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The dreams have been especially awful recently.
Hex is no stranger to bad dreams. Travelling with the Doctor tends to expose you to some pretty dreadful stuff that makes for some decent horrifying nightmare fuel, of course. And even before he’d had any clue that aliens and monsters and Evil-From-The-Dawn-Of-Time were anything to worry about, he’d seen some things during late-night shifts at St. Garts that were almost comparable. But there’s a difference between the bad dreams that make him wince and gasp upon waking, the ones that he knows are just his brain processing all the Bad Stuff and filing it away all neat and tidy-like – and the ones that linger.
The really, really bad dreams that make him wonder if there’s something really, properly wrong with him. The ones that get him staring at himself in the mirror for longer than he really should be, searching for any visible sign that a screw’s been knocked loose, that one too many bad encounters has knocked his brain for a loop that he won’t be able to come back from. Not that he ever can spot one. That would be too easy, wouldn’t it?
It usually goes a bit like this: he says goodnight to the Doctor or Ace – or neither or both of them, depending on how busy and how traumatised all of them are by that point – he spends a good few minutes searching for his room, trying not to feel too much like the TARDIS is gently making fun of him in the process, and then he sets about the process of getting ready for bed once he’s there.
And then he settles down, and he closes his eyes, and he’s in a library.
Not like the TARDIS library, because the TARDIS library is huge and sprawling and has an incomprehensible filing system that not even the Doctor seems to be able to parse, but the TARDIS’s shelves don’t reach so far upwards that they disappear into a misty stratosphere of drifting darkness. Here, the books are identical, each and every one, tucked neatly onto the towering shelves without a single tome out of place.
Hex reaches out to the nearest of them, fingers brushing hesitantly against the leather spines, and feels a shiver of something... wrong , tingling up-and-down his own spine. The best way he can think to describe it is the sensation of seeing your own bones. He shouldn’t be touching these books, he thinks. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
“Oh dear,” says the Doctor from the other end of the shelves. “Snooping around where you shouldn’t be, Mister Hex?”
“Like you’re one to talk.” The words are out of his mouth before he can think better of it, and he clamps down on them immediately. But it’s too late, the Doctor is already striding towards him, hands in his pockets, a smile on his face that doesn’t quite meet his eyes.
“It’s not snooping if you want me to find you.” The Doctor’s voice is light, but there’s an edge to it that makes Hex’s skin crawl like it’s ant-infested.
He slinks up towards Hex through the shadows so swiftly that it feels more like he’s teleporting, flickerflashing from one darkness to the next, until he’s so close that Hex can smell the ink-and-old-paper on his clothes and hear the cheerful tune he’s humming so clearly it’s like vibrations echoing through his brain. He’s reaching for one of the books now, pulling it down without a care in the world, flicking through it equally carelessly.
“...I don’t think we should be here,” Hex says. The wrong-feeling is getting worse and worse by the second. His skin is itching.
“Isn’t that what I just said?” The Doctor barely seems to be reading the words on the page, the rate he’s flipping through them. His eyes don’t focus on the words, but he reaches the end, raises an eyebrow at the final page, tosses the book to one side. It crunches on the ground with a rustle, pages folding in on themselves. “Hm. Lacklustre. Another, I think…”
Hex tries to ignore the unease he feels at watching the Doctor snatch down a second book from the endless shelves. He tilts his head back, stares up at the dusty spines, and tries to read the titles. Every time he gets his head around the shape of a letter or the structure of a word, it slips away from him, sliding through his grasp and through his brain.
The Doctor flips through another full book, then another, then one more. Hex says, “Are – are you looking for something?”
“Or other.” The smile that the Doctor shoots him is one that he knows very well. It’s the one that’s all teeth and no joy, eyes flat and blank and vicious, no mercy left. It’s the smile that’s directed at dictators past the point of salvation, power-mad emperors about to be toppled, each and every Dalek that’s ever gotten in his way. It’s the smile that you get if you’re in the Doctor’s way, and are about to be extremely not in his way, possibly fatally. It’s always given Hex the creeps, watching it from the sidelines, but having the full force of it directed at him is another thing entirely. It makes him feel like meat. Suddenly reminded of the fact that’s all he is – meat and bone and flesh stuffed into a thin sack of skin. The Doctor could kill him. It wouldn’t be hard. It might not even be strenuous.
