Thirteen and Evelyn: Spiral
Sep. 9th, 2015 11:09 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
memoirsverse.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
curious_cosmos![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
10th_13thdoctorTime. It was about Time. She knew this somehow.
About its passage, its myriad threads and layers that interwove and bent and curled and coiled and tangled and knotted and snapped and broke and frayed-- rewrote and rewrote and rewrote again and again and again until nothing was truly real, not anymore--
The drugs were spinning her mind about in a screaming haze of confusion and disorientation. They had told her she was being treated with Thorazine. Were antipsychotics supposed to do that? She was fairly certain they weren't. Sure, dizziness, nausea maybe, insomnia, but not this-- this surging storm inside her mind. There was a small part of her that very rationally pointed out that something here was very, very wrong, that they were doing something to her--
"Evelyn," the doctor said, pushing his spectacles up an aqualine nose that was too large for his face. She turned her eyes to him, looked at his squashed, fleshy visage, the spiderweb of age-lines running over it, the gray wispy combover. Something about the way his features were put together seemed almost comical and disproportionate to her, pasted on, like they had been pegged onto a Mr. Potato Head. A small, almost desperate giggle erupted from her mouth.
"Do you understand what I'm saying to you?" he was asking.
She scratched absently at a frayed spot on the arm of the sofa she was sitting on with one fingernail. "The Doctor isn't real," she said. "I never traveled through time and space in the TARDIS. I never... Traveled, as Siobhan. I am fully human." Large brown eyes, glassy from the drugs but nontheless possessing a certain sharpness, a certain inexorability, lifted again to Dr. Hobb's face. "So you say."
"Do you still beg to differ, then?"
A short, sharp bark of a laugh that broke apart and danced and twirled and rattled inside her skull. She lifted her hands to her head to calm the rush of drug-induced dizziness, of a delirium that she was certain she hadn't felt before coming here. Before being brought here, against her will. She remembered being given scopolamine once, sometime in the 1920s on Earth (where, where, she was having difficulty remembering where, she remembered the name of the drug but not the location?), during an interrogation. Her chest had felt weighted down, like somebody had been pressing on it, and her head had spun for hours after. This was worse. "You know I do."
But did she? Did she really? It was all so... fantastical. A shape-changing alien from another world and his--- her, now-- bigger-on-the-inside time machine that looked like an old phone box on the outside? An inexplicable, mystical ability to separate from herself and Travel to far-off worlds like in a dream? Alien paternity, so she was only half human? It was preposterous. All of it.
Dr. Hobb sighed, glanced down at his notes over the top rims of his glasses, tapping his pen on the paper. "Your family is coming to see you this afternoon, Evelyn. Would you like that?"
"Not particularly."
"And why not?"
Evelyn shook her head, giving a small snort. "Reasons." She was beginning to feel like a sullen teenager being interrogated by an overbearing parent.
He was talking again, talking and talking and talking, and she was tired of it so she tuned him out. Words, words, words. At last, he stopped, glanced at his watch, removed his spectacles, and looked at her.
"I suppose that's the end of our session for today, Evelyn," he said. He motioned to the two orderlies who had entered the room on cue. "Paul and Jim will take you back to your room so you can get ready to see your family. Is that all right?"
"Everything's all right in this place," she muttered, but allowed herself to be escorted back to her room without fuss. One of the men-- Jim? informed her that she had about an hour before her parents arrived. Then they turned to leave, and locked her in. She sank down into a sitting position on the bed, pulling her knees to her chest and trying to breathe away the dizziness.
It was all real. None of it was real. It was real. It wasn't. It was. It wasn't.
Time.
"Where are you?" she murmured, and rested her head against her knees.
"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Doctor (Part 1)
Date: 2015-09-10 03:25 pm (UTC)The Doctor tried visiting at different times of day; then, in the middle of the night, trying several different ungodly late (or early) hours to see if she could catch Evelyn leaving her apartment due to her usual habit of taking walks around Wisteria in the middle of the night...but, nothing.
