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There are dead leaves under her, damp and cold; their earthy smell mixes with the flat, familiar smell of blood. Not so familiar when it’s hers. Her chest aches, every beat of her heart a reminder of her broken ribs. She knows how brutal resuscitation is, but hasn’t ever felt it. She’s sweaty, too hot, her hair sticking to her face, her neck; she should be cold, shocky. She probably is shocky.
She hadn’t heard her ribs crack. She'd been gone, slipping away into peace, but it seems that won’t be her lot. The stranger-- the immortal-- he has a fierce, obsessive will.
Abigail clenches her hand: it shakes. She's not ready to do this. She must do this.
Her dear Henry. She can only die once. He could be harmed so badly, how many ways could this man hurt him? He’d been tortured before, and this man-- this man is insane, so instantly violent. She’d kept Henry’s secret only by sheer habit when the stranger shared his, but that one rejection had made him so-- so--. He must never find Henry. Never.
She breathes in bitter, tannic leaves and the worrying smell of blood. So much blood. It still always smells a little like gunpowder, after all these years. And death.
"For two thousand years, I thought I was alone," hisses the immortal.
"You are alone." She snatches for his jacket. She hurts so badly, all over, her chest, every movement, her ribs are splintered in her chest and digging into her lungs, and her arm, sprained, it feels as if the muscles will tear open as she closes her fingers around his knife--
There is a sound like time stuttering. The whole world coughs and a shadow falls over them-- suddenly a man where there was no man, a tall figure.
The immortal rears up.
“Who-”
"You can't remember this. You aren't ready," says an impossible voice.
Henry. Her Henry, in a sleek grey coat, a dark scarf twined around his neck. There’s a strange glow in his eyes; they seem to look through her and the other man.
Henry touches the immortal's forehead and he slumps forward, dropping to the side.
"Henry-?" she whispers. She drops the knife, her hand shaking, becoming unresponsive-- she can’t imagine making the effort to pick it up again. Unless she needed to. She would.
"No time to explain, darling. Five minutes from now, you must be dead. The whole of time depends on it."
She shakes her head-- a terrible pain, her chest feels cracked open and raw. "No."
"Yes. But. Are you ready to die?" He's changed, and he hasn't. He’s so strange, so abrupt, still, so odd. Her Henry. What a question to ask, at a time like this.
Tears cloud her vision, and she shakes her head again. Oh she hurts. But she doesn’t want to die, as long as she’s hurting, she’s alive, and Henry is here--
He smiles at her, his whole face, wide and relieved. That hasn’t changed. Her Henry. “Then five minutes from now can wait.”
He stoops, and envelops her in his arms. She gasps at the pain of it, vision whiting out for a moment because oh it’s agony, but then it fades, somehow, distant and apart from her, and he tucks her into his coat, wraps her closer and closer in himself, and…
She is in a dim room, lying on a mattress. She is in a dim room, full of strange, half-alive machinery, a central pillar that moves softly with a sound like breathing. She can hear a heart, beating. She hears all of time stutter, and the world cough, and then suddenly she’s in Henry’s arms again, on a unmarked, white ceramic floor, almost blinding by the bright lights set in the high, domed ceiling.
“Henry! Henry, I got your message--” a woman, running up, rubber-soled shoes slapping. Abigail can hear that, but her vision is dimming, the world so bright and tilting alarmingly. “What have you done?”
“Susan! You have the medical team standing by?”
“Of course, but-- oh, Rassilon’s name-! Med team, med team, here-- it’s a human woman, in her mid sixties, she’s badly hurt-”
More running feet, a strange hum: Abigail hasn’t the strength to keep her eyes open. She feels as if she’s floating off the ground. Something stings at her neck, and the pain and the confusion both blissfully vanish.
When she wakes up, she can breathe without pain. She has a headache, as if she’s been asleep too long, but it’s such a minor pain compared to before. Was it all a nightmare? The skin around her ribs feels tingly and tight, a funny ache when she shifts that isn’t pain. It’s like the memory of pain, down in the muscle, an achy, old break in a thunderstorm feeling she can’t quite pin down.
