Imprisoned
by
xXx MissHaun†ed-MoonLigh† xXx

Title: Imprisoned
Fandom: Doctor Who (2010)
Characters: the Eleventh Doctor
Rating: T
Summary: He has nothing left to live for now. The Universe is lost. Spoilers for 'the Pandorica Opens'.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Please thank Mr Moffat and the BBC.
Author's Note: The ending of this episode broke my heart :( and I needed to vent. Angsty and depressing, I'm sure – so I'd wager it'll probably be OOC. Still, I feel better, now. Rated for possible language and violence. Majorly spoilery! You have been warned! It also faintly hints at how the finale could begin ...

"When it's time to live and let die,
And you can't get another try,
Something inside this heart has died,
You're in ruins."
- 21 Guns, Green Day

Imprisoned

The shock is overwhelming. His mind and body are numb, the revelation too great to fully comprehend.

He stares out at 900 years' worth of accumulated hatred and despair, finally defeated by an impossible alliance of every being he has ever feared, hated, or envied. They stare on. Some are smug, some elated. Some look on with pity and others with the psychotic jubilation that only comes from knowing you are inches away from an inevitable Victory.

He wants to cry and shriek and charge at each and every one of them. Wants to break them so painfully and so justly, if only to cause even the slightest flicker of the agony he himself is feeling in overwhelming waves. But there is no revenge to be had, and there is no escaping fate. Not today. He isn't going to be able to talk himself out of this one.

A sort of terrified acceptance wells up inside his chest, sending his frantically beating hearts into overdrive, as if they're desperate to beat out every single thudding rhythm before the doors slide shut and he is sealed away forever. He can sense the tears beginning to sting at the corners of his eyes ... but no, he isn't going to give them the satisfaction.

He wants to scream for Amy, and can feel the fear and desperation for her safety burning like ice through his veins. He can't deny it any longer. Everything that happens to Amy now is his own doing. He brought her here. He sent Rory up there after her...

He wants to warn her, so badly. He wants her to run. He wants her to be safe and happy and millions of light-years away from this nightmare. But she won't hear him, not from so far underground with such major distractions overhead for her to be occupied by. He isn't stupid. The penny had dropped with a sickening clatter mere seconds after the Autons had restrained him. And now, his hearts are breaking.

Beautiful, magical, impossible Amelia Pond ... is dead ... or at least, she soon will be. Gone forever. Probably killed by the only man she could ever truly and safely love. Her fiancé. Her partner for life.

Her executioner.

His thoughts shift and there are still others he wants to cry out for – he wants to scream for River, is mentally praying she will escape the TARDIS before the foreseeable explosion can consume her, too. But he isn't optimistic, for that hope is a futile one. And then there's the TARDIS, herself. His one true companion, the only being in the cosmos who has been by his side since the very beginning. The poor girl has only seconds left to exist, and now there is absolutely no way he can save her. No way to undo what has been done.

They're all doomed.

The frozen shackles around his wrists are biting hard into the flesh. The plates on either side of his head are restricting movement almost completely, and the mere thought of facing an eternity of near total paralysis sends icy shivers speeding up and down his spine.

'Seal the Pandorica'.

Blind, utter panic overwhelms him. He no longer cares that he's pleading to beings he promised himself he would never beg to, nor that his terrified cries are falling on deaf ears. He no longer fears being trapped for the rest of eternity – only dreads the knowledge that the imminent obliteration of all of Time and Space will mean the destruction of everyone he has ever known and loved. He weeps for them. He weeps for Rose and his other self. Weeps for Donna and Martha and Mickey and Sarah-Jane. And for Rory, for River, for Jack and his friends at Torchwood. For all those he has met and shared his life with – and for those he will now never get the chance to meet.

But most of all, he weeps for Amy. The girl who waited. The lonely Scottish girl who never really belonged. The little girl with the vibrant red hair, who never gave up on fairytales, but whose fairytales have given up on her.

The soft hiss of hydraulics accompanies the ominous crash of the sealing doors.