“Here we are, there we go,” he says suddenly, and there’s another book in his hands now.
Hex says, “Can we leave? I want to go.”
And the Doctor says, “No, not yet. Watch this – I do believe you’ll enjoy this part.”
As Hex watches, the Doctor curls his fingers into the pages of the book – suddenly, with such intense violence that it’s like being slapped in the face. Hex feels his entire body seize with the force of it.
He says, “Don’t – ”
The Doctor smiles, and it’s that flat-eyed predator smile again. “It’s only words, Mister Hex. What’s that they say about sticks and stones?”
His heart is beating out of its chest, feels like he’s about to explode from the inside. The Doctor won’t stop smiling at him like it’s any other day, and his head throbs once – a single, searing jolt that sets the inside of his eyes sparking and shrieking – and as he watches, the Doctor’s fingers tighten and his arm tenses, and there is the most awful –
Rip.
*
And then Hex wakes up, panting and sweating and cursing in pitch-blackness, and it’s always the same when he wakes up from these dreams – he can’t seem to shake the overwhelming feeling that there’s somebody there. His half-awake half-crazed brain says it’s the Doctor, the Doctor’s there staring at his from the corner of the room with those unblinking alien eyes of his, even though that’s stupid – why would the Doctor be there, watching him? Why would anyone? The TARDIS wouldn’t let an intruder into his room, wouldn’t let them past the front door, even.
Nonetheless, he fumbles for the bedside lamp switch, manages to hit it by chance, watches the room flare into light as he takes shuddering, shaky breaths to calm himself. See that his room is empty, tidy, clean. He’s perfectly alone.
Nobody is there.
*
When he stumbles into the kitchen, bleary and bedraggled and sleep-deprived, Ace is poking at the toaster with distinct suspicion. There is a half-empty jar of marmalade open on the countertop, breadbag ripped open and spilling crumbs of a sourdough loaf everywhere. He’s pretty sure that’s his marmalade jar, but is far too tired to get into an argument with Ace about it. She’d only deny it wholeheartedly – or worse, just look at him and say, yeah, and? before sticking her fingers into it and shoving a whole glob of the stuff into her mouth.
He's not particularly hungry, but he goes for the fridge anyway.
“Wotcher, Hex,” Ace yawns as he passes. “Fair warning; pretty sure the toaster’s unionised with the kettle. I’d keep away from the toast and tea until I figure out how sentient they’ve become.”
“Sure,” says Hex vaguely. There is no milk, or at the very least nothing he can recognize as milk. There is a jug of water he deems as probably not Water-like Acid In Disguise, so he settles for that and a stale-looking muffin. He’s had worse on night shifts. For him, this is positively decadent.
Still, he’s worn-out enough that he nearly trips over his own feet on the way to the small kitchen table. He catches himself on his elbows, winces, struggles to a chair.
Ace laughs, still distracted by the toaster; says, “ Whoa there.”
“Whoa,” Hex agrees. “Got dizzy for a sec. Think I’m fine, though.”
Ace whacks the side of the toaster with a spatula, and there is a puff of smoke and a spark, and she says, “You sure? You seem kind of out of it.”
“You do look awfully peaky,” the Doctor comments, lightly enough. He’s materialised on the other side of the table, or maybe he was always there and Hex’s eyes just skimmed over him. (He does that, sometimes. Ace calls it his Invisible Man routine, thinks it’s endlessly amusing; says he should take up a career in cat burglary. Hex tends to say that it’s creepy and could he please stop doing it so early in the morning because he’s not sure if his heart can take it. The Doctor often replies that he has no idea what either of them mean, and just keeps on doing it.)
Hex unwraps the muffin, squints at it, remembers that he doesn’t like orange-with-poppy-seeds, and finds that he’s uneasy at the Doctor’s presence for no reason he can understand. There’s nothing especially threatening about the way he’s holding himself. In fact, he seems to be quite enjoying his cup of tea and doing not a thing otherwise, and it would be hard to look at him and see anything but a small cheerful man with a questionable fashion sense. Still, the uncanniness of whatever dream he’d been having – the details aren’t quite there – it lingers, it remains.
Hex shakes it off.
“Just slept weird,” he says, manages a smile and scrubs a hand through his hair. “Wherever we end up’ll probably wake me right up, yeah?”
“Probably,” says Ace, looking entirely too delighted at the prospect of things going horribly wrong.
