion, his fury. But his eyes… they are only…
“You may change your mind at any moment,” the Doctor says quietly, “and I will send her away. I don’t give a damn if she’s got the handcuffs on and she’s hauling you out the door, you say one word and the deal’s off.”
His words are trickling into her consciousness like slow-settling rain. Her hands are starting to shake, her thoughts jumbling helplessly, her heart is turning inside out. The Section Leader-but Sully-but The Room-but Andy-to know, to really know-but she promised and oh God the Room but to know-
A tear slips from her eye.
“Oh, oh, don’t. Please, Miss Smith.” He takes her wrist, his grip tight, his fingers curled over her pulse. He bends his head to catch her eye. “Have you changed your mind? Shall I tell Beth to go away?”
She shakes her head, nods, shakes her head again. Her fingers clench tight around his wrist of their own volition; she can feel her fingernails digging into his skin. She does not want him to release his grip. It’s only-when I leave the cell? What can I do if I change my mind then?
“Tell me. I will, of course, be coming with you.”
Her head jerks up, startled. How-
“It is my condition, and on this there will be no compromise.” He leans down, presses his forehead against hers. The sound of his breathing is ragged. “As I am always reminding you, you are not allowed to leave me.”
Why are you doing this for me?
“What choice do I have?” A bitter laugh, a choking sound. “I can’t lose you.”
I promised-
“You were already going away from me. Inside yourself.” A pause. “As Josie did. Before she…”
She squeezes his wrist to cut him off. She cannot hear this now. Thank you.
Another tear slips down her cheek. He uses the fingers of his other hand to wipe it away. They were your friends.
She catches that faint pastel outline from him again, that secondhand ache.
And then he puts that arm around her and pulls her close to him, her head against his chest, his head in the crook of her shoulder. Repeats one more time, whispering, in her ear:
“You are not allowed to leave me.”
xxxxx
The Section Leader is not enamored of the Doctor’s plan.
“The entire point of this endeavor was to secure a private interview,” she snaps. “Not to have you hovering about in the background, censoring any information she may wish to give about her general welfare.”
“Your concern is touching.”
“This is unacceptable-”
The Doctor folds his arms. “Then you had better change the venue of the interview, hadn’t you?”
“What on Earth are you getting at?”
“You know perfectly well. Whatever ghastly backdrop you had planned for this session, drop it. You will interview Miss Smith in your office, and I will be in the adjacent room behind the one-way mirror the Brigade Leader installed after that…unpleasantness…with the Duchess. You can cut the intercom if you like, but I will be watching to ensure Miss Smith’s safety.”
The Section Leader’s lips thin, and she taps her heel three times against the ground. “Oh, very well. If you insist. But you had better not fall behind on your schematics for the war satellites.”
She signals the guards, and they open the door, moving towards SJ-her heart hammers, they are holding handcuffs, they are reaching for her-
The Doctor steps in front of her.
“What now?” the Section Leader sighs, impatient.
“They will not touch her.”
The Section Leader raises an eyebrow. “I’m certainly not letting a terrorist outside her cell without proper restraints.”
“Neither you nor they will touch her. I will have your word, or we will go no further.”
The Section Leader sighs again, as though she is truly the most long-suffering soul in the universe. “You have my word, Doctor. I shall not touch a hair of your little plaything’s head.” She takes the handcuffs from the guard and dangles them towards him. “Now may we please proceed?”
The Doctor does not dignify this with a response, merely takes the handcuffs from Shaw and turns to SJ. “May I?”
Oh. Of course. He has to do it.
She holds out her hands in front of her, and the Doctor fastens the handcuffs loosely around them. The metal is cold, and heavy, and her hands tremble.
“Oh, come now, Doctor,” the Section Leader says. “A brawler would find those roomy. Her hands will slip right out.”
The Doctor tightens the handcuffs exactly one notch.
For a second the Section Leader looks tempted to continue pushing the issue, but then she nods to the guards, who spin the Doctor around and cuff him-his hands are put behind his back.
And then they are walking out of the cell.
