Needle and Thread, a doctor who fanfic

Three short introspective pieces in the aftermath of Midnight. I'm not very fond of these, but I thought I'd post them anyway. My favorite is definitely the last; so you can just read that if you like. The first is Dee Dee, the second is the Doctor, the third, set during the episode, is the unidentified feature creature. (Please forgive my semi-colon addiction. I really need to find a support group for that.)

i. Mute

Nobody talks, after. All that screaming, all that shouting, all that arguing and echoing and debating and attacking, and it led them to a place of silence. They sit far apart; the six survivors spreading themselves thin so there's no chance of eyes meeting, or hands brushing. Only two sentences are spoken once the initial shock wears off – the Doctor's question and the professor's reply. They had talked for hours at the beginning of the trip. Had it been an ordinary trip, they might have arrived at the waterfall as friends, and traveled back without the inhibitions of strangers.

Dee Dee feels sick. She focuses on the material that makes up the seat in front of her, stretched around the chair's frame like skin. There is too much thinking in the room. Each and every one of them has found themselves realigned. Dee Dee has learned what she is capable of, has learned what would drive her to kill. She would have, she knows now, let the others shove Mrs. Sky Silvestry out onto the deadly planet (not participating, never participating, because it's one thing to approve and not interfere and another to actually be involved,) but she doubts she could have let them do it to the Doctor. The Doctor spoke to her, after all: he had been kind and understanding and had respected her intelligence, all of which was more than Professor Hobbes had ever done. Sky had been taciturn and a little stand-offish, and her impersonal behavior had made everything so very, very easy. Mrs. Silvestry never spoke to Dee Dee, and Dee Dee never spoke to Mrs. Silvestry.

She feels a guilty sort of relief about that.

The Doctor looks broken, she notes, when she dares to steal a glance at him just when rescue pulls up next to them, and then decides the word is too benign. The Doctor looks shattered, disillusioned and exhausted, and it makes her insides squirm to realize that it is their fault. (Worse, he looks disappointed. She has never done well with disappointment; it reminds her of the few poor marks she received in her school years, and she has never liked the tight-throat, dry-mouth, stinging-eyes of being made to see her shortcomings.)

She gets to her feet and falls into place in the silent procession as they board the new transport. She feels tired; she feels old; she feels dirty. She will go home, she knows, and she will (eventually) sleep, and life will return to normal. She will listen to music, she will laugh, she will brush her teeth and write her research papers and read poems. She knows this.

But right now, she can't imagine that any of them will ever leave this tiny vessel. Something of hers will always be here: the gasping, ruthless, desperate part of her soul, hiding under the seats and huddling, bright-eyed and hysterical, in the (midnight sky) shadows. She steps into the rescue transport with a new weight on her shoulders, a new darkness in her eyes. She wonders whether they'll repair the old Crusader, their Crusader. It could be that in a short while, new faces will fill those seats, eager and awed, ignorant to the malicious traces the ship holds. (She hopes they burn it instead.)

The ride back to the leisure palace is a blur in Dee Dee's memory, a washed out smudge against the backdrop of horrors she had just experienced. She doesn't shake, but she feels dazed, disconnected; there is an unpleasant tingling all along her body, strongest in her hands and (oddly, but fittingly) her lips. When they step off the vehicle, the cool air of the palace beats against her face, shocking and clean. She inhales, and all she can taste is smoke.

The Doctor gets out last. She knows this because she is standing a few paces away, leaning against the wall, watching the others leave. He is moving stiffly, and he steps into the arms of a pretty woman with red hair and a sympathetic expression, tucking his chin against the crook of her neck. This is Donna, then, the friend he mentioned before. For some reason, seeing them together – an amorphous blur of brown and white and red – makes Dee Dee feel even worse.

They stand like that for a very long time, and Dee Dee wants to approach them, wants to say 'I'm sorry' or 'Are you all right?' or 'We should have listened.' Mostly, she wants to apologize until her tongue goes numb and her gums bleed, but there has been enough of this – enough of words and noise that smother them in crushing, meaningless weight. She wants (needs) to solicit forgiveness she doesn't think she deserves, to wring her hands and cry and plead and make excuses.

She turns her head away, and says nothing.

ii. Bite Your Tongue

He knew someone once, a woman in the eighteenth century, who was claustrophobic. She was (and still is, if he cares to visit; she can be resplendent in present tense at the flip of a switch if he so desires, though she is adamantly dead here in the twenty-sixth century) a woman of some wealth, with hair that hung in gentle brow ringlets and a quiet manner about her when she wasn't helping him fight off a horde of aliens with a worrying addiction to gold. But she was also the tiniest bit unbalanced, because she treated her phobia like a particularly addicting poison – instead of avoiding it, she tried to embrace it as often as possible. She wedged herself underneath her bed and into tight corners and into closets, and she would stay there even while her heart sped up and her breath hitched. She flirted with terror casually. Nothing that she put herself through seemed to make her fear ease at all, but she did it anyway. The Doctor assumed it was for the adrenaline rush, which was something he could understand completely.

He's never had much to fear before – well, certainly not something that one could cuddle up to without getting killed (or exterminated, for example.) The things that terrify him have never been tied to things that he can hold onto; they are all abstract concepts that are entirely situational and can never, ever be made benign. His fears are a tangle of loss and helplessness and sorrow and, when encountered, one couldn't simply back away from them.