“There you go, then.” There are energy bars tucked into the corner of a half-open cupboard. They look human-safe, at Hex’s reckoning. He squints at them, then takes three, shoving two into a pocket. “So, where are we heading today, Doctor?”
*
Later, they’re stumbling across the plains of an alien planet, and Hex doesn’t know what to say because he’s still reeling from the Doctor yelling at him. Actually, properly yelling at him.
It had been a long day, and Hex barely even knows what he did wrong after all the chaos – something about talking to the wrong person, alerting the wrong group of people at the wrong time – red instead of blue, against the Doctor’s explicit instructions. And then everything had gone to hell. No-one was hurt, in the end, but it wasn’t thanks to Hex, and it’s a miserable trek back to the TARDIS despite the fact that they’re all alive and a lot less beat to hell and back than they usually are.
As soon as they’re inside, the Doctor slams the external door and departs in a silent flurry of furious energy – leaving the two of them in the console room, quiet and awkward, not knowing where to go from there. Hex rubs his fingers along his knuckles, silently worrying at them. After a minute, Ace shrugs off her jacket and drapes it over the back of a chair, rolling out her shoulders. Hex watches her fiddle with her ponytail, unravelling it and retying it to sweep up all of those flyaway strands.
“He didn’t mean what he said,” she says eventually. “Back there, I mean.”
Hex shrugs. “Sounded like he did.” His throat is a bit tight, a bit dry. “Probably deserved it.”
“Seriously, he didn’t mean it. Trust me, I know. He’s just…” Ace trails off, and then looks at Hex. “You really scared him.”
“Me?” He tries to laugh it off, but Ace just shakes her head, and stares at him, long and hard.
“You all right?” she says, with a strange note to her voice that he can’t quite place. She hesitates, and then adds, “You’ve been kind of… off, lately.”
“Oh, cheers, ” he says, bothered by the assessment more than he thought he’d be.
For a moment, he bites his lip, wondering if he should tell her – but, no, what would he tell her? There’s nothing to tell.
“Just haven’t been sleeping right for a bit, now,” he settles on. “Weird dreams, you know.”
“Too much cheese before bedtime,” Ace says sagely, and elbows him. “Or maybe the TARDIS is trying to tell you something. She’s a bit psychic like that.”
Hex nods, even though he really doesn’t think it’s the TARDIS behind the way his brain’s been spinning recently. It doesn’t feel like her style, not that he really knows what her style is. (Of the two of them, Ace is definitely the TARDIS’s favourite – she always finds her way through the corridors exactly as fast as she wants to, the wardrobe is always quick to present her with exactly the outfit or necessary costume that suits her down to the ground. Hex doesn’t mind, exactly, but he’d like to get to his bedroom without tripping into the middle of an Olympic swimming pool or a room that’s only ball pits for once.)
“I’ve had strange dreams before, Hex,” Ace says, and now her expression is warm, fond and teasing in that way it gets when she’s in her I’m a veteran of the time-space adventuring conga and I’m telling you what’s what mode. “Get them all the time, it’s not exactly weird, with us doing what we do. Give it some time to settle, and you’ll be sleeping all right in no time, yeah?”
Hex nods, and finally moves to tug his own jacket from his shoulders. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
*
She is not.
The dreams don’t stop.
*
“I mean, what use are you?” Ace is saying, sprawled out on the library floor with scraps of paper littered all around her as she tears pretty curling ribbons out of the endless identical books, over and over and over again. “Too scared to fight half of the time; from what I can tell you just stand around repeating ‘oh my god’ in slightly different tones of voice. Oh my god. Oh, my god. Oh my god.”
Hex couldn’t stop her, even if he wanted to. Ace is a force of nature. He hunches himself up against the bookshelf opposite her, spine-to-spines, and watches it happen. He wants to laugh it off, solidify it into a joke. Ace teases him all of the time, this shouldn’t be any different. But for some reason, his smile feels stiff on his face. “Hey – hey. Come on. I don’t sound like that.”
She rolls her eyes, keeps on making confetti and streamers out of the pages, one book at a time. “Suuure you don’t. Well, fine – more Scouse, maybe. Oh my god. ”
His head aches. There’s something wrong with his left side, there’s a creeping numbness paired with an almost electrical prickling that’s making terror shoot through his veins because on one hand that’s all the signs of a stroke but on the other what in the name of anything is he meant to do about it? Ace isn’t going to help him, that’s for sure. Too busy tearing up books. The Doctor is... he doesn’t know where the Doctor is.
