Two Birds In a Cage, 10/???
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.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
A.N. I shameless ganked the gist of a Cory Doctorow blog post about the short story The Cold Equations for the Doctor’s rant in this chapter.
She is watching the girl sleep. The spy. Of course she is a spy. Just because Josie wasn’t they expect her to swallow anything.
Just because they beat the girl half to death-
The girl stirs. Her mouth falls open, a silent cry, her back arching up against the mattress-
She is at the side of the bed. She does not remember moving. Her hand is on the girl’s forehead. Humans burn so hot, and the girl is in the grips of a fever-
The spy. The spy. The spy.
Sleep, she tells her, and the girl’s mouth relaxes, shoulders soften, her body folding back down bonelessly onto the bed. A small body. So thin. A sketch in light pencil.
She takes the girl’s pulse with her other hand. It is fast, but slowing. She will not need the medication this time.
The girl is getting better.
“I need more time,” she says out loud-why is a part of her surprised she can speak out loud?-“and this is no place for her to wake up to, in her condition”-but why does she care, if the girl is a spy, if she volunteered for this as Beth did-“a little more time”-but it’s already been-
She is still touching the girl’s forehead. She does not need to be touching the spy’s forehead. She takes her hand away.
“A little more time. That’s all.”
xxxxx
Of course the Doctor isn’t there when she wakes up. That would mean he might have to sit still as she asks him questions-what was that dream? Me making up a reason, or you telling me something? An accident or on purpose?-and he wouldn’t have let that happen.
A flash of something like alarm, light and prickling-is he still there at all? Did they take him-
She hears him moving around the cell, and her heart (whose heart? the girl or the--) starts again.
There’s a moment of dizziness as SJ sits up (who is she, she was sitting next to the girl but down on the bed now so she is the girl isn’t she?) but that passes within seconds.
And the pain is gone. Her head-completely free, completely clear. For a little while last night, she thought it was never going to feel that way again.
SJ swings her legs over the edge of the mattress and pushes aside the curtain. The Doctor glances up, meets her eyes for a long second, measuring. Then he gives her a brisk nod and looks down again, sweeping together a large pile of mangled machine parts, metal filings, and sawdust.
It takes a moment to realize what is wrong with this picture.
The picture is missing an odd, canvas-covered pet project in the corner.
She springs up, walks to the corner. She can see his shoulders tensing out of the corner of her eye.
There is a perfect outline in the dust. But a perfect outline of what?
She checks that the bed-curtains are still blocking her from the camera, and raises an eyebrow at him.
The Doctor looks away.
SJ crosses the room to peer around him at the mess on the floor. Not that she could tell anything from this anyway-about the only components she recognizes are the electrodes-but the Doctor gives them a swift shove with the end of his broom, pushing them a foot away from her.
“You can check the clock if you like.” A short, hard sentence, his back to the camera. He punctuates it with another jab at the pile, looking at the metal pieces, not her. “I’d recommend checking the viral samples’ growth rates. They’d be considerably harder to tamper with than the clock.”
She risks a touch to the inside of his wrist (if the camera sees, surely it will look subservient, imploring?), and his head snaps up, eyes startled.
She realizes that she doesn’t know what to say.
She looks down, instead, away from him, away from the clock. What was this, anyway?
He pulls away.
“A failed project,” the Doctor says gruffly. “No longer necessary. Redundant.” The bristles of the broom slip and scratch against the concrete floor. He seems to be trying to use the broom both to block the mess from her view and to punish it somehow, smash the shards into yet smaller pieces.
He flaps his hand towards her notebooks and the viral samples, and since she’s crossed into the camera’s view she has to flinch and quickly comply. She stabs the pencil downward into the paper, making nonsense marks as she taps out Morse code. I have a right to know.
He nods, but says nothing. She thinks, for several seconds, that he’s still not going to answer.
“In 1954, Astounding Magazine published a story called ‘The Cold Equations’ by Tom Godwin,” the Doctor says to the floor. “A girl stows aboard an Emergency Dispatch Ship to see her brother. She doesn’t realize that her added weight means there won’t be enough fuel to deliver the medical supplies the ship is carrying. She has to be jettisoned. No one’s fault. Only the cold equations.”