SJ feels dizzy the second she steps through the bars, as though she is entering another world. The cell has been her only world for so long. Everything else has taken on the consistency of dreams, and it’s dreams she’s stumbling through now, nightmares of dark hallways dripping with condensation and etched with frost, echoing footsteps. Everything is blurred with unreality, impossibility, too many new things, too quickly-and yet strange details leap out at her, seize her with familiarity-that broken light, fizzing and popping-those long scratches in the stone, stained dark, as if someone had held on until their fingernails broke and bled-the last time she saw these things, they were taking her downstairs, and she was dying-
SJ stumbles, fetching up against the Doctor; she grabs at his arm. She does not fall.
Up and up and up. How far have they come? Surely not so far. Surely not so far for her to be this dizzy, this light-headed from decreasing gravity. She is a satellite spinning out of orbit, becoming lost in space. Only the Doctor’s arm beneath her hand anchors her.
The Doctor is there. The Doctor is there. The Doctor is there.
And then the Section Leader brings them to a halt before a set of doors. The Doctor shifts, squeezes SJ’s hand.
“Well, Doctor,” Shaw says, indicating the left door with a sweep of her hand. “This is your stop.”
“After you,” the Doctor replies with mock chivalry, indicating the door to the right.
“Really, Doctor, I’m beginning to think you don’t expect me to live up to my end of the bargain.”
If they start to banter now, SJ will-not scream, that’s an impossibility now. She will implode, will fracture, will lose her nerve. She cannot, not now. Not when she is so close.
“No one could malign your adherence to the letter of an agreement,” the Doctor is saying. “But you cannot deny a certain slipperiness of the spirit. It would do my hearts a world of good to know that-”
“I gave you my word,” the Section Leader says, and her voice is ice, she is not even pretending to find him amusing now. “You have called me many things today, Doctor, all without punishment, but I will not stand for being called a liar.”
SJ feels something pass between the two of them, electric and invisible.
“We’ll go through together,” he says, and then he turns to SJ.
“I’ll be right here,” he says out loud, his eyes serious, and his hands on hers are transmitting, If you need me, break something. And below that, a hum, a buzz, that doesn’t quite clarify into words, comebacktomecomebacktomecomebacktome.
And just before he pulls away, she hears, I didn’t like the way she looked at Josie.
xxxxx
“Well, you’ve cleaned up nicely,” the Section Leader says. “What a pretty little whore you make.”
The teacup rattles against the saucer in SJ’s hand.
The room is small, and dusty, and pink. Dark pink walls, the paint somewhere between fuchsia and vomit. The one-way mirror behind the Section Leader-smart, the Doctor won’t be able to read her lips. The requisite photograph of the Leader, and the other requisite photograph of her immediate superior, the Brigade Leader (slightly lower), and-and they’ve been moved recently, there are old nail holes inexpertly caulked in and a rectangle of darker, unfaded paint. Until recently, there was a third photograph…
She has been looking too long. She looks quickly back down at her hands in her lap, handcuffed in front of her, holding the saucer and the teacup and trying to hold perfectly still, don’t tremble hold perfectly still-
“It’s good to finally see your training paying off. My, it certainly took a lot to soften you up, didn’t it? Wore my poor little boys right out.”
Rough pink carpet a shade darker than the walls. Two fragile loveseats-stolen from one of the warehouses above?-with spindly legs and frayed floral cushions. SJ on one, the Section Leader across from her.
A low table between them, with a silver tea service. Probably also stolen from a dissident’s seized possessions.
“Tell me, who was your favorite? Anderson? Carter? Jones?”
And she has to bite her lip to keep from opening her mouth, Pavlovian response, confess confess confess-she has to spill lies from her lips so she will be safe, she has to say whatever it is the Section Leader wants to hear, the rising memory of The Room urging say anything say anything say anything to make it stop to please them say what they want truth lies anything.
“I think it must have been Anderson. You certainly squealed like a pig to slaughter when it was his turn. My boys do love a screamer.”
say anything say anything don’t spill the tea whatever they want hold perfectly still say anything
“What, no smart aleck replies? No scathing rejoinders? Why, Miss Smith-“
And she can hear the smile, dry and amused and on the edge of smug, in Section Leader Shaw’s voice:
“Cat got your tongue?”
Don’t look up. Looking up is a trap. Hold very still. If you hold very still, the predator may not see you. The predator already sees you. If you hold very still, the predator may become bored and let you go.
