The Clock's Dial - Chapter Fifteen
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six ,Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, Chapter Ten, Chapter Eleven , Chapter Twelve, Chapter Thirteen,Chapter Fourteen
Fifteen - The Way Back
It hurt. Cold and fire and ice and burn.
Hell. This was Hell, and she was inside of it.
God, it hurt.
They had stepped into the void, TARDIS and the Wolf and the woman-child together, and had simply stopped.
Rose’s destination shone inside her head, a beacon in the furious burn, but it offered no respite.
I am yours, I am here, meant nothing in this nothingness.
The hand of the TARDIS, the power of a dying star harnessed to extend Her reach, joined with the Wolf and cocooned Rose like a second skin, but the void penetrated, skewering her like a butterfly under glass, immobile and helpless.
BAD WOLF roared, but still Rose’s flesh registered the horror of the place she had been fool enough to enter. The alien otherness of the void assaulted her; it might not have been pain, but agony was all her still human mind could translate the sensations into.
The Void was nothing. It was the absence of all that governed the Universes - gravity, light, colour, height, depth, touch - the simple things were rendered meaningless, never mind the yawning chasm where the sense of Time and Space should be. Little wonder the TARDIS had all but expired from the effort of crossing it unprepared.
Shielded and somewhat primed, still the triumvirate quaked at the task before them as the Void clawed at their invading presence. Rose was substance, created in the antithesis of the Void, and the Void could not endure her, mobilising like white blood cells to remove her infection.
Rose cowed beneath the onslaught.
Even sight hurt.
Naively, Rose had imagined the void like the wall that symbolised her exile - white and featureless. She had been wrong.
There was no such thing as white in the non-place of the Void.
Black, scarlet, white, blue - colours flashed in dazzling succession, as sharp and uncomfortable as a camera flash in the dark, leaving ghostly echoes of their attack even as the next sparked and died against her retina. None were real, but her brain had no way to interpret what she was seeing, leaving her reeling beneath a psychedelic glitter ball of sensation as neurons and synapses scrambled to make sense of senselessness.
Time failed to pass
Rose became aware that she was screaming. There was no sound, but her throat registered discomfort from effort, her mouth was open and her lungs burned.
She determined that she should close her eyes. At some point, her eyes closed.
The world became a more manageable semblance of black, that blindness a relief from the chaos of pointless colour she was shutting out.
The white hot/cold misery of sensation eased a little and in the respite Rose found the will to step forward.
Her leg moved, the rest of her following. Her muscle memory told her she was walking though there was no corresponding input from foot or leg or swinging arm to confirm her belief. The pain rippling over her skin, screaming in her mind, neither lessened nor increased. All things were constant. Still, it was her belief that she moved.
She took another step, and another. There was no exertion. She decided to run. Was running.
I am running, she told herself, over and over again. Running, running, running; it became meaningless, but still she ran, because there was still hope.
Eventually, Rose stopped. She seemed no closer, no further, than she had been to the vague sense of destination that tortured her mind. The promise of home beckoned still, but was like an endless echo, trapped in a labyrinth - its call directionless and futile.
If only she had thought to bring string.
At the stray musing, Rose felt something against her finger tips; thin and coarse, rough as she rolled it between thumb and forefinger. She opened her eyes and found she held crudely woven twine, trailing from her fingers and disappearing into the miasma which swirled around her, or within which she swirled.
‘Am I supposed to be Theseus now?’ she wondered to herself, wishing suddenly that she hadn’t bothered reading up on her mythology after being mistaken for Persephone; Theseus might have escape the Minos’ maze but it had taken Hercules to rescue him from hell.
At her disparaging thought, the thread wavered.
‘No!’ she screamed, her knees almost buckling at the onslaught of fear from within and pain from without. ‘No, no, no, I’m sorry, don’t...’ The string solidified and Rose grasped it so hard her knuckles stood out stark white.
As she moved to follow the trail of red twine, part of the entity that was Rose in this place noted with interest that the agony of the Void seemed to lessen for a moment. The fragile spark of realisation stood no chance against the tumultuous deluge of senselessness and almost instantly conscious thought became nothing more than a litany of red and string and follow.
Red. String. Follow. String, follow, red, follow, string, follow, follow, red, follow, string, follow, follow, string, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow.