Finally, the Doctor landed her TARDIS inside Evelyn's apartment (not an unusual occurrence, granted). Her chest (and hearts) felt painfully heavy as she swept her gaze over the console's instruments. As the pale, electric glow of the amethyst time rotor light spilled over one side of her dark brown face, she folded her arms across her broad chest and tugged on a long, thin black braid as she studied the console monitor; switching camera views with a button, she peered into the screen and...found no sign of Evelyn.
Her bedroom, however, looked in horrible disarray, so the Doctor had to investigate.
"T'is makes no bloody sense," she murmured, now twirling the braid around one of her spindly fingers. The only two explanations that seemed to jangle about in her mind were: one, Evelyn had been imprisoned somehow or held hostage whilst moving about the cosmos in her Traveling form, or...two, someone here in Wisteria had taken her against her will.
Whirling around, she considered the latter; she knew of Evelyn's stepfather but had not met him. She'd observed him once in a crowd at some sort of political-or-other thing, and found him to be a bit too arrogant and pompous for her liking. Then again, some could say the same about her, whether in this incarnation or her previous ones (especially when she was the bloke in the tight suit and spiky hair). But, she could protest -- and sometimes did, Gallifrey was a completely different world -- both literally and metaphorically -- from Earth. Different society, different culture, different mores: all of which formed me on a fundamental level from birth until my adulthood in my first incarnation.... before her and her granddaughter Arkytior had stolen that Type 40 TARDIS and fled. Yet something about Evelyn's stepfather made a spot in one of the back corridors of her Time Lady mind positively itch...a noisome thing that nothing could scratch, no explanation could answer.
The Doctor whirled around to face the TARDIS doors. Reaching up and diving one of her hands into an inner pocket of her black velvet blazer, she swept her fingers around until they brushed against her sonic and psychic paper. Good. Inhaling a deep breath and then letting it out with a long sigh, she quickly jogged down the ramp which led to the door. Her fingers curled around the little chrome handle and pulled the door open.
Sliding halfway through the entrance, she swept her gaze in an arc around the room. Clothes had been hurriedly tossed all over Evelyn's bed, and one of her dresser drawers was half-open. She slid out of her TARDIS' doorway, hearing the door close behind her with a soft 'click'. Moving closer to the open drawer, she saw half its contents emptied.
Spinning around, she marched towards the bedroom door and passed into the hallway. Ducking into the bathroom, she pulled open a cupboard and noticed half of Evelyn's toiletries were now gone. Her jaw began to clench, and her thick, deep brown lips began to tighten into a worried line. Her obsidian eyes darted around the bathroom, looking for any more...clues, when a horridly sour smell suddenly bloomed in her senses, hooking her by the nose. She turn around and darted out of the bathroom, following the disgusting odor to the kitchen. "Wot is that smell, Evelyn would not 'low such a t'ing, I know that smell, it's..."
The Doctor (Part 2)
Date: 2015-09-10 03:26 pm (UTC)Her mind registered it, her gaze now falling on a cereal bowl left standing on the kitchen counter, its clean ivory milk now a pale, sallow yellow. Stepping towards it (and switching to her respiratory bypass to avoid the stench), she dug into her jacket pocket and without even thinking, pulled out her sonic screwdriver and scanned the contents of the bowl. As the tool collected data, the violet light on its tip glowed, and the its familiar, pulsating buzz sounded over the bowl . Once she was done scanning, she lifted the tool up and peered at its readings, her dark black eyebrows slanting under the furrows forming in her forehead.
The milk had been sitting out for exactly two weeks.
"Fuck!" she growled, then quickly reached inside her inner jacket pocket and slid her sonic into it. Spinning around, she sprinted out of the kitchen, the thick soles of her black 18-hole laceup boots clunking heavily across the linoleum kitchen floor. She ran in a narrow, concave arc through the living room, into the hallway, and then into Evelyn's bedroom, where she snapped her fingers and watched her TARDIS doors open. After she bolted inside, the old girl shut the doors after her. She had to figure out who had taken Evelyn -- and to where.
