Doctor Who Fic: Like a House Falling into the Sea 1/5(?)
Title: Like a House Falling into the Sea 1/5?-The Storm
Series: The Abyss: a brief history of the Time War. “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Author: Unknown Kadath (aka kadath_or_bust)
Beta: tempusdominus10
Word Count: 5,334
Rating: T
Characters: 8th Doctor, Destrii, 9th Doctor in future chapter
Genre: Adventure, Drama
Summary: The Doctor thought he’d escaped his destiny, but on a planet called Avarinne, under the long shadow of the Time War, he learns just how mistaken he was.
Disclaimer: Well, I own Avarinne … that’s about it. Destrii isn’t mine, either. See spoiler alert.
Spoiler Alert!-for Oblivion and The Flood. From whence comes Destrii, but hopefully it’ll make enough sense even if you haven’t read those.
Author’s Note: I always swore I would never write stories about the Time War. (To myself. It would be even more embarrassing if I’d promised someone else.) But then, I always said the same thing about post-Journey’s End fic, and I’ve got a whole damned series I’m working on for that.
I figure I’d better work on this before the next season airs, in case Mr. Moffat decides to start telling war stories and contradicts all the fun ideas I’ve had. Or comes up with similar ideas himself-I’ve had fics derailed both ways in the past. (One of the reasons I swore off writing fics for shows before they get cancelled. Like I’m doing now. Sigh.)
This is both the prologue and the epilogue (and probably an interlude) to a trilogy I never intended to write about the War. (Hey, it’s a Time War. These things happen.)
The rest of the trilogy will probably consist of one story that takes place in a single day, one story that takes place both before and after that story, and a final story that will be so chronologically deranged I do not know where to begin describing it. I know where I’ll start writing it, though-smack in the middle.
All of these stories can probably be read alone or out of order without losing anything-except, possibly, the last. In the unlikely event that the last story requires knowledge of the others, I’ll add a note to the beginning of it.
So, without further ado, here is my prologue/interlude/epilogue. It’s turned into a mad sort of Joseph Campbell thing, with monsters and labyrinths and heroes, but then, doesn’t everything?
Like A House Falling Into The Sea
Part One: The Storm
“X will mark the place
Like a parting of the waves
Like a house falling into the sea
Into the sea”
Radiohead, “Where I End and You Begin”
1. Destriianatos
I was born on a world called Oblivion, but I’ve only ever known one home in my life, and that’s Avarinne. Even growing up on Oblivion, when I called it my home, I didn’t really feel that way. I hated it. It was more hell than home, and the only love I ever got was lies.
I’ve lived different places, between Oblivion and Avarinne. Called some of them home, too. What makes a home, anyway? Is it just the place you happen to grow up in, some random patch of ground where you got born? Cos that’s Oblivion. Just a load of dirt. Or is it someplace that makes you who you are? Well, that’s everywhere, then.
It’s not just the place you like to be. I liked the Salvation. And I liked the TARDIS. Liked a few other places, too. But they’re not home. Well-the TARDIS could have been, maybe, if things had gone differently. Or could it? Maybe it wasn’t the TARDIS. Maybe it was just the Doctor, and the traveling.
No. Home is the place that makes you feel complete every time you come back to it. Home is the place you carry with you whenever you leave it. Home is the place you want your children to be born.
Home is where you want to go to die, so it’s the last thing your eyes ever see.
I was lucky. I found a home. I got all of those things. How many people go through life never knowing what a home is?
It started as just another adventure. Yeah, sure, I thought Avarinne was beautiful. The first time I saw it, when I stepped out of the TARDIS door and saw the shell-pink sand stretching down to the clear amethyst water under the pale green sky, I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was warm and quiet, and the breeze carried the scent of salt and tropical blooms.
Back then I thought it was just one of a million beautiful things I was gonna see. I thought I was gonna see this stuff every day.
Me and the Doctor.
2. Oh, No, Here We Go Again
“This keeps happening to you, Doctor. You, not me. It’s not my fault.”
“I’m not trying to apportion blame, Destrii. As such. I’m merely suggesting that referring to an admittedly obese local leader as ‘the Pillsbury Doughboy’ might be a slight lapse in discretion.”
“Oh, come on. We’re a million light-years from Earth. Probably a million years, too-“
“We don’t know that!”
“Well, we would if the TARDIS sensors were actually working. Anyway, this lot don’t even have radios. No way do they know what it meant.”
“I’m sure they could tell your tone of voice was disrespectful. And since you called him ‘lard-butt’ in your next sentence-“
“His guards were groping me!”
“It was a perfectly ordinary weapons search. And it’s no excuse for hitting people.”
“Oh, I’m just supposed to take it, huh? Let them push me around? Smile and make nice?”
“Hm, let’s see. With heavily armed thugs? Yes!”
“And what if they’d decided to lock us up anyway? Y’know, if you’d let me carry weapons, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, we could have been shot, instead.”
“Yeah, cos slow execution is sooo much better.”
“I don’t see what you’re complaining about. You’re not the one who’s going to drown when the tide comes in.”
“No, I’ll just starve slowly. Hey, haven’t you picked your manacles yet?”
“It’s rather difficult, with these primitive locking mechanisms! And it isn’t as if I’ve got a proper lock-pick. What about yours? You said you were good at locks.”
“They’re really rusty. And they’re at a bad angle.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, hurry up. The water’s almost up to the pocket where I keep my jelly babies.”
“Never mind your jelly babies, what about my leather jacket? It’s ruined!”
And then-perfect end to a perfect day-we got kidnapped by fish-men.
3. Not At Home
The morning had started out as usual. He’d been darting around the console, hitting buttons and flipping switches and talking a mile a minute about something or other-I think it was some music group called the Beatles he wanted to take me to see. He was wearing a green velvet jacket, just like the one he’d had when I first met him. (He’d swapped it for blue, for a bit, but that one got toasted a few adventures back. The man travels all through history having adventures, but he won’t take a chance and do something new with his wardrobe.)
The interior of the TARDIS (back then, anyway) was this vast sort of steam-punk cathedral, with a hologram ceiling and dark wood and heavy metal struts. It had a Jules Verne control console in the center, and the walls were lined with antiques and futuristic gizmos. One of the lights on the console was blinking insistently.
“Is that supposed to be blinking?” I asked.
The Doctor paused. “No,” he said, in a clipped voice I’d rarely heard him use. He reached over and hit a button, and the blinking stopped.
“What was that?”
“That was for incoming communications.”
“Somebody you don’t want to talk to, huh?” He seemed kind of cranky about it.