Ace is laughing to herself, shaking her head. “Useless, Hex, I’m telling you – useless.”
“I help,” he insists, voice cracking. “I – I help people. I’m a nurse, I – I can help.”
“Who are you gonna help? The Doctor?” She shrugs, careless. “Hex, hate to break it to you, but I’ve been patching him up a lot longer than you have. And he does the same for me. We don’t need you, mate.”
It hurts because it’s cruel, and it hurts even worse because he knows she’s right.
*
The Doctor takes them to the theatre, a quiet evening out; a play Hex has never heard of. It’s not quite his style, and it doesn’t strike him as the Doctor’s either and certainly not Ace’s, but it’s a weirdly good time anyway. Some sort of absurdist play about culture and rhinos. Weirdly depressing for a play about rhinos, but not bad at all.
If it weren’t for the awful headache beginning to take up permanent residence behind his eyes, and the brief Dalek incident that they have to sort out during intermission, Hex would say it was the best evening he’s had in a while.
All through, he catches the Doctor casting glances at him with an unreadable expression, and shaking his head and looking away from Hex makes a questioning face-scrunch back.
It feels like he’s looking for something in Hex, trying to communicate some sort of thought or meaning, but can’t quite find the way to do it. His attention seems to be more on Hex than Ace or the play. It’s a startling change. It’s more than unusual.
Hex wonders why the thought makes him so uneasy.
*
Hex has seen the Doctor defuse bombs, rewire spaceships, sew up wounds and trouser pockets and pockets of ripped time all within minutes of each other. He does it all with the deftest fingers this side of the cosmos, and it’s always mesmerising to see those clever fingers at work. And now he’s in the library again, and he’s watching the Doctor cross-legged on the ground, tearing books edge-by-edge into perfect paper squares. With quick, precise movements, he’s pressing his fingers along creases and flipping and turning the paper inside-out and upside-down. It’s twisting in the Doctor’s grasp like it’s alive, folds and valleys forming as it transforms from flatness to fullness.
There are paper cranes all over the ground, scattered in swirls and spirals, piled up on top of each other, sightless paper-faces staring into the darkness. They’re splashed all through the shelves, stacked on top of ravaged ripped books, the paper tide of frozen birds lapping up at Hex’s feet. The Doctor finishes another one with a flourish, adds it to the unending parade, and says, “You know the Earth superstition, of course?”
Hex tries to say that he’s heard of it, of course he has, but his head aches fiercely and he shuts his eyes. The paper is rotting. The ink-smell is thick and pungent in the air, and he wishes he were dead.
“One thousand for a wish,” the Doctor continues thoughtfully, and the ripping of book paper tears through the air like a slow scream as he takes another book to pieces. “What would you wish for, Mister Hex? I do believe more wishes isn’t an option, so you’ll have to choose carefully. You only get one, as they say.”
There are a lot more than one thousand paper cranes here. Hex would like to not be here anymore; would like the pounding in his head to stop, please, please stop, but he’s not sure he can wish for either of those things. Not that the Doctor is listening, or even cares. The Doctor’s never listening to him. The Doctor never cares – not for him, anyway.
The sound of ripping and tearing and folding stops, just for a moment.
“I know what I’d wish for, of course.”
Hex opens his eyes. The Doctor’s gaze has never been more cold, inky depths boring wells in his face. The kind wrinkles around his eyes are currently darkly cruel, all sharp creases like a sharply-folded crane.
He says, “I think I’d wish for you dead, that might be pleasant,” and the paper crane in his hands tears in two and falls apart to nothing and Hex does too.
*
“You should talk to him,” Ace says. “Think he wants to apologise.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He can’t remember what the Doctor should be apologising for. His mind feels ripped, torn, holes in all the places where the words should be. Can’t remember if he’s dreaming or not.
“Hex – ”
“Ace,” says Hex. His voice feels like it’s raw from screaming, even though he hasn’t spoken much at all today. “If he really wants to apologise, he can come talk to me himself.”
*
There’s a library in Hex’s head, and it’s burning.
*
His fingers are never not stained with ink these days. He’d tried washing it off, scrubbing at it with his palms and then a rough flannel, but the water had just run black for nearly half an hour like his fingertips were bleeding the stuff. So now he just shoves his hands in his pockets on hot planets and wears cosy gloves on cold ones, and no-one’s any the wiser.
