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At some point checking the asylum’s life signs had become a regular part of Helen’s day.
Wake up. Check for life signs. Move. Repeat.
Flitting between vents and server rooms was hardly the most comfortable existence, but she was alive, and for now that was enough.
Still, it was an inherently unsustainable plan. Every day the undamaged areas she had access to were shrinking, and she was having to make longer and longer excursions into the open between hiding places. Even beyond that, her supplies were dwindling quickly. The Kandyman holed himself up in his kitchen so often now that she didn’t dare raid it again, and though the prisoner canteen did pose a far easier target she wasn’t desperate enough to eat anything that he’d made just yet.
Contacting the outside world hadn’t been going well. None of her plans had, particularly, though that didn’t stop her spending every free moment she had hunched over a monitor she could barely use trying to get word to anyone that might listen about what was happening inside of Rykerzon.
So far, nobody would.
As she crossed off another lead in her journal (which was really more of a notepad), and glanced at all the list of exhausted options. A part of her was ready to despair.
Giving up felt like the easier option, sometimes, at least until the little voice in her head chimed in to keep her on track.
It’s only worth giving up if you’ve given it the best shot you’ve got.
Helen pocketed the notebook, and picked up her bag. The south patients wing was quiet. She could hide out there a few hours.
Sleep was getting increasingly difficult to come by as the days wore on. At first she’d used disused patient rooms, but that had quickly become far too dangerous as the inmates became more violent. By now she was lucky to get a few hours at a time curled up in one of the dusty server rooms before she was forced to move on again.
Exhaustion and the need to become increasingly strict in rationing her remaining supplies were beginning to ware her down, making each move take a little longer. She wasn’t sure how much longer she was going to be able to keep up this pace.
Opening up a monitor she could still barely understand, Helen glanced at the yellow-green dots that monitored the prison population. There were at least half a dozen less than yesterday. They’d begun tearing each other apart. The Kandyman seemed to be spreading them out more effectively now, which was a concern for her, especially given how many of them were clustering close to her current hiding spot.
She scanned the map to try and find some barren corner of the facility, eventually deciding that the abandoned infirmary wing might have to do. There were still prisoners there, but they’d torn the place apart so thoroughly it wasn’t their focus any more.
It was a risky trip, she’d have to leave her maintenance routes and walk through the main corridors of the prison, and even when she got there she wouldn’t have more than basic access to the computer systems so far from the main servers, so there was no chance of getting word out.
Another wasted day.
She shook her head before she could let herself delve too far into the depths of despair. She’d think of something. Calling for help had been her best plan, but she’d find another. She’d been running out of people to call anyway.
“Plan B gone.” Helen muttered the borrowed words into the empty room, wilfully pretending as though she wasn’t on at least plan J by now. “We’ve got a whole alphabet to get through, yet.”
Luckily for her, she knew a lot of alphabets.
Helen could remember the exact moment when poking around in Rykerzon’s data banks had turned up the first mention of Kaldor. She knew the general gist of how far she’d been transported forwards, but at some point it everything became just some vague, hard to grasp future, seeming so far off from everything she’d ever known that she couldn’t entirely process it.
It hadn’t really occurred to her that Liv might have been out there, somewhere.
She’d found her, after wasting more of the precious time she could scavenge to work than she’d admit. She was younger than Helen had ever seen her. Newly-qualified, but real, and alive, and out there. After that she wasted more of her time than she could realistically justify looking at the little passport-sized photograph that popped up alongside her qualifications, even eventually tracing it onto her rapidly depleting little pad, just to have it with her.
Somehow, it motivated her far more than anything else had since she’d run into those maintenance shafts. It was stupid— she knew that even if she were somehow to escape, she couldn’t ever actually go to this version of Liv, but it was something.
Maybe keeping up hope at this point was stupid. She was losing control of system, and running out of places to hide. She’d come so close to being caught so many times now, it was only a matter of time before the Kandyman won.
Helen was well aware that she was waiting for a miracle which was seeming increasingly unlikely to come, and it was becoming harder and harder not to give in.
She closed the notebook in her hands, and traced the pad of her thumb over the words scratched into the cardboard cover.
Miracles don’t happen if you don’t make them.