“You might say that.” Then he muttered something about interfering busybodies (which was rich, considering the source) and somebody wanting him to stop the decline and fall of the Roman Empire last time they called. Whatever a Roman is.
Then he shook off his irritation and gave me a bright smile. “But never mind them! How would you like to see the Beatles?”
“Beatles?” I said. “Why would I want to see a bunch of bugs?”
“They’re not bugs,” he explained. “They’re men. They’re just named after bugs.”
“So why would men call themselves bugs?”
He stopped in mid-dart. “Do you know, I haven’t a clue? Let’s go ask! 1960’s, what do you say?”
“Yeah, whatever. Listen, can we go meet Leonard Nimoy while we’re there?”
“Well, technically, we shouldn’t. I mean, that’s not the point of time travel, going around meeting famous people.” Which was rich, coming from him. From the way he talks, he never does anything else. But then a wild grin lit up his face. “But then, what’s the point of time travel if you can’t meet a few celebrities, eh?”
He turned and gave a dial a decisive twist, then did a double take and stared a readout. “Oh, dear,” he said, frowning. “Now what on earth …”
The TARDIS rocked. “What’s that?” I asked. “Have you gone and hit something?”
“No …” He frowned. For a moment I thought he looked really upset, maybe even scared, but then he just looked a little puzzled and I figured I’d imagined it. After all, he never looked scared of anything. “There’s some sort of temporal turbulence here. We’ve been thrown off course. I’m going to set us down somewhere so we can get our bearing. We can see the Beatles later.”
I peered at the readouts, hoping he was fussing over nothing, but there was a really nasty gravity anomaly out there, twisting through the dimensions. Sigh. Destrii and the Doctor to the rescue, again.
He landed us in some shrubbery just above a beach, on a little deserted island. We saw some smoke off in the distance, waded across a narrow channel, and walked until we came to the guard outpost.
The rest, as they say, was … par for the course.
4. Rescue-Uh, Sort Of
“Uh, Doctor?” I whispered.
“Yes?” The Doctor shook his head, trying to get his wayward curls out of his eyes. Back then he was a slender man in a green jacket who looked like a mad poet. Or someone who wanted to be a mad poet. I suppose he was, sort of. He was cute, in a pale, slightly old-fashioned way, but he always started whinging whenever I tried to kiss him.
“I think we got company.” I nodded to the gently lapping water.
There were two forms coming out of the shadows of the coral. They looked a little like the people who had captured us, the Teroi-bipedal, with webbed hands and feet, silvery hair. But they were obviously better adapted to life underwater. Their faces were elongated, with snouts a bit like a blunt dolphin’s nose, and they were covered with silver scales where the Teroi had gray-brown hide. Also, the Teroi couldn’t breath for long underwater. Hence the execution by drowning.
Our two visitors had more primitive clothing than the Teroi. Just loincloths (which they looked pretty good in, by the way), and belts with a few tools stuck in them. They were carrying spears.
“Oh, that’s fascinating,” said the Doctor. “There appear to be two sentient species on this planet. Obviously related to each other, of course.”
“Of course.” I started working harder on my manacles. “They don’t look real friendly.”
“Hm. Maybe it would be best if you didn’t speak. Hello! Hello, there! I’m the Doctor, and-ahh!”
The shorter, stockier fish-man had nudged the more gangly one, who swam up and jabbed at the Doctor’s ankle with his spear.
“Doctor! Doctor?” I shouted, but his head was already falling back.
“Paralytic,” he gasped. “Like curare? But with a fascinating molecular similarity to …”
He trailed off, making a few last feeble attempts to speak before going completely limp. The fish-man swam at me, and I kicked out as much as the chains would allow. “Oh, no, you don’t!”
He was fast, I’ll give him that. I only managed to get in a few glancing blows before he jabbed me, and I’m damned good in a fight. Of course, he was armed with a long spear and I was chained up, which went a ways to evening up the odds.
5. Captives
The Doctor didn’t shake off the drug much faster than I did. He claimed later that they must’ve given him a higher dose because of his higher body mass and got their sums wrong, but I think he just didn’t want to admit he’s not always the superior life-form in our little team. Snob.
We were paralyzed, not sedated. I was aware of everything, although as I couldn’t turn my head my view was somewhat limited, and our captors didn’t say much.
They took us down under the water. That didn’t scare me; I have gills. But I hate being helpless. And then there was the Doctor-he needed air. You know, I used to think only weak people tried to protect each other. Turns out you need to be a lot stronger to do that than to just look out for yourself, cos a lot of the time you can’t help. And it hurts.
Yeah, thanks, Doc. That was something I really needed to know. Sure, it’s made me a better person-big whoop. Virtue doesn’t act as a painkiller.
But I didn’t need to worry about him. They put us in some sort of diving-bell contraption. It was made out of some sort of leather-I’m guessing tanned bladder or stomach, stitched together with gut and sealed with resin to stop the air leaking out. Crude, but it worked well enough.
It was translucent but not transparent. I couldn’t really work out where we were going, except that it wasn’t to the surface. Not until the end, when we passed underneath something that blocked out the sun and came up in a little cave.
The two fish-people took us out and set us on a little rocky shelf that was the only dry land in the cave. It was of pale fossil coral, with the same golden-pink tone as the sand, full of tiny, perfect snail-shells. The low roof of the cave was the same, with light and air coming in through little chinks. It was dark and cool, the water a deep wine-purple.
There wasn’t any visible way out, even before the fish-people tied us up again. The only entrance was underwater. No problem for me, if I could get out of the ropes.
I realized that I was turning my head as I looked around. Not a lot, and not very steadily, but it was movement. I glanced over at the Doctor, trying not to alert the fish-people. He gave me a quick smile, so quick I almost missed it.
“The Teroi prisoners,” said the stockier fish-guy. Now that I could moved my head, I could see him a little better, even through the surface of the water. There was a flicker of movement. More fish-people, led by a big, lean one wearing a necklace of polished quartz, and a little chubby one with dull scales who was wearing an astonishing assortment of carved bones, beads and gewgaws. I figured that one had to be the local chieftain. Chieftainess. It was a little hard to tell.
The two of them, along with the stocky fish-man, came up to the rocky shelf and stuck their heads up out of the water.
“I am Threkian, Leader of the Long Kelp people of the Istoi,” said the lean one with the more restrained jewelry. I figured it just went to show you never could tell. “You have violated our waters, Teroi. You have poisoned the rivers and driven us from our hunting grounds, and you must answer for those crimes. But if you aid us, we will show you mercy.”