He takes another stab at the pile; the little pieces rattle as they hit the back of the dustpan.
“You tell yourself a story. You tell yourself it’s an objective story. You didn’t write the laws of physics. You ignore that you wrote the fuel supply and the distance between the stars.”
SJ is staring very hard at the notes on the paper in front of her. She does not see them.
She sees a girl on a bed, sleeping.
“You tell yourself a story about your life. You tell yourself it’s an objective story. A moment of pain and fear and mistrust and hatred-that’s worth it, to prevent more pain, isn’t it? It wouldn’t really be hurting her if it stopped her hurting. You’ve been read so many stories that said pain was necessary, you forgot you didn’t have to write your story that way.”
You were going to use it on me. Her hand is sweating; the pen is slippery in her hand. This is what you used on Josie.
“Different effect. Same cause.” He raises his eyes; she sees the motion in her peripheral vision. “I know you may not believe this, I know you won’t, but- I abandoned this plan weeks ago. When we first made our contract.”
Then why are you only taking it apart now?
A long silence. He looks away again.
“I was going to do it gradually,” he says at last. “Carefully. It was going to disappear piece by piece, and you would never have noticed, or asked me any inconvenient questions.”
Then why didn’t you?
“Because after last night, that would have been obscene.” He stops, shakes his head. “It would have always been obscene, but last night-when you-
“When Josie-when I-when we-we decided. With Josie, I asked her permission. I did ask her permission.”
SJ nods, very slowly.
“Godwin tried to save the girl,” the Doctor says. “He wrote three separate endings where the girl was ingeniously saved. The editor sent them all back. He was right, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. There are some ways in which the girl should not be saved.”
What ways are those?
It is the most important question. She stares very hard at the clock and the paper and the viral samples in front of her and notes that they have grown no more than would be expected in a single night, and still she cannot breathe and her heart cannot beat until he answers.
“The same ways in which Godwin killed her. The ways that would make her into a chess piece to be moved around without consultation.”
The words. A hand clenched around her heart, loosening.
She can breathe.
“I know it will be some time before you-trust me again.” His voice gruff. His hands clenched around the broom handle, the knuckles white. “But I think it is worth it-to tell you the truth. To begin this again, honestly.”
He is not human. His body looks human, stooped shoulders, scarred back, grey hair. Feet of clay. But he is alien, and that word is stardust in his eyes and mysteries in his bones and quick clotting factors in his blood, his mind layered in a singing wind-chime-whisper language she will never understand no matter how often she hears it in dreams. Choices and decisions splintering into fractals she cannot guess. Stories he may never tell, of the things he did when he fled the land of dragons in his boat of paper scraps and autumn leaves, to protect his hatchling and the humans he picked up along the way.
The guards and the Section Leader and the Brigade Leader and all the rest, they will never know how much they should fear him-fingertips that can brush against your brain, eyes that can send you into endless sleep. He could turn them all to his dolls and robots with a touch. He still would not escape-so many miles to the surface!-but he could take so many of his tormentors with him.
They should fear him, and that thin transparent film that is the only thing protecting them from his power: that he does not choose to use it as often as he could.
He is choosing not to use it now.
He is choosing not to use it against her again.
He is not human.
It does not matter.
She can’t say all this in Morse.
Come here.
A twitch of his hand on the broom. “Why?”
She resists rolling her eyes. Trust him to choose this moment for some all-too-human stubbornness.
Because I can’t hold your hand under the table if you’re all the way over there.
Her alien almost drops his broom.
He crosses the room to her. He is so tall next to her. His hand is cold as it closes around hers. That is who he is, her alien. His human. This moment, can she say it-
I trust you.
She cannot look at him or they may see. She has to pretend she cannot feel his hearts’ beat in his fingers or the cameras will catch it and it will all be lost.
I want you to remember that.
She can hear him swallow.
You sent me to sleep for months. You were planning to-I can’t stop being scared of you like turning off a switch. But you told me, and you say you’re not going to do it again, and that’s all I have, so-I trust you. And I need you to tell me something.
“Anything.” His voice is harsh, choked. Out loud. She squeezes his hand hard in reproof.
I need to know about my dreams.
He nods, a slight blur at the corner of her eyes. May I…come in?
xxxxx
She is standing above the bed. The Doctor is with her.