Still, it’s soaking through his jeans, black smears on the corridor walls that he brushes up again, a corrosion prickling at his skin and the back of his throat, acid and rotting.
Ace and the Doctor have noticed, they can’t not have noticed, he can’t imagine them not noticing – but they haven’t said anything about it to him. Why would they? It’s not like they care. If they really cared they would have done something about it. If Ace were like this the Doctor would be doing everything about it.
*
The Doctor says, “Mister Hex – ”
Hex snaps, “Leave me alone, ” but there’s not anywhere he can run to, is there?
*
The TARDIS lands less and less often, days stretching to weeks in between locations, and eventually it trickles off to nothing altogether, but Hex barely notices. They drift in the Vortex, and Hex drifts through the unfolding labyrinth, milling around the base of the mountain range and kicking his feet in the swimming pool and avoiding the library for no reason he can understand.
He sees the Doctor and Ace seldom; catches occasional glimpses of them in the corridors or coming out or in of rooms. Sometimes he hears the Doctor muttering to himself, muffled music coming from Ace’s room, the occasional crash or explosion from very far away.
They’re avoiding him. Or maybe he’s avoiding them. Maybe they’re all avoiding each other. Hex can’t remember which it is.
Would it matter?
*
“Hold still,” says Ace, and flicks a lighter with a grin. It sets her inky eyes dancing with flame. “You know, I’ve always wanted to do this to you. You’ve got the sort of face that was made for burning, Hex-y.”
It’s strange. He’s not even the one she’s setting alight, but he still feels like he’s burning.
*
The Doctor says, “Have you been writing on your skin?”
Hex tries to remember where they are, what they’re doing. He’s been staring at the book in his lap for, no, he doesn’t remember how long. Console room. He doesn’t know what the book is. His fingers skim the paper and he flinches for no reason at all. “What? No. Used to, back in the ER. Notes to myself for… milk, paperwork, you know. Haven’t recently.”
“Never mind,” says the Doctor, who is watching him. The unblinking stare sets his skin crawling, even more so when he realises that the Doctor isn’t looking at his face, not really. His eyes are on Hex’s neck, sliding sideways to take in his bare arms, his fingers against the cover of the book. He’s watching Hex’s skin with something like fear and something like fascination. The scrutiny makes Hex even twitchier, makes him tug his shirt up from where it’s slipped over a shoulder, makes him hide behind the book and start planning a way to politely excuse himself from the console room and get to his own room.
Now, what’s going on? Is he dreaming again? These days, it’s so hard to tell.
*
“This isn’t the dream,” the Doctor tells him, paintbrush in hand, sweeping vast inky strokes across every surface in sight. The books go shrivelling and drowning in the wake of that brush, melting away and dissolving their way into sad blackened piles of paste and paper. “This is very much real. Don’t forget that, Mister Hex, don’t you even try. Now hold still while I take you to pieces.”
*
“I’m not asleep right now, am I?” he asks Ace, the two of them making tracks through the corridors, her just a few paces behind him, or maybe he’s trying to catch up to her ahead, forever and always.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Ace says, but it barely sounds accusing at all, it just sounds worried. And it isn’t an answer, not even close, so he just keeps on walking, hoping that if he gets far enough he’ll walk right out of the dream and into reality.
*
There is a library in Hex’s head.
It’s burning and burning and burning.
*
…
He’s not an idiot. He can admit when there’s something wrong. He knows that this isn’t a normal state to be in, and he knows that he should probably be doing something about it – be asking someone.
Nobody’s doing this to him. He’s doing it to himself. He knows enough about addiction to be wary of relying on drugs to sleep, but some days his eyesight blurs and grits fiercely enough that he’s halfway tempted. He’s not sure it’ll do him much good, though. He’s not not sleeping. He gets to sleep just fine, even gets a solid eight hours of sleep per night, it just doesn’t seem to be registering to his brain that he should feel rested.
He thinks about asking them to take him home. Wonders if they even would, even if he asked and begged. Ace might laugh. The Doctor might make excuses. Maybe he’ll spend the rest of his life haunting the TARDIS corridors. Maybe he’ll never die.
Maybe he should just lie down and fall asleep and never wake up again.
Maybe maybe maybe.