She (her voice was definitely feminine) spoke somewhat awkwardly, as if in an unfamiliar tongue, and dipped her head partly into the water afterwards, wetting her gills.
“You got the wrong people, partner,” I told her, annoyed. They’d ruined my jacket for nothing. “We only just got here. And we don’t know what Terroy are. Though if they’re a bunch of thugs with gray skin, I can see why you don’t like them.”
“It’s true,” cut in the Doctor, struggling to raise his head against the aftereffects of the drug. “We’ve only just arrived on this world. We were taken prisoner and left to die-thank you for rescuing us, by the way-presumably, as my companion says, by these Teroi you’re talking about, they seemed a nasty enough lot. I’m the Doctor, by the way, and this is Destriianatos. I know we’ve got off on the wrong foot-er, fin-but hopefully we can all be reasonable sentients about this …?”
He gave them his most charmingly innocent smile, all wide blue eyes and hopeful expression.
The fish-people were looking at both of us in surprise. “You speak Istoyen remarkably well,” said Threkian, her words smoother this time. “For Teroi.”
“Huh?” I said.
“TARDIS’s telepathic circuits,” whispered the Doctor out of the side of his mouth. “Translates for us. They think we’re speaking their language.” Then, to Threkian, “That’s because we’re not Teroi.”
“Lies,” said the stocky fish. “Look at them! What else could they be but Teroi?”
“Are you blind, algae-breath?” I demanded. “Look at us! Do we look like those guys?”
“They are air-breathers,” said the chubby fish-man. “And the angry one’s skin is like that of a Teroi. I imagine the other is an albino.”
“No, we can prove it!” said the Doctor. “These Teroi, they had webbed fingers. Look at my hands. You’ll see they’re quite different. I even have an extra finger. And Destrii is the same.”
There was a low mutter under the water. Threkian turned to the chubby fish. “Plecthros, is it so?”
“Salar!” shouted Plecthros. The gangly fish who had helped capture them darted out of the shadows. “Go have a look at their hands.”
“Yes, Plecthros,” said Salar. He didn’t look entirely pleased about his assignment, but he pulled his body up onto the rock and gingerly reached for the Doctor. The Doctor held up his hands obligingly.
“It’s true!” he called back. “Five fingers! And no webbing.”
“Fascinating!” said Plecthros. (She seemed to be female, too. Odd. I thought only a man could have fashion sense that bad …) “Is there scarring?”
“No, none.” He reached for my hands, hesitated at my glare, and gave me an apologetic look. I decided to humor him. After all, he was being polite. “And the other’s hands are the same.”
“Then they are freaks,” said the stocky fish. “The other Teroi sought to kill them for it. They are a savage people. But that does not absolve these two of their crimes.”
“Peace, Hirass,” said Threkian. “What say you, Plecthros?”
“I have never seen such being,” answered the chubby fish. “But I suppose that is the most likely answer.”
“Lies will not be tolerated,” said Threkian, addressing us. “You will tell us the plans of the Teroi, one way or another. Hirass, bring the caustics and the knives. Begin with the albino-I believe it is the weaker, and will break faster.”
“I have them already,” said Hirass, pulling a wicked-looking obsidian knife from his belt and advancing on them.
“Now wait, wait, wait, wait-“ started the Doctor, voice rising.
“Hey, sushi-face!” I raised my hands to my necklace, pressing a hidden button to deactivate the hologram it projected. “Tell me I’m Teroi now!”
Threkian was the only one who stood her ground, though her body stiffened in shock. Plecthros gibbered and did a little back flip in the water. Salar gave a whistling yelp and fell backwards off the rock shelf with an almighty splash. The onlookers finned away.
“Demons!” said Hirass, surging forward with the knife. He got tangled with the fleeing Salar and gave the youth a clout on the head.
“Wait, Hirass!” barked Threkian. Hirass began to argue, still advancing on the Doctor, and Threkian surged forward and silenced him with a blow of her own. “Wait, I said! Plecthros, stop gibbering and tell me what this means.”
“Salar!” said Plecthros, not coming any nearer.
“Now you’ve done it,” muttered the Doctor.
“Done what, saved your stupid hide?” I hissed back. The projection of a terrestrial humanoid had vanished and my true form was revealed-a fish-woman, silver-blue, with scaled skin and webbed hands-but obviously more adapted to life on land than my captors.
The long-suffering Salar pulled himself back up onto the shelf. I snarled at him. “Please,” he said.
“Destrii,” chided the Doctor.
“All right,” I grumbled. “But only for you.” See the lengths I go to?
Salar’s eyes went wide. I supposed he thought I was referring to him. But I let him examine me, and he remained perfectly polite.
“Well?” asked Plecthros.
Salar shook his head. “She’s not Teroi.”
“I can see she’s not Teroi, boy, but what is she?”
“Destrii is from a world called Oblivion,” said the Doctor. “And I’m a Time Lord, from the planet Gallifrey. I may look like a Teroi-a little-but I assure you, I’m quite different. I have two hearts. Go on, take my pulse.” A brief flicker of concern crossed his face. “Er-two hearts isn’t normal for this world, is it?”
“No,” said Threkian.
She waved Salar over to check the Doctor. The boy gave her a nod. His eyes had gone very wide. “Two hearts,” he confirmed.
“Demons,” said Hirass. I was getting really tired of him. “The two-hearted one said it himself. They come from another world!”
“No, no, we’re flesh and blood like you,” said the Doctor. “But we’re travelers. We come from lands very far away.”
They seemed to accept that. Apparently they were so primitive that not only did they not have space travel, they didn’t know their own world very well. But who’s complaining? It worked in our favor.
“So what do we do with them?” called a voice from the crowd of observers in the shadows.
Threkian considered. “We captured them believing them to be Teroi, our enemies. But they were only the prisoners of the Teroi. They have done nothing to wrong us. Let them go free.”
This set off a storm of arguments, which the Doctor resolved by standing up and tossing aside his ropes. “Thank you, Threkian,” he said. “You are indeed a wise leader.”
I shook off my own ropes, a little annoyed at being upstaged and a little curious about how he’d done it. But not curious enough to ask and encourage him. “Yeah, whatever. Can we go now? I don’t like this place anymore.”
“Destrii, Destrii, Destrii,” he sighed, “don’t you think we ought to stay and try to help?”
“It’s not our problem. I don’t see why we have to get involved.”
“First,” he said patiently, “because it’s the right thing to do. You’ve met the Teroi. There’s something seriously fishy going on here.”
I groaned. It didn’t deter him.
“Second, there’s the temporal disturbance. We still have to get to the bottom of that. And anyway, what’s the point of travel if you’re not going to get involved in anyth-oh …”
He put a hand to his head.