SJ’s fingers twitch on the handle of the teacup.
“In retrospect, I would have taken the entire arm,” the Section Leader says, as though she is discussing redecorating the room. “You adapted too quickly to the loss of your fingers; you didn’t give him a chance to pity you, didn’t let him help you.”
She looks SJ up and down again, nods, and takes a sip of her tea. “Yes, less damage to the face but I’d have taken the arm. Still, no point in crying over spilt milk.”
The predator sees you. There is no point pretending. Look up.
Look up.
SJ looks up.
The Section Leader’s eyes are flecks of diamond.
“Curiosity finally won out, has it?” The Section Leader wags a finger, lips curling. “Patience, Miss Smith. I have a few things I wish to discuss first.”
She leans forward, and SJ flinches.
The Section Leader raises an eyebrow. “Oh ye of little faith. Didn’t you believe what I told the Doctor? I gave my word.” She slides the swagger stick from the loop on her belt. “What was it I said now? Oh yes, I promised not to touch you. Not a hair of your head. Didn’t I?” Her eyes harden. “You may nod, Miss Smith.”
Her head jerks down like a puppet’s on a string.
“Of course-” Shaw’s hand slides down the length of the swagger stick. “There is touching, and there is touching, isn’t there?”
The swagger stick rises. SJ holds perfectly still as its end presses into the couch cushion, barely an inch from her shoulder.
“I’m not touching you now, am I?” The rod presses deeper into the fabric, makes a hissing sound as it slides down the velvet. “I’m not touching you at all.” The wood scratches against the cloth as it skirts SJ’s knee. “He’s watching right now. What do you think is going through that mind of his, Miss Smith?” The tip traces around the edges of her bare feet, slides up through the air, barely a hair’s breadth from the fabric of her trousers. “What do you think your Doctor’s thinking, as he watches me…” up and up the swagger sticks climbs “…so very carefully…” SJ must hold perfectly still “…not touching you?”
The swagger stick pauses in its progress.
The Section Leader produces a cigarette from nowhere, lights it one-handed. Leans forward and slowly, a parody of tenderness, blows the smoke towards SJ’s face. The warmth of the smoke ghosts over her cheek, a momentary caress. “Well, Miss Smith?”
SJ is trying not to cough. She is trying not to look away from the Section Leader’s face, the other woman’s eyes alight with a strange fire.
“You may answer, Miss Smith.”
Very carefully, trying not to tremble and spill her cup, SJ raises her shoulders, and lowers them.
The Section Leader lets the end of the stick drop; sinks back into her seat, a satisfied cat-that-got-the-cream smile on her face. “Drink your tea.”
It is bitter, and burns her lips as it slips past them, the tannic taste drying out her tongue even as she swallows.
“You don’t trust him fully to protect you. You are a clever girl then.” Inhale, and then exhale, that long stream of blue-grey smoke. Her eyes still alight, her mouth still smiling. Her eyes still measuring. “And that makes you worth something to me, unlike your predecessor.” Her lips twist. “That pathetic little traitor would have spread her legs for a pat on the head and a word of praise. Two words and she’d have sucked his cock into the bargain. Heaven only knows what she would’ve done for three; probably thrown herself into a volcano.”
The Section Leader’s eyes have become slightly unfocused during this monologue, gazing back into the past, and SJ dares a glance at the folder on the table between them, the slip of paper peeking out from it.
The Section Leader sees.
“All in good time, Miss Smith.” The Section Leader refills SJ’s cup, the brown liquid bubbling, the china heating in her hand. “I wasn’t consulted about her suitability, you know-never mind that I was the only one with any firsthand experience of his temperament or his inclinations. Men! They thought any little chit would do. And so they purchased him a pretty bauble that he could set on a shelf and admire. He couldn’t do anything more-he might break a fragile, fine-spun thing like her, and oh, that would never do to have on his conscience.” Her smile is hard, her smile is cold. “But with someone already broken-someone to he could take apart, always intending to fix her later-” her voice is bitter, bitter, bitter-“oh, he could have no qualms about someone like that! What projects he will have in mind for you!”
The twist of her mouth on ‘projects,’ almost a snarl, makes SJ’s stomach turn over. It must show on her face, because the Section Leader laughs. It is derisive, but somehow, also…forced?