They are looking down at the bed, where another Doctor is holding another SJ.
“Where are we, really?” SJ says. Only a flickering ripple of oh-that’s-strange surprise that she can speak. Dreams.
“Here,” the Doctor says from beside her. “Our bodies, on the other hand, are still standing at the counter.”
“And you don’t think that’ll look just a bit odd?”
A smile that she sees in her head, since she doesn’t turn her eyes. “Compressed time. One of the many benefits of a telepathic grammar.”
SJ looks down at the bed again. The Doctor and the SJ on it are asleep, the girl deeply, the alien more restless, his fingers twitching on her wrist. “What was that dream? Why would I-”
The standing Doctor’s fingertips brush her eyelids, icy cold. She jerks away.
“Hush now,” he says. “This is only a metaphor.”
Blue light around the sleeping Doctor, pale as ice-blue light around the sleeping SJ, glowing softer but deeper like the eye of a flame, and the midnight blue light twists suddenly, sinks, stabs into the sleeping Doctor-
SOMANYTHINGsomanymanymanySOmANyTHtInGsthingsthingsthings-bluewhitelightfallingrushingcrashingin-there is the girl and she is the girl and she is watching the girl and she is the alien and she and the alien are watching the girl who is a memory in the alien and she is the she is the she is the-
She is crouched behind a hedge, tiny and startled away as the raging clumsy bull rips and tears-
She is crouched behind a wall, watching a beautiful salamander scamper off the edge-
She is crouched next to a bent and broken cage, hand outstretched almost as if she has forgotten it is there, as if she has forgotten the birdseed in her palm, as if the bird with its little head cocked-
She is the bull the salamander the bird the-
“Let’s choose just one set of symbols,” the Doctor says from beside her, the Doctor, and it is a wave crashing over her in relief, the Doctor, the Doctor is here, the Doctor is next to her, the Doctor is real and can be defined and his definition can anchor her down into one body and brain and memory if she just… “There is a limit to objective correlative.”
She is watching her dream again. She and the Doctor are watching her dream. In the dream there is a girl lying asleep on the cot. She looks like SJ but with injuries far worse than SJ has ever seen in the mirror. She is also translucent and flickering.
In the dream there is a Doctor. He is also translucent, but glows pale blue.
Another wave crashes over SJ, realization. “This was your dream.”
And the midnight blue rippling through the world, knocking sections of the dream askew and slipping into the other light without a second’s hesitation, wavering back and forth, and the pale lights twists, alarmed, trying to take hold of the other light and ease it away, and the air is full of thoughts, thick and mixed and whose are they whose is she who is he they I-
She has moved. The dream has moved. She is standing in front of the countertop, her eyes trained down at its surface. She is standing in another time. She and the Doctor are standing in the Doctor’s body. They can feel her body several feet behind them on the bed. They cannot move.
She can feel all the different layers of reality, like plastic wrap rubbing against her mind. There are the her and the Doctor whose bodies are standing at the counter in one time and whose minds are standing in the memory of the Doctor’s body in another time. There is the her behind her on the bed, and the dream that is a memory that is a prison of hurt and weight and on top of her and never-ending never never. And there is the memory of hearing that dream-his memory of her memory-ripping straight across the thirteen feet of space and stabbing into his (her?) brain without a second of skin contact-
She remembers waking up, and not being to-
--move, he can’t move, he remembers the nightmare’s vise-grip on his mind and then gasping awake he felt her, she-
--couldn’t move (sleep paralysis, old thing)-
--please move, Sarah, what is this, it can’t, humans can’t-
--a twitch and it all unlocks, oh thank God-
They can move.
She can move, and she (remembers) hauls herself to a sitting position-
He can move, and he (they) remember/start away from the curtain, from the girl who should not be able to do these things, and there is a crash and a clatter of displaced equipment, a fluke, it’s only a fluke, of course it only because they hurt her so badly, cracked her mind right open…
And a slow cement-heavy certainty fills his chest, crushing him under the weight. Again. He has to do it again.
xxxxx
How many? she asks afterwards, when he has pulled her out. When the clock has ticked one, two, three seconds from the last second she saw before he took her under.
I dreamed of my home-world once, he says. Do you remember?