“Doc?” I asked.
“Told you not to call me …” he mumbled, and crumpled into a tangle of legs on the ground.
6. The Storm
I ran to his side and rolled him over onto his back. He was breathing and I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong with him, but he was out cold and even whiter than usual, face screwed up in pain.
“What’s wrong?” asked Salar. “Is he ill? Plecthros! The Doctor is ill!”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Plecthros, go help him,” ordered Threkian. But then there was a faint whispering noise outside, like wind. “No, wait! Storm! Everyone into the water!”
“Come on,” said Salar. He began to pull the Doctor towards the edge of the rock shelf.
“No!” I said. “He can’t breath under water!”
Salar looked around wildly. “The cage!”
“What?”
“The air balloon we brought you in. We can put him into that!”
We pulled the Doctor into the water, which got a bit of a twitch out of him but didn’t wake him up, and into the diving bell with a little difficulty (he’s incredibly uncoordinated when he’s unconscious). The Istoi kept their heads well enough for Threkian to assign several guards to help me tow the bell with us as we fled the caves, diving deeper and deeper. I’d never been that deep under water before. All I’d known on Oblivion were pools. It was a little disorientating.
“What’s going on?” I asked Salar.
“A Storm.” I could hear the capital letter. “The gods are angry.”
“Don’t believe in gods,” I said, and he gave me a scandalized look. But there was something going on, and it wasn’t a normal storm. The water was vibrating, or that’s what it felt like, and everything looked and sounded strange. There was a tingling like electricity and a metallic taste in the back of my mouth.
“Rock fall!” someone shouted, and we swerved to avoid a massive boulder tumbling down through the water.
We came to an area where the seafloor evened out and a great turquoise forest of kelp grew up from it. (I’m assuming it wasn’t actual earth-kelp. But it looked kelp-ish, and that’s how the TARDIS translated the Istoi word.) We swam into the shadows, dragging the diving bell with us, and stopped at a series of pits roofed over with woven kelp.
“Our village,” explained Salar.
“Yeah, great,” I said. “I’m going to check on the Doctor.”
He was still unconscious. I wondered if he’d be better off on dry land. But that wasn’t an option right now. Fortunately, the water was fairly warm.
Salar and Threkian (who seemed to be the only two Istoi who weren’t totally useless) bullied Plecthros into checking on the Doctor. No surprise, she didn’t have any answers.
“It doesn’t look like the Storm-sickness,” she said. “But I don’t know anything about Time Lords. Time is the enemy of those with the sickness, so perhaps he is protected. Or perhaps the Storm makes him more ill?”
“What’s Storm-sickness?” I asked, brushing the Doctor’s damp hair away from his face. He didn’t seem like he was getting any worse, but I was still worried. Some days I seem to do nothing but worry about him. It’s annoying. “We don’t have these Storms where I come from.”
“Salar can show you,” she said. “Salar!”
He took me to the edge of the village. It was sort of peaceful and pretty-the Storm didn’t feel as bad down here. “Why does she push you around like that?” I asked him. “And why do you let her?”
“Why do you let the Doctor tell you what to do?” he countered.
“I don’t! Yeah, sometimes I do what he wants, cos I like him. And I like traveling with him.”
“That’s why I do what Plecthros says,” he told me. “Well, not so much because I like her. But she’s not that bad. She’s our Shaman, and I’m her apprentice. I get to learn all kinds of things, and go interesting places. And meet interesting people, like you. Here we are. Fethys, can we come in?”
There was a feeble response, and he lifted up a flap over one of the pits and we went in. It was a sort of underwater house, with tools in niches in the walls and a little hammock of woven kelp fiber. In the hammock was a very old woman, shrunken and wasted. Her hair was dull and thin, and her scales were falling off and leaving raw pink patches of wrinkly skin.
“Salar,” she said. I saw that her eyes were milky and blind, like pearls. “What news?”
“I brought a visitor. Her name is Destriianatos, and she comes from very far away. She and her friend want to help us, but they’ve never seen Storm-sickness before.”
Fethys held out a trembling hand. I didn’t want to go to her, but I couldn’t exactly run away, so I swam forward. Her fingers were like little cold sticks.
“Destriianatos,” she said. “Welcome to our village. Can you help make me better?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Fethys was so old, I couldn’t see how anyone could tell she’d got this Storm-sickness.
“Fethys is a little younger than me,” said Salar.
I looked at Fethys. Her face was like a skull.
“I have to get some air,” I said, and swam out of the pit as fast as I could.
7. The Story So Far
“Hey!” said Salar when he found me. “What’s the matter with you? It’s not contagious or anything. If that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid!” I said. I wasn’t sure why I even cared what he thought of me. “I’m not afraid of anything! I’m just … not used to seeing sick people, okay?”
“What do you mean, not used to sick people? Don’t people get sick where you come from?”
“Yeah, they got sick all the time. And then they’d get killed.”
Salar gaped at me. “Why’d they do that? That’s horrible!”
I shrugged. “If they were sick, it was because they were weak. Weak people didn’t deserve to live. Or that’s what I used to think. But you’re right-it was a horrible place. Everything was horrible. That’s why I ran away, and then I met the Doctor. Things are different with him.”
Salar was keeping his distance from me now, like I was the one who was sick. “How’s he different?”
“He’s … he just is. He’s always trying to be nice to people, you know? Trying to help. He helped me, even though he didn’t have much reason to. He saved my life after my uncle tried to kill me.”
Salar’s eyes, if possible, went even wider. He mouthed something like, Your uncle?
What, was everybody supposed to be nice or something on this world? Nobody had any homicidal relatives? He was acting like I’d been, I don’t know, some sort of abused child or something.
Okay, so my mother used to take me down to the dungeons when I was a kid and torture me, but then I knifed her in the back. I decided not to tell Salar that bit. People get all funny about it when they hear I killed my mother.
I didn’t have a great childhood. But I’m not a child any more, abused or otherwise. I can take care of myself. Uncle Jodafra just took me by surprise. Which was embarrassing enough …
“I trust the Doctor,” I said. “I don’t know why. I mean, everybody else I trusted, it turned out they were just using me. But you get to know the Doctor, and he’s just … different.”
I tried to tell him a little more about the Doctor, and the TARDIS. I wanted him to understand that the Doctor was special. It’s not like I would trust just anybody.
Salar nodded. He looked like he hadn’t understood one word in ten of what I’d said.
“I want to go see if the Doctor’s any better,” I said. “Can we do that now?”
“Yes, of course. I think the Storm’s breaking, maybe he’ll be awake.”
