Ten/Evelyn: Ouroburos

[memoirsverse.livejournal.com]

10th_13thdoctor

((Trigger warnings apply here: violence, character death))

Evelyn

It wasn’t supposed to end this way. She wasn’t supposed to end this way.

It occurred to her as she lay bleeding and broken on the floor of the cell that this was rather an odd thing to think. After all, how should it end? How should a life of traveling paths across the stars, defending and protecting and helping side by side with an ancient Time Lord, end? Had she really expected to go quietly and peacefully in a bed, gently slipping into oblivion as old age claimed her?



She’d lost track of how long they had been here. Days. Weeks, maybe. How was she to know? The hours bled together until they formed deep scarlet swirls of pain and maddening boredom and the sight of the dim, murky light creeping slowly, slowly across the stone floor as it spilled through the small window. Only their captors broke the tedium with their sadistic sport, or to (on the occasions that they thought about it) bring them a few dried bread crusts and a bowl of stained water, a parody of nourishment.

And all of this for a small, completely unintended insult. Her fault. The guards had concentrated most of their fury on her small form, hurting her again and again– and worse, in front of the Doctor. This is what happens to those who insult our emperor, they would say as their cruel laughter echoed hollowly off the walls. They die slow.

Too depleted. Shattered like glass, cracked and torn apart, her life slowly draining away. She couldn’t Travel like this, couldn’t get them out. She wasn’t strong enough, not here, not now, not when it mattered.

The sun had set. She wasn’t exactly certain when it had set, but the light had dimmed to a thin sliver of moon, and the cramped cell was heavy with shadow. Evelyn turned her head, her eyes searching through the gloom for the Doctor. She thought she could just make out his silhouette nearby, and her single heart lurched with love and grief and despair.

Her fault.

“Doctor…?” Weakly, she stretched out a hand.

That was when she realized that she was hearing the sound of heavy booted feet approaching.


*************************************************************

Ten

Those bastards.



The Doctor was still seething from the last round of violence they’d unleashed on Evelyn. Locked up together for the last several days, he’d been forced to watch as they beat her senseless. And to ensure that he couldn’t do anything but watch, they’d restrained him every time the bloody brutes had come to their cell to torment her.


They’d taken away his sonic, of course, and had placed them in a partially underground facility. Some of these long, shadow-drenched hours, he’d stared at the cell door, trying to figure a way out. Besides their unpredictability, their way of showing up at random hours to torment her, they’d also toyed with him: keeping him awake for several days straight, at times beating him in front of her…of course, he was a Time Lord. He could take a lot more of what they could dish out. But they knew they could hurt him far worse by hurting her.

His right eye was badly swollen from his last encounter with the sadistic guards, his fist slamming into it when he’d barked an insult at him the last time ‘round. He was able to somehow creak it open to peer at Evelyn’s hand reaching for him, and heard her utter his name in the darkness.

He began to reach for her. “Evelyn –” But he was cut off by the loud thud of boots on the cement floor.

********************************************

Evelyn

It was instinct, a reflexive attempt to avoid more pain, that caused her to flinch and curl inward on herself as the door to their cell opened with a metallic clang and rasp. She stilled her body, willed herself to turn her head, lifting eyes in a bruised and swollen face to rest accusingly on their tormentors.

One of the men who entered the cell held some sort of authority over the others. He seemed to have duties elsewhere, but Evelyn had seen him on occasion entering the prison and barking out orders, directing the guards this way and that, meting out cruel punishments for the prisoners held in these cells. He was a tall, massively proportioned man with a bald dome of a head, dressed in the stark black-and-white leather gear and black cloak of the Emperor’s guard.

He stood near the entrance of the cell, flanked by three prison guards, and regarded them silently for a moment before saying, “I’ve orders to kill one of you. Only one of you, though. The other gets to live. For a while.” His lips curled slowly into a hungry smile. “Care to guess which of you is about to meet the next life?”

Without turning his head, he motioned to the guards. “Hold them.” His hand closed around the hilt of the dagger that rested at his hip beside his sword, and he drew it from its sheath and held it almost introspectively in a gloved hand, one finger testing the deadly honed edge of the blade. The guards moved toward the prisoners.

****************************************

Ten

The Doctor watched the head guard, his throat nearly closing up as twin blades of rage and fear sliced through him. Both, constant companions which he kept at bay, yet always feeling their scorching breath on his neck as he walked. Both of which were equally likely by themselves to consume him, but together he was a mere captive in flesh, needling under their blades…or dancing beneath their jerking strings.

Once the guards seized him, his hearts were already drumming wildly in his chest. Switching to his respiratory bypass so that he didn’t faint, he struggled wildly like an enraged giant feline, growling, hissing, and twisting just like one in their grasp. But he was a little twig, a matchstick man in their hands. And what would be said of him when this man was gone? And what would he himself remember: a tale told of an idiot, full of sound and fury?