Hope had kept her going this long, but there was something new now. Stubbornness. She might not have hope in the strictest sense, but she refused to live in a world where she’d never see Liv again. She refused to live in a world where the last real conversation they’d ever had would have been her sulking about being left behind, rather than…
Well rather than what she hadn’t quite worked out. She kept telling herself that if when they met again she’d confess everything, but it was very easy to be brave when Liv wasn’t actually standing there.
She’d sit curled in her quiet corners and daydream about just kissing her, and to hell with the consequences. In her head, she could confess a million things she’d never had the guts to say when she’d had the chance, and in a strange way that was what kept her going.
She’d wasted so many chances, and if a miracle was what it would take to finally tell Liv how she felt, then she’d find a way to make one for herself.
New life signs didn’t appear on Rykerzon.
Prisoner life signals were coloured yellow on the screen. There were less and less of them every day. Staff were blue, though the Kandyman had been the only blue dot on screen for weeks.
After weeks of living hidden from view, Helen woke up, and got ready to move on, when she spotted a cherry red dot not too far from her hiding place.
“What’re you showing in red, System?” She queried, despite knowing it would likely be fruitless. Her and the Kandyman had been fighting for control over system for weeks, leaving the AI fragmented and tricky to use.
“Unknown life sign.”
“Right.” She replied, sounding just a little less tired than she had for weeks. It was a change to her routine, and that was more than enough to bolster her.
Logically, she knew it was far more likely to be a foe than a friend, but she couldn’t help but thing that, if system could shield her life sign, wouldn’t the Eleven have done the same? Maybe, just maybe, this was someone brand new.
“Can you get me a visual?” She leant forwards, inspecting the screen a little closer. The screen stuttered, and froze for a few painful seconds, before an image popped up. It was too badly pixelated to make out much about the figure, but the blue blur in the background was more than enough.
TARDIS blue.
Helen let out a slow breath, and with it months of tension.
They’d come for her. She hardly dared believe it.
“System? Can you bring—” She cocked her head to one side, staring at the mess of colours in front of her. To her (very slight) disappointment, she realised it had to be the Doctor, since from what she could make out the stranger was far too tall to be Liv. “Can you bring him to me?”
The AI stuttered back into life, and Helen felt giddier than she had in months.
She was getting out.
Admittedly, getting him to her hadn’t been as simple as she’d hoped, but that brand new spark of hope hadn’t dimmed by the time she finally managed it, pushing open the stubborn hatch in the floor to let him in, and seeming to do quite a good job startling him in the meantime.
“Down here. Quickly!”
“Helen!”
He’d dropped down before they could be followed, and she slammed the hatch back into place with a single practiced movement, shutting them into the dark subterranean corridor which had been her whole world for so long now.
“Doctor.” The word came out a little breathless, and she couldn’t hide the grin on her face.
She dragged him into a hug without really thinking about it (which had to be one of the first times she’d ever really done so), just so thrilled to finally see a friendly face amongst the masses trying their best to tear her apart. He didn’t return as quickly as she might have hoped, almost as though he was caught off guard by her being there, but frankly she was too relieved to care.
“I hardly dared hope you’d come looking.” She admitted, looking up at him with a grin still fixed across her face. “All of time and space.”
“I don’t leave people behind.” The Doctor said, his expression unreadable.
I don’t leave people behind. For some reason the singularity of that statement set her on edge.
“Where’s Liv?” Helen asked, and— oh she didn’t like the shadow that fell across his face when she said that. She waited for an answer, letting out a nervous laugh when he didn’t supply her with one. “Doctor, where is she?”
Helen tried to think of reasons why Liv might not have come along. Of course, there was security to think of. Maybe it was like back at the capital on Gallifrey— easier to sneak two people in than a battalion, and easier one person than two. Still, there was a nagging part of her that said Liv wasn’t one to be left behind for a reason as simple as that.
“Do you know the route back to where the TARDIS is?” The Doctor asked, ignoring her question entirely.
“I—” Helen hesitated, and glanced at her little paper sketch of the complex, since she didn’t have access to a monitor here. She’d marked out the routes that, as far as she knew, were still intact. It wasn’t as reliable as the digital counterpart, but she’d found it invaluable in those cases when she’d been cornered without access to system. “I think so, yes. We should be able to get back there through the service route.”
“Brilliant.” The Doctor said, though his tone told a different story. “Lead the way.”
