Chapter Text
SILENT NIGHT
Yorkshire, 1984. Christmas Eve.
The cold is a hostile enemy. The wind bites, hisses, singes his cheeks and nose. The snow under his boots wails with every step. He presses on.
He wanders through the black of midnight. He’s strange, mysterious, an other. Yet he trudges.
He feels a hole inside of him. He remembers. He remembers that something is lost to him, but he can’t remember what. He remembers a time when he had a vague idea, before the memory flared and faded like a leaf dries and crumbles before it disintegrates, murdered by time.
The air inside the church burns his skin. The heat from the people, the heat from the candles, the heat from shelter, hurts more than the cold winter’s night. He wipes his boots clean of snow on the doorstep, then takes a seat on one of the hard, wooden benches. He waits.
He listens. The priest, the sermon, the churchman preaches about their saviour, about the light that will guide them out of the dark. He thinks, in a woman’s voice: Is this a story or did it really happen? In his own: It’s what they believe. He frowns, he can’t understand the significance of the memory.
Afterwards he gets a pat on the back by the churchman, stopping him on his way out. “You’re new to the congregation?”
He tightens his forehead, annoyed at the man for disturbing the silence in his head. “No.”
He walks out.
The hinges on the TARDIS door scream as he pushes past, the wood creaking and groaning, alive with pain. He folds his arms over the console, buries his face between the levers, feels the cool of the metal against his cheek.
“Why did you bring me here?”
She wheezes in return, the engine engaging, pumping with life, disintegrating.