The bed she’s lying on is firm. Not hers. It smells familiar, so familiar, as if she’s in a hospital, a good one, clean and airy, and faintly, very faintly, the smell of antiseptic.
A low beeping sound, just in time with her heart; she can feel it pulsing sluggishly, a throb in her eardrums. Beyond, far away and muted, the hum of people speaking, moving, jostling.
“No-” she sits up.
She shouldn't be able to sit up, the crash--
“Easy,” says the woman’s voice, the first voice she heard after--
After. Abigail can see her, now, a small, young thing with a cockatoo fan of golden-brown hair and a puckish face; her eyes are blue, calm, and kind. “You’re safe, I promise you are.” She’s holding out a glass, a small, friendly smile waiting at the corners of her mouth.
Abigail looks around her, desperately: she’s lightly bandaged but unharmed, she’s in a bed in a mostly bare room, walls papered with a pleasant, silky peach. Nothing here except a bed, a nightstand, a chair, and an array of strange, graceful machines. That one, there, that must be an electrocardiogram, but it’s like nothing she’s ever seen before. It’s speeding up along with her pulse. There’s nothing attached to her, no sensors or electrodes, no leads. “The man. The man with the brown hair,” she starts.
“The immortal who kidnapped you, he isn’t here. He isn’t here.”
“How do you-- what do you know?” Abigail pulls back, huddling against the headboard, ready to run if she must.
“Please calm down! Your regrown muscle tissue is still fragile, you mustn’t tear anything.” The woman reaches out, but when Abigail pulls away, she retreats, tucking her hand at her side in a placatory gesture, the one still holding the glass resting it on her knee.
“Where am I?” she demands. Fear has always made her angry. “How was I brought here? Who are you?”
“Oh dear. Oh, Henry,” the woman sighs. She leans forward, setting the glass on the nightstand. Abigail stares-- ignores it. Her throat is so sore, dry, but she’s not ready to trust this. “Oh. Where to even begin-- I’m so sorry, Abigail. This is almost as sudden for me as it must have been for you. I didn’t even realized he’d learned to-- oh, that man.”
The woman takes a centring breath, and sits back, primly. She has such a genteel way, this little person, it’s at odds with her odd vinyl jacket and her working-class northern accent.
“My name is Arkytior. But call me Susan, please, my friends all do.”
“And complete strangers, too?”
“I know I’m a stranger to you, but I’ve been a friend of your husband’s for… quite a long time. He’s told me all about you and Abraham, his first family. I know about Nora, too, poor woman. Back at his very beginning, in the nineteenth century.” She takes another breath and smiles reassuringly-- reassuring herself or Abigail-? “The year is thirty-seven thirty-five. You’re in a very good hospital on Io.”
Good lord. She can’t expect Abigail to believe that. It’s like something out of Abraham's old space adventure magazines, right out of a dogeared copy of Amazing Stories or Other Worlds. William Shatner should be here, wearing gold, declaiming out of the television set. She always did think that Henry would look good with pointed ears, in blue...
Oh, listen to her!
“You can’t mean the moon.”
“I do.”
“Of Jupiter,” Abigail says, to bring home the absurdity of it all.
“Yes!” Susan nods, encouragingly, as if she’s just answered a question correctly.
“You can’t mean-- I mean, the thirty-seventh century--”
“Thirty-eighth. But. Oh dear. Oh, Henry, some days I could strangle him, he’s got no idea of consequences. Oh, I know why he brought you here, of course, but it’s all going to be so difficult to explain!”
“It sounds like rubbish.” Of course it does. It sounds like utter rot. She doesn’t know what to disbelieve first. “What on earth would I be doing in the thirty-eighth century?”
“Henry brought you here. I didn’t even know he was going. I didn’t know he could! He left a note to have a medical team on standby at the hospital here. Just handed it to me and vanished about three hours ago.”
Abigail crosses her arms. She’s not going to respond to any more of this-- fantastical nonsense.
“Your husband... he’s a very rare individual, Abigail. It took a long time, centuries after I met him to understand. For either of us to understand, and I should have known much earlier. He’s a--”
Susan-or-whichever-she-calls-herself spreads her hands. “He’s a young time machine.”
