Chapter Text
The earth remembers everything we lose to time.
The doctor knows that very well. Everything his father taught him has proven to be true — when the sun sets and when it rises, the secret histories and dead bodies buried under millennia’s worth of soil and bones. All 88 ways the stars align at night, and how quickly a racing comet would incinerate you should it fall to Earth and strike you in the forehead. He remembers everything he learnt from his predecessor, and makes sure he leaves it behind in his work, to be found by historians and never swept away by the sands of time. Perhaps the doctor’s greatest wish is to be a story told by not legends, but the ones who despised him most. A man’s hatred always bears the truth.
The walk down the empty corridors is silent. The doctor makes an eager beeline for the doors at the end of the path. He walks with the eagerness of a sweat-laced orphan, his footsteps echoing against the metal planks and off the walls of platinum; like he beat the back of his mother’s head with a shovel and is selling her blood to the cannibalistic butcher. He fails to register the unceasing, jittery chittering of his right-hand man, who is virtually scampering at his feet alongside him, struggling to keep up. The doctor only needs the self-affirmation that the voice in his ear belongs to Agent Stone, which he recognises well enough.
“Enough with the whining, Stone, if I didn’t know what I was doing I wouldn’t be your superior now, would I?”
“Sir, I doubt you heard me the first time, what I said was — ”
“Did I stutter ?”
They stop two feet away from the entrance. The doors tower over them by at least five metres, and when the doctor brushes his calloused fingers over the surface he is greeted by a frigid chill up his spine. He looks to his right, where a rectangular piece of shamrock-tinted glass is embedded against the wall. A thick layer of dust coats the surface. This part of the facility must not have received any visitors in the past 6 months (or so), even the staff treat it like the backrooms.
“Sir,” Agent Stone begins, “I don’t think we are alone.”
A deafening silence fills the air above them, light and still, it turns the doctor’s brain to morning mist. He holds his breath, and hears two things, which is everything and nothing at all: his assistant’s breathing, racked with the dread of a prophet;
and, beneath the floor, a heartbeat. It is faint. It sits on the absolute threshold, like it is there just for the doctor to feel it beneath the soles of his boots. It beats weakly. It kills itself slowly with its pulse, it burns itself alive with the secrets it hides. Its fire burns from the bottom up.
The doctor throws his right-hand man an all-knowing smirk. “Why, of course we’re not alone, my good man! We have a funeral procession to attend.”
“A what ?” As the doctor has hypothesised, reasoned quantitatively and concluded before, Agent Stone is what one would consider to be clueless . “Did someone die, sir?”
“No, Watson, not yet. Someone will, though.” the doctor sighs — and then cranes his head towards Agent Stone’s ear, a pinch of sparkle and glee in his whisper.
“Just the rest of this goddamned planet except for the two of us.”
The doctor pulls the fingerless glove off his right hand. He slams his palm against the glass. The doors hum menacingly in a low drone, and open to reveal an enclosed chamber, devoid of windows and lit in a dim scarlet, cluttered with cut, exposed wires and stray papers of abandoned aeroscience research.
For the doctor, it does not seem that he even noticed anything else in the room but the cylindrical pod at the centre, sitting upright and the size of a multi-purpose vehicle — and what lies within its bulletproof glass casing.
The hedgehog sleeps on his back, his hands stacked atop one another as they rest on his chest. His body is suspended upright within the water, and his ankles are chained to the back of the pod in steel cuffs. The doctor pays close attention to the gold bracelets on each of the creature’s wrists — their iridescent glow bathes the water in a radiant vermillion red.
“Sir,” sputters Agent Stone, “sir, that — thing looks just like — ”
The doctor holds up an index finger, and Agent Stone instinctively zips his mouth shut. The former searches for a device sitting at the base of the pod, and kneels, beginning to key a code unknown to even his assistant. As he fiddles with the buttons, which click softly as if they’ve never rusted over time, he begins to whistle a melody. It is slow, it starts bitonally in B-flat minor and the parallel major, and it is ominously sweet, like it hides a tasteless venom that swallows your gut whole. Agent Stone is unable to solve the identity of the song his employer is whistling to.
The same low drone of the doors sounds again, this time from the pod. The doctor begins to chuckle heartily. He presses his lips to the glass. “Wake up, my little red giant.”
Tremors fill the room. Papers fly, their stories and their secrets will be remembered. The world remembers everything, and the stars simply watch. The cuffs on his ankles are released, and the hedgehog floats up to the top of the pod slowly. He lifts his eyelids, just a little, allowing the doctor a closer look at what hides beneath. The most gorgeous pools of molten rubies, and the vengeance that stirs within them smells like blood.
Then his eyes fly open.