Next Chapter: The Wasteland--Coming Soon!
Series: The Abyss: a brief history of the Time War. “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Author: Unknown Kadath (aka kadath_or_bust)
Beta: tempusdominus10
Word Count: 5,334
Rating: T
Characters: 8th Doctor, Destrii, 9th Doctor in future chapter
Genre: Adventure, Drama
Summary: The Doctor thought he’d escaped his destiny, but on a planet called Avarinne, under the long shadow of the Time War, he learns just how mistaken he was.
Disclaimer: Well, I own Avarinne … that’s about it. Destrii isn’t mine, either. See spoiler alert.
Spoiler Alert!-for Oblivion and The Flood. From whence comes Destrii, but hopefully it’ll make enough sense even if you haven’t read those.
Author’s Note: I always swore I would never write stories about the Time War. (To myself. It would be even more embarrassing if I’d promised someone else.) But then, I always said the same thing about post-Journey’s End fic, and I’ve got a whole damned series I’m working on for that.
I figure I’d better work on this before the next season airs, in case Mr. Moffat decides to start telling war stories and contradicts all the fun ideas I’ve had. Or comes up with similar ideas himself-I’ve had fics derailed both ways in the past. (One of the reasons I swore off writing fics for shows before they get cancelled. Like I’m doing now. Sigh.)
This is both the prologue and the epilogue (and probably an interlude) to a trilogy I never intended to write about the War. (Hey, it’s a Time War. These things happen.)
The rest of the trilogy will probably consist of one story that takes place in a single day, one story that takes place both before and after that story, and a final story that will be so chronologically deranged I do not know where to begin describing it. I know where I’ll start writing it, though-smack in the middle.
All of these stories can probably be read alone or out of order without losing anything-except, possibly, the last. In the unlikely event that the last story requires knowledge of the others, I’ll add a note to the beginning of it.
So, without further ado, here is my prologue/interlude/epilogue. It’s turned into a mad sort of Joseph Campbell thing, with monsters and labyrinths and heroes, but then, doesn’t everything?
Like A House Falling Into The Sea
Part One: The Storm
“X will mark the place
Like a parting of the waves
Like a house falling into the sea
Into the sea”
Radiohead, “Where I End and You Begin”
1. Destriianatos
I was born on a world called Oblivion, but I’ve only ever known one home in my life, and that’s Avarinne. Even growing up on Oblivion, when I called it my home, I didn’t really feel that way. I hated it. It was more hell than home, and the only love I ever got was lies.
I’ve lived different places, between Oblivion and Avarinne. Called some of them home, too. What makes a home, anyway? Is it just the place you happen to grow up in, some random patch of ground where you got born? Cos that’s Oblivion. Just a load of dirt. Or is it someplace that makes you who you are? Well, that’s everywhere, then.
It’s not just the place you like to be. I liked the Salvation. And I liked the TARDIS. Liked a few other places, too. But they’re not home. Well-the TARDIS could have been, maybe, if things had gone differently. Or could it? Maybe it wasn’t the TARDIS. Maybe it was just the Doctor, and the traveling.
No. Home is the place that makes you feel complete every time you come back to it. Home is the place you carry with you whenever you leave it. Home is the place you want your children to be born.
Home is where you want to go to die, so it’s the last thing your eyes ever see.
I was lucky. I found a home. I got all of those things. How many people go through life never knowing what a home is?
It started as just another adventure. Yeah, sure, I thought Avarinne was beautiful. The first time I saw it, when I stepped out of the TARDIS door and saw the shell-pink sand stretching down to the clear amethyst water under the pale green sky, I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It was warm and quiet, and the breeze carried the scent of salt and tropical blooms.
Back then I thought it was just one of a million beautiful things I was gonna see. I thought I was gonna see this stuff every day.
Me and the Doctor.
2. Oh, No, Here We Go Again
“This keeps happening to you, Doctor. You, not me. It’s not my fault.”
“I’m not trying to apportion blame, Destrii. As such. I’m merely suggesting that referring to an admittedly obese local leader as ‘the Pillsbury Doughboy’ might be a slight lapse in discretion.”
“Oh, come on. We’re a million light-years from Earth. Probably a million years, too-“
“We don’t know that!”
“Well, we would if the TARDIS sensors were actually working. Anyway, this lot don’t even have radios. No way do they know what it meant.”
“I’m sure they could tell your tone of voice was disrespectful. And since you called him ‘lard-butt’ in your next sentence-“
“His guards were groping me!”
“It was a perfectly ordinary weapons search. And it’s no excuse for hitting people.”
“Oh, I’m just supposed to take it, huh? Let them push me around? Smile and make nice?”
“Hm, let’s see. With heavily armed thugs? Yes!”
“And what if they’d decided to lock us up anyway? Y’know, if you’d let me carry weapons, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, we could have been shot, instead.”
“Yeah, cos slow execution is sooo much better.”
“I don’t see what you’re complaining about. You’re not the one who’s going to drown when the tide comes in.”
“No, I’ll just starve slowly. Hey, haven’t you picked your manacles yet?”
“It’s rather difficult, with these primitive locking mechanisms! And it isn’t as if I’ve got a proper lock-pick. What about yours? You said you were good at locks.”
“They’re really rusty. And they’re at a bad angle.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, hurry up. The water’s almost up to the pocket where I keep my jelly babies.”
“Never mind your jelly babies, what about my leather jacket? It’s ruined!”
And then-perfect end to a perfect day-we got kidnapped by fish-men.
3. Not At Home
The morning had started out as usual. He’d been darting around the console, hitting buttons and flipping switches and talking a mile a minute about something or other-I think it was some music group called the Beatles he wanted to take me to see. He was wearing a green velvet jacket, just like the one he’d had when I first met him. (He’d swapped it for blue, for a bit, but that one got toasted a few adventures back. The man travels all through history having adventures, but he won’t take a chance and do something new with his wardrobe.)
The interior of the TARDIS (back then, anyway) was this vast sort of steam-punk cathedral, with a hologram ceiling and dark wood and heavy metal struts. It had a Jules Verne control console in the center, and the walls were lined with antiques and futuristic gizmos. One of the lights on the console was blinking insistently.
“Is that supposed to be blinking?” I asked.
The Doctor paused. “No,” he said, in a clipped voice I’d rarely heard him use. He reached over and hit a button, and the blinking stopped.
“What was that?”
“That was for incoming communications.”
“Somebody you don’t want to talk to, huh?” He seemed kind of cranky about it.
“You might say that.” Then he muttered something about interfering busybodies (which was rich, considering the source) and somebody wanting him to stop the decline and fall of the Roman Empire last time they called. Whatever a Roman is.
