Tenth Doctor and Evelyn: Kidnapped

[memoirsverse.livejournal.com]

10th_13thdoctor

Evelyn:

“What have they done to you?”

The Doctor:

The Doctor found it hard to focus. He could see Evelyn when he looked up at her from where he sat on the ground, but her outer edges looked…blurry. Her image kept shifting and changing from blurry to clear and back to blurry again. He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut to try to fix it, but it was no use. And on top of it, sheets of sweat kept falling into his eyes and making them sting.

‘Eb-bel-en,” he slurred. “M’I glad t’see you.”

Evelyn:

The very last thing that Evelyn had expected to find when her Traveling form separated and phased across the universe this night was the Doctor, obviously in a drugged stupor and being held captive in a dingy little cell.  After a moment of shocked and horrified staring, she quickly moved to his side, dropping into a crouch beside him.  “Who did this to you?” she growled, reaching for him to search for injuries.  “Come on; let’s get you out of here.  Where’s your TARDIS?”  She frowned worriedly, hoping that she could successfully get him to his TARDIS before she drained herself and reflexively phased back home.  Even if he was able to tell her exactly where it was, she might still have to phase multiple times to find it, being unfamiliar with the location, and carrying him with her would drain her even further and quite probably force her to inadvertently leave him to fend for himself.  She didn’t want to abandon him in this state.

The sound of approaching footsteps startled her from her contemplation and into action, and she made a decision quickly.  Better to get him clear and safe first, and then bring him back to find the TARDIS when he was recovered enough.  She was fairly certain she could at least do that much, with proper focus.  “Hold onto me, Doctor, and don’t let go.”  She put her hands on his shoulders and added, “Brace yourself.”

The Doctor:

The Doctor had to fight to make himself follow Evelyn’s words. “D-dunno,” he replied to the first question as she examined him. “Species I’ve neva en-encoun-tered.” He was struggling to even sound out his words at times: it felt like his lips were numb and loose, almost refusing to cooperate.

“TARDIS?” he queried, gazing up at her with dulled, half-closed eyes. “I dunno. Prob’ly where I l-landed her. Th-they were not…” He fought through the haze in his brain, which was trying to lapse into speaking Gallifreyan, and he mumbled a couple of morphemes in his native tongue before forcing himself back into English. “In..in…interest’d in her. Jus’ me.” He raised his hand slightly and pointed a long, pale index finger at his own chest.

Sweat poured down his forehead, more of it dripping into his eyes. He could feel the blue Oxford shirt beneath his pinstriped suit was completely soaked. What had the fuckers done to him this last time…test his internal temperature controls? He tried to remember the name of the substance he’d overheard them talking about, but the name was obscured by more fuzz in his brain. Whatever it was, they’d pumped him full of it, and his stomach was barely staying still inside his body; nausea tumbled inside it, threatening to brim up over the edge, and he had to clamp his jaw tightly shut to fight the urge to vomit.

Beyond the haze of his own thoughts, he heard Evelyn tell him to hang onto her: he reached out and wrapped his arms around her waist as tightly as he could.

Evelyn:

Evelyn closed her eyes and took a breath as she circled her arms around his back, locking the two of them firmly together.  Instinctively, with barely a note of deliberate intent, she formed a mental image of a clear protective bubble around the both of them before shifting backwards and plunging them into the chaos of what she called the Between-Space or the Storm-Tunnel, though the Time Lords called it the Time Vortex.  They were whipped through the tumultuous funnel like twigs caught in a formidable ocean storm, and she pushed with her mind and her will, and an instant later they were emerging in the mundane warmth of her living room.  She carefully lowered him to the carpet by the coffee table and couch and rocked back on her heels, closing her eyes against a wave of vertigo as she passed ghostly-pale hands through long silvery tresses.

“Okay.  Give me a minute.”

She was close enough to her primary form that all she had to do was let go, and a second later she found herself dragging deep breaths into her lungs as she lay in her bed, caught in the usual sensory overdrive that overtook her whenever she returned to her primary form.  Her short dark hair was a tangle beneath her head tickling her neck and shoulders, the lace-trimmed satin cami and pajama bottoms like sandpaper against her overly sensitized skin, her heartbeat echoing hollowly in her ears.  For a brief moment, the disconnect that always followed her journeys blanked her memory as her essence slid and snapped back into place within its framework, but then everything reconnected and it all flooded back.  She rolled out of bed with such haste that she nearly sprawled on the floor, but got her feet beneath her and hurried to the living room.  Carrying the Doctor back here had weakened her considerably, but she had become quite adept at ignoring the side effects that accompanied her Travels.  She certainly had better things to concern herself with right now.