Evelyn
Date: 2015-09-12 09:43 pm (UTC)A voice said, Look me in the stars..
She wasn't reading, but instead gazed through the window, watching the irridescent orange-and-white smears of the koi as they flitted beneath the water. The pond itself, even the too-pretty bridge, were gated, fenced in so they wouldn't be a danger to the patients. Look but don't touch, don't experience.
She had tried to escape four times since arriving here. She had simply walked out the door the first time, past the clinically manicured hedges, through the cast-iron gate and down the black tarmac of the driveway. And then, seemingly an instant later, with no memory of how she got there, she woke in the bed in the room that served as her prison cell (though of course they never called it that), and she was secured with leather restraints for a day or so, and watched closely, until Dr. Hobb gave the order to give her some space and freedom. So accomodating, this Dr. Hobb. She didn't like him. He was up to something. (Did that sound like paranoia? She wasn't sure... it might be paranoid. Maybe her perceptions weren't exactly reliable. Isn't that what they kept telling her?)
And tell me truly, men of earth...
A man and a woman were entering the room, well dressed, poised, high society. Her parents, Robert and Isabelle Alvar. Well, technically, Robert was her stepfather. She'd been uncertain about whether or not he knew this until recently.
She looked at her mother. Isabelle always looked well-groomed, dainty, the perfect aging Southern belle-- though there always seemed to be something... missing in her eyes. A kind of blankness that often spiked with unspoken resentment when she looked at Evelyn, though Evelyn was fairly certain her mother didn't fully understand why.
Robert pulled out a chair for his wife and then straightened his tie, looking somewhat uncomfortably around the room before taking his own seat. "Evelyn," he said. "It's good to see you."
"I c'n tell," she said. She was trying to sound sarcastic, but it came out sounding more slurred.
"Don't mouth off to me, young lady," he retorted, and she bristled at being spoken to like a child. "You're here for your own good. You know that."
"Oh, am I?" Shaking her head, she gave a small, bitter laugh. "...Can 'magine what this's doing t'your poll numbers." She peered at him closely. "Though I s'pect you're payin' people t'keep it quiet. All this must be so embarrasing for you. But why'm I here? How'd you learn about..." she trailed off, gesturing in loose circles and staring at him with glassy, inquiring eyes.
"Doesn't matter where I learned about it, sweetpea," he drawled silkily in his polititian's voice. She cringed at the pet name, the artifice that dripped from his voice as he said it. "Fact is, sweetheart, ya need help. An' I'm makin' sure you get it. Dr. Hobb's very good at 'is job. He'll help you get back to reality."
If all the soul-and-body scars...
"I already know what's real," she told him.
Were not too much to pay for birth.
The Doctor
Date: 2015-09-14 08:11 pm (UTC)"Get yer head togetha, Doctor," she softly chided herself as she rushed out of the TARDIS. The Doctor darted around inside Evelyn's home and checked all of the doors and windows. None showed signs of forced entry, so Evelyn was clearly taken by someone -- or someones -- she knew. To be doubly sure, she scanned with her sonic in and around each door and window, her tool buzzing and the violet light blinking as it took in readings. After each scan she peered at it, confirming that none of them had been opened in two weeks, and no signs of stress were present.
So...this left the Doctor with one idea of who'd likely taken her. She knew Evelyn did not have an easy relationship with her parents, so they immediately rose to number one on her list of suspects. The most logical thing to do...would be to go to her parents' home and spy on them. To see where they came and went...and if it led to Evelyn's whereabouts at all.
Dashing back into her TARDIS, she bounded around the console rapidly, setting the coordinates and moving through the takeoff sequence as quickly as she could, not unlike her mannerisms from her tenth or eleventh selves (well, more properly, her eleventh or twelfth selves -- the number order of her incarnations was a bit wonky what with Granddad usually not calling himself the Doctor).
"Evelyn...I will find ye," she declared as she curled her long brown fingers around the takeoff lever "I promise!"
