Chapter Text
It’s familiar.
One, two.
Screens, narrow corridors, spiral staircases. The sound of his fingers, striking against his palm, counting, always counting, lest the current of time that is his birthright slip away from him. Somewhere out there, he knows, is the buzz of flies and a creeping figure, shrouded in bone-white.
Four, five, six.
It’s wrong.
Seven.
He pauses. The ceiling is too high, the floor too close, the sound of the seconds he taps too soft. The echo of the corridor he’s in is wrong, all wrong, in a way he can’t quite pin down. And the familiarity— well, it’s not supposed to be familiar, is it? He’s not— he’s not supposed to remember.
Eight.
He frowns, then—
“Doctor?”
The voice is so jarring that he almost— almost (ten)— loses count.
“What?” he says, twirling around, and the voice that slips out between his lips is strange and Northern and unmistakably female.
Oh.
Oh.
Three humans. Yaz. Ryan. Graham. Fam. Blonde hair. Confession dial. What.
“What are you doing here?” He— no— she says, and she tries to quell the stab of panic, tries to steady herself against the overwhelming tide of disorientation and wrongness. No one should be here. No life, no footsteps, no voice but her own, and yet even her own sounds wrong.
Seventeen.
“Did you not notice us?” Yaz sounds half-amused, the rest of her voice tinged with bewilderment not directed at her.
“Doc,” Ryan says, looking around. “Why are you doing that with your hand? Where are we?”
She gapes at him, her mind grasping for words but only finding a solid fog of what.
“Corridor,” she says finally, ignoring his first question, and her words sound like they’re underwater, “Second floor, ‘bout fifteen seconds away from room seventeen. But nevermind that,” Don’t think of the Veil. “Strange. I don’t remember getting here. Do you?”
Or rather, she does, far too well, and the corridor exists like a hall of mirrors, a hundred million versions of her just beyond the edge of her vision. But she doesn’t remember getting here this time, and that’s what she has to focus on.
Her left hand curls into a fist, even as her right hand continues tapping out the seconds. Thirty-nine. Her fingernails dig into her palm.
The fam shake their heads.
Right. It’s probably not the same thing. If they didn’t come from the teleporter room, then maybe it’s alright, maybe she doesn’t have to — No, not going there. Not thinking about that. Shut the door and lock it.
What were they doing here? If they wanted another confession from her, they wouldn’t have brought the fam here. They wouldn’t have given her company, people to put on a show for, people to fight for. They wouldn’t have put her with people she can’t speak the truth in front of.
Who were they, anyways ? The Time Lords were gone— Gallifrey burnt nuked gone— no, not thinking about that either.
Forty-five.
Something heavy has turned over in her stomach, and there’s a sound almost like a cloister bell ringing in her ears. It takes a moment before she remembers she needs to breathe, another to force herself to.
“... okay?”
She turns to her friends with a smile that feels tight and uncomfortable on her face. “Sorry, didn’t catch that. Run that by again?”
“I said, are you okay? It’s just, you...” Yaz hesitates, “You look scared, almost.”
Does she?
Yaz takes a small step forward. She automatically takes a step back.
Right.
“I’m fine,” she lies, brutally pushing down the roaring tide of memory and emotion until she knows her eyes are blank and far too bright. “Always fine, me. Just need to think of a plan. Love a plan.”
Nice word, that. Solid word. Plan. She ought to plan more. What can she do right now?
Buy more time. Get the hell away from the Veil.
“Okay,” she says, shooting a quick glance at the nearest screen, “Don’t ask me how I know this, but we have about,” she recognizes the pattern of the stones in the screen, “Eighteen minutes to live if we don’t move, so—”
She yawns. Wait— yawns?
She feels her knees buckle. Yaz and Ryan collapse. Graham slumps against the wall and slides downward.
Distantly, some part of her wonders where the bird chirps are.
No.
////
She wakes up.
She’s lying on a couch in the library, a heavy tome of Nytrian fairy tales still open in her hands, the taste of an unfinished sentence lingering on her lips. The world is pleasantly hazy, and she wonders if she should just stay there, enveloped in half-consciousness. After all, she hasn’t had a chance to enjoy this in ages. Hasn’t slept properly in ages. Not since, well—
red sand under her nails the master the war the moment the barn burning burnt gone—
Not since.
The TARDIS lets out a low, comforting hum. She takes a breath.
What was she dreaming about, actually?
