Chapter Text
“Close call, eh?”
“Oh, yeah. Super close. Surprised we all made it out of there! Well, not surprised. No, never doubted it. My survival skills are pretty superb,” The Doctor states matter-of-factly, a scrunch of her nose as she bounded up to the console and into her usual taking-off routine.
The three companions beside you rolled their eyes, slowly walking away from the door - but you stayed still, and you weren’t sure why. It felt… odd. Wrong. Like you forgot something. It’s on the tip of your tongue, just past your conscious thoughts, but you brush past it to revel in the victory of escaping.
Escaping. You don’t know why you flinch at that, and you aren’t sure why your hands feel so warm while your skin feels entirely too cold.
“Close... close call,” You joked back, a bit late in response, and again - you don’t know why your brain is a few steps behind, why you can’t see the world through the present and instead see it in left behind seconds. The words fall out of your lips, brows suddenly furrowing at an aching pain you hadn’t felt a few seconds ago. The adrenaline flowing through your body descended. Your legs stopped shaking from the running, the tension of the situation dissipating.
You made eye contact with Yaz beside you, and she grins before locking eyes with a flickered gaze, victorious smile dropping suddenly.
“Doctor,” Yaz said, voice shaky, or maybe certain - you can’t tell if she yells or whispers, and you aren’t sure why you can’t tell. “Doctor, something’s wrong.”
Graham, Ryan, and the Doctor turned in sync to face you, and their expressions turned to shock.
You furrow in more confusion.
“What? Why do you all look so...” You start, attempting a laugh in your slight misunderstanding, feeling only pain with it. You glance down at your fingers, and the sudden movement of your head causes your vision to go fuzzy. You pulled your head back up, noticing the wave of vertigo the movement brought, and locked eyes with the Doctor numbly.
“Oh,” you breathe. And your legs give out.
Everyone speaks at once - shouting, yelling - words moving a mile a minute and coming together as nothing coherent in the same way your body meshes with the floor, and you groaned out even though you can’t recognize your own actions through the horrific pain suffocating your senses.
“Doctor!”
“Oh, Doc, what-”
“What’s wrong with-”
“Move.”
You look up as the Doctor shoves past both Ryan and Graham, approaching you with a calm fury that might have scared you if the sudden pain in your body wasn’t all the more terrifying. Everyone stood still as she moved, quickly, smoothly, completely sophisticated though her eyes are suddenly a storm, a straight path to you that you’re sure couldn’t have possibly been interrupted.
“Talk to me. What’s going on? What happened out there?”
You flinched, her hands landing on your face, palms to your cheeks to keep you looking at her - time moved slowly, or maybe it moved too fast, and you can’t piece together the timeline accurately - you’re just flowing and existing without the knowledge of doing so. She looked between your eyes quickly, something grave appearing in her own at that analysis.
“Oh, what did I miss? How could I miss this?”
You opened your mouth to say something, but no words came out. Were you hitting turbulence, or was the room only spinning for you?
“Hang on, no – keep your eyes open, hey – do you hear me? Can you nod if you hear me?”
Her voice was drifting away from you. You were also drifting - drifting away from reality, fighting to cling on to what felt real, distantly registering the Doctor’s hold on you tightening. Merely keeping your eyes open felt like running a marathon. Nodding seemed completely off the charts.
Your eyes slid closed, and somewhere in the fog, you heard the Doctor calling out to the others. You caught bits and pieces, such as med bay, virus, and quickly – over and over again – you tried to wrap your head around the words, understand their meaning, but it was like grasping at smoke.
At last, you let yourself fall, and the darkness embraced you.
You’d awoken some time later. Opened your eyes only to squint into a sea of brightness; tension clamping over your temples, digging into your skull like claws. Your hearing was muffled, your eyes stinging and vision blurred as if you’d been plunged into a pool full of chlorine. The lines between reality and unconsciousness were unclear, leaving you floating agonisingly somewhere in between.
Your senses weren’t all there, but your brain was quick to identify that your throat was dry, and as a conclusion, you were thirsty. Not just thirsty, but parched, and thus, you swung your legs over the edge of the mattress – because you were in bed, apparently – and shakily carried yourself out of the room. Drowsily, half-asleep and barely walking in a straight line, but still on your feet nonetheless.