Men in high-collared robes, on pedestals. Voices like wind-chimes and circling stars.
And once you took me to that room with the fire, and your friends.
A golden-haired girl in his arms.
Why didn’t you tell me? SJ demands. Why didn’t you tell me I was hurting you, I would have- And she has to stop herself from squeezing too hard, from her nails biting into his palm. Because what would she have done? Different things at different times, and hurting him was not always a thing she would have avoided.
Well, I was rather ferociously in denial for the first two. And it wasn’t so bad, really.
Liar.
He squeezes her hand, gentler than she did his. I would stand with you against every nightmare if I could.
xxxxx
That night:
There is something hiding behind the Doctor’s face.
She can hear its legs skittering.
She can hear its legs skittering behind his eyes.
“Don’t you trust me?” asks the Doctor. He is behind her. “I’ll save you.”
Thock, thock. Someone is knocking.
“Don’t trust him,” says Sully. He is lying in the shower. Half of his head has been shot off. “You always trust the wrong person.”
“Shouldn’t have trusted me,” says Fitzoliver. There is a red line around his neck.“Should’ve known I couldn’t be counted on.”
Thock, thock.
“Never should have trusted you,” Andy says. “I had my whole life ahead of me.”
“Hold still,” says the Doctor, and they are in the Room, and he is bending over her to press his lips against the cross-hatched scars on her throat, his lips are burning cold-
Thock, thock.
“That’s quite enough of that,” says the other Doctor behind him, and the dream-a dream, she feels the relief like cool water rush through her, of course it’s a dream, begins to fold up and away…
xxxxx
Thock, thock. Her eyes snap open. The Doctor’s hand against the headboard. The Doctor’s shadow on the curtain. Her heart is still pounding.
“Sarah Jane?”
SJ sits up, cross-legged, and pulls open the curtain.
His face is pensive as he looks down at her. He is keeping the muscles of his face deliberately tight and still. She takes his hand.
You saw?
“Bits and pieces. The stress level was high enough to obviate the need for skin contact, but not…” He looks away. “It's been higher. Somewhat.”
Don’t be offended.
His thumb skates over her knuckles, and his lips twitch upward a fraction. “I’m sure this isn’t the first dream where the villain’s had my face,” he says. “I shall live, probably.”
She reaches up, tugs at his shirtsleeve until he sits down on the bed next to her. She presses her palms to his face, her little fingers framing the line of his jaw. Skin and muscle and bone beneath her fingertips, solid flesh that will not melt.
It’s happening less, she says. It will stop, eventually. I don’t believe it anymore. Some parts of my brain just need to catch up, is all.
“I’m relieved to hear it,” he says.
I’m throwing you out of my pack just yet. She lets her hands trail back down to his. Wonders if now is the right time to ask the question. Could you teach me to not…broadcast, or whatever it is I do?
He raises an eyebrow. “Something you don’t want me to see?”
She shoves him. Actually, I wanted to avoid paralyzing you again, but if you’re going to be an ass about it…
He considers. “I don’t know if humans can achieve that level of directionality.”
So we have to keep tripping over each other’s nightmares?
“Is it so bad?” he asks softly. “Now that we know, we could wake each other whenever we have one. We could build mental landscapes-I could show you worlds with effervescent seas circling sands soft as swan’s down, glaciers that gleam like diamonds in a noon that lasts an entire year, cities made of song-”
She puts her hand over his mouth. Don’t-it sounds marvelous, Doctor, it truly does, but I can’t--
We could talk. He looks at her with those blue eyes. Shadowed eyes. Not moving her hand from his mouth. Really talk. The way my people do. Since I left, I haven’t…she couldn’t. My grand-daughter. Talk the way-we do.
She moves her hand to cup his cheek.
I’m not saying never. Someday, I’d love to, but-I’m only human, and this is so much, and-for now, could you just teach me a way to wake up by myself? Please?
“I suppose I could implant a subconscious suggestion-”
By myself.
He sighs, then nods. “Very well. He swings his legs up onto the bed, and pulls the curtain closed. “We’ll take the long way ‘round. You’re lucky I spent so many years in a Tibetan monastery or I'd not have the faintest idea how to adapt this to your physiology.” He taps the mattress next to him. “Come on then. We’ll start with some simple breathing exercises.”