Her brow furrows. A word flits through her mind, and she snatches at it.
Birds. Why birds?
Every hundred years, a little bird comes, and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain.
The book slams shut.
She’s up in an instant, racing out of the library, stumbling in her socked feet and sending a silent plea to the TARDIS and she pulls open the first door she finds and skids to a halt in front of a dining table, where her friends are all gathered, bleary-eyed, Graham clasping a cup of tea and Yaz sitting on the floor.
“Mornin’, cockle,” Graham says, and Ryan grunts in agreement.
It takes a moment to reattach her voice to her brain. “Morning!’ she chirps, before falling into a more serious tone, “Right. Fam. This is very, very important,” she says, widening her eyes to stress the word, “What did you all dream just now?”
Graham blinks, but knows her well enough to not question the, well, question. “I was in a castle, I think. Stone walls and all. Staircases,” something tightens in her chest and the other two turn to look at him, but he doesn’t seem to notice, “You three were there, actually, and Doc, you were doing this odd thing with your hand.”
A beat of silence.
“Like— Like this?” From the ground, hesitantly, Yaz raises her hand and mimics the movement.
“Right…” Graham says.
“Ryan, you as well?”
He nods. “You were acting all sorts of weird too, Doc. Like you knew that place, and it weren’t good.”
“Hold up,” Yaz cuts in, “We had the exact same dream. How did we have the exact same dream?”
They all turn to look at her, and the Doctor waves her hand dismissively, “Plenty of things. Probably some kind of psychic inducer. Always love a good dream-sharing. Problem is,” she says, and her mouth feels a little too dry, “Are we still dreaming?”
Ryan opens his mouth as if in protest, when, right on cue, the TARDIS lights go out.
“Well, well, well,” says a voice, distinctly female and Scottish, “Long time no see, eh?”
///
Yaz scrambles to her feet as the TARDIS emergency lights flicker on. She grabs the closest thing she can from the kitchen counter and whips around to face the newcomer.
Nearby, she can hear a muttered curse as Graham spills his tea on himself.
“Who are you?” she says, in her best PC Khan voice. The woman— dressed in an old fashioned dress with a hand on a hip and leaning on an umbrella like some sort of evil Mary Poppins— shoots her a pitying glance, raising an eyebrow as if to say, Really?
Yaz lowers the spoon in her hand.
The woman takes a step closer, looks at her critically, her gaze penetrating. Yaz is rooted to the spot, her hand clenched tight around the spoon. The woman cocks her head, as if considering a vaguely interesting specimen, then abruptly twirls around to face the Doctor.
“Always take to the eye candy, don’t you?”
The Doctor looks like she’s seen a ghost. She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. She looks bewildered, and, Yaz notes with surprise, almost sad.
“Oh, pathetic. I borrow a pretty image from your past and suddenly all of your wits evaporate,” the woman sneers, “If you even had any in the first place.”
The Doctor continues gaping at her.
“Oi, mate,” Graham says, standing up, and Yaz realizes that she is supposed to say this, but her voice feels like it’s frozen in her throat, “Who gave you the right to talk to the Doctor like that?”
The woman disappears, and reappears right next to Graham. Like teleportation, her brain provides. Ryan lets out a strangled choke and stumbles backwards.
The woman frowns, then shoots a glance back at the Doctor, who hasn’t even moved. “Not quite your usual type, is he?” She turns back to Graham, “And who gave you the right to defend her?”
Ryan clears his throat, “She’s our—”
“Fam,” she sneers, spitting the word as if it’s something dirty, “Yes. She’s your universe. But what are you to her? You aren’t her real family. You barely even know her, and she is a living god. You’re nothing more than pets, really—”
“Stop,” the Doctor says, and her voice is firm, “They’re my friends.”
Yaz remembers to breathe. The woman crosses her arms.
“Stop, Dream Lord.”
“As if you can order me around,” she snaps, and Yaz catches a glimpse of genuine hatred twisted into the shadows of her face, “Look at you. The Oncoming Storm, dressed in an outfit that might as well have been chosen by a five-year-old. Rainbows, really? Let me guess, yellow for your useless, frankly irritating optimism, blue for the box you stole, and red,” she’s suddenly standing right in front of the Doctor, their faces inches apart, “For the blood you don’t want them to see.”
The woman smiles. Yaz shivers.
The Doctor’s hands twitch. She sets her jaw stubbornly. “Last time, we played your game. This time, I refuse to. I know both worlds are dreams. I know how to escape. I know you’re cleverer than this, Dream Lord. What’s your ploy?”