He tries it now, pulling the metaphoric walls around him. He remembers the taste of his own words in his mouth, being manipulated out of order to someone else's liking. He remembers that loss of control; the inability to protest or struggle or explain. Words are weapons to him; they are his only defense. They helped him out of executions, misunderstandings, imprisonments, wars. He has saved the world with his words. He can talk until the stars burst in the sky and new constellations replace them. Words are powerful tools, perhaps surpassing the sonic screwdriver when things get really bad. Being without them was shackles and chains and sinking to the bottom of the ocean with a good thousand tons of pressure pushing down on him. He never screamed so loud in his life as on Midnight, and the only sounds he made belonged to another's will. He has gotten into the habit of taking for granted that most creatures can be reasoned with, that they will have some measure of compassion for other sentient beings underneath everything (Exceptions apply. If there's one thing he's learned, it's that the universe likes variety.) That thing – and it's been inside his head, so now he knows it – that thing had none of that compassion, none of that intrinsic empathy. Had it been desperate, had it been afraid, he would understand. But he knows, now, how cold it was. It didn't feel; it was manipulative and greedy and cruel. It ripped into him, and it wouldn't have stopped, not ever.

He leans against the console. Donna is asleep and they are spinning through the vortex. The TARDIS is wheezing, but quietly, rocking along on the eddies of time like a sea ship on the ocean. It is not silent – his breath rushes onto the air, his dual heartbeat fills his ears, his ship shifts and clangs and sings. He cannot think of a time when he knew true silence, and this suits him. Silence is something that should be had in moderation; its true form is a few shades too close to death for his liking. His natural form is untempered energy; stillness is reserved for moments that never last too long.

He is practicing, that is all. If they had been quiet, all seven of them jammed in that suffocating Crusader, what would the creature have to absorb? He can't help but feel that he went wrong somewhere, that there was something he should have done better to keep the situation from deteriorating the way it did. (It's more than that. He wants to feel that he went wrong somewhere, or he'll wind up feeling betrayed, and he likes to think the best of humans. Oh, he doesn't blame the six people for action out in fear, not entirely, and he's never thought humans perfect – he has plenty of disdain for their worst habits, but he has nevertheless believed them capable of great things. It stings to be proven wrong.)

So he stays here, in about as solid a silence as he can find, and he is quiet for so long that it feels like his lips are trying to fuse together. He doesn't need to dwell on this; it was a blip, a single misadventure. He'll move past it; he'll only think of it on rare occasions; it will fade like a particularly vivid dream, but for some reason he needs to do this first, if only to prove his initial judgment correct – it does nothing to help. The best cure has always been normalcy (Well. His version of normalcy, which some would argue to be vastly abnormal,) so he sets a course and waits for Donna to wake up. He is suddenly very, very grateful to have her, wonderful human being that she is. Ninety percent of the time, he gets it right, and that's a margin of error he can live with.

iii. Magniloquence

Heat. So hot, so close, so new and fresh and alive. Little things with such splendid red in them, sealed in their own cage. It rubs itself against their metal box; they flare and shriek more and more each time. It wants – oh, it wants. The cold has been so much, here, surrounded by hard things and sharp things, false things that sparkle in the light but remain frozen to touch… Not like them. Not like them, soft and sweet and hot.

It bites down and rips their box open, eager to touch, feel, have, taste. It rends front and back, but the Things inside the front melt in the sun, too quick for it to so much as inhale their heat. It is disappointed by their fragility, but it is determined. So it goes to the rest, more careful, more cautious; it must preserve that inner burning. Its mind is quick; it devises a plan and dives for the brightest point, the one with the most red coursing its weak body – the loud one, the warm one, the open, shining one. It plunges in and tears away troublesome obstacles, soul and will and self, expelling them and burrowing itself deep, very deep, to the place that pounds and chases fire through the red-and-blue network under the shell's skin – yes, good, yes. It basks, content, and wants more. It stretches, pressing itself tight against the walls of its container and worming into the deepest recesses of the usurped consciousness.

A vibration troubles it, a twitch of new sensation. Its curiosity burgeons, it turns to the other Things, one extremely close, two centers instead of the one it is relegated to (it envies the Thing its gluttony in this; two points of such incredible warmth.) It watches the Thing create the vibrations and copies – lips and tongue and jaw and air. The result is pleasing, a buzzing and tingling in its new mouth. More.

They feed it lines; it tries them out, growing, expanding. Each is easier than the last, but it doesn't like this – this reduction to following their lead, when it wants power and control. It wants its own voice; its own movement. It watches, it echoes, it reaches into their heads and finds the tissue centers that control this power. It wants it, so it coils its psychic grasp and holds on, sapping it out. They keep delivering, and it delights in its options. It finally selects the prettiest voice, the one with the most words, the most chance for throat-tickling syllables. Such strange, dazzling sounds the others lack. It reaches for those, it pulls them in, drawing them into itself, soaking them up, snatching them away. It ignores the others; they are meaningless.

The owner of the words approaches – good, good, makes it easier – and sinks down to look in the shell's eyes. It wonders what the owner thinks of it – whether the owner offers the words as a gift, as a sacrifice, or if the owner doesn't grasp the situation. Either way, it has a desire to do something known as laughing, but it still doesn't have the knowledge of how. It likes this one, the owner and the strange sounds. They are matched, struggling, and then – there! There! It finds what it is looking for and pulls it to itself, and sensation crashes into it powerfully, along with a wealth of words: strange words, old words, bright words and dark words, lovely words and terrifying words, words with sharp edges and words with comforting depths. So many, many words, and it wants to try them all, all the shapes of these exotic sounds. They belong to it, now.

"Oh, look at that; I'm ahead of you."

She smiles.