Then he shook off his irritation and gave me a bright smile. “But never mind them! How would you like to see the Beatles?”
“Beatles?” I said. “Why would I want to see a bunch of bugs?”
“They’re not bugs,” he explained. “They’re men. They’re just named after bugs.”
“So why would men call themselves bugs?”
He stopped in mid-dart. “Do you know, I haven’t a clue? Let’s go ask! 1960’s, what do you say?”
“Yeah, whatever. Listen, can we go meet Leonard Nimoy while we’re there?”
“Well, technically, we shouldn’t. I mean, that’s not the point of time travel, going around meeting famous people.” Which was rich, coming from him. From the way he talks, he never does anything else. But then a wild grin lit up his face. “But then, what’s the point of time travel if you can’t meet a few celebrities, eh?”
He turned and gave a dial a decisive twist, then did a double take and stared a readout. “Oh, dear,” he said, frowning. “Now what on earth …”
The TARDIS rocked. “What’s that?” I asked. “Have you gone and hit something?”
“No …” He frowned. For a moment I thought he looked really upset, maybe even scared, but then he just looked a little puzzled and I figured I’d imagined it. After all, he never looked scared of anything. “There’s some sort of temporal turbulence here. We’ve been thrown off course. I’m going to set us down somewhere so we can get our bearing. We can see the Beatles later.”
I peered at the readouts, hoping he was fussing over nothing, but there was a really nasty gravity anomaly out there, twisting through the dimensions. Sigh. Destrii and the Doctor to the rescue, again.
He landed us in some shrubbery just above a beach, on a little deserted island. We saw some smoke off in the distance, waded across a narrow channel, and walked until we came to the guard outpost.
The rest, as they say, was … par for the course.
4. Rescue-Uh, Sort Of
“Uh, Doctor?” I whispered.
“Yes?” The Doctor shook his head, trying to get his wayward curls out of his eyes. Back then he was a slender man in a green jacket who looked like a mad poet. Or someone who wanted to be a mad poet. I suppose he was, sort of. He was cute, in a pale, slightly old-fashioned way, but he always started whinging whenever I tried to kiss him.
“I think we got company.” I nodded to the gently lapping water.
There were two forms coming out of the shadows of the coral. They looked a little like the people who had captured us, the Teroi-bipedal, with webbed hands and feet, silvery hair. But they were obviously better adapted to life underwater. Their faces were elongated, with snouts a bit like a blunt dolphin’s nose, and they were covered with silver scales where the Teroi had gray-brown hide. Also, the Teroi couldn’t breath for long underwater. Hence the execution by drowning.
Our two visitors had more primitive clothing than the Teroi. Just loincloths (which they looked pretty good in, by the way), and belts with a few tools stuck in them. They were carrying spears.
“Oh, that’s fascinating,” said the Doctor. “There appear to be two sentient species on this planet. Obviously related to each other, of course.”
“Of course.” I started working harder on my manacles. “They don’t look real friendly.”
“Hm. Maybe it would be best if you didn’t speak. Hello! Hello, there! I’m the Doctor, and-ahh!”
The shorter, stockier fish-man had nudged the more gangly one, who swam up and jabbed at the Doctor’s ankle with his spear.
“Doctor! Doctor?” I shouted, but his head was already falling back.
“Paralytic,” he gasped. “Like curare? But with a fascinating molecular similarity to …”
He trailed off, making a few last feeble attempts to speak before going completely limp. The fish-man swam at me, and I kicked out as much as the chains would allow. “Oh, no, you don’t!”
He was fast, I’ll give him that. I only managed to get in a few glancing blows before he jabbed me, and I’m damned good in a fight. Of course, he was armed with a long spear and I was chained up, which went a ways to evening up the odds.
5. Captives
The Doctor didn’t shake off the drug much faster than I did. He claimed later that they must’ve given him a higher dose because of his higher body mass and got their sums wrong, but I think he just didn’t want to admit he’s not always the superior life-form in our little team. Snob.
We were paralyzed, not sedated. I was aware of everything, although as I couldn’t turn my head my view was somewhat limited, and our captors didn’t say much.
They took us down under the water. That didn’t scare me; I have gills. But I hate being helpless. And then there was the Doctor-he needed air. You know, I used to think only weak people tried to protect each other. Turns out you need to be a lot stronger to do that than to just look out for yourself, cos a lot of the time you can’t help. And it hurts.
Yeah, thanks, Doc. That was something I really needed to know. Sure, it’s made me a better person-big whoop. Virtue doesn’t act as a painkiller.
But I didn’t need to worry about him. They put us in some sort of diving-bell contraption. It was made out of some sort of leather-I’m guessing tanned bladder or stomach, stitched together with gut and sealed with resin to stop the air leaking out. Crude, but it worked well enough.
It was translucent but not transparent. I couldn’t really work out where we were going, except that it wasn’t to the surface. Not until the end, when we passed underneath something that blocked out the sun and came up in a little cave.
The two fish-people took us out and set us on a little rocky shelf that was the only dry land in the cave. It was of pale fossil coral, with the same golden-pink tone as the sand, full of tiny, perfect snail-shells. The low roof of the cave was the same, with light and air coming in through little chinks. It was dark and cool, the water a deep wine-purple.
There wasn’t any visible way out, even before the fish-people tied us up again. The only entrance was underwater. No problem for me, if I could get out of the ropes.
I realized that I was turning my head as I looked around. Not a lot, and not very steadily, but it was movement. I glanced over at the Doctor, trying not to alert the fish-people. He gave me a quick smile, so quick I almost missed it.
“The Teroi prisoners,” said the stockier fish-guy. Now that I could moved my head, I could see him a little better, even through the surface of the water. There was a flicker of movement. More fish-people, led by a big, lean one wearing a necklace of polished quartz, and a little chubby one with dull scales who was wearing an astonishing assortment of carved bones, beads and gewgaws. I figured that one had to be the local chieftain. Chieftainess. It was a little hard to tell.
The two of them, along with the stocky fish-man, came up to the rocky shelf and stuck their heads up out of the water.
“I am Threkian, Leader of the Long Kelp people of the Istoi,” said the lean one with the more restrained jewelry. I figured it just went to show you never could tell. “You have violated our waters, Teroi. You have poisoned the rivers and driven us from our hunting grounds, and you must answer for those crimes. But if you aid us, we will show you mercy.”
She (her voice was definitely feminine) spoke somewhat awkwardly, as if in an unfamiliar tongue, and dipped her head partly into the water afterwards, wetting her gills.