The woman’s lips stretch wider, and she juts out her hip. “Now that, that would be telling.”
Yaz feels the inexplicable urge to yawn.
“Oh, look, eighteen minutes almost up. Better wake up.”
////
Yaz is awoken by the buzz of a fly.
She clumsily lifts a hand to bat at it, but the movement is intercepted by something— a hand— catching on the cuff of her sleeve. Her eyes snap open.
“Up,” the Doctor hisses, pulling her up with surprising strength, “Up, now. Oh, Rassilon, why did I take three humans? No, no time for questions, we have to move.”
The Doctor is dragging her, storming forward at a frightening pace, and Yaz is half-stumbling, half-jogging to keep up. She twists her head to the side and sees Graham in the Doctor’s other hand, and Ryan in his.
The Doctor tugs them around a corner, and Yaz catches a glimpse of a white-robed figure. “Doc—”
“Save your breath,” she says, and they break into a run.
////
The Doctor is right. By the time they’ve made it up several narrow staircases and down far too many corridors, Yaz is breathing heavily. Graham has stopped running altogether, and is leaning on one of the stone walls, clutching his chest, wheezing.
“Not— Not that I don’t love running for my life and all, Doc,” Graham gasps out, “But I’m not as young as I used to be.”
The Doctor leans against the other wall, grimacing. “Right, sorry ‘bout that,” she says, but her eyes are still scanning the corridors, her fingers still clapping against her palm, her posture flighty.
The fam collapse on the floor as well. “What were that for, anyway?” Graham asks.
“Running from that thing, right? That...” Yaz trails off, searching for a word to describe the shrouded figure.
“Yeah, I saw it too,” Ryan adds, “Looked creepy as hell.”
Graham frowns. “Well, I didn’t see it.”
“This big shrouded thing. White robes and flies. It looked wrong, somehow.”
“Doctor, what was it?”
The Doctor is uncharacteristically quiet, tugging at her coat with one hand and with the other… Is she— is she counting out the seconds?
Right. Definitely not ominous.
“Doctor?”
“It’s the Veil,” she says shortly, peering out through one of the windows.
“What is it?”
“It’s Death.”
A pause. “Thought the Grim Reaper wore black,” Graham probes, tentatively, “And had one of those things— scythes.”
“No, not like that,” the Doctor sighs, then runs a hand through her hair, “Shouldn’t have said that. It just represents death, I s’pose. Moves like death. Acts like death. Kills you like death.”
“What does that mean?”
She shrugs as if trying to dislodge an unwelcome weight on her shoulders. “We all live on borrowed time, one breath to the next, dying from the moment we’re born. We run, and it walks. We rest, and it doesn’t. The Veil always catches up.”
Yaz shivers.
“How long do we have?”
“About fifty minutes.”
“Fifty minutes?”
“Forty-eight minutes,” she amends, “Maxes out at eighty-two, so I s’pose that’s not bad. Still, might’ve gotten to seventy minutes if Graham here didn’t stop running.” She smiles weakly.
“Oi!”
They were used to the Doctor’s offhand knowledge about, well, everything, but it’s clear that—
“You know an awful lot about this place, Doctor,” Ryan observes.
“You’ve been here before, yeah?” Yaz asks.
“Yeah.” There’s something almost forceful about her tone that shuts down the question halfway past her lips and hastily replaces it with another.
“What— is this place?” she asks.
“Ah, asking the difficult questions,” the Doctor grimaces a little, then swallows, “Well, first off, we’re in a dream, but this place is real. Kinda. Depends how you define place, or real, really, since it was more of a parallel-time folded dimension—”
“Doctor.”
“— with a repurposed psychic interface and a pretty neat entropy loop—”
“Doctor.”
Her face blanks, and she pulls her coat tighter around herself. “It’s an interrogation room,” she says finally, “That… thing. The Veil. If it touches you, you die. If you give it a confession before it can, though, it freezes, and the castle shifts ‘round a bit. Lets you run. Almost impossible to leave,” she pauses, “Should be the same in a dream, I think. Not much wiggle room when your memory’s as good as mine.”
“Oh.” She latches on to the implications of interrogation room and her brain fills in the blanks and oh she really hopes not— “You were…”
“Trapped here, yeah,” the Doctor says lightly, “Spent a fair bit of time running around.”