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.
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
A.N. I shameless ganked the gist of a Cory Doctorow blog post about the short story The Cold Equations for the Doctor’s rant in this chapter.
She is watching the girl sleep. The spy. Of course she is a spy. Just because Josie wasn’t they expect her to swallow anything.
Just because they beat the girl half to death-
The girl stirs. Her mouth falls open, a silent cry, her back arching up against the mattress-
She is at the side of the bed. She does not remember moving. Her hand is on the girl’s forehead. Humans burn so hot, and the girl is in the grips of a fever-
The spy. The spy. The spy.
Sleep, she tells her, and the girl’s mouth relaxes, shoulders soften, her body folding back down bonelessly onto the bed. A small body. So thin. A sketch in light pencil.
She takes the girl’s pulse with her other hand. It is fast, but slowing. She will not need the medication this time.
The girl is getting better.
“I need more time,” she says out loud-why is a part of her surprised she can speak out loud?-“and this is no place for her to wake up to, in her condition”-but why does she care, if the girl is a spy, if she volunteered for this as Beth did-“a little more time”-but it’s already been-
She is still touching the girl’s forehead. She does not need to be touching the spy’s forehead. She takes her hand away.
“A little more time. That’s all.”
xxxxx
Of course the Doctor isn’t there when she wakes up. That would mean he might have to sit still as she asks him questions-what was that dream? Me making up a reason, or you telling me something? An accident or on purpose?-and he wouldn’t have let that happen.
A flash of something like alarm, light and prickling-is he still there at all? Did they take him-
She hears him moving around the cell, and her heart (whose heart? the girl or the--) starts again.
There’s a moment of dizziness as SJ sits up (who is she, she was sitting next to the girl but down on the bed now so she is the girl isn’t she?) but that passes within seconds.
And the pain is gone. Her head-completely free, completely clear. For a little while last night, she thought it was never going to feel that way again.
SJ swings her legs over the edge of the mattress and pushes aside the curtain. The Doctor glances up, meets her eyes for a long second, measuring. Then he gives her a brisk nod and looks down again, sweeping together a large pile of mangled machine parts, metal filings, and sawdust.
It takes a moment to realize what is wrong with this picture.
The picture is missing an odd, canvas-covered pet project in the corner.
She springs up, walks to the corner. She can see his shoulders tensing out of the corner of her eye.
There is a perfect outline in the dust. But a perfect outline of what?
She checks that the bed-curtains are still blocking her from the camera, and raises an eyebrow at him.
The Doctor looks away.
SJ crosses the room to peer around him at the mess on the floor. Not that she could tell anything from this anyway-about the only components she recognizes are the electrodes-but the Doctor gives them a swift shove with the end of his broom, pushing them a foot away from her.
“You can check the clock if you like.” A short, hard sentence, his back to the camera. He punctuates it with another jab at the pile, looking at the metal pieces, not her. “I’d recommend checking the viral samples’ growth rates. They’d be considerably harder to tamper with than the clock.”
She risks a touch to the inside of his wrist (if the camera sees, surely it will look subservient, imploring?), and his head snaps up, eyes startled.
She realizes that she doesn’t know what to say.
She looks down, instead, away from him, away from the clock. What was this, anyway?
He pulls away.
“A failed project,” the Doctor says gruffly. “No longer necessary. Redundant.” The bristles of the broom slip and scratch against the concrete floor. He seems to be trying to use the broom both to block the mess from her view and to punish it somehow, smash the shards into yet smaller pieces.
He flaps his hand towards her notebooks and the viral samples, and since she’s crossed into the camera’s view she has to flinch and quickly comply. She stabs the pencil downward into the paper, making nonsense marks as she taps out Morse code. I have a right to know.
He nods, but says nothing. She thinks, for several seconds, that he’s still not going to answer.
“In 1954, Astounding Magazine published a story called ‘The Cold Equations’ by Tom Godwin,” the Doctor says to the floor. “A girl stows aboard an Emergency Dispatch Ship to see her brother. She doesn’t realize that her added weight means there won’t be enough fuel to deliver the medical supplies the ship is carrying. She has to be jettisoned. No one’s fault. Only the cold equations.”
He takes another stab at the pile; the little pieces rattle as they hit the back of the dustpan.