“Henry is not a machine,” Abigail snaps, despite her resolve not to indulge this woman any further. Each thing she says is more absurd than the last!
“Yes. He is. An organic machine-- grown, not built, sentient, intelligent. He was born human, like you--”
And not ‘like I?’ Abigail wonders, a little deliriously.
“--but taken out of time in 1814, just before the moment of his death, and used in some highly unethical experiments.” Susan looks sour, and rather older than her years-- or at least older than her face, if she’s really known Henry for ‘centuries.’ And she’s already met one other immortal....
“Experiments run by my own people, I’m ashamed to say. They were creating hybrids, grafting newborn TARDIS minds into living bodies, trying to create spies that they could control in dozens of influential species and times. But it was so dangerous. Many of the early trials-- failed. Horribly. My grandfather himself was one of the experimental subjects. He barely escaped with his own mind intact.” Susan makes an exasperated noise. “Not that he told me so. I had to find out about it from great uncle Braxiatel, of all people. He could have said, he came to visit just a regeneration later, he could have said something. ...Of course, he was terribly forgetful in that regeneration.”
Abigail’s mouth is hanging open. She closes it, and glares. Defiantly, she takes the glass and drinks-- it’s only water after all, a bit soft but no worse than the taps in Amsterdam. It’s like heaven, and she tries not to gulp the rest, setting the empty glass down with a firm thunk.
“Pardon me. I didn’t mean to drag you into family business,” Susan says, looking sheepish. “The hybrid time machines, the grafts, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Grandfather stopped the experiments, put an end to them. He and his own time machine helped to stabilize the newborn life-forms-- the second generation, Henry’s generation, were even able to keep their old minds intact. But only by forgetting what they were-- and maturing immensely slowly. The human mind simply isn’t ready to see in the fourth and fifth dimensions, you see?”
Abigail certainly doesn’t. Susan goes on blithely anyway.
“And a transdimensional newborn can’t just be put into a finite, linear body, and expected to manage. It drives the poor thing mad, along with the host. Not even Grandfather could take it for long. It takes centuries and centuries for a human to build up enough neural connections to collect the right sensory input, let alone understand it. Even with a Time Lord to help things along. Henry rather made some leaps, but it still took such a long time. He was just beginning to get really good control of his telepathic circuits and temporal senses a few decades ago. I didn’t know he could survive the vortex by himself, let alone-- you must believe me, I really had no idea he’d learned to travel.”
“This was my first trip.”
Her heart catches in her chest again-- as it had when he’d appeared in the woods. Henry. He’s standing by the door, leaning on his arm against the frame.
“How long have you been standing there?” Abigail asks, sharply, afraid and confused and not meaning to be cruel but still her voice is accusatory. Henry dips his head, contrite, but still smiling, like he used to when he’d managed to hide some pleasant surprise from her.
“Since you woke up,” he admits. “I didn’t want to wait a moment longer to hear your voice again.”
“Your first trip!” Susan yelps. “Without practice, you went-- millennia, and half a billion kilometers, with no idea if you could even survive? Henry, how could you be so irresponsible-?” She jumps to her feet, crossing her arms and glowering direly at Henry, banked fear in her eyes.
“I saw where I needed to be. I knew I could go. It was-- easy, when I understood.” Henry ducks his head a little further, smiles shyly through his lashes at Abigail, trying to look apologetic for Susan but not managing to tear his eyes away to look at her. “I’m sorry. I really didn’t have time to explain. I do now, if you’ll let me.”
“Henry, what she’s been saying--”
“True, I’m afraid, darling.” Henry comes to the bed, past a fuming Susan, extending his hand hesitantly.
Abigail takes it, clasps it tight, trying not to let her lip tremble or her eyes spill over.
“Why would you come back, after all that time-- for me?”
Because if it really has been centuries. If he is some sort of extraordinary celestial machine, her Henry, and he’s been living without her all this time-- so much time. She’s can’t imagine so much time, millennia-- the bed begins to feel like it’s spinning beneath her.
“I’ve lived a long life, Abigail. I’ve married and buried lovers,” he admits, and she knew he must have but it still hurts to hear it. “I’ve raised children, learned new languages, been on dozens of worlds. But time couldn’t take you out of my heart, dear. How could I forget you? How could I forget how much you meant to me? And I knew you weren’t ready. I found your letter, early in the twenty-first century.”