Tortured, she had wanted to ask, but she swallows, and doesn’t press.
It’s Graham that speaks up next. “So… that Dream Lord thing…”
The Doctor gives a noncommittal hmm.
“You’ve encountered her before, yeah? What did she want last time?”
She turns at that. Her brows furrow a little, and before she can speak—
“Oh Doctor, Doctor,” says a voice. Yaz jumps.
The Doctor spins around in an instant, coat flaring around her.
The woman takes a moment to inspect her nails. “Hasn’t anyone told you that it’s rude to talk about people behind their backs?”
The Doctor takes a step towards her, jabs a finger at her with a growl. “That’s it. You tell me what your game is, right now.”
She laughs almost delightedly. “Or what? You can’t do anything to me, and you wouldn’t dare anyways. A coward, that’s what you are. And so proud of it, too.”
“Tell me.” There’s a dark edge to her voice, cold and dangerous.
“I’ve all but spelled it out for you, Doctor. Oh, please. For a genius, you can be so. very. dull.”
////
I’ve all but spelled it out for you, Doctor.
She closes her eyes, and allows herself to detach from her surroundings. Focus.
A beat of her hearts. The tapping of a second. Her mind races, forming lightning-fast connections.
What did she want last time?
Last time, last time with the two worlds and the danger— why? To make her doubt herself? To satisfy a whim? To torment her?
No.
Amy’s choice.
Amy, Amy’s choice, Amy’s men, Amy— It was to make Amy choose, for once and for all.
Except, except, except— that doesn’t seem like something a villain would do. It definitely isn’t something the Daleks would do, or the Silence, or even the Master. It’s too.. trivial, even given how Amy was weighing on her mind back then. In fact, now that she thinks about it, too helpful, almost, in a way.
Except—
Sorry, wasn’t it obvious? The Dream Lord was me.
The darkest parts of her subconscious, sure, but still her. Not your standard villain, really. Think, Doctor. Amy’s choice— choices.
Her last body— Eyebrows— was chosen as a reminder. It stands to reason that the Dream Lord chose Missy for a reason, too.
I am your friend.
The Dream Lord was me.
The only person in the universe who knows her completely and despises every part of her and is still on her side. The only person who would— could— force her to do this.
And— and— The Dream Lord also chooses the setting.
Last time. Leadworth for Rory and the TARDIS for her. Amy’s choice.
This time. The TARDIS and… the confession dial.
Words are her weapons, words, words, words.
Red for the blood you don’t want them to see.
Coward.
You know everything about us. And we know nothing about you.
Why don’t you ever share anything with us?
Who are you, Doc? I mean, really.
Her eyes snap open at the strike of her palm.
“Confession,” she gasps, “My confession dial. My interrogation room.”
It’s wrong, it’s wrong and it’s right and maybe, some part of her dares to point out, this is what needs to happen.
The Dream Lord smiles, “Good girl. How many confessions does it take to move the wall?”
“Four,” she says, and her hearts are beating something fierce, “Three for room twelve. The fourth for the wall.”
“Forty-eight minutes to think, Doctor. Less, now. Chop chop.”
And before the Doctor can open her mouth to reply, she falls like a puppet with cut strings.
////
The Doctor is pacing.
Ryan does not understand.
It’s not the situation he doesn’t understand— he gets the gist of it, even as the details of the other dream are fuzzy and fading like, well, a dream. He understands that there’s two worlds, one in that castle, and one in the TARDIS, that this Dream Lord person can switch between them. He understands that the Dream Lord wants the Doctor’s confession, whatever that may mean.
He even understands that this world, the TARDIS world, is also a dream, no matter how real it feels right now.
What he does not understand is why. Why the Dream Lord. Why the castle. Why the Doctor is so silent. Why the Doctor, this brilliant, mad Doctor, is so afraid.
“Stop thinking so loudly,” the Doctor snaps, and Ryan jumps. He wonders for a moment whether being in a dream means that she can hear his thoughts, somehow, before he catches sight of the identical guilty expressions on Yaz and Graham’s faces as well. Right. Just plain old reading faces.
The Doctor sighs. “You have questions,” she says resignedly, pausing in her pacing to lean against the— deadlocked, they’d checked— kitchen door. “Ask.”
The invitation is so unexpected that by the time Ryan has ordered the words in his head, Graham’s already asking.
“If this is a dream, why can’t we just, y’know, wake up?”