“You tell yourself a story. You tell yourself it’s an objective story. You didn’t write the laws of physics. You ignore that you wrote the fuel supply and the distance between the stars.”
SJ is staring very hard at the notes on the paper in front of her. She does not see them.
She sees a girl on a bed, sleeping.
“You tell yourself a story about your life. You tell yourself it’s an objective story. A moment of pain and fear and mistrust and hatred-that’s worth it, to prevent more pain, isn’t it? It wouldn’t really be hurting her if it stopped her hurting. You’ve been read so many stories that said pain was necessary, you forgot you didn’t have to write your story that way.”
You were going to use it on me. Her hand is sweating; the pen is slippery in her hand. This is what you used on Josie.
“Different effect. Same cause.” He raises his eyes; she sees the motion in her peripheral vision. “I know you may not believe this, I know you won’t, but- I abandoned this plan weeks ago. When we first made our contract.”
Then why are you only taking it apart now?
A long silence. He looks away again.
“I was going to do it gradually,” he says at last. “Carefully. It was going to disappear piece by piece, and you would never have noticed, or asked me any inconvenient questions.”
Then why didn’t you?
“Because after last night, that would have been obscene.” He stops, shakes his head. “It would have always been obscene, but last night-when you-
“When Josie-when I-when we-we decided. With Josie, I asked her permission. I did ask her permission.”
SJ nods, very slowly.
“Godwin tried to save the girl,” the Doctor says. “He wrote three separate endings where the girl was ingeniously saved. The editor sent them all back. He was right, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. There are some ways in which the girl should not be saved.”
What ways are those?
It is the most important question. She stares very hard at the clock and the paper and the viral samples in front of her and notes that they have grown no more than would be expected in a single night, and still she cannot breathe and her heart cannot beat until he answers.
“The same ways in which Godwin killed her. The ways that would make her into a chess piece to be moved around without consultation.”
The words. A hand clenched around her heart, loosening.
She can breathe.
“I know it will be some time before you-trust me again.” His voice gruff. His hands clenched around the broom handle, the knuckles white. “But I think it is worth it-to tell you the truth. To begin this again, honestly.”
He is not human. His body looks human, stooped shoulders, scarred back, grey hair. Feet of clay. But he is alien, and that word is stardust in his eyes and mysteries in his bones and quick clotting factors in his blood, his mind layered in a singing wind-chime-whisper language she will never understand no matter how often she hears it in dreams. Choices and decisions splintering into fractals she cannot guess. Stories he may never tell, of the things he did when he fled the land of dragons in his boat of paper scraps and autumn leaves, to protect his hatchling and the humans he picked up along the way.
The guards and the Section Leader and the Brigade Leader and all the rest, they will never know how much they should fear him-fingertips that can brush against your brain, eyes that can send you into endless sleep. He could turn them all to his dolls and robots with a touch. He still would not escape-so many miles to the surface!-but he could take so many of his tormentors with him.
They should fear him, and that thin transparent film that is the only thing protecting them from his power: that he does not choose to use it as often as he could.
He is choosing not to use it now.
He is choosing not to use it against her again.
He is not human.
It does not matter.
She can’t say all this in Morse.
Come here.
A twitch of his hand on the broom. “Why?”
She resists rolling her eyes. Trust him to choose this moment for some all-too-human stubbornness.
Because I can’t hold your hand under the table if you’re all the way over there.
Her alien almost drops his broom.
He crosses the room to her. He is so tall next to her. His hand is cold as it closes around hers. That is who he is, her alien. His human. This moment, can she say it-
I trust you.
She cannot look at him or they may see. She has to pretend she cannot feel his hearts’ beat in his fingers or the cameras will catch it and it will all be lost.
I want you to remember that.
She can hear him swallow.
You sent me to sleep for months. You were planning to-I can’t stop being scared of you like turning off a switch. But you told me, and you say you’re not going to do it again, and that’s all I have, so-I trust you. And I need you to tell me something.
“Anything.” His voice is harsh, choked. Out loud. She squeezes his hand hard in reproof.
I need to know about my dreams.
He nods, a slight blur at the corner of her eyes. May I…come in?
xxxxx
She is standing above the bed. The Doctor is with her.