No. It was not going to end like this. Not if he could help it.

“Wait!” he cried, his struggle in the arms of the guards who held him dying down. Swallowing back a hard lump, he then softly offered:

“Take me instead. Punish me in her place.” Then his ragged breath rattled out. “I beg you.”

Yes, Evelyn would probably scold him for it later, if it worked. But he could regenerate. She couldn’t.

**************************************************************

Evelyn

It only took one guard to haul Evelyn to her feet, and she sagged in his grip, barely able to keep herself upright. Her heart pummeled the inside of her chest as she waited for the guardsman to approach her– he had come for her, she knew. Of course he had.

The Doctor’s savage struggles in the grasp of the other two guards seemed only to amuse the one with the dagger, but when he stopped fighting and with a solemn voice offered himself in exchange for Evelyn, she felt as if her breath had been torn from her lungs. “No! Doctor!” she wailed, and wrenched her arms in the guard’s iron clutches in a futile attempt to break free, turning her glower on her would-be executioner. “Don’t hurt him! Don’t you touch him, you bastard!”

The executioner smiled. “How very touching,” he said to the Doctor, “Admirable, even. But I’m afraid I have orders to fulfill. Which means that you get to live on. Alone.” He seemed to contemplate that for a moment. “At least for a while.”

He turned to face Evelyn, closing the distance between them with a few strides. His brutish face twisted into a leer as he looked down at her, and she flinched back as one gloved hand reached up to twirl a lock of her hair between his fingers. “Such a shame. You must understand, my dear, it isn’t personal. I simply have a job to do.” The hand slid around to the back of her head, grasping a fistful of her hair and pulling her head back. She stared defiantly into his eyes, her jaw clenched.

“Not that I don’t enjoy my job,” he quantified, right before he buried the dagger to its hilt in her solar plexus, tilting the blade upwards so it plunged directly into her heart. Her eyes were wide and disbelieving as she stared at him, but only a small, choked sound emanated from her bloodied lips.

With a jerk, he pulled the weapon from Evelyn’s body, and the guard holding her released her. She crumpled to the floor. Shaking a grimy handkerchief from a pouch at his belt, the executioner calmly cleaned his blade and slid it back into its sheath, then motioned to the other guards. “Leave the body,” he ordered. “The Emperor doesn’t want his guest to be lonely.”

*************************************

Ten

The Time Lord’s eyes flashed wide open as he watched the executioner plunge his blade into Evelyn. Armies of fire flashed through him, and the Doctor’s danced in a hot wind, torn between rage and despair. Every sound – the bastard’s taunting, Evelyn’s choking and gasping, the sickening sound of the blade hissing through skin, the slurp of its exit – needled through his soul.

“NOOOOOO!!!”

He struggled even more, lurching forward while held fast by the arms of the guards – and if there had not been two of them, or if he had been even a little bit physically stronger (his weakened state owing to lack of food and sleep) – he might have been able to leap out of their grasp and tear the man away from her.

But he was utterly helpless. Held by these brutes, and unable to do a bloody fucking thing.

Still, he screamed and clawed at them, snarling despite the fact that it all did not do one bit of good. When they finally let her drop to the ground – and tossed his scrawny frame onto the floor as well – he scrambled to her side. His senses barely registered the slamming of their cell door as he carefully turned her over onto her back with both hands, searching her eyes for some sign of life.

“Evelyn…” he fought back tears as he started to do the most natural thing that came to him. He didn’t care if he was robbing himself of a future: stirring up his remaining regeneration energy inside himself, he watched his hands begin to glow golden, aureate sparkling clouds beginning to lift off his palms.

“Hang on, ngudia tu,” he breathed, his darkening gaze fixing on the wound in her belly. “I will not let it end like this!”

**********************************

Evelyn

First, there was darkness.

She floated in it, weightless, limbless, like droplets of mist hovering in the night air. There was no movement, no direction, only Being. She Was.

Her awareness began to expand, flooding outward from the point of consciousness that encompassed her entire world, rushing and surging in all directions. Time spread about her like a tapestry, the sunrise and the sunset of the universe, ripples and waves of potentialities curling and spiraling together, nesting within themselves, breathing with their own life, their own unity.

Somewhere on ancient Gallifrey, a flutterby spread its wings and tossed itself into the air, and a hurricane roared into being on twenty-first century Earth.

A tidal wave of grief slammed into her awareness from somewhere without, agony and despair and fearsome determination, and the resonating song these emotions emanated from haunted her, drew her focus into a single, uncomfortable, four-dimensional point. A song of her own welled up in response, sonorous refrains of love. The other’s song was a reverberating dirge now, and a screaming, defiant discordance– I will not let it end like this!