“Good question. Hard question. Have you ever tried waking up from a dream? Consciously?”
He shrugs. “I don’t dream much, Doc.”
“Imagine you’re dreaming. What would you do to wake up?”
“Fall, I s’pose,” Ryan says, “I always wake up falling.”
“Die?” Yaz adds.
“Gold star to Yaz! Well, half a gold star,” she scrunches up her face, “Slight problem. The Dream Lord won’t let us die. Probably. Don’t actually know, to be honest, but I’m not that keen on trying.”
“Who is the Dream Lord, anyways?”
“It’s right in the name, innit? Dream Lord. Controls dreams.”
“To you.”
She stiffens. “Ah. Can I pass on that?”
Yaz crosses her arms. Ryan and Graham follow suit.
The Doctor stays silent for a while, and he hopes that she’s not preparing a lie. Eventually, she sighs, “It’s... complicated. She’s a friend, I think. Well, not a friend. Definitely not a friend. More of an… ally?”
Something icy spreads across his chest. “Is she going to be another O?” Because if the Doctor can call him an old friend even after he’d tried to kill them all, then he doesn’t want to know what the Dream Lord would do.
The Doctor winces. “Nah, she won’t hurt you.” A thoughtful expression crosses her face for a moment, “Don’t think she’d be able to, really. Not intentionally, at least. Not physically,” she winces again, “Was that reassuring? I was trying for reassuring.”
They shake their heads.
She blows out a breath. “I can promise she doesn’t want to hurt you.” There’s a wry twist in her voice that gives him pause, and then—
“What about you?” Yaz asks.
“You heard,” the Doctor says lightly, “She wants me to confess.”
“Confess what?”
“Truths, truths that I’ve never told anyone before. Secrets.”
Secrets. The word sounds strange in the Doctor’s voice, because for all the secrets she has locked up, she has always pretended to wear her heart on her sleeve.
Two hearts. One on her sleeve, one in an underground bank vault at the end of time.
“Why does she want your secrets?”
“Lots of people want my secrets. She doesn’t. She doesn’t need to.”
“Okay,” he says, “Why does she want you to confess, then?”
The Doctor closes her eyes briefly. “Smart boy,” she says, then, levelly: “It’s ‘cause she wants you lot to hear it.”
It takes a moment.
Then suddenly he understands, and it feels like a bucket of water dumped over his head.
The Dream Lord wants— She—
“Why?” Someone says, and it might be him, “Why would she want—”
The Doctor shrugs.
“Doc, you don’t mean...” Graham.
Her lips quirk humorlessly.
“It shouldn’t be like this.” Yaz.
“Shouldn’t it?” Her voice is quiet.
“It shouldn’t! You should tell us things because you trust us, because we’re your friends, not because of some freak dream where— where—”
“Yaz, stop, look at me. You lot didn’t even know what species I was until after— until a few weeks ago. You know less about my past than you can find in the average thirty-ninth century public library. You wanted to know more?” the Doctor spreads her arms with a bitter smile, “Turns out you’re getting a chance.”
That hurt, a little.
Yaz grits her teeth. “What does she gain?”
The Doctor starts pacing again. “Nothing. Everything. It’s complicated.”
“Care to elaborate?” Yaz bites out.
“Not particularly, no.”
“There has to be another way, Doctor.”
The Doctor crosses her arms, pulls her shoulders in, grips her elbows with her hands. “And what if there isn’t—”
Ryan cuts her off. “Yaz is right, Doc— This, this isn’t you.” You don’t give up like this. You never tell us anything. You don’t trust us. “You’re the Doctor. We can always find a way to escape.”
“And what if I want to do this?”
You don’t trust us. He thinks of O. He thinks of the Doctor moody and silent for so many adventures, playing the part of the perfunctory tour guide and hardly ever the part of friend. He thinks of her paper-thin smiles and evasive rambles. He thinks of late nights when he tries to talk to her only to be met with hmms and a sorry, maybe later.
The words sting.
“Well, why would you?” he flings at her, not loudly, but forcefully all the same, “You’ve been so bloody closed off since—”
“Son,” Graham warns.
“— O, and you obviously don’t trust us enough to tell us whatever the hell is going on, so why would you do this?”
“Well, think of it as our only way out, then,” the Doctor snaps, setting her jaw stubbornly. She stuffs her hands in her pockets and lightens the tone of her voice, “Sides, I do trust you,” she says, the lie falling from her lips easy as breathing, “Just lousy at showing it. You’re my fam.”