They are looking down at the bed, where another Doctor is holding another SJ.
“Where are we, really?” SJ says. Only a flickering ripple of oh-that’s-strange surprise that she can speak. Dreams.
“Here,” the Doctor says from beside her. “Our bodies, on the other hand, are still standing at the counter.”
“And you don’t think that’ll look just a bit odd?”
A smile that she sees in her head, since she doesn’t turn her eyes. “Compressed time. One of the many benefits of a telepathic grammar.”
SJ looks down at the bed again. The Doctor and the SJ on it are asleep, the girl deeply, the alien more restless, his fingers twitching on her wrist. “What was that dream? Why would I-”
The standing Doctor’s fingertips brush her eyelids, icy cold. She jerks away.
“Hush now,” he says. “This is only a metaphor.”
Blue light around the sleeping Doctor, pale as ice-blue light around the sleeping SJ, glowing softer but deeper like the eye of a flame, and the midnight blue light twists suddenly, sinks, stabs into the sleeping Doctor-
SOMANYTHINGsomanymanymanySOmANyTHtInGsthingsthingsthings-bluewhitelightfallingrushingcrashingin-there is the girl and she is the girl and she is watching the girl and she is the alien and she and the alien are watching the girl who is a memory in the alien and she is the she is the she is the-
She is crouched behind a hedge, tiny and startled away as the raging clumsy bull rips and tears-
She is crouched behind a wall, watching a beautiful salamander scamper off the edge-
She is crouched next to a bent and broken cage, hand outstretched almost as if she has forgotten it is there, as if she has forgotten the birdseed in her palm, as if the bird with its little head cocked-
She is the bull the salamander the bird the-
“Let’s choose just one set of symbols,” the Doctor says from beside her, the Doctor, and it is a wave crashing over her in relief, the Doctor, the Doctor is here, the Doctor is next to her, the Doctor is real and can be defined and his definition can anchor her down into one body and brain and memory if she just… “There is a limit to objective correlative.”
She is watching her dream again. She and the Doctor are watching her dream. In the dream there is a girl lying asleep on the cot. She looks like SJ but with injuries far worse than SJ has ever seen in the mirror. She is also translucent and flickering.
In the dream there is a Doctor. He is also translucent, but glows pale blue.
Another wave crashes over SJ, realization. “This was your dream.”
And the midnight blue rippling through the world, knocking sections of the dream askew and slipping into the other light without a second’s hesitation, wavering back and forth, and the pale lights twists, alarmed, trying to take hold of the other light and ease it away, and the air is full of thoughts, thick and mixed and whose are they whose is she who is he they I-
She has moved. The dream has moved. She is standing in front of the countertop, her eyes trained down at its surface. She is standing in another time. She and the Doctor are standing in the Doctor’s body. They can feel her body several feet behind them on the bed. They cannot move.
She can feel all the different layers of reality, like plastic wrap rubbing against her mind. There are the her and the Doctor whose bodies are standing at the counter in one time and whose minds are standing in the memory of the Doctor’s body in another time. There is the her behind her on the bed, and the dream that is a memory that is a prison of hurt and weight and on top of her and never-ending never never. And there is the memory of hearing that dream-his memory of her memory-ripping straight across the thirteen feet of space and stabbing into his (her?) brain without a second of skin contact-
She remembers waking up, and not being to-
--move, he can’t move, he remembers the nightmare’s vise-grip on his mind and then gasping awake he felt her, she-
--couldn’t move (sleep paralysis, old thing)-
--please move, Sarah, what is this, it can’t, humans can’t-
--a twitch and it all unlocks, oh thank God-
They can move.
She can move, and she (remembers) hauls herself to a sitting position-
He can move, and he (they) remember/start away from the curtain, from the girl who should not be able to do these things, and there is a crash and a clatter of displaced equipment, a fluke, it’s only a fluke, of course it only because they hurt her so badly, cracked her mind right open…
And a slow cement-heavy certainty fills his chest, crushing him under the weight. Again. He has to do it again.
xxxxx
How many? she asks afterwards, when he has pulled her out. When the clock has ticked one, two, three seconds from the last second she saw before he took her under.
I dreamed of my home-world once, he says. Do you remember?
