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“Doctor!” Jack beams, arms flung out and eyes crinkled, and he hangs still and sterile and skeletal, and you think he’s always been wrong but this is perverse, is a wax figurine with a pulse. “Finally got you! Am I good or what?”
What emotion is that splayed across his face? Is it happiness? Irritation? How do you read emotions off a corpse?
He stands over you, face grey under the industrial lighting. He wasn’t here before, you decide, even as your mind tries to buck back into liminality. It’s like a logic puzzle: your cell is single occupancy, therefore you are the only person meant to be in it, therefore he wasn’t here before. QED.
It has taken you a very long time to learn cause and effect.
“Jack,” you say, and you’re aiming for cautious but you’re aiming blindly, back to the target and hand over your eyes. “How are you here?”
Your neck hurts.
When you push back the part of your mind that says he’s here so he was always here, the only thing left is teleport. But you don’t know. And it’s easier, when you talk. Speech requires breath, requires life. If you’re talking, then you can almost trick yourself into believing you’re alive.
“Doc,” hand pressed to his chest, mouth hanging open, and that’s shock but sometimes it’s done sarcastically and you can’t remember how to tell the difference. “Did you really think a place like this could stop me?”
Did you? It’s hard to pluck memories out of the before-now-after that was your life (you knew Jack you know Jack you will know Jack), to map four dimensional scenes onto your three dimensional vision. Jack Harkness is a friend, you think. You try not to think about how you can see his teeth.
“No,” you chance, flipping a coin, and his smile widens.
His eyes flick around the room, drifting from wall to wall. They stop on the wall you sleep against, the one you try not to look at. The one you carve a line into every time the morning bell rings. The one that reminds you of what you lost.
“Gotta say, I don’t like the look of your digs. Little cramped for my tastes.”
He was smiling. You know that, because you were thinking about his teeth. That’s a thought you had, and you know you had it, because it’s a thought you don’t usually have and the incongruity of it hurts. His face is flat now, head tilted to the side.
You remember, belatedly, how conversation is meant to go. Someone says something, and then you say something back. Your something is usually a joke. But jokes require steps, set up and punchline, one after the other. A timeline in miniature. And you—
He said something, so you have to say something. You said how before, didn’t you? You think. You think you did.
“Why are you here?”
“Why am I here?” His voice is sharp, and you can’t quite figure out the significance. “Are you kidding me?”
Oh. Did you make a joke anyway? What was the punchline?
You tilt your head to the side, mirroring him, and hiss at the movement. Your neck hurts.
You don’t think that Jack’s eyes were that wide before.
“Doctor,” he says, slowly. “Are you okay?” Sadness? Disappointment? Anger? His voice is black text on white page, is wavelengths charted onto a graph. It’s a flat nothing.
Are you okay? Your answer catches in your teeth, splinters in your throat.
Memories are hard to grasp but muscle memory works fine. Are you okay, Doctor, over and over again and you answer in the future determinative positive [ no-now-yes-I-will-be ] and the TARDIS translates it as [ yes ] and it isn’t a lie because it isn’t your fault they don’t know Gallifreyan.
Are you okay, and you reach for the word and there is nothing.
There is a ragged hole where your mother tongue used to be (except it wasn’t, of course. except your mother tongue shrivelled up when you were a child and the woman who called herself your mother surgically implanted a new one and memories are hard to grasp but this one hurts so much that you refuse to let it slip through your fingers again) because Gallifreyan is half spoken half temporal half psychic half mathematics and your mind is unable to formulate words in a non-euclidean language.
And you could just say yes but you don’t think that’s right, and you don’t know why the thought of saying something that isn’t right is so repellent to you (are you the shepherd’s boy?) but there are so few things that stick that you don’t want to try and dislodge it.
There is such a thing, you know, as non verbal language; you lift a shoulder up in a shrug.
Jack’s face does…something. You don’t know. His jaw moves a little. His chest rises rapidly. Death rattles.
“Right,” he says. He holds out a hand. “Let’s get out of here, yeah?”
You don’t like being touched. That’s a thing you know about yourself, along with the fact that you don’t like lying and you don’t like the way that these four walls make you want to scratch at your skin.
You don’t like being touched because it hurts. It hurts inside, where they— Where there used to—
But you take Jack’s hand and there is nothing. And that is almost worse.
You have been in the cell for a long time, you know, because there are many lines on the wall that you don’t like to look at. Before the cell, you were somewhere else, you know, because you have only ever seen this face reflected in the bowls of water they give you, and you have had many.
And now, you are not in the cell.
And you weren’t here before, because—
Because?
There was a cell. Cause and effect. You have to— You bite the inside of your cheek. Your neck hurts.