“Doctor.” His voice is sharp.
“Oh, humans, just let it go, won’t you?” she says, a frustrated expression on her face, “We’re doing this. No more questions. Oh!” she forcefully changes the subject, rummaging in one of her pockets and pulling out a pack of uno cards, “Who wants to teach me how to play poker?”
////
She wakes up and the Veil is creeping around the corner.
Her heartbeats skyrocket, and, in an instant, she’s on her feet, about to run before she sees the three humans and then she’s reflexively reaching down to pull her friends up when—
“There’s no use, Doctor,” Missy— no— the Dream Lord’s voice calls out, almost pityingly.
She freezes. Her hearts hammer so hard it’s a miracle she hears the next words over the drumbeat.
“Would you really rather keep running than tell them a truth? Almost makes a girl wonder what you’re so desperate to hide.”
She automatically opens her mouth to retort before snapping it shut. No. Bait. Distraction. What can she even say to that anyways? No. Also distraction. Think. Dream. Fam. The Veil is nearing, and she needs to run or confess. Run or confess or, or— burning blistering regeneration burning like her planet—
She’s not going to run.
She has already said that she’d do this. Already, for some wretched reason, fought to do this. She needs to— what’s the word— commit. She takes a breath, and it sounds harsher than she’d like it to be.
What truth hasn’t she told before? Her eyes flit to the Veil, to the walls, to the floor.
The buzz of flies. Memories. Confession dial.
Oh. Oh. Easy.
She straightens up and turns to the Veil with a tight smile on her face. She squares her shoulders, tilts her head ever so slightly, plays her part. Commit.
“Hello,” she says, with an awkward, forced wiggle of her fingers, “Again.”
It stops, still several feet in front of her.
And then, suddenly, she can’t stop talking, her northern lilt far too cheerful with only the barest edge to betray her anxiousness.
“Ooh, that was enough to make you stop? Your standards are getting lower, I’m afraid, but then again, it‘s been a long time since I’ve last talked to you. We stayed here for quite a while, didn’t we? You and I, good old times,” she’s running her mouth, and she hates it, “Had my memory of this suppressed for a bit, but I s’pose it’s what you get for messing around with neural blocks. Knew this place existed, couldn’t remember the specifics— you’d think it’d be harder to blur out four and a half billion years.”
Her speech takes a peculiar cadence on the last few words, and she finds herself wishing that Ohila hadn’t told Clara that particular truth, hadn’t told her so she wouldn’t have to acknowledge it.
There’s a distinct sound of someone choking behind her, and it’s a jarring reminder that she isn’t as alone as she’d like to be. Her friends are watching.
She realizes with a jolt that her hands are shaking, and she stuffs them into her pockets.
“I remember now, though. I remember everything. These corridors. The sea. Room twelve. Dying,” she bares her teeth, “Four billion years of my own personal hell, and I remember every second of it. I know this place better than my own TARDIS.”
She can feel the Veil waiting, waiting— well, about as well as a mechanical death-machine can. Her truth is incomplete. She opens her mouth, but the words catch in her throat.
She’s all too aware of three pairs of eyes staring at her back.
Commit.
“I confess, I remember,” she says levelly, staring straight at the Veil, suppressing the swell of she-doesn’t-know-what in her chest, “I confess, I’m still afraid.”
The rumble and rasp of stone on stone. The turning of gears. Through the window, she catches a glimpse of the castle rotating, twisting in a bizarre, far-too-familiar manner.
She takes the barest moment to compose herself, then turns to her fam without meeting any of their eyes. She knows all she’ll find are questions, and she has a feeling she’ll be sick of questions before long.
“Right then! Anyone up for running?”
////
They’re back in the TARDIS kitchen, drinking tea.
Correction: The fam is drinking tea, while her cup is untouched as she systematically takes apart the coffee machine just for something to do. Having something in her hands doesn’t make the silence any less painful or expectant, but it does make it more bearable. And there has always been something comforting in the act of creating something anew.
Something comforting, too, in the act of taking something apart, but she doesn’t want to think about that right now.
The worst thing about the silence is that it’s not truly silent, not with the thoughts buzzing in her head, not with the glances her friends keep trading— and she doesn’t even have to look at them to know what they’re doing. They’re wondering if she’s okay, wondering why she’s doing this if she hates it so much, wondering whether asking will make her snap.
