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.

"

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The Doctor (Part 1)

[10th-13thdoctor.livejournal.com]

For two weeks, the Doctor had visited Evelyn's apartment, knocked on the door, but...nothing.

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..."