The sounds soon fade from existence, and all that is left to be heard are the harsh, ragged breaths escaping his petrified and trembling lips. Two tiny needles situated on either side of his head puncture the skin near his temples. There is a cooling, rushing sensation, as some unknown alien substance rapidly begins to flood through the cells, seeping into his bloodstream and racing at top speed towards his vital organs.

For one horrifying moment, he fears it will kill him. Kill him and prevent regeneration. He is fighting the drug's effects with everything he possesses, screaming at the top of his lungs and tugging desperately at his bindings, but deep down, he knows it is pointless.

Then he stops. And he realises that he would give anything to die in this very moment, if it meant he could avoid the prospect of existing through an eternity of confinement and isolation. He has nothing left to live for now. The Universe is lost.

His struggles cease. One solitary tear snakes a glistening path down his ashen cheek, as a faint mist begins to cloud his vision. The box begins to tilt on its axis, the stone shackles blurring out of focus as a strange buzzing sound fills his ears. The icy liquid coursing through his veins leaves every nerve-end tingling with discomfort.

His heart-rates slow to an unnatural and unhealthy rhythm, so slow now, he fears they will stop beating completely. But vaguely, he realises without really caring much that it isn't going to kill him – the box has been designed for preservation, not for destruction.

His head falls forward, the drug paralysing every limb and ligament until it can no longer be supported. His hands unclench against his will and every muscle in his body relaxes, as all the tension and fear and anger from moments before is suddenly replaced with an eerie calmness. His worries are gently dusted away by an overpowering wave of total exhaustion. He is unable to fight it any longer, and his eyes flutter closed. The buzzing sound fades away.

Silence falls.

The Pandorica is one of the most evil but effective designs he has ever had the misfortune to come across.

It is everything the Doctor has ever feared, rolled up into one box with him trapped inside it. Claustrophobia. Paralysis. Isolation. These are then combined with the memories he wishes he could forget but is expecting to be subjugated to for all of eternity – or at least, until the madness consumes him and he can recall them no longer.

Yes, he knows all too well of the predestined outcome of his imprisonment.

Insanity.

For days on end, his body is rendered comatose. The tiniest of pinpricks pierce his temples where the metal plates rest against his fevered skin, and oh-so-slowly, his prison cell fades from existence. For a few glorious moments, he is free. No worries, no cares, no memories, no nothing. The sedative kicks in, and he is floating. In those precious moments, he senses peace to be just within his grasp ... but then the contraption transports his mind to a realm of pain and despair, and he is left wandering alone through the hazy fog of his memories. Every time it happens, less recollections are recognisable. Each time he leaves, a little part is permanently erased. One by one, his memories are deserting him.

Once or twice, upon 'waking' from the periodically induced comas, during those fleeting moments of complete acknowledgement, he has pondered on his ability to continue existing without access to food and water and air. He presumes the contraption takes care of any such crucial requirements, and the worry escapes him.

During these sparse moments of recognition, he marvels at just how perfect a trap has been sprung. The Pandorica is inescapable. A cold, unforgiving, isolated, claustrophobic prison during his waking hours, which then becomes a never-ending void of rapidly deteriorating memories during his sleeping ones.

His enemies have done far too well, this time.

Soon he will be nothing but a vacant shell, forsaken by the Universe he has tried so hard to protect, drifting on alone through the emptiness. Drowning in despair.

'I'm the Doctor. I'm from Gallifrey. I'm a Time Lord, and I'm 900 and ... 900 and well, something years old. Or am I 1000 years old, now? Or 2000? ... No, think, remember! I'm the Doctor. I'm from Gallifrey. I'm a Time Lord. I'm the Doctor. I'm from Gallifrey. I'm a Time Lord. I'm the Doctor ...'

There is very little left to be erased, and the Doctor fears his next venture into the shredded realms of his memories will render him completely incapable of recalling anything at all about himself.

The mantra has been going for days, but he refuses to silence it because he must remember. If he forgets ...

An overwhelming sense of dread begins to cloud his thoughts and the panic rises.

'I am ... I am ... who am I?'