“Yes, I’d thought you’d have that reaction.” She leans forward. “My, you can’t stand the thought of being someone’s project, can you? It makes your blood run cold, knowing you’re part of someone else’s plan, realizing that what you want isn’t the center of the universe. You and all your self-centered little friends.”
She slaps the hand with the cigarette down on the folder, the ash scattering, and SJ’s eyes dart back down to it, but Section Leader Shaw is not yet ready to divulge its contents. She is leaning forward, her eyes boring into SJ’s.
“Do you know where I grew up, Miss Smith? The banks of the Thames. You dissidents-spoiled little children, the lot of you. You never think how lucky you’ve had it.” She sneers. “Oh, poor you, growing up in a scientific labor camp, coddled and kept safe from the cold and the hunger, from the criminals and the terrorists you so romanticize. You don’t know what it’s like to have to scrounge in the garbage for a bite of moldy bread to eat, only to have it snatched from your hand by someone bigger and stronger. To know that you will live and die there, in that squalor, unless the government manages to snatch one second from tracking down troublemakers like you to implement one of its humanitarian programs!”
SJ is not going to look at the mirror. She is not going to look at the mirror. She is not going to let Section Leader Shaw know how very, very much she wants the Doctor to come get her right now.
The Section Leader’s voice is shaking now, but her frame is deadly still, a cobra poised to strike. She is hissing her words:
“We didn’t have the luxuries you did-what was it your Aunt Lavinia got for you for your ninth birthday, a purple bicycle with streamers?”
SJ starts. It had been a purple bicycle, with blue streamers, and suddenly she can see it as though it is in front of her, can feel the rubber grips beneath her hands, smell the oil-how did the Section Leader know-
Sectin Leader smirks. “Oh yes, and a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and a bag of peppermints.” Her voice drips sarcasm: “Oh, the hardship. How oppressed you were.”
She leans in further still, her voice low and swift and sharp. “Do you know what I got for my ninth birthday, Miss Smith?” Her eyes not leaving SJ’s for a second. “Far more than I ever expected. I expected nothing. What could my father afford? The factories perpetually empty, bombed by dissidents. The unemployment lines clogged with whinging freeloaders, wanting something for nothing. My father never complained. My father was a loyal citizen. He reported my mother when I was five, for seditious talk against the state. And what from his reward, from our neighbors, from the very people who should have been glad to have a traitor removed from their midst? They set fire to our shelter! The idiocy-the ingratitude-”
The Section Leader’s free hand is clenching and unclenching around the swagger stick. Smoke billows from her mouth, a lock of hair sticking to the edge of her lips, her eyes flaming, and SJ realizes with a chill that shivers up her spine and reverberates down into her hands that this woman is completely insane.
The cup and saucer rattle in her hand. If she drops it now…
But the Section Leader doesn’t notice. This time, she is firmly in the past, even as she stares SJ down as if trying to slice her through with her eyes.
“But on the banks of the Thames my father found a wounded eagle, and in the trash he found a dented birdcage, and on my ninth birthday he gave them to me. And it meant more than you will ever know.”
The chill is spreading, vibrating through SJ’s every nerve. Gooseflesh prickles. She can feel the frigid air on every centimeter of exposed skin.
“But the eagle wouldn’t eat. The eagle would not drink. After a few days, the eagle would not even lash out when we tended its wounds. It would not even scream.
“Do you know what I did then, Miss Smith?”
She is so cold. She cannot think. The cold is stabbing through the thin cotton weave of her clothes like dozens of icy knives.
Beth Shaw takes a long drag on her cigarette, and then smiles, beatific. “I found a sparrow.”
Sparrow and the sound of it echoes in her head, spirals, like the pattern of a wing, no, a feather, no, flight-
Something is wrong, when something went wrong she was supposed to-
“As long as the sparrow bobbed and fluttered in fear, the eagle sat and watched it. Was content to eat only the mice and rats I brought. But one day the sparrow sat still, and the eagle-more than full-lashed it to ribbons. It could not help it. It was a bird of prey. It was what it was made for. But do you know, that eagle mourned its little cellmate. It grew still yet again. And it died not long after.