And she could see a light, a coruscating gold, building in the song’s… hands? Her awareness shifted again, paging through the dimensions like flipping through a book, downward, downward, down into the realm of height, of width, of depth. The song had a shape in these dimensions, slender and pale, battered and gaunt from maltreatment and neglect. She could see his eyes, dark and desolate and wild with desperation as he reached forward with the light.

And then she saw the body, lying sprawled and unmoving on the cold stone floor like a broken doll.

Her body. Her… construct. One of the two forms that had been created to serve as her prison.

Something like a memory flickered in her awareness, a knowledge. The light, this pulsing gold energy, was a limited supply. It was for him, not for her. If he poured it all out into the limp ragdoll body he was leaning over, he would be harmed. The fact that this harm would take place in the future was meaningless to her; the cause and effect were inextricably linked.

No! She could not allow this. But she suspected he would not care about his own well-being, not if he was willing to sacrifice this for her. She would have to convince him another way.

Her focus narrowed even more, and her presence began to fill the room, a cold breeze that swept over the man’s body and ruffled through his hair, wrapping around him in an embrace. She did not have words, did not have the sort of language that consisted of strung-together syllables and vocal mutterings, but she pushed her intent in his direction, towards his mind, as she drew together her will and pushed at his body with gale force.

*stop stop… do not you should not do not… you hurt me… do not it hurts me DO NOT DO NOT*

*************************************

Ten

At first he thought it was merely a cold wind that had blown in through a window. But the instant he felt her words mixed into the current – then felt it lift him and shove him backwards away from Evelyn’s broken form – he knew it was her.

For less than a picosecond, he wondered how she could have done this, then flashes of her Traveling form – the milky-haired being with the impossibly violet eyes – shuttered inside his darkened amphitheater, dawning into light inside his skull. Then the visions solidified even more as flashes of her from Gallifrey – the Galatea he’d known in his first incarnation – came into more solid focus. She was a Chronoform. Unfettered of a physical body, her ability to do this was perfectly logical.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. They knew their traveling could court danger at any time, but he expected to be the one to be horribly wounded, past rescue, and then this man be enveloped in a blaze of light before a new face emerged.

He’d failed. And now her physical form was lifeless, broken beyond repair. And she’d forbidden him to do the one thing he could do right now to save her.

“WHHHHYYY?” he screamed as he stared up at the ceiling, his voice now high-pitched, ragged, and cracking.


**************************************

Evelyn

His scream, slashed and ground jagged with fury and despair, enveloped her, reverberating through her entire being. She pulled back for an instant as his pain blended together with her own, and she shuddered with the force of it as it washed through her essence. The intensity of emotion in this form was like a tidal wave, amplified and distilled to its purest essence, and she struggled to contain it.

With a determined impetus of will, she gathered herself and drifted back to his side. Her touch was gentle this time as she wrapped herself around him again, threading a breeze through his hair, against his cheek, his eyes, his lips, like a kiss.

Again, for his sake, she lied, pressing the wordless concept into his mind to be translated by his own language. She lied, because she would not see him pour himself out to emptiness because of her. Would not see him lay down his lives for her. Never. Never.

Hurts me, she intoned, a single note heavy with meaning as it pulsed along their link. Please. Hurts. Hurts.

She could hear another song, now that she was calmer, a familiar, nearby resonance trembling with golden light, streaming through an endless structure that folded itself into the higher dimensions even as it held a doorway to the lower. She felt a strange kinship with that song, as though their souls were composed of similar substance. It called to her, drew her close, beckoning her towards its embrace.

Her memory was dim, faded, mostly untranslatable between her forms, but it clicked after a moment.

She could save him. Perhaps she could not save him from his grief, from the pain of his loss, but she could save him from imprisonment, from torture and death.

Her form gusted about him in a last immaterial embrace before she slid from the cell and towards that golden song that echoed through infinite corridors.

******************************

Ten

The Doctor could feel Evelyn skimming around his battered, too-thin frame. Anyone else would have only felt a light breeze tickling his skin: but buried in that breeze was her consciousness. It wasn’t solid, like her mental patterns in her physical body that he’d felt when she was still living, or even what he’d sensed in his dreams when he met Galatea (although, he had to admit, what he felt drifting around him was a little closer to what he’d sensed from Galatea, except more…scattered).

Her words signaled in his mind. Unbeknownst to him, everything he thought inside his darkened mind left his lips; but her presence left him with a least a mist of light to shatter his darkness. He felt something – her will? – coalescing, and reassuring him that he wouldn’t meet his end here, too.

“Very well,” he murmured sadly in Gallifreyan as he sat on the floor next to her broken body, wrapping his arms around his bent knees and curling up into a ball while lowering his head. “I trust you.”

A few seconds later, she drifted away, and he distinctly felt her drift out of the cell and down the corridor.

For a long time, he remained in that position, a single beam of light pouring onto his gaunt coiled-up body as he sat, his face buried in his knees.

And waited.