The Doctor:

The Doctor felt some sort of energy hum and then encircle them – leaving just enough space around them for a protective layer of oxygen. He leaned into Evelyn’s shoulder, resting his head against her wall of strength. It felt familiar…like muscle-wrapped fortified chassis beneath her skin. And that was all he needed to steady the slow-rotating storm inside his head, and momentarily quelling the chaos in his stomach.

When they entered the vortex, he did not dare open his eyes. But he could feel the tunnel of time and space swirling around them. Through his skin and mind, he could still sense its form, a spectral churning cylinder veined with bolts of chaotic energy. What it must feel like on the exterior skin of his TARDIS – like what he was sure Jack experienced the time he clung to its doors and rode it to the end of the universe – now translated through his body as they traveled down the tunnel through space and time, bouncing around inside it and ricocheting off its inner wall.

He was barely aware of their exit, blinking rapidly as she stood over him. His half-closed eyes focused on the way her silver-white hair waved with her movements. Then just as he felt himself being carefully laid onto a…carpet, was it?…she disappeared.

And returned a few minutes later in her usual form.

“Eb-bel-en,” he croaked, blinking up at her. “T-t-thank you. I…I…”

But the storm rekindled in his stomach. “I’m gonna be sick!” he exclaimed, lurching himself onto his shaky feet with the last of his strength, clasping his hand over his mouth and stumbling blinding through her apartment by memory until he located the open doorway to her bathroom. Sinking to his knees, he crawled inside in just enough time to yank up her toilet lid before the contents of his stomach came hurtling up.

Evelyn:

Evelyn had made her way back to the living room and was in the act of kneeling at the Doctor’s side when he scrambled to his feet and hurtled through the hallway and towards the bathroom.  An instant later, she heard the sound of retching, and she winced to herself as she rose a little bit unsteadily to her feet and followed.

Approaching the wiry, pinstriped figure currently wrapped heaving around her toilet, she leaned forward, bracing herself against the sink, and placed one hand on his back.  Her palm traced slow circles over the sweat-dampened material of his suit jacket and sharp jut of his shoulder blades, and she worried about the unusual amount of heat she felt radiating from his body.  Her voice was soft and soothing as spoke, intertwined with a soft tinge of projected calm even as she struggled to cordon off her own fear for him so it wouldn’t echo in her tone and cause him more stress.  What had they done to him? “You’ll be okay.  Just breathe.  Breathe.”

After a moment, her hand still resting against his back, she asked softly, “What did they give you?  Do you know?”  Not that she would know how to counteract whatever it was, but perhaps he would if she could get him talking lucidly enough. Now that she had whisked him away from danger, she was unsure of how to proceed in helping him, though she knew enough to not take him to the hospital.  (Really, that one was pretty obvious to her, what with his being an alien and all)

Rising from her half-crouched position beside him, she filled the plastic drinking cup that she kept by her toothbrush with water from the sink and offered it to him before dropping back down beside him.  She let her eyes pass over his form, searching for signs of physical damage.  “Did they… Are you injured anywhere?”

The Doctor:

After a few moments, the Doctor was finally able to stop retching. He drew in a series of deep, sharp breaths, gasping and coughing at stuttered intervals in between.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her hand wrapped around a full glass of water; with a shaking hand he reached for it, took it from her, and tipped its lip towards his half-open mouth. Quickly, he swallowed down two huge gulps before drawing in another long, deep breath.

Lifting a shaking arm up towards his face, he dragged the cuff of his shirt sleeve across his wet lips before raising it up to mop the sheets of sweat raining from his forehead. He braced himself, leaning both arms on the toilet seat and turned his head to look up at Evelyn. “Th-they gave me a substance….a biochem’cal somethin’ or other,” he forced out. “This…one…was meant…to ex-ex-experiment with m’internal temp’rature control. I-I-I dun ‘memba the name o’ it –”

A sudden wave of nausea seized him, careening up from his stomach and washing over him up to his throat. He turned and gasped before dry heaving into the bowl again. This time, nothing came up. Drawing in and exhaling a few more deep breaths, he turned back to her and continued to speak. “If…I…had m’TARDIS, I could test m’self to see what it is,” he explained. “But…th’old girl is prolly near where ya found me. On Sekorus T’ree –”

This new wave of nausea barreled through him too quickly for him to stop. He turned barely just in time to vomit out a small amount of a thin, greenish-yellow substance into the bowl.

After a few rough, dry coughs, he turned and looked back up at her. “Injured?” he queried, his eyelids rapidly fluttering. Even his brain was a bit foggy, and he had to rustle around in his head to pull up recent memories. “Uh….yes!” he hissed out, suppressing another bolt of nausea rocketing through him. Reaching up his hands as he braced himself on the toilet bowl by his chest, he unbuttoned the next three buttons on his Oxford shirt and pulled back the collar. Shifting the neck of his vest top downward, he revealed a long, thick angry red gash across the right side of his chest. “Wanted t’see m’second heart,” he explained.

