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adventuressingIn her dream, Charley is frozen. She knows, in the way that one knows these things in dreams, that she's in cryo-sleep aboard the Viyrans' ship, despite the fact that she can't be, that she's awake and conscious to know horribly her own inability to move, to feel the seconds draining past slow and immutable. Her pulse is thready, high and fast under skin that feels too tight, but she can't so much as breathe to calm herself.
Everything is white, Viyran white, and all she can smell is antiseptic and plastic; there's nothing organic aboard the Viyrans' ship-- she never found out if they had bodies, under their robotic-looking shells, and even she isn't organic anymore. A ghost, a disease, Patient Zero, a thought of a dead girl, her body stolen away and her mind frozen behind a wall of frosted perspex.
Time passes, interminable, awful, millennia, and gradually the muttering engine-hum of the Viyrans' ship is replaced by footsteps, two sets of them, and Charley can't see (of course she can't see, they'd had nothing but sound here), but she knows to whom those feet belong. But this time she can't even talk, doesn't even have the comfort of humming a song, or chattering to fill the great white emptiness; she's trapped, bodiless, inconsequential, dead-but-not.
And then-- and she doesn't know if he's always been there and she's only just now noticed, or if he's faded into being suddenly-- there's another Doctor sitting in front of her, sat magisterially in his chair as if it were a throne, blue coat and spats and dandelion-puff of blond curls, looking past her with his eyebrows raised, unimpressed, addressing a Viyran who towers as an indifferent plastic monolith.
'Charlotte Pollard?' he sniffs, 'Never heard of her. Honestly, if you're attempting to bludgeon me into cooperation, threatening the life of a dead girl hardly seems the most efficacious way of going about it.'
Doctor, she wants to shout, wants to pound her fists against the cryopod window, wants to apologise because she did this, she's the one who wiped his memory, or as good as. She left him here, and he's here again now and he can't see her, wouldn't know her if he did. She doesn't notice the illogic in his words.
Everything is white, Viyran white, and all she can smell is antiseptic and plastic; there's nothing organic aboard the Viyrans' ship-- she never found out if they had bodies, under their robotic-looking shells, and even she isn't organic anymore. A ghost, a disease, Patient Zero, a thought of a dead girl, her body stolen away and her mind frozen behind a wall of frosted perspex.
Time passes, interminable, awful, millennia, and gradually the muttering engine-hum of the Viyrans' ship is replaced by footsteps, two sets of them, and Charley can't see (of course she can't see, they'd had nothing but sound here), but she knows to whom those feet belong. But this time she can't even talk, doesn't even have the comfort of humming a song, or chattering to fill the great white emptiness; she's trapped, bodiless, inconsequential, dead-but-not.
And then-- and she doesn't know if he's always been there and she's only just now noticed, or if he's faded into being suddenly-- there's another Doctor sitting in front of her, sat magisterially in his chair as if it were a throne, blue coat and spats and dandelion-puff of blond curls, looking past her with his eyebrows raised, unimpressed, addressing a Viyran who towers as an indifferent plastic monolith.
'Charlotte Pollard?' he sniffs, 'Never heard of her. Honestly, if you're attempting to bludgeon me into cooperation, threatening the life of a dead girl hardly seems the most efficacious way of going about it.'
Doctor, she wants to shout, wants to pound her fists against the cryopod window, wants to apologise because she did this, she's the one who wiped his memory, or as good as. She left him here, and he's here again now and he can't see her, wouldn't know her if he did. She doesn't notice the illogic in his words.
