Thirteen and Evelyn: Spiral

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10th_13thdoctor

Time.  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.

"