Perhaps you were still half-asleep, but reality felt strangely disjointed. You were continuously trying to wrap your fingers around it all, grasp it, ground yourself, but it all just kept slipping through your fingers, leaving you adrift.
You’d always considered yourself to have a decent sense of direction. City streets, forest trails and everything in between – getting lost was never really an issue for you. You could probably find your way simply by looking at the stars, letting familiar constellations guide your way back home, if the need was dire enough.
What were you to do, however, if you found yourself on a trail that just kept going forever – and there were no stars?
Was the kitchen normally this far away?
You squinted into the distance of the corridor sprawled out in front of you, but your surroundings remained a confusing blur of amber light and lurking shadows, continuously shifting in and out of focus. Everything around you combining like a rainbow of colours on a paint palette into some sort of murky mess. Through the fog in your brain, however, you were certain you were going the correct way.
Your head, ah, your head – your temples were overcome with a pounding ache with every step you took, and the vertigo still had a strong hold on you. The corridors swayed from side to side when you moved your head in certain ways. Must be some bad turbulence, you thought. Don’t think it’s ever been this… bad before.
As you went along, the corridors only grew more and more unfamiliar. You peeked into tidy, seemingly unused empty bedrooms, an overpacked humid greenhouse, a room full of loud arcade games, storage areas filled to the brim with intergalactic trinkets, and even a sparkling blue swimming pool with waterslides with vivid colours that only served to add to your headache. Strangely enough, all things you’d expected to find aboard the TARDIS.
Every now and again, you’d turn your head at strange murmurings behind you and colours flashing in the corners of your eyes, leaving you tethered between what was real and what wasn’t.
The TARDIS corridors were confusing even at the best of times. By now, you were well aware of the ship’s mind-boggling bigger-on-the-inside mechanics – just how big the ship was, though, still proved itself to be a mystery to you. That was one of the secrets only the Doctor could know.
The Doctor, your Doctor – ah, you could really, really use her help right now.
Where was she? And where were you?
After a while, the rooms you came across became more unexplainable to you. Dark rooms with no visible lighting to show what’s inside. A room full of clocks that were all ticking completely in sync. A room with a huge, glowing tree-like structure made entirely of wires. The number of closed doors you encountered only increased, too. Some of them brought an unsettling feeling upon your gut as you stumbled by, and you elected not to indulge in your curiosity.
Were the corridors growing darker, or was that your eyes playing tricks on you? Maybe this was all just a strange dream. Some sort of bodily side effect to time travel. The matter wouldn’t surprise you.
After quite some time, you started to suspect you were going in circles. It wasn’t until you walked past the room of clocks for the third time that your suspicions were confirmed, and your stomach turned in a different, somehow more sickening way.
You stopped dead in your tracks next to the doorway of the room, staring into it in disbelief. It was the same room. You knew it at your core. The clocks just sat there, ticking at you almost mockingly, as you swallowed back your nerves and leaned against the doorframe, grabbing onto it with clammy hands. The background hum of the TARDIS, a sound which normally brought you a sense of peace, now served only as a cruel reminder that you were stuck.
What would the Doctor do right now?
Well, you figured for starters, she wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. Aside from that, panicking would probably be quite low on her list. Regardless of that, you distantly registered your heart rate picking up and your fingers trembling. The line between fear and illness began to blur, making your emotions more difficult to read, even as you were experiencing them.
Adrenaline rushed through your system at the realisation that you were very much lost. Not just lost, but lost inside a technological marvel that could be infinite for all you knew. You didn’t have anything on you; no phone, no means of finding your bearings, not even the water you initially set out looking for. It was just you, alone with yourself, which seemed like the most terrifying part of all.
To top it all off, you didn’t feel right. You struggled to form any coherent thoughts and shape them towards a plan. Your head ached, and so did the rest of you – the ticking from the clocks almost appeared to echo in your eardrums. The memories of the past few days seemed like nothing but distant snippets of a dream you had started to forget. Reluctantly, you decided to walk back in the direction you came from.