Evelyn:

A clammy tendril of ice-cold fury coiled itself around Evelyn’s heart as the Doctor revealed the gash, and for an instant something dangerous flickered in her brown eyes.  It vanished as quickly as it had appeared, supplanted by grim determination.  Dropping back down into a crouch beside him, one hand reached out to rest on his shoulder as she leaned forward to examine the wound, eyes scanning closely while she kept her hands clear of it.  It appeared to be closed, at least, but she frowned deeply as she took in the jagged redness of it, concerned about infection.  “All right,” she said, rising a little bit unsteadily to her feet and turning to the sink to wash her hands, “Let’s get this cleaned up for starters.”  Turning in the cramped little bathroom to the linen closet behind her, she removed a clean hand towel and dried her hands off, then snagged a soft washcloth, pivoting back to the sink, turning on the tap, and holding it under the faucet for a moment.  She contemplated having him close the lid and sit on the commode so she could better reach him, but then thought better of it– she wasn’t sure if he would need to vomit again.

She lowered herself to the floor beside him, feeling the coldness of the linoleum through the thin material of her pajamas.  Reaching up with the sodden washcloth to probe gently around the wound, she said softly, “I’m sorry.  I should have tried to find your TARDIS instead of bringing you back here, but I wasn’t sure how long I would last.  Didn’t want to accidentally abandon you there.”  A small, gentle smile touched her lips as she looked up at him– he was ridiculously tall compared to her, even when they were sitting on the floor.  “I can try to take you there later.  I don’t… I’m not sure, but I think I may be able to plot a course if you help guide me.  If you can remember an exact location.”  She wasn’t sure how she knew that; it was the same sort of intuitive knowledge that had allowed her to shield him when carrying him earlier.

Comments

Evelyn

[memoirsverse.livejournal.com]

Her sleep was for a time deep, the sleep of one who had struggled against a creeping exhaustion until finally succumbing. It was a dreamless sleep, a Travel-less sleep.

An indeterminate amount of time later, her cat came padding into the room from wherever she had been hiding. She began to walk over to the couch, to rest on her favorite perch on its back, and was rather perturbed to find a strange man sleeping there. Lifting her head and twitching her whiskers, she tried to get a whiff of the newcomer. His scent was something altogether different from anything she'd ever encountered, and for a moment, Nimue contemplated bounding over him to reach her nesting spot. She thought better of it, though, and made her way to the plush easy chair where her Evelyn slept. Deftly hopping up, she settled in the warm lap, her fluffy tail curling around her.

Evelyn was nominally aware of the sudden weight of the cat in her lap, the motion drawing her momentarily to the brink of wakefulness. She came more fully awake as the sound of a pained groan from the Doctor, and sat up, jostling Nimue and blinking groggily. Squinting at him for a moment, she debated whether or not to go over to him, but he seemed to be as deeply asleep as she had been a moment ago. She leaned back again, her hand idly stroking down the bright orange, brown, and white patchwork of Nimue's fur, and fought against the heaviness pulling at her eyelids, struggling to stay awake in order to keep watch.

The Doctor

[10th-13thdoctor.livejournal.com]

The Doctor continued in a deep, mostly dreamless sleep, moving through a murky viscous blackness. The dull pain wincing from the scar on his chest soon faded as he sunk in deeper.

Soon, some images came unbidden to him from behind his closed eyelids: the view of Sekorus Three he'd seen once in his fourth incarnation when doing a bit of reading in the TARDIS library...the pale green smattering of bushes and trees he'd seen once he peered out of the TARDIS doors after landing there...and then...a Catkind? This was a female, tall and slender, with calico fur and wearing a long emerald off-the-shoulder evening gown. She spoke, but for some reason he couldn't translate her words, which was unusual since he could speak nearly every language.

"'Scuse me," he mumbled, "I'm sorry, but I can't understand you." (Unbeknownst to him, his sleeping form also mumbled these words -- but half incoherently.) But she looked at him confused...and he wondered why his TARDIS was not translating either. Wait -- was he very far away from the TARDIS?

And in the depths of his dream, he could feel himself focus on her with a steely-eyed gaze, his own face expressionless (he'd not had many good experiences with Catkind). Finally she sniffed him, mumbled something he still couldn't translate, stroked his hair, and then walked away.

Well, he decided inside his dream. That was strange. He hoped that whatever substances the Sekorans had given him hadn't damaged his brain. This deep in sleep, he couldn't tell, and exhaustion fogged through the labyrinth of his mind, curling into its corridors like light gray smoke. Maybe he could better judge things after he woke up. He became partially aware in his sleep -- it edged at the periphery of his senses -- that he was starting to feel cold. His sleeping self mumbled malfan and his body shivered lightly.