“Sorry,” Jack says, quietly. His mouth is turned down, and his hands are held out before him, hovering over your shoulders. There’s a device wrapped around one of his wrists. “I know you hate these, but I couldn’t exactly get you out of there any other way.”
There is a box behind him. It’s dead. It’s dead like you’re dead, like Jack’s dead, still and unnatural and stuck in rigour mortis. Jack follows your line of sight and laughs.
“Right on target! God, I’m good.” He saunters up to the box’s door, trails a hand across its sign. “Now you are a sight for sore eyes. Right, Doc?”
You follow him slowly. There should be something inside it. You know that, like you know your name. Something warm and soft and kind and home in your—
In your—?
“Doc?” Flat voice, flat mouth, flat eyes.
Your neck hurts. You swallow. Reach out a hand. And even though you know it won’t, it still hurts when you gently touch a finger to the P in PULL TO OPEN and nothing happens.
“Doc.” Louder this time. Urgent, you think.
You turn your head to catch his eye. He still looks flat and still. His chest is moving though.
You know he’s dead, because he is, but you wonder, suddenly, if it’s just you. If it’s just you who’s dead and he’s alive. His chest is moving, and your neck hurts.
“Jack,” you say. You’re scared, you think, and you don’t want him to know it. You can’t tell if he knows it.
You were in a cell, and you thought it was yours, and you were wrong, because this box is yours. This is yours.
This is yours, and it’s dead.
Jack pushes you to the side, ever so gently, and then he pushes on the side of the box. The door. When it opens, the noise makes you hurt.
Or, no, it doesn’t. Not pain, exactly. Something like pain, that makes your eyes tear up in the same way.
It’s bigger on the inside. You knew that, of course, but— Non-euclidean language. Non-euclidean room. Your mind tries to grasp at it and it hurts.
“Doctor?” He’s halfway into the— The room. The box. He shouldn’t be able to be that far into it. Bigger on the inside. “Doctor?”
His face flattens again. It wasn’t before, you realise. His eyes were wide, for a moment, mouth open. You don’t remember when that happened.
You know what he’s going to do. He pulled you from the cell. He’ll pull you into the box. And it will hurt. You don’t want it to hurt.
But cause and effect is hard and forethought is like molasses, and by the time you’ve had it, he’s already grabbed your hand.
You were in a cell before this, you think. You were in a cell, and sometimes they would put you in a room, and they would strip you, and they would put you under a hole, and they would turn a lever, and the water would come. And it was always cold and it always hurt, because it would come down so fast that it felt like it was trying to break through your skin.
That’s how this feels, as he drags you into the room. There is something inside this dead box, and it is trying to break through your skin.
And you.
You want it to.
You want it like you’ve wanted nothing else, more than breaking the walls or escaping the water or someone to talk to.
You are a dead thing, and you have never wanted before. The box is dead, and it wants you back. What does that mean? Your neck hurts.
You take your free hand, and you dig your nails into the meat of it.
“Doctor!” Loud and sharp, as he wrenches your hand away from your skin. “Don’t— You’ll hurt yourself!”
A whine, trapped behind your teeth. That’s the point. That’s.
“My neck hurts.” You’re frustrated, and you need him to know it. You don’t know how to make him know it. Oh. Words. “I’m scared, Jack.” Wrong one, but it fits. It always fits. “Angry, I think. My neck hurts. The—” Box, you mean to say, but TARDIS trips out across your tongue instead. Isn’t that funny? You didn’t mean to do that. “Something’s wrong with me. Her. With—” You want to rub your eyes but your hands’re still trapped in his. “I need to— I don’t—” Another sharp noise behind your teeth. “My neck hurts.”
Jack stares at you.
There is a way to— You know how to fight. Knew how to fight. Once. But fights are like conversations. You can start one (teeth normally, clamping down before you even think about it) but then there is a response, and you can’t always remember that, can’t always remember how to avoid it. Forethought. Step after step after step, and you’re still lagging on yours. You need your hands and you can’t get them.
“Okay,” Jack says. His voice is quiet again. Soft. “What happened to you, Doc? What’s wrong with your neck?”
“It hurts,” you hiss. You should’ve told him you are frustrated.
What happened to you. What’s happening to you. Cause and effect. Something will happen, if you bite him, and you don’t think it will be good.
“I know,” he says. Still quiet, still soft. You really shouldn’t bite him. “I know. Can I look?”
That. What?
“There’s nothing stopping you?”
Jack blinks. “Huh,” he says. “You’re being very literal, aren’t you? Back in the cell, too. You weren’t joking. You were just— Huh. Okay.” And then, “Will you let me look? Would that be okay?”
Would it? How would you know. How could you possibly know what could happen.
It’s harder, because he has your hands, but you lift a shoulder.
“Thanks,” he murmurs.