Men in high-collared robes, on pedestals. Voices like wind-chimes and circling stars.
And once you took me to that room with the fire, and your friends.
A golden-haired girl in his arms.
Why didn’t you tell me? SJ demands. Why didn’t you tell me I was hurting you, I would have- And she has to stop herself from squeezing too hard, from her nails biting into his palm. Because what would she have done? Different things at different times, and hurting him was not always a thing she would have avoided.
Well, I was rather ferociously in denial for the first two. And it wasn’t so bad, really.
Liar.
He squeezes her hand, gentler than she did his. I would stand with you against every nightmare if I could.
xxxxx
That night:
There is something hiding behind the Doctor’s face.
She can hear its legs skittering.
She can hear its legs skittering behind his eyes.
“Don’t you trust me?” asks the Doctor. He is behind her. “I’ll save you.”
Thock, thock. Someone is knocking.
“Don’t trust him,” says Sully. He is lying in the shower. Half of his head has been shot off. “You always trust the wrong person.”
“Shouldn’t have trusted me,” says Fitzoliver. There is a red line around his neck.“Should’ve known I couldn’t be counted on.”
Thock, thock.
“Never should have trusted you,” Andy says. “I had my whole life ahead of me.”
“Hold still,” says the Doctor, and they are in the Room, and he is bending over her to press his lips against the cross-hatched scars on her throat, his lips are burning cold-
Thock, thock.
“That’s quite enough of that,” says the other Doctor behind him, and the dream-a dream, she feels the relief like cool water rush through her, of course it’s a dream, begins to fold up and away…
xxxxx
Thock, thock. Her eyes snap open. The Doctor’s hand against the headboard. The Doctor’s shadow on the curtain. Her heart is still pounding.
“Sarah Jane?”
SJ sits up, cross-legged, and pulls open the curtain.
His face is pensive as he looks down at her. He is keeping the muscles of his face deliberately tight and still. She takes his hand.
You saw?
“Bits and pieces. The stress level was high enough to obviate the need for skin contact, but not…” He looks away. “It's been higher. Somewhat.”
Don’t be offended.
His thumb skates over her knuckles, and his lips twitch upward a fraction. “I’m sure this isn’t the first dream where the villain’s had my face,” he says. “I shall live, probably.”
She reaches up, tugs at his shirtsleeve until he sits down on the bed next to her. She presses her palms to his face, her little fingers framing the line of his jaw. Skin and muscle and bone beneath her fingertips, solid flesh that will not melt.
It’s happening less, she says. It will stop, eventually. I don’t believe it anymore. Some parts of my brain just need to catch up, is all.
“I’m relieved to hear it,” he says.
I’m throwing you out of my pack just yet. She lets her hands trail back down to his. Wonders if now is the right time to ask the question. Could you teach me to not…broadcast, or whatever it is I do?
He raises an eyebrow. “Something you don’t want me to see?”
She shoves him. Actually, I wanted to avoid paralyzing you again, but if you’re going to be an ass about it…
He considers. “I don’t know if humans can achieve that level of directionality.”
So we have to keep tripping over each other’s nightmares?
“Is it so bad?” he asks softly. “Now that we know, we could wake each other whenever we have one. We could build mental landscapes-I could show you worlds with effervescent seas circling sands soft as swan’s down, glaciers that gleam like diamonds in a noon that lasts an entire year, cities made of song-”
She puts her hand over his mouth. Don’t-it sounds marvelous, Doctor, it truly does, but I can’t--
We could talk. He looks at her with those blue eyes. Shadowed eyes. Not moving her hand from his mouth. Really talk. The way my people do. Since I left, I haven’t…she couldn’t. My grand-daughter. Talk the way-we do.
She moves her hand to cup his cheek.
I’m not saying never. Someday, I’d love to, but-I’m only human, and this is so much, and-for now, could you just teach me a way to wake up by myself? Please?
“I suppose I could implant a subconscious suggestion-”
By myself.
He sighs, then nods. “Very well. He swings his legs up onto the bed, and pulls the curtain closed. “We’ll take the long way ‘round. You’re lucky I spent so many years in a Tibetan monastery or I'd not have the faintest idea how to adapt this to your physiology.” He taps the mattress next to him. “Come on then. We’ll start with some simple breathing exercises.”