And as the last word left her lips, she yanked the takeoff lever down and sent the TARDIS into a wild lurching dance into the Vortex.
Evelyn
Date: 2015-09-15 04:48 pm (UTC)Evelyn's eyelids fluttered against the viscous crust that tried to gum them shut. Dr. Hobb's face hovered nearby, blurred and... wrong, somehow, and she blinked her eyes to get rid of the haze. She tried to bring her arms up and felt the tug of leather straps at her wrists, restraining them at her sides. An attempt to move her legs told her that her ankles were restrained to the bed in a similar fashion. A quick glance to the side told her that this wasn't the room they had been keeping her in, yet it was familiar somehow...
"Hello, Evelyn," Dr. Hobb said. His face looked like it was melting, and Evelyn closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened her eyes again, the effect had vanished, though his features still looked disturbingly off kilter. Like a mask. Side effect, she thought. They've drugged me again.
The chaotic swirl of confused delirium was back, surging through her head in a breathtaking tempest. Yes, she had most certainly been drugged again, not with the sedatives that had slurred her speech in the common room earlier when she was visiting her family, but with that other drug, the one they claimed was an antipsychotic.
The common room. Her family. She shook her head from side to side, trying to remember what had happened.
Oh yes. She had tried to escape again, after they had left. Had she made it outside? Everything was blank...
"Welcome back," Dr. Hobb said. She turned to look at him again, and then saw a sinister, fluid movement behind him, in the corner beside the door.
It was a creature.
A tall creature with a large head and terrible, wrinkled features and no mouth and its face reminded her of skulls, of death, of nightmares; and absurdly, it wore a dark suit and tie like some horrid parody of humanity, and its hands were tipped with long fingers that shifted and flexed slowly, deliberately, threateningly, and it made gutteral rushing, clicking sounds like some sort of demonic insect as it stared at her, and she had seen it before, and she knew what Dr. Hobb had been doing to her--
"Doctor Hobb--" she whispered to the psychiatrist. "There's something behind you."
He turned, and his back stiffened and a small gasp emanated from him, so she knew he saw it, she wasn't crazy--
He turned back to her and shook his head sadly. His face was not the face of somebody who had just seen a nightmare creature. "Evelyn... there's nothing there." He smiled then, and her heart began to pound as she watched the smile turn... gleeful.
Evelyn (Part 2)
Date: 2015-09-15 04:48 pm (UTC)His fingers were digging into her soft flesh, bruising, and she tried to pull away. "You're hurting me," she gasped, and he squeezed harder as she struggled ineffectually against the restraints.
"Evelyn, I'm not even touching you," he said in that infuriatingly pleasant, everyday voice as he tightened his grip even more. "You're imagining this. Just like you imagined the other times you claimed I hurt you. Do you remember? You can't trust your perceptions, Evelyn. They aren't real." She remembered then the interrogations, as he had pressed her for information about her life, her travels and her Travels, and always, always about the Doctor. She remembered that the creature itself had commanded her to give the information asked for, and it was a blur, but Dr. Hobb had muttered something about her being resistant to post-hypnotic suggestion for some reason, that they needed to break down her mind first, her will (he seemed paradoxically to know the creature was there, even though he didn't always remember it, and how did that even work?). She remembered how she would wake later with no memory of what had happened, covered with bruises and cuts and electric burns, and Dr. Hobb would say that she had hurt herself and needed direct observation and heavy chemical restraint (and what sort of nurses did they employ here that believed these wounds were self-inflicted?), and they would treat the injuries and then pump her full of sedatives that would leave her limp and half-conscious.
She writhed against her bonds and tried to jerk away from him, but he held fast. The creature stood behind him still, chirring as it watched. "Tell me about the Doctor," Hobb said again.
"Go to hell!" she hissed, and spit in his face.
The Doctor
Date: 2015-09-27 02:23 am (UTC)And together they would find Evelyn.
The trip only took a mere couple of minutes, owing to the short distance in space and negligible difference in time she needed to travel. Her ship groaned and wheezed her way into material being, in a park just a block down from the Alvar's home. Bounding down the ramp to the double doors, she pulled them open and stuck her head outside to peer around.
