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curious_cosmos2015-09-09 11:09 pm
memoirsverse.livejournal.com) wrote in curious_cosmos2015-09-09 11:09 pm
Thirteen and Evelyn: Spiral
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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.
"
The Doctor
"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
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)
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
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
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
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.