He is conscious, but he doesn't want to be. His vision is hazy and his thoughts are sluggish. He knows he should be bored, but he is simply too tired to be. He wants the sedative again. To be awoken so abruptly when he had been mere minutes away from total system shut down is nothing short of pure torture. So close to the end, but just not close enough. His preserving prison is too perfect. It knows just when to pull him back from the brink of Death ... knows right down to the second the limit of his body's capabilities. He mentally curses the Pandorica and its designers – he would curse them verbally, but the sound of his own voice frightens him. It is too loud, too alien.

He prefers the silence.

Once upon a time, he thinks he can remember being terrified of it. But now, the silence is his dearest friend.

He reflects back for a moment to the girl with the red hair, and wonders why he can't see her clearly in his dreams, anymore. She used to be so vivid – her fiery locks leaving burn marks searing across his retinas, their glow illuminating even the cold, deadened darkness of his cage. But now ... now she is nameless and faceless. All he can see is that beautiful crimson hair.

He thinks he should miss the red-haired girl. She is – was – somehow important to him.

But how can you miss something you can't even remember?

Days, weeks, years, millennia. All are the same to him. Second after second passes by without incident, though in all honesty, he can't even be sure there are seconds around him anymore. There is no time. No space. No sight, no sound. No up, and no down. He is existing, and nothing more. Everything of value has been incarcerated; the outside world means nothing to him. He remembers none of it, not a trace. Every now and again, a fleeting memory tantalises him – a flash of colour, a ghost of a laugh that has him clinging to consciousness for precious moments, just praying that this time, he will recall something of merit, … but then the moment passes. The memory fades. And he is as alone now as he has ever been.

The sparse instants of wakefulness reveal little by way of conclusive thought, except for the recurring repetition of a strange, but somewhat comforting riddle. Over and over again, when the unknown, oppressive grip around his soul squeezes ever tighter, and when the darkness encroaching his shredded senses becomes a shade darker, he remembers the words of the tale so vividly it's as if they are engraved beneath his eyelids.

'There was a goblin. Or a trickster. Or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. Nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it – one day, it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.'

He smiles because he can still remember the words. And he smiles because he understands them, even after all this time. He can't remember everything ... but he knows it's referring to him. He is feared. 'The most feared being in all the cosmos.' Yes, he is feared and he is strong. And wise and patient. He doesn't know anything about himself, not anymore ... except that he is the creature who has been imprisoned within the Pandorica, ensnared by enemies intent on protecting the Universe from his wrath. The riddle makes him smile. And the riddle gives him hope that, one day soon, he will be free – just as the tale predicts...

Ahh, there it goes. The icy liquid courses through his body, once again. Just like that, the riddle is forcefully pushed from his mind by the cold, relentlessly grasping fingers of oblivion.

The walls of his prison are humming with warning – something has disturbed his resting place. If he focuses his mind that little bit more, he can make out the faintest trace of a creature hovering just beyond the box's outer shell – and an aura of destined greatness surrounds this being. He shivers with fear. The unknown person who stands mere feet away from his cell ... dare he let himself hope they hold the key to his freedom?

His suspicions are confirmed when the shackles about his wrists and ankles suddenly fold back without warning. The support is removed and he slumps forward in the chair, too weak to support himself. His whole body is trembling, his mind too fuzzy to make sense of what is happening. Green light illuminates the back of his closed eyelids and the rusty hiss of ancient hydraulics becomes the first sound he has heard for nearly two-thousand years. The silence is broken and he flinches in pain as the noise reverberates through his skull, pounding repeatedly against his throbbing eardrums. The needles retract from his temples, the sedative slowly fading away, allowing focus and balance to return to him for the first time in centuries. The panels rise, freeing his head which falls forward against his chest, because his neck has long since lost the ability to support the weight.

The hissing gradually builds, every note grinding into his head like a jackhammer. The doors slide painstakingly slowly open. The support vanishes. And he stumbles out of his prison for the first time in an eternity, collapsing to the ground in a heap of dishevelled distress, gulping in oxygen as though every breath could very well be his last.