Squinting at the house from her spot in the park, she saw a car parked in front. Checking her pockets for her sonic and psychic paper, she slid out of the open doorway and listened for the TARDIS doors to close behind her with a soft click. As she walked up the sidewalk and began to cross the street, she kept her eyes on the house, watching to see if anyone emerged.
The Alvars
Date: 2015-10-07 01:44 am (UTC)Isabelle Alvar stepped to the front porch of their lovely Antebellum-style home and reached up one small, delicate hand to smooth a loose strand from her otherwise perfectly coiffed brunette hair. Shifting uncomfortably in her expensive pumps, she fidgeted with the strap on her Gucci bag as she waited for her husband to emerge from the expansive house.
Her thoughts turned to her daughter, locked up in that awful place (<i>where she belongs,</i> she added to herself before a small stab of guilt made her regret the thought), and wondered, not for the first time, who it was that had talked Robert into handing over his daughter.
Well. She wasn't <i>really </i>his daughter. A fact which he was well aware of, as he was well aware of her... indiscretion with Soren all those years ago. But, as had ever been done in the affluent Alvar family, dirty little secrets were swept neatly under exquisite Persian rugs and subsequently ignored.
To be honest, Isabelle's memory of the entire sordid affair was... patchy at best. It had often confused and worried her how little she actually remembered of her time with Soren and even of her pregnancy with Evelyn.
Isabelle opened the clasp on her handbag and removed a metal cigarette case. Removing a cigarette, she tucked it between her lips and used her lighter to ignite the end, taking a long drag before lowering it and breathing out a spiraling plume of smoke.
Robert stepped from the door. "There you are, dear." He didn't bother kissing her cheek. Nobody was watching. "Are you ready to go?" He gave a disapproving glare at her cigarette.
"Another staged public dinner appearance," she sighed. "Can't we do <i>anything</i> like normal people anymore, Robert?"
"Now, Izzy, you know we need all the publicity we can get for this election," Robert drawled in his rolling Louisiana accent. He plucked the cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out in an ash tray that sat atop the porch railing.
"You need it, you mean," she said, gazing longingly at the smoldering remains of her tobacco fix. She sighed, finally giving in to her need to understand, and turned to face her husband. "Robert. Are you ever going to tell me why you had Evelyn... locked up there?"
He gave her a condescending look. "Come on now, Izzy. She's delusional. She believes she's been flying through all of time and space with an alien from another planet. She was always a little--" he gave a low whistle and flicked his finger back and forth-- "But something made her completely crack. So I took measures to have have it taken care of. I'm her father. It's my job." The last sentences were spoken with some degree of sarcasm, but she was expected not to comment, so she didn't. His hand closed around hers, and she tensed a little but did not pull away "Tranquility Garden is one of the best places in the state for this sort of thing. Trust me. They'll make her better."
The Doctor
Date: 2015-10-12 02:55 pm (UTC)The woman appeared to stop for a moment, and pull something out of her purse. The man stopped and turned to her. The Doctor wasn't close enough to hear what they were saying, but they looked like they were going to leave the house soon. If they were going by car, she wouldn't be able to follow them on foot -- she could run fast, yes, but not that fast.
Slowly, she emerged from underneath the tree and walked a little closer to the house to peer at the car and its license plate number. Also, she wanted to hear more of their conversation, to get some idea of where they might be going. But sweeping her gaze around her surroundings, she judged that she couldn't get close enough for that to successfully happen. Not to mention, a faint nagging in the back of her mind told her she might look out of place in this neighbourhood. So...her other idea, sonicing and entering, was out of the question.
She grasped her chin and rubbed it in thought. Then, an idea came to her. Surely one of them had to be carrying a cellphone. If she could isolate its signal and track it via GPS, the TARDIS would lead her right to their destination.
Her eyes bolting wide open at the idea, she spun around, pivoting on her left heel, and strode quickly back to the TARDIS.