*
“Right,” says Ace. Her eyes are narrowed, her face is set. Besides her, the Doctor looks similarly solemn and serious. “This is an intervention, and not just ‘cause I’ve always wanted to say that.”
Hex blinks, dizzy with the effort of focusing on the here-and-now. “Uh?” He’s in the garden. He can’t remember arriving in the garden, but the false-sunlight is blurring the two of them into indistinct tense blobs. He can smell smoke. He scrubs at his eyes, and they burn with acid of the ink. “I’m… it’s fine.”
He makes to stand up, but the Doctor plants the tip of his umbrella very gently on his chest – and somehow that is enough to pin him in place. “No,” says the Doctor. “No more running. You’re staying right here.”
Which is enough to make his breath come short and his eyes widen, because it’s exactly what he’d been expecting, and he says, “What? No, you can’t – ”
“Not like that, ” Ace says, sharp and exasperated, and then, “Come on, Hex, please tell me you’ve noticed something’s actually wrong with you. This isn’t normal exhaustion anymore. It’s some kind of alien… psychic… whatever. It’s a something. You know this is a something. You do know that. Right?”
Of course he knows it. He just didn’t think she had realized. It’s not like there’s any external sign, anyway, he looked perfectly normal, there isn’t even the trace of –
“There isn’t? Look at yourself,” the Doctor says, softer this time – pulling away the umbrella, sliding it away to the ground.
Hex doesn’t want to. But there’s something in the Doctor’s voice that makes him cast his gaze downwards. He looks down, and sees there is writing all over him, cramped black ink running all the way from his fingers up his arm and past his sleeve, covering every square inch of pale skin. The same words, over and over and over, and he breathes, “ Oh, ” and then, “Oh, my god – ” because if any moment called for it it’s this one, and –
The Doctor takes his hands. It’s startling like a gunshot, because the Doctor’s rarely ever tactile with him. Hex’s instinct is to pull away, but the Doctor just holds on – not tight, but firmly enough that it’s hard to slip away. He doesn’t seem to mind the ink that smears and drips, unending.
“Hex,” says Ace, and now she’s crouching down next to him too, her gaze warm and concerned. “We’ve been chasing after you all week. When did you get so good at hiding from us?”
“We can help,” is all the Doctor says. His pale eyes are searching, calculating, alien – but more than that, they’re kind. Kind in a way that they’ve never been in the dreams, so this has to be the real world, right?
His head aches. He wants to sleep. He wants this to be over.
“All right,” says Hex, voice cracking at the edges – and lets them both in.
*
There is a library in his brain, and it is burning. The shelves are blackened and burnt, scraps of paper crisped to nearly-nothing making twirling trails up to the scorched ceiling.
The Doctor is there, but the Doctor is too, and after a second of startled incomprehension the first Doctor says, “Oh dear, how inconvenient,” and turns into Ace in a flurry of page turns.
To which the Ace that is already there says, “ Really? Nice try.”
And the second Ace says, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, shouldn’t you be thrilled?” and grins with sharpest teeth before darting off into the shelves, flattening herself into the shadows.
Ace drops her grip on Hex’s hand with a snarl, and makes to chase after her doppelganger, but Hex is shaking his head, and saying, “No. No, he’ll set you on fire. I – you can’t – ”
“But I can,” says the Doctor, and plunges into the darkness like a knife through butter.
Ace groans, tossing her head back to the ceiling in exasperation, complains, “ Professor, ” and all around them, there are flashes of light and explosions of rage as they flit and fight all the way across the limits of perception. Then, just as suddenly, the Doctor’s stumbling back, lips tight and white.
“My turn,” says Ace, hopefully.
But the Doctor just shakes his head and plants himself in the centre of it all, a diminutive pillar of sturdiness in a sea of destruction, and raises his voice like a trumpet call. It rings and echoes as he proclaims, “I name you Outis, I name you Null and Nemo; I know precisely who you are and I will not stand for this a moment longer – Nobody No-One, show yourself!”
And out he comes – Hex watches himself emerge from the shadows, and the body language is nearly right but the eyes are all wrong. The eyes are always wrong, he’s beginning to realise.
“All right, you caught me,” he says with a laugh that Hex has heard from his own mouth a million times – strange and hollow from so far away. “So now what?”
“No more of this,” says the Doctor. “Use your own face, No-One.”