Faltering a moment longer, she complied, beginning to follow the route she knew rather well by now, though she kept glancing back over her shoulder towards the Doctor.
He looked troubled, and it was hardly reassuring.
“Is she waiting for us there?” Helen asked.
She didn’t get a response.
Helen wasn’t ashamed to admit that she’d broken into a run as they approached the TARDIS doors, slamming through them with the kind of relief she’d never expected to feel.
“Liv!” She called, looking around, and expecting the other woman to be standing there. Her grin faded slightly as she realised the room was empty. “Liv?” She called again, a more quizzical note to her voice this time.
The Doctor came up behind her, walking slower than might have been considered sensible in an prison full of violent inmates driven half-mad by the Kandyman, though it wasn’t as though the Doctor had ever been entirely sensible.
“Helen—” He said, defeat evident in his tone.
“Liv?” Helen tried again, before turning to face him. Dread settled like a stone in her stomach, threatening to sink that golden bubble of hope she’d held onto all this time. “Where is she?”
What if she’d decided enough was enough and gone home?
What if she was hurt and couldn’t come along?
What if she’d also gotten trapped somehow and the Doctor hadn’t found her yet?
“I think you should sit down.” The TARDIS doors closed, taking with them the last view of the prison world which had been her home for so long.
“I don’t want to sit down.” Helen’s smile had mostly gone, now, but some remnant of it stayed in place, tinged with a level of bewilderment. She’d had so many grand ideas of how her reunion with the pair of them would go, that she couldn’t quite process what was happening. “I want to see—”
She paused. She’d caught the Doctor’s eye for the first time, and she really didn’t like the way he was looking at her.
“What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”
The words that came next didn’t seem real.
Helen didn’t remember how she ended up on the floor. Her legs seemed to have given way underneath her. She was vaguely aware of the Doctor helping her into one of the plush armchairs just beyond the console, but she didn’t really register it.
She felt numb.
“What do you mean lost her—” She finally managed to ask, though she knew without having to wait for the Doctor to elaborate.
Lost.
Gone.
Passed.
He was telling the story, and she wasn’t taking it in, not really. It didn’t matter how many euphemisms he used for what had happened, the blow wasn’t softened.
Dead. Liv was dead.
It just didn’t compute.
Liv had always fought so hard, and had survived so much, she couldn’t just be gone. It was too ridiculous to believe.
In her determination to find something to fight for, Helen had told herself that she wouldn’t live in a Universe where she couldn’t see Liv again. The concept of a Universe where live was just… gone? It was too absurd to think about.
She pressed her fingers to her lips, trying to stifle the sob which escaped her.
Somehow it was the circumstances of it all that were the worst. It felt so utterly pointless. Nothing had been gained, nobody had been saved— it felt far too mundane for someone who’s life had burned so bright.
“Why—” She managed, breathing heavily to try and keep herself from breaking down completely. “why would— Why? Why would you take her there?”
Would it have been easier if Liv had died off in that nebulous future? Or somewhere in the distant past? Probably not. Still, there was something which stung even worse about the fact that it had taken place then. The war was something Helen had lived through, and had put away in her mind. It was something she was done losing people to. Now it was as if some long gone monster of her childhood had emerged from under the bed to snatch away the person she cared about more than anyone else in this Universe.
“Helen—” The Doctor tried.
It was selfish, especially given she’d asked, but she found she had no desire to listen.
She pushed herself out of the armchair with a shaking hand, and beginning to walk away. She had no idea where her unsteady feet were carrying her, but she didn’t care. Away from here.
The Doctor called after her, but she didn’t stop.
Helen had spent so much time in Rykerzon thinking about how her reunion with Liv would go. She’d imagined hugs, and confessions, and in her wilder dreams, kisses. She’d had whole speeches planned out. She’d almost believed that she might go through with one of them.
She found herself sitting on Liv’s bed, staring at a photograph of the pair of them sitting above a messy desk. They were all smiles, and it felt like a lifetime ago now, but it couldn’t have been all that long.
Her eyes scanned over Liv’s in the photo. She still couldn’t quite believe she’d never see that face again.
Into the still air of a room which was no longer needed, Helen finally voiced words she’d bitten back a thousand times, as though it wasn’t far too late.
“I love you.”