“You got the wrong people, partner,” I told her, annoyed. They’d ruined my jacket for nothing. “We only just got here. And we don’t know what Terroy are. Though if they’re a bunch of thugs with gray skin, I can see why you don’t like them.”
“It’s true,” cut in the Doctor, struggling to raise his head against the aftereffects of the drug. “We’ve only just arrived on this world. We were taken prisoner and left to die-thank you for rescuing us, by the way-presumably, as my companion says, by these Teroi you’re talking about, they seemed a nasty enough lot. I’m the Doctor, by the way, and this is Destriianatos. I know we’ve got off on the wrong foot-er, fin-but hopefully we can all be reasonable sentients about this …?”
He gave them his most charmingly innocent smile, all wide blue eyes and hopeful expression.
The fish-people were looking at both of us in surprise. “You speak Istoyen remarkably well,” said Threkian, her words smoother this time. “For Teroi.”
“Huh?” I said.
“TARDIS’s telepathic circuits,” whispered the Doctor out of the side of his mouth. “Translates for us. They think we’re speaking their language.” Then, to Threkian, “That’s because we’re not Teroi.”
“Lies,” said the stocky fish. “Look at them! What else could they be but Teroi?”
“Are you blind, algae-breath?” I demanded. “Look at us! Do we look like those guys?”
“They are air-breathers,” said the chubby fish-man. “And the angry one’s skin is like that of a Teroi. I imagine the other is an albino.”
“No, we can prove it!” said the Doctor. “These Teroi, they had webbed fingers. Look at my hands. You’ll see they’re quite different. I even have an extra finger. And Destrii is the same.”
There was a low mutter under the water. Threkian turned to the chubby fish. “Plecthros, is it so?”
“Salar!” shouted Plecthros. The gangly fish who had helped capture them darted out of the shadows. “Go have a look at their hands.”
“Yes, Plecthros,” said Salar. He didn’t look entirely pleased about his assignment, but he pulled his body up onto the rock and gingerly reached for the Doctor. The Doctor held up his hands obligingly.
“It’s true!” he called back. “Five fingers! And no webbing.”
“Fascinating!” said Plecthros. (She seemed to be female, too. Odd. I thought only a man could have fashion sense that bad …) “Is there scarring?”
“No, none.” He reached for my hands, hesitated at my glare, and gave me an apologetic look. I decided to humor him. After all, he was being polite. “And the other’s hands are the same.”
“Then they are freaks,” said the stocky fish. “The other Teroi sought to kill them for it. They are a savage people. But that does not absolve these two of their crimes.”
“Peace, Hirass,” said Threkian. “What say you, Plecthros?”
“I have never seen such being,” answered the chubby fish. “But I suppose that is the most likely answer.”
“Lies will not be tolerated,” said Threkian, addressing us. “You will tell us the plans of the Teroi, one way or another. Hirass, bring the caustics and the knives. Begin with the albino-I believe it is the weaker, and will break faster.”
“I have them already,” said Hirass, pulling a wicked-looking obsidian knife from his belt and advancing on them.
“Now wait, wait, wait, wait-“ started the Doctor, voice rising.
“Hey, sushi-face!” I raised my hands to my necklace, pressing a hidden button to deactivate the hologram it projected. “Tell me I’m Teroi now!”
Threkian was the only one who stood her ground, though her body stiffened in shock. Plecthros gibbered and did a little back flip in the water. Salar gave a whistling yelp and fell backwards off the rock shelf with an almighty splash. The onlookers finned away.
“Demons!” said Hirass, surging forward with the knife. He got tangled with the fleeing Salar and gave the youth a clout on the head.
“Wait, Hirass!” barked Threkian. Hirass began to argue, still advancing on the Doctor, and Threkian surged forward and silenced him with a blow of her own. “Wait, I said! Plecthros, stop gibbering and tell me what this means.”
“Salar!” said Plecthros, not coming any nearer.
“Now you’ve done it,” muttered the Doctor.
“Done what, saved your stupid hide?” I hissed back. The projection of a terrestrial humanoid had vanished and my true form was revealed-a fish-woman, silver-blue, with scaled skin and webbed hands-but obviously more adapted to life on land than my captors.
The long-suffering Salar pulled himself back up onto the shelf. I snarled at him. “Please,” he said.
“Destrii,” chided the Doctor.
“All right,” I grumbled. “But only for you.” See the lengths I go to?
Salar’s eyes went wide. I supposed he thought I was referring to him. But I let him examine me, and he remained perfectly polite.
“Well?” asked Plecthros.
Salar shook his head. “She’s not Teroi.”
“I can see she’s not Teroi, boy, but what is she?”
“Destrii is from a world called Oblivion,” said the Doctor. “And I’m a Time Lord, from the planet Gallifrey. I may look like a Teroi-a little-but I assure you, I’m quite different. I have two hearts. Go on, take my pulse.” A brief flicker of concern crossed his face. “Er-two hearts isn’t normal for this world, is it?”
“No,” said Threkian.
She waved Salar over to check the Doctor. The boy gave her a nod. His eyes had gone very wide. “Two hearts,” he confirmed.
“Demons,” said Hirass. I was getting really tired of him. “The two-hearted one said it himself. They come from another world!”
“No, no, we’re flesh and blood like you,” said the Doctor. “But we’re travelers. We come from lands very far away.”
They seemed to accept that. Apparently they were so primitive that not only did they not have space travel, they didn’t know their own world very well. But who’s complaining? It worked in our favor.
“So what do we do with them?” called a voice from the crowd of observers in the shadows.
Threkian considered. “We captured them believing them to be Teroi, our enemies. But they were only the prisoners of the Teroi. They have done nothing to wrong us. Let them go free.”
This set off a storm of arguments, which the Doctor resolved by standing up and tossing aside his ropes. “Thank you, Threkian,” he said. “You are indeed a wise leader.”
I shook off my own ropes, a little annoyed at being upstaged and a little curious about how he’d done it. But not curious enough to ask and encourage him. “Yeah, whatever. Can we go now? I don’t like this place anymore.”
“Destrii, Destrii, Destrii,” he sighed, “don’t you think we ought to stay and try to help?”
“It’s not our problem. I don’t see why we have to get involved.”
“First,” he said patiently, “because it’s the right thing to do. You’ve met the Teroi. There’s something seriously fishy going on here.”
I groaned. It didn’t deter him.
“Second, there’s the temporal disturbance. We still have to get to the bottom of that. And anyway, what’s the point of travel if you’re not going to get involved in anyth-oh …”
He put a hand to his head.
“Doc?” I asked.
