Resurrection

The samples were safely stored. The fresh adrenaline now coursing through her body forbade sleep. The small submarine continued on course, four more hours to its destination.

Dim lights and random pings against the hull provided the only external stimuli to her brain, a brain which had been sliding into madness just a short time before. She shivered as she thought of all that had expired and poured yet another cup of steaming tea. She held the cup firmly, daring her hands to tremble.

Was it gone? Completely gone from the folds of her brain?

She made her protégé, Will, show the frozen specimen to her before placing it in isolation. There would be time enough for a secure and methodical analysis of the parasite in her laboratory, under very controlled conditions.

Will, poor Will, had taken the brunt of her brief descent into hell. He was now lying on his bunk, seemingly asleep, a rest well deserved. She insisted that he sleep.

She wanted to be alone, alone with her thoughts. However, a wave of nausea interrupted her urgent need to place all her regrettable behaviors into a logical context. She moved to the basin and waited until her stomach stopped heaving. The multiple drugs she had injected were now reminding her that they would have to be purged. She decided not to rush the process with more drugs but to bear the natural consequences until they were back at the Sanctuary.

Once she had relieved herself and rinsed her mouth of its bitter taste, she sat back down at the table and leaned her head against the hull. She was bruised but alive, brought back from the dead through her assistant's creative solution to ridding her body of the parasite. She rubbed her chest as she remembered how those last minutes felt, the moments when her lungs were desperately screaming for air. After the initial panic and struggle, there was a moment of peace, capitulation. She could meet Death like that again.

'It was an impossible decision' as she had told her guilt-ridden colleague. If anything, it was she who should be feeling the pangs of guilt for her manic actions which almost destroyed him too.

Yes, she was being driven by the thing inside her head but why didn't she have the power to fight back? Beat it? Her old brain, her reptilian brain, was fighting for survival and would attack anything, anyone who stood in its way.

She kept her eyes shut as she tried to recall the most traumatic moments of her experience: the brutal pain, the seduction of relief – of going deeper, the paranoia and violence and sexual desire … all those primitive emotions coming alive with a vengeance, mixed in with her own fears and loneliness.

Madness was the ultimate form of survival. It was an illicit drug, a perverse pleasure, a sense of power and control which freed her from the restraints of her own rational mind. She shuddered as she realized that she had reached the point of taking Will's life. In her rage and desperation, she simply pulled the trigger as she stared into his face.

Her eyes flew open from the sudden shock of that realization. She remembered now the sheer look of terror on Will's face.

And then she knew. She knew and understood how her lover, how Druitt was capable of taking those women's lives in the alleys of Whitechapel. Like her, he was a victim of madness.

The sub made an automatic adjustment and she felt the subtle change as the Nautilus ascended to its new coordinates. Even though the ship had been brought to the brink of implosion, the hull's integrity held. All systems were now operating properly.

Homeostasis.

The sub was taking her home.

She was rising.

Author's Note: This is a tag for S1 episode, Requiem. No copyright infringement intended.