And he leans in, and drops one of your hands, and moves your hair out of the way. And then he inhales, sharply. His breath tickles your neck.
You’ve never been able to see it, of course, but you know what’s there. It’s the same, every single day, so it’s easy to stick. A thick knot of scar tissue just beneath where your hair stops. Sometimes when you wake up your fingers are curled around it.
It wasn’t always as thick, but. Sometimes you remember that it’s there. Sometimes you remember what it is. You’ve never been able to dig through it, no matter how hard you try. They just sew it back up again.
“What is this? What did they do?”
You’re still frustrated, but it cools a little, at having such an easy thing to answer.
“They killed me,” you explain, and his hand spasms against yours.
The room’s lights dim a little. You wonder why.
“Doc,” he says, and his voice is strangled. “Can you— Will you explain? What you mean. By that.”
“I wasn’t in a cell,” because you know this. Because you’ve had many faces and only one has ever been in the cell. “And then I was? And then the air was sweet and thick. And I fell asleep. And then I woke up. And everyone was dead.”
Oh. This feels— This feels.
That’s another thing you’ve added to the list of things you know. You know that you like explaining things.
Your lips tug up at the ends. Jack’s don’t.
“What do you mean by everyone?”
“Me. You. The box.” You say TARDIS again, even though you didn’t mean to. “The— There were others. Outside the cell. In other cells? And people who would give me food. Showers. Put me in other cells. Them too. Everyone. I don’t—” This time, the shrug is involuntary. “I can see them breathing,” you murmur. “They talk. But they’re not— There’s nothing. Like corpses. Like animatronics.”
You like explaining, you know, but you don’t know how to keep going beyond that. You don’t know how to explain the way you’d screamed yourself hoarse when you’d first woken up, and for days? weeks? months? after that. You don’t know how to explain about the nightmares, and how you can’t always tell if your eyes are open or not. You don’t know how to explain that the only reason you know this isn’t a hallucination is because the box is trying to push into your skin.
“Doctor,” Jack says, slowly. Something sickly trickles across his expression. “I’m holding your hand. What am I thinking? What am I feeling?”
You stare at him. His eyes are a little wide, and his mouth is parted, and his jaw is tight. His neck is stiff. Your hand is tight in his. You don’t. How would you know what any of that means? How could it mean anything? The dead don’t think, and they don’t feel.
His face seems to— To shatter, almost. “Psychic inhibitor,” he says, like it’s a realisation. “Fuck. Okay.”
Oh. You know what that means. He’s holding your hand, and it doesn’t hurt. It’s like touching porcelain. Touching used to hurt and now it doesn’t. There’s a link there, somewhere.
“Mm,” you say. You want to rip into your neck again, but. Something happened, last time. Jack did something. You don’t remember. Your fingers twitch.
He frowns again, suddenly. “Wait, no. Time Lords are low level psychics. This shouldn’t have affected you this badly. Did they—” He swallows. “Do you know what else they did? Doctor, did they take anything out?”
Did they?
You’ve never. God. You’ve never thought about that. You’ve never considered that.
“I don’t—” You say. You can’t breathe. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I was in a cell,” because that’s easy. Because that happened. “And I— Things happened. Days. I tracked—” Did you? Did you track them? How could you have done that? “No, I. I don’t remember. I can never remember.” You want to dig your nails into your neck but your hand is on your forehead and your other hand is in Jack’s and you don’t— “Why’re you holding my hand,” you mumble, because maybe he’ll remember what you don’t.
“Doc,” sharp again. Or, no, wasn’t his voice soft before? “Look at me for a sec, please.”
A hand grasping your chin, pushing it up ever so slightly.
You can see yourself in his eyes. Your own are wide and panicked and your hair is longer than— It’s long. Was it always? It feels wrong, so it must’ve been short before. Or maybe it’s always been long, and it’s always felt wrong.
“Pupils normal,” he says, considering. “I don’t think you’re drugged. They’ve definitely blocked your telepathy, but that shouldn’t mean you’re having this much trouble with—” His mouth drops, and he drops your chin at the same time. “Time,” he breathes. “Time Lord. They knew you were a Time Lord. Is that—? Temporal inhibitor? Is that a thing? Did they block your time sense?”
You lived a long life before the cell, you know, and you don’t remember much of it. Non-euclidean. Past and present and future and never weres and almost shoulds and things that will have always never happened and time looped back and forth each way until all that was left was a tangled mess of temporal energy. And that’s your life.
And then the cell. And the sweet air. And everything is dead, because for something to be alive it needs a past and a future but there isn’t any. There’s just now. There’s just now because memories don’t stick and forethought is beyond you and cause and effect is a thing that you only know exists because you write it deep into your bones with every second you have and even then it isn’t always enough.
“Yes,” you say. And drag a nail across your neck.