“Told you not to call me …” he mumbled, and crumpled into a tangle of legs on the ground.
6. The Storm
I ran to his side and rolled him over onto his back. He was breathing and I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong with him, but he was out cold and even whiter than usual, face screwed up in pain.
“What’s wrong?” asked Salar. “Is he ill? Plecthros! The Doctor is ill!”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Plecthros, go help him,” ordered Threkian. But then there was a faint whispering noise outside, like wind. “No, wait! Storm! Everyone into the water!”
“Come on,” said Salar. He began to pull the Doctor towards the edge of the rock shelf.
“No!” I said. “He can’t breath under water!”
Salar looked around wildly. “The cage!”
“What?”
“The air balloon we brought you in. We can put him into that!”
We pulled the Doctor into the water, which got a bit of a twitch out of him but didn’t wake him up, and into the diving bell with a little difficulty (he’s incredibly uncoordinated when he’s unconscious). The Istoi kept their heads well enough for Threkian to assign several guards to help me tow the bell with us as we fled the caves, diving deeper and deeper. I’d never been that deep under water before. All I’d known on Oblivion were pools. It was a little disorientating.
“What’s going on?” I asked Salar.
“A Storm.” I could hear the capital letter. “The gods are angry.”
“Don’t believe in gods,” I said, and he gave me a scandalized look. But there was something going on, and it wasn’t a normal storm. The water was vibrating, or that’s what it felt like, and everything looked and sounded strange. There was a tingling like electricity and a metallic taste in the back of my mouth.
“Rock fall!” someone shouted, and we swerved to avoid a massive boulder tumbling down through the water.
We came to an area where the seafloor evened out and a great turquoise forest of kelp grew up from it. (I’m assuming it wasn’t actual earth-kelp. But it looked kelp-ish, and that’s how the TARDIS translated the Istoi word.) We swam into the shadows, dragging the diving bell with us, and stopped at a series of pits roofed over with woven kelp.
“Our village,” explained Salar.
“Yeah, great,” I said. “I’m going to check on the Doctor.”
He was still unconscious. I wondered if he’d be better off on dry land. But that wasn’t an option right now. Fortunately, the water was fairly warm.
Salar and Threkian (who seemed to be the only two Istoi who weren’t totally useless) bullied Plecthros into checking on the Doctor. No surprise, she didn’t have any answers.
“It doesn’t look like the Storm-sickness,” she said. “But I don’t know anything about Time Lords. Time is the enemy of those with the sickness, so perhaps he is protected. Or perhaps the Storm makes him more ill?”
“What’s Storm-sickness?” I asked, brushing the Doctor’s damp hair away from his face. He didn’t seem like he was getting any worse, but I was still worried. Some days I seem to do nothing but worry about him. It’s annoying. “We don’t have these Storms where I come from.”
“Salar can show you,” she said. “Salar!”
He took me to the edge of the village. It was sort of peaceful and pretty-the Storm didn’t feel as bad down here. “Why does she push you around like that?” I asked him. “And why do you let her?”
“Why do you let the Doctor tell you what to do?” he countered.
“I don’t! Yeah, sometimes I do what he wants, cos I like him. And I like traveling with him.”
“That’s why I do what Plecthros says,” he told me. “Well, not so much because I like her. But she’s not that bad. She’s our Shaman, and I’m her apprentice. I get to learn all kinds of things, and go interesting places. And meet interesting people, like you. Here we are. Fethys, can we come in?”
There was a feeble response, and he lifted up a flap over one of the pits and we went in. It was a sort of underwater house, with tools in niches in the walls and a little hammock of woven kelp fiber. In the hammock was a very old woman, shrunken and wasted. Her hair was dull and thin, and her scales were falling off and leaving raw pink patches of wrinkly skin.
“Salar,” she said. I saw that her eyes were milky and blind, like pearls. “What news?”
“I brought a visitor. Her name is Destriianatos, and she comes from very far away. She and her friend want to help us, but they’ve never seen Storm-sickness before.”
Fethys held out a trembling hand. I didn’t want to go to her, but I couldn’t exactly run away, so I swam forward. Her fingers were like little cold sticks.
“Destriianatos,” she said. “Welcome to our village. Can you help make me better?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Fethys was so old, I couldn’t see how anyone could tell she’d got this Storm-sickness.
“Fethys is a little younger than me,” said Salar.
I looked at Fethys. Her face was like a skull.
“I have to get some air,” I said, and swam out of the pit as fast as I could.
7. The Story So Far
“Hey!” said Salar when he found me. “What’s the matter with you? It’s not contagious or anything. If that’s what you’re afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid!” I said. I wasn’t sure why I even cared what he thought of me. “I’m not afraid of anything! I’m just … not used to seeing sick people, okay?”
“What do you mean, not used to sick people? Don’t people get sick where you come from?”
“Yeah, they got sick all the time. And then they’d get killed.”
Salar gaped at me. “Why’d they do that? That’s horrible!”
I shrugged. “If they were sick, it was because they were weak. Weak people didn’t deserve to live. Or that’s what I used to think. But you’re right-it was a horrible place. Everything was horrible. That’s why I ran away, and then I met the Doctor. Things are different with him.”
Salar was keeping his distance from me now, like I was the one who was sick. “How’s he different?”
“He’s … he just is. He’s always trying to be nice to people, you know? Trying to help. He helped me, even though he didn’t have much reason to. He saved my life after my uncle tried to kill me.”
Salar’s eyes, if possible, went even wider. He mouthed something like, Your uncle?
What, was everybody supposed to be nice or something on this world? Nobody had any homicidal relatives? He was acting like I’d been, I don’t know, some sort of abused child or something.
Okay, so my mother used to take me down to the dungeons when I was a kid and torture me, but then I knifed her in the back. I decided not to tell Salar that bit. People get all funny about it when they hear I killed my mother.
I didn’t have a great childhood. But I’m not a child any more, abused or otherwise. I can take care of myself. Uncle Jodafra just took me by surprise. Which was embarrassing enough …
“I trust the Doctor,” I said. “I don’t know why. I mean, everybody else I trusted, it turned out they were just using me. But you get to know the Doctor, and he’s just … different.”
I tried to tell him a little more about the Doctor, and the TARDIS. I wanted him to understand that the Doctor was special. It’s not like I would trust just anybody.
Salar nodded. He looked like he hadn’t understood one word in ten of what I’d said.
“I want to go see if the Doctor’s any better,” I said. “Can we do that now?”
“Yes, of course. I think the Storm’s breaking, maybe he’ll be awake.”
Next Chapter: The Wasteland--Coming Soon!