The silence has been broken, and all of a sudden he is hit full force by the sights and sounds of an ancient, bustling building. He can hear footsteps from all directions, some quite close, others rooms away from him. He can feel those footsteps reverberating through his trembling fingers via the freezing marble floor.

He can hear whispers – he presumes the location he's in warrants quiet conversation only, as nobody seems to be shouting aloud purely out of respect. But every whisper echoes over and over again through his pounding skull, the volume simply too high for his sensitive mind to cope with after millennia of complete and utter stillness.

He oh-so-slowly lifts trembling hands to cover his failing ears. And cries.

Seven-year-old Amelia Pond from Leadworth is the little girl who waited. She has a vibrant and beautiful head of scarlet hair that stands out with severe contrast against the bleak, grimy colours of her dull and grey world.

On one not-supposed-to-be-so-eventful day, she finds an unusual box in a museum.

A box that whispers to her.

She can't quite understand it – nor can she quite figure out why the colours are all wrong; why they don't match with the dullness and the ordinary that usually surrounds her day-to-day boring lifestyle. They're more ... vibrant. Like her hair. The symbols all the way around the circle in the middle intrigue her. She can't read them, but they look odd. They're illuminated by a strange, greenish tint coming from somewhere beneath the boring, stone exterior, giving her the impression there is something living (or maybe trapped?) below the surface.

It looks like it doesn't belong, which is fine with her because she doesn't really belong, either. She feels connected. The sign beside it reads 'Beware, the Pandorica.'

"Just like Pandora's Box?" she murmurs to herself, glancing nervously about her to see if anyone is looking her way. Satisfied she is quite alone for now, she raises a steady hand and gently rests it against the cool, engraved stone.

She isn't quite sure what she had expected to happen once she touched it.

She thinks she probably expected alarms to go off, and for guards and policemen to dash to her side and usher her quickly away before the eccentric curator caught her manhandling his most prized exhibit. She even went so far as to expect the box to suddenly open up and reveal the most terrifying of all creatures, only for said creature to then escape and run rampant through the museum, eating everyone and everything in its path (most probably starting with her, if her jelly-legs are anything to go by).

But what she could never have dreamed of expecting to happen once her fingers pressed against the smooth, cool – and strangely enough, breathing - stone of the box, was for the most broken man she has ever seen to tumble from its confines as the hissing doors slide gently open. She sees a chair, and dotted blue spotlights, and restraints at the places where wrists and ankles should be. She sees loaded syringes beneath the head-plates and feels a wave of chilly, musty air engulf her, floating out towards her from the box's confines.

Then she turns to consider the box's only occupant, who is now lying at her feet, trembling from head to foot, drenched in a cold sweat with skin so pale it looks like he hasn't seen daylight in ... well, forever. He is gasping, greedily gulping in breaths of clean, fresh air as if it is the most precious commodity in the world. She supposes it probably is, for him. He is shielding his ears with wavering hands, clearly beleaguered by the noise, yet everything seems silent and still to her – she is the only person in this part of the museum ... well, for now, at least.

Amelia raises a stunned eyebrow, biting her lip.

She knows she is going to be in big trouble. If her Aunt finds out what she's done ...

She shudders, but then pushes the thought from her mind as the stranger twists his head, moving it for the first time since tumbling from his prison. Her bright and dubious eyes lock with his haunted, sunken ones, and a tiny whimper escapes his chapped lips. His eyes avert and he hangs his head, but not before she notices the welling tears. His shoulders tremble, and his whole body is soon heaving with racking sobs that he obviously can't hold in for a moment longer.

Amelia's initial fear quickly melts away. This stranger isn't dangerous to her. He couldn't be dangerous to anyone, not in this state. Instead, all she can feel towards him is an overwhelming sense of horror and pity. She wants to comfort him ... but what do you say to a stranger who's been locked inside an ancient box since forever? Especially considering you're not even supposed to be in this part of the museum right now, and you're not supposed to have released him from said box, and your Aunt is going to be coming back for you any second now and she's going to see just what a terrible mess you've made of the once pristine historical Pandorica exhibit ...