“Wish I could,” he says through a pair of lips shaped just like Hex’s.
“‘Course you could, you’ve got a few,” Ace snaps. “Put them back on and stop using us as Halloween costumes, you inky creep.”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to pull yourself together after getting erased from the narrative?” he demands, face flashing this way and that, eyes staying always the same. “I had to reconstruct myself from footnotes, from APA citations, from sticky notes halfway to crumbling to dust! Of course I don’t have a body of my own anymore; I don’t even have a brain! That’s why I’m using his. ”
“Not mine, or Ace’s?”
“Oh, I tried yours already, or have you forgotten?” He now looks more like Ace than any of them. Lips curled, face sneering painfully at them all. “Not gonna make that mistake again, Professor! And as for darling dotty Dorothy – ”
Ace very nearly rears up and rushes him, but somehow Hex’s weak grip on her sleeve is enough to make her subside.
“ – well, the distrust isn’t that bad lately, is it? Much easier to go for Doubting Thomas over here. A day or two more and I’ll be fitting his skin just fine, and we won’t have to bother each other at all.”
“You disgust me,” says the Doctor, quite quietly.
“What’s the matter? I’ve heard you invite me in before.” A slow head tilt, a slow smile. “‘Nobody hurts my friends and gets away with it’, wasn’t it?”
“You’re a fan of strong language, it seems,” the Doctor says. “Here’s some you might not have picked up on.”
And then he speaks.
Hex feels rather than hears the words as they exit the Doctor’s mouth. At first he tries to process them as English, but quickly realises that’s more than fruitless; it’s not even remotely comparable. And it seems to ripple throughout the ruined library – making Ace flinch and nudge him behind her, making Hex shudder with the impact – until it’s so much that he can’t even think straight, can’t process a single thought in his native language.
And maybe that’s the point of it, because from the look of things they’re starting to affect the unwanted intruder. Hex watches with blurry eyes as he attempts to survive in the unfamiliar sentences, live among the impossible phonemes and tonemes and dance between the shifting conjugations. But he can’t get a grip, and he can’t get a word in edgeways – and in scrubs and slashes of lacunae upon lacunae, he is erased away to nothing at all.
Language resettles, and Nobody No-One is gone.
“He’ll be back,” says the Doctor, but it’s not so much grim as it is exhausted. And then he turns away, and sees Hex crumpled against one of the bookshelves, hands digging into his hair as his head throbs and stabs. The unceremonious departure of his unwanted brain invader has done nothing to lessen the pain. If anything, it’s made things worse.
Ace keeps yelling at him now, asking what’s wrong, what does she need to do, pulling him down against the ground and against her so he doesn’t fall over and hurt himself, but she can’t help right now.
It’s all right, though. The Doctor has it covered.
With clever, careful fingers, he puts everything back together. The scattered junkyard of ripped-and-ruined paper is smoothed out, reshuffled, flattened back into sheafs and bound back to books. The shelves are reconstructed and levered up to their full height, aged wood going from blackened and irreparable to shining with polish within minutes.
And all through it, Ace sits beside him, shoulder pressed up to his, hands clasped around his, holding him steady. Quite unlike her, she doesn’t say a word. Together, they watch the Doctor work his magic, and the ache in Hex’s head recedes to a dull throb, and then a distant prickling.
And then the Doctor raises the final book and slots it gently, carefully, into its place on the very last shelf – and his head is clear. There had been a tension in Hex’s shoulders, a tension in every bit of him – stiffening his body and his brain and soul. And now it’s gone, and he just about melts into Ace’s side. For once she doesn’t even make fun of him for it.
“Oh,” he mutters. “Well, now I just feel like a right idiot.”
“So, nothing new,” says Ace lightly, but it’s never been more clear that she doesn’t mean it.
“It’s not perfect,” the Doctor says, coming to sit beside them. “I did all I could, but some things are beyond repair.”
“It’s all right,” Hex says. “I think it was a little broken to start with.”
The library isn’t anything special, never was. But they way she looks at it, and the gentleness with which the Doctor treats it – it makes him feel like it could be. One day, if not now.
“Could go for a nap,” Hex says eventually, half-sandwiched between his two best friends in the universe in the middle of a library that doesn’t exist. “Maybe two. Maybe six.”
The Doctor chuckles, and Ace bumps their elbows together again. “Go on, then,” she says. “We’ll be here.”
And home is just one blink away.