Abigail swallows. It’s becoming worryingly real, all of this. She’s had several nasty shocks recently and she may be coming round to the idea that her husband has spirited her into the future to a hospital like something out of one of Abe’s old magazines, and that he’s made a friend of another very strange immortal.
Henry is still gazing into her eyes, his own still faintly aglow-- literally-- but warm and sweet and as familiar as the beat of her own heart. “I could never forget how much more you’d wanted. I wanted so much more, too, darling.”
It’s the stuff out of her dreadful old poetry. Eternal love, outliving the stars.
Oh. Now she is crying. She wasn’t going to let a little thing like being flung into the future and learning that her husband wasn’t entirely human make her cry, she’s-- she’s simply furious with herself.
Henry kneels beside the bed, still clasping her hand.
“You said.” Her voice breaks and she has to fight past a lump in her throat, determined not to let the side down. “You said I would be dead in five minutes.”
“Yes. Five minutes from that moment I found you. You must.” He swallows around the words as if they’re too large for his throat. “For history to stay its course. We can’t change it-- I can’t change it. But every moment outside of those five minutes is ours. We can go anywhere. See anything. Visit Abraham, meet my children of other centuries, if you like. You don’t need to, of course, I’ll understand if you’d prefer to only revisit the life we had together--”
He breaks off, starts again soberly: “I’ll understand if you’d rather not travel with me at all, after the shock I’ve given you. I’ve spirited you off to someplace alien, among strangers, and that must be difficult to forgive. But please at least take this chance. Life. For as long as you’d like. Whether you’re with me or not. Don’t ask me to put you back in those five minutes, not yet. I’m not ready. Please?” Oh the sweet fool. He was always so foolish.
The tears are falling again. There’s a giddy, dizzy joy she can barely understand raising up from inside her heart. She believes him. She must be mad, but she believes every word. “...We can go anywhere?”
“Anywhere. Everywhere. Oh, Abigail, if we step out to the viewing platform right now we can see Jupiter rise, your first planet-rise. The universe is so beautiful-- all of time and space. I haven’t seen a fraction of it. I’d love to see it with you. Let’s go. Let’s get lost, out there.” He leans toward her, ever so slightly, ever so hopefully, lips parting as she leans up to meet him--
“If Grandfather’s Type 40 could talk, she’d sound like you. Henry, give the poor woman a moment. She’s just woken up!”
Abigail and Henry both turn to look at Susan, who still has her arms crossed.
“Susan,” Henry says, a touch strained, composing himself with a familiar and endearing effort. “Your grandfather’s Type 40 can talk. I’ve met her. We’ve had lovely conversations. We do share a certain predilection towards spontaneity, it’s true. Now I don’t wish you to think I’m not grateful for your help. I am, so infinitely grateful I can’t begin to express it. You’ve saved Abigail’s life today and mine more often than I can say, I cannot thank you enough, but--”
“Please give us a moment alone,” Abigail finishes. “I’m all right, Susan. I’m used to him, you know.”
“It’s been fifteen hundred years and I’m certainly not,” Susan says with a shake of her head, but she uncrosses her arms, and relaxes her shoulders, and has a fond look for them both before she leaves the room.
The door opens like a rime of ice melting, going transparent and as fragile looking as spun sugar, dissolving right into the wall to let her out, and then swishes closed behind her, reforming into a solid wall.
Abigail gapes.
“Did you see the door-?”
“Darling-- you’ve just found out I’m half time machine, and you’re worried about the door?”
“But that was extraordinary. Is everything like this in the future?”
“More or less. Some places are practically old fashioned. Others, well, they make this place look like our old apartment in Brooklyn by comparison.”
“Henry-- Henry, you must show me. Show me everything. Everywhere.”
Centuries have done nothing to dim his breathless, incredulous smile. He simply comes alight, reaches out and embraces her, and she cradles him against her, and her lips find his, and the universe is unrolling at their feet and neither of them care just this moment.
How love fled, and hid his face -- but they have found him together, amid a crowd of stars.