Confused, Amelia shrugs her shoulders, drops to her knees in front of the cowering shell of a man, clasps her hands firmly in her lap, and waits.

His hearts are racing, his weary, dull eyes squeezed tight shut as he cries and heaves and gulps in more and more air until he's feeling lightheaded, until his throat feels scratchy and raw, thanks to thousands of years' worth of neglect and lack of use.

Lifting those beautiful, tear-filled, but haunted orbs for a fraction of a second, he almost imagines he can see a head of vibrant red hair settled not too far above him. A long-since lost memory stirs, before fading away almost as quickly as it had generated. The little girl sitting cross-legged beside him isn't one he can recall. He knows he should be thanking her - whoever she is - but he can't remember how to form coherent sentences. He hopes she understands.

The sudden freedom is just too much.

With a shaky sigh, he shoots the bewildered girl a look of pure undying, unadulterated gratitude, before letting his mind fade into blissful nothingness.

She wonders why her Aunt hasn't returned for her, yet.

Actually, come to think of it ... she wonders why nobody seems to be visiting this exhibit, now. She hasn't seen a single tourist or student or tour guide, or anyone since entering the exhibit herself two and a bit hours ago. For the whole time, she's been sitting here, legs crossed with her arms folded in her lap, simply staring in awe at the unconscious man beside her. Occasionally, her eyes flicker up to consider his former prison, but the sight of that evil-looking chair with its stone restraints and its cold, blue lights leaves her shuddering with fear, her breath hitching in her throat. And she has to look away for fear she will lose her nerve and run from the room altogether.

So she stares at him, instead.

A hollow, dishevelled mess of a man with unruly brown locks flying away in all directions. The tweed jacket and the bow tie and the braces are all faded and thready – the elbow patches wearing away slightly. His face is gaunt and shadowed, and she wonders if food for him has been occasional – just enough to sustain life, but not enough to maintain weight and health. His skin is of a sickly pallor and the intense circles rimming his hallowed orbs make his eyes seem all the more ghostly than they ought to be.

It seems as if everything has been perfectly preserved, but as with her world, the colours of his existence are slightly dimmer round the edges. She has the impression he is a man with great power and wisdom, but at the same time, she fears his imprisonment will have stripped him of all of that. Just like the colours have faded from his jacket and his bow tie and his braces, the light and spirit could just as easily have faded from his soul.

She can't quite put her finger on it ... but she feels like she's seen him somewhere before. There is a connection, there ... just like the one she had felt with the Pandorica. A sense that she should know the bizarre box and its even more bizarre prisoner, and yet can't quite recall just how or why...

She hopes he will come round soon, so she can take him home and look after him. She has a lot of questions, but Amelia Pond isn't stupid. She knows he needs looking after first.

Her questions can wait.

A comfortable silence descends upon the Pandorica Exhibit.

She wonders what her Aunt will say when she's introduced to this familiar stranger. Well, that's if her Aunt does actually come back for her. She thinks she should be a little more worried about her sudden disappearance, but Amelia's thoughts all seem to keep coming back around to the man lying before her.

She just can't appear to get round to panicking, just yet. The only thing she is worried about is getting home with a strange man in the middle of the night without an Aunt to drive them there...

But she will worry about that when the time comes. For now, little Amelia Pond from Leadworth is more than happy to sit here and watch over her new found friend in silence. Gingerly, she rests a hand against the stranger's frozen cheek, a tiny smile gracing her surprised, youthful features.

Yes, she's made her mind up. She's going to wait here with him. She doesn't care how long it takes for him to come round. She will sit here with him for the rest of the day, if she has to. She's in no hurry.

Sucks, I'm sure, but hey. I'm not sure whether I should leave this as a stand-alone or add another chapter ... I think I'm tempted to see what happens during the final episode before I add any more to this slightly morbid fantasy of mine ...

Anyway, ta much for reading! Hope it wasn't too bad.

Blessed Be!

Hugs,
xXx MissHaun†ed-MoonLigh† xXx