She’s fine. She’s really, truly fine, here in the TARDIS at least where she can distance herself from the memories and ghosts don’t linger in every movement. Her time in the confession dial was far from the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She’s fine and she doesn’t need their pity.
She breaks the wire she’s fiddling with and hastily sonics it back together.
“We don’t pity you,” says a voice, and she hears the hesitant clink of teacup on saucer, cutting through the silence she uses as a shield.
Had she said it out loud?
“You do,” she mutters, not caring, “My species is slightly telepathic. I can feel it.”
She can’t, but that’s not the point. Rule #1: the Doctor lies.
Oh. Is she back to that now?
“Telepathic?”
She internally winces at the alarm in the tone. “Not very, not unless I’m touching you,” she says, “Not really a big deal, y’know. The confession dial too, I s’pose— the castle place. Not a big deal. They wanted information, I needed leverage. Punched through a wall to get out.”
“Not a big deal?” Yaz cuts in sharply, “That was psychological torture, Doctor.”
She really doesn’t know what to say to that, it really wasn’t like that— no, strike that, it was — but she’s over it. Really. Mostly. Maybe. At least when she isn’t— isn’t shoved into the place by her own bloody subconscious.
Her breathing sharpens. Maybe she was wrong about not snapping.
“It wasn’t like that,” she says anyways, and even without looking at them she’s pretty sure nobody in the room believes her. There’s a pregnant pause, as if debating whether to press her on it anyways, and then—
“Four and a half billion years?”
“It was a thick wall,” she says, far too lightly, and she breaks another wire but can’t bring herself to fix it.
“Why?”
She grits her teeth. “Told you, needed leverage. To save a friend.”
“How do you stand that place?” someone asks, and she can almost hear the echo of her own words under it. My own personal hell.
That does it.
Torture. Hell. Afraid.
She doesn’t answer. She can’t answer. How does she explain? The grief and guilt she had felt at the time, the fear, the running, the shock of remembering, the days of burning at every reset, over and over again, the blistering fire of failed regeneration just beneath her skin. How does she explain that she can’t stand it, she can’t but she has to and she has always put them above her and she has always been good at suppressing and—
“Doctor.” Concern. Alarm. The scrape of chairs against the floor.
“‘M okay,” she mumbles, over the drumbeat of her hearts, “Sorry, ‘m sorry.”
A cool hand suddenly rests itself on her shoulder, and she barely stops herself from flinching. It grips her shoulder hard enough to be painful, and she can feel the crescents of nails even through the layers of fabric. The room goes deathly still.
“You should be,” says Missy’s voice, “This is your fault, you know, for playing the part of the hero, letting them push you around and tell you what to do. Pathetic. Look at you. Legendary Time Lord, president, savior, god. And a first-class intergalactic guide dog,” the Dream Lord smirks, “But I suppose that’s what you’ve always been.”
She wants to retort, wants to snap back, wants to run far away.
Instead, she says, “I got your message already. Why are you still using that face?”
The Dream Lord laughs appreciatively, and she suddenly realizes how much she misses it— misses Missy, misses her friend. “Would you rather another?” the Dream Lord smiles, and steps back so the Doctor can see her. Her figure start blurring, shifting, hair lightening and growing out into wild curls until—
No.
— she settles on the image of River Song. “What about this one, sweetie?”
She stops herself from flinching, nausea rising in her throat. “You have no right to that.”
Uncaring, the Dream Lord taps her chin thoughtfully. Then, she shifts again, and the Doctor feels a stabbing pain through her hearts.
Rose.
The Dream Lord considers it like an outfit put on, smoothing her hands over the curves of her body. “This pet shows up an awful lot for a millenia-old memory, doesn’t she?” the Dream Lord asks, each word a twisting pain, jarringly not-Rose. She sneers. “Cliche.”
And then, and then, the Dream Lord makes her way through all of her companions like some sort of grotesque fashion show from hell, and the Doctor can only watch, horrified, as the Dream Lord finally settles on her.
The Doctor looks upon her own cruellest expression, and the Dream Lord smiles.
“Oops, looks like the time’s up. Better start running.”
////
The Dial.
They run.
////
The TARDIS.
They look at each other in tired silence.
“Doc,” Graham starts, “We’re not going to make you talk, okay? If you don’t want to, let’s just play some of that Uno.”
////
Run.
////
The Doctor holds a fan of multicoloured cards, hopelessly losing.
Ryan tries not to take it as a bad omen.
////
Run.