“Do you take my meaning, Miss Smith?”
Does she? Something is-she has to hold onto the cup. It’s hard to hold onto the cup because she is shaking-if she holds onto the Section Leader’s voice-the lights, even the lights are cold, burning cold…
“If you submit, the Doctor will destroy you. Not by violence, as the eagle did. But he will destroy you nonetheless. He will take you apart, piece by piece. He will not be able to help it.”
SJ cannot look away from the Section Leader’s eyes. The Section Leader’s eyes are gleaming. They are filling her vision. They are filled with lights, and all the lights are connected, and something is-
“Oh, he has all the very best of intentions. He will always have reasons. He will always have excuses, and explanations, and soft words to erode your resolve. He has all the time in the world and you have none, do you understand? You have begun to accede to his requests, and if you do not stop, he will not stop, until every part of you belongs to him, until you are wholly his creature, until you cannot extricate any part of you from him. You will cease to struggle, and you will be destroyed, and when he sees that you are destroyed he will die, and for the good of the country I cannot not allow that to happen.”
All the lights are connected, and they spark-
If you need me--
Cold and they spark, hold onto the voice, something I was supposed to do, blue, oh they spark-
“Would you like me to save you?”
Yes, yes, she would like to be saved. But she has to-
The teacup falls from her hand, oh thank goodness, it will shatter on the floor and the Doctor will-
The Section Leader catches it.
“I’m not ready for you to take your leave just yet. I need an answer.”
The Doctor was going to…but the Section Leader caught the tea…something in the tea-even her blood is running cold through her veins, she sees all the connections now, they are spreading and multiplying and tangling and they will strangle her if she does not hold onto
(she held onto the Doctor’s arm)
the voice, the voice, any voice…
“You need my help.”
help
“Even you can’t be so blind not to see what’s happening. Oh, I’m sure you managed to justify it the first time.” Her face is swimming in SJ’s vision. Her tongue darts out over her lips. “He is so very fascinating when he’s helpless-though it can be interesting to let him take charge from time to time. But you don’t feel that way, do you? Not with your horror of being a project. And still you gave in last night, and took him to your bed. Because you are the sparrow, and you cannot keep constantly moving. You were tired. You had no choice.”
Words, and words, and words-there were words she wanted to-words she needed to-
SJ points her shaking hand towards the folder. Her fingers just touch the edge, if she could just make them bend-
The words-
“Greedy little bitch.” Her voice dispassionate again, suddenly. The Section Leader flicks the folder towards SJ and the blank white piece of paper inside flies free, twists and turns slow-motion into the air before her eyes like a taunting dove.
(‘failure’ says the piece of paper with its ripped folded mouth)
her fingers are ice
(she hears it say ‘failure’)
Andy Sully sorry Audrey Dottie Fitzoliver oh no
“There’s nothing in there. The real folder was delivered to the Doctor-” the Section Leader bends her head to check her watch, and for SJ, the whole room slides up and down like the tide-“three minutes ago.”
The Doctor was supposed to stay with me
(the doctor lies)
connect the lights
(all lies)
spark blue
“ I’m giving you something far more valuable: the knowledge of what he’ll do with that information, how much he’ll share with you, how much you’ll have to bargain for. What you’ll have to bargain with.”
she is frozen and shaking and all the colors of the room are melting, dripping pink like viscous organs, and everyone’s minds are sparking blue (the section leader and the doctor and the guards and all the lights voices too many and) and tilting tilting to fall she was never strong enough-
Aunt Lavinia it wasn’t like you said why did you leave me all alone
“And I’m still waiting for an answer, little sparrow. Would you like me to save you?”
Oh yes, please. Someone, anyone. Oh god oh god please please please…
SJ nods.
And then she is falling, falling, down into the threadbare pink carpet, her face against the rough fibers, and the lights spark blue and she hears everything all the voices everywhere and she understands and the dragons hiss and squirm through the holes in reality, and from far above her-a thousand miles away, up above her in the well in the center of the Universe from which the gods draw the waters of Time-comes the Section Leader’s voice, musing:
“Do you know some of my colleagues prefer to interrogate men? I confess I find it rather boring. Men rage and struggle and strain, and snap. They break themselves completely in one blow. But women…
“Women bend.”