Follow.
Follow.
Red. A line of red. Follow. Red line. Line. Follow. Line... and dot. A dot, just in front of her. There. Something new. Something unexpected. A Dot. Rose stopped. A dot, just before her toe. And another. A line and dots?
Rose stopped and stared.
It took a while for her to process the meaning of the new pattern at her feet; several long looks before the presence of the bright red dots translated into a realisation that her fingers had begun to bleed. It was longer still before she understood the considerable passage of time that must have passed for the slight friction of uneven thread passing across soft flesh to have shredded her so thoroughly. The dragging sense of helplessness at what that signified was, in comparison, instantaneous.
The thread fluttered to nothingness as Rose sank to her feet and let the chaos take her.
.
.
.
.
‘Rose?’
Rose shifted inside her mind as something identifiably noise tickled at her senses.
‘Rose.’
Awareness skittered across her skin and the voice grew stronger, more demanding.
‘Come, child, you are stronger than this.’
Rose blinked and blinked again.
‘Finally, I was beginning to think I was conversing with myself!’
Rose achieved sufficient focus to enable her to see, standing before her and grinning widely, the kind old man who had tried to give her a perfect honeymoon.
‘Hello, my dear,’ he said.
Rose lost herself for a moment in the infinite gaze of the Host, an Eternal, older than the Doctor, perhaps as old as Time and even before.
‘Hello,’ she managed, trying and failing to wiggle her fingers in greeting.
‘Oh, my poor child,’ the Host lamented, catching sight of her damaged fingers. Rose followed his distressed look, surprised for a moment to find frayed flesh crusted with blackened blood. The visual reminder of her situation was enough to prompt her brain into slightly higher functioning.
‘Are you real?’
The Host’s eyebrows, ridiculous in their bushy, wirey grey glory, hitched in amused castigation.
‘Are you really here?’ Rose amended.
‘Does it matter?’ the Host countered.
The pause before Rose’s response might have lasted hours or seconds, but eventually she spoke.
‘I don’t know.’
The Host chuckled, ‘Better not to ask, then, surely? Now, stand up,’ he commanded.
Despite herself, Rose obeyed the gentle command, limbs resolving themselves into a position that resembled standing despite the inability of her mind and senses to verify the fact. It was horrifying, to be so entirely without anchor, and for a moment oblivion beckoned.
The Host reached out and grasped her hand and it was enough, just enough, to secure her.
Rose stared at her hand, held by another, and in the recognition of her hand, became aware in a rush of the rest of herself.
‘I’m tired,’ she lamented, feeling all at once not only her fatigue but also how impossibly small and young and unprepared she was.
‘I know.’
Rose stifled the desire to sob but could not contain her need to draw nearer, seeking comfort. Real or not, the embrace she found herself in soothed her.
‘This is harder than I expected.’
The kind old Eternal smiled, letting her linger in his paternal embrace. ‘Of course it is, child! Ah, my children, so brave, so blind.’ He pressed a kiss to her crown and Rose felt, deep inside her, that he was no longer speaking to her alone.
‘Even you, my heart, my brave Bad Wolf, could not truly imagine traversing the Void!’
‘I’m lost,’ Rose lamented into a chest that suddenly rumbled with laughter.
‘Oh, child, child! Lost? So definite!’ The Host drew back a little. ‘I much prefer temporarily misplaced, don’t you?’
‘Like Pete and his keys?’ Rose wondered.
The laughter grew. ‘Just like that, yes!’
The old being placed a gentle finger beneath Rose’s chin, lifting it until she was forced to meet his gaze. Rebelling against the depths exposed to her, Rose closed her eyes.
‘There is nothing lost that cannot be found, child,’ the Host’s soft voice reminded her.
‘That’s Sense and Sensibility,’ Rose protested. The pressure against her chin released and Rose shivered. ‘Is this even real?’ she asked again.
‘Remember, you are stronger than you think, Rose,’ came the soft reply.
When she opened her eyes again, she was alone. Alone, but standing. Standing and able to comprehend; the unfathomable had been replaced by bland nothingness and that, Rose recognised, was a victory of sorts.
‘I am stronger than I think,’ she reminded herself. ‘I can do this.’
Rose had to laugh as, as if in answer to her affirmation, a forest appeared before her, a dark path stretching away from her and disappearing between the densely packed trees.
Aware of a new weight, Rose looked down and observed that she appeared to be wearing a red cloak.
‘Red riding hood?’ she queried, ‘I thought I was the wolf?’
The world before her stuttered out of existence.
‘Oh.’ Rose frowned. ‘I still need a way out,’ Rose observed.
A large sign, replete with the words “Way Out” appeared before her.
‘That’s bugger all use!’
The sign flickered, almost as if with displeasure at her ingratitude, before disappearing.
‘I need a direction. I need to know the way out of here!’ Rose retaliated.
The grey before her wrinkled and resolved itself into something new.
Rose gaped as, brick by yellow brick, a path manifested before her.
‘You have got to be kidding!’ she exclaimed to herself, gazing at the sparkly shoes that were suddenly encasing her feet.
‘You know,’ she muttered to the Void, ‘the film made up the whole ruby thing; in the book they were silver.’
The shoes resolved themselves into shiny silver leather, glinting as if spot lit, despite the absence of any direct light source.
Rose frowned. Could it truly be as simple as that?
Knowledge flickered to life inside her mind, an open door finally accessible now the incessant cacophony of nothingness was quietened by illusion and she was capable of thinking once again.
The Void needed her gone - she was infection, an aberration. A foreign body, like a splinter in human flesh, too solid to be destroyed - just as her own defences would mobilise to ease the intrusion from beneath her skin, so the Void sought to propel her from it. She had simply to harness the Void’s own compulsion, give impulse direction. In short, wishing might indeed make it so.
‘There’s no place like home,’ Rose whispered, her heels clicking together once, twice…
The Void screamed as Rose’s world dilated to a pin prick, ballooned to infinity, sucking her inwards, thrusting her out.
Her heels connected for a third time and, with a pop that, in some time and place, snuffed out a star, Time and Space reclaimed a small human girl from a nondescript estate in London, England, the ineffable entity that resided within her and the fraction of an ancient ship that was temporarily hitching a ride inside her head.
‘Shit!’ Rose choked out, as up and down and substance regained meaning and promptly provoked gastric rebellion.
The acid smell of sick tickled her nose and made her eyes water as they blinked open. At the uncertainty of blurry grey she felt more tears gather, her weary legs crumpling beneath her. She hardly registered pain as she connected with the metallic ground though, for, in one disbelieving syllable, her ears had brought her the confirmation she craved.
‘What?’
Rose winced as her smile broke across taut skin that felt almost sunburnt.
Home. She was home.
‘Did you miss me?’ she managed, casting her question up and out, half blind and struggling as finally her body was in a position to recognise how exhausted it was.
She couldn’t be entirely sure, but she thought the Doctor sounded rather indignant in his repetition. She was, however, perfectly certain of his touch as, in a mess of feet and hands and coming together, he caught her before her head impacted with the floor and the world went perfectly dark.
Epilogue
The Eternal smiled as he watched the Doctor curl himself around the slumbering form of his wife; Rose had proved herself worthy of his faith in her, just as he had been sure she would. Once upon a Time, of course, such a feat as traversing the Void would have been unnecessary, but now he was the one of the few, if not the last, and it was hard, even for one such as him, to run interference against all the vagaries of fate.
Though he would not admit it to himself, he was relieved that the tiny prompt he had planted in her mind had been sufficient to give her strength when she had needed it. She would tell the Doctor he had helped her, but not even he had power enough to venture through the Void alone. It had been all her, in the end; sheer bloody mindedness trumped even the TARDIS - but then Rose had demonstrated that fact before.
The Doctor buried his face in Rose's hair, inhaling her scent with the fervor of a man who had believed that sense lost to him. The Doctor was afraid, but he needn't be; Rose would be well. Her emaciated form, her bloodied hands and feet, all would heal with time. Time and love. Both now granted her in abundance. There would be challenges, perils, yes, but ultimately ...
The Eternal sighed regretfully and forced himself to look away. The Doctor and his Rose, in the TARDIS. The stuff of legends. All was as it should be and he had no cause to linger. He was needed elsewhere. Still, maybe Time and Space might indulge him with an occasional visit - once every decade or so, just a peek...
With one last glance at the lovers, the ancient meddler slipped away. Today, the Universe had been kind. For now, that was enough.