Chapter Text
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
As he fell, he prepared himself to run. If the impact didn’t shatter his bones. If this dimension had a ground to run on. His thoughts were racing at the pace of his heartbeat, making the few seconds seem endless. Get up, if you can. Look around. Go. He wondered if the delay with which each of them had disappeared into the void would turn into a longer stretch of time in this other dimension. Giving them time to prepare for him. If any of them were going to survive the landing.
It caught him off guard that there wasn’t one. He was falling, and then he wasn’t; he had the sick sensation of weightlessness in his stomach (used to be part of the fun, a very long time ago), then he was just standing there, a rocky, deserted landscape appearing around him as if it had been switched on.
Lucky for him, a boulder shielded him from his hostile travel companions’ view; even luckier that the Chuldur were much less prepared for the sudden change. They dropped to the ground with pitiful cries, flailing like a drowning person who hadn’t quite realised they’d been pulled onto dry land already. They probably inflated the drama out of habit, but it occurred to him that they couldn’t have been too sure that the Doctor had never meant to kill them. He was pretty confident that they had never shied away from taking a life. He stared at the chaos in front of him, overwhelmed by the plain bizarreness of the sight.
Then he finally remembered to run.
They were on one side of a wide, softly sloped valley which seemed to have been washed out by rain or a river a long time ago. Little vegetation remained, low-growing spiny bushes in browns and dusty greens, barely holding on; some splintered and dried out skeletons of trees. He tried to get a better hint on where to find water and shelter, climbing up the hillside to reach a gap that branched from it, but the loose gravel under his feet - and the possibility of snakes - took most of his attention. He couldn’t stop any more to look around. In the hierarchy of things he needed to survive, a solid distance between him and the serial killer family stood right on top. Shrieking voices followed him into the narrower valley, echoing between the bare rocks like a furious army of ghosts. But as soon as they had calmed down enough to take in their surroundings, they started bickering, and from the few words he could make out, everyone was blaming everyone else. Let them waste time. He kept climbing, and eventually, their voices faded in the distance.
The air was thinner here than on Earth, at least in the places he’d visited so far. It was still within his breathing range, but he wondered how well the average human would be able to cope. The Chuldur at least seemed no more inconvenienced than he was. Pity.
How long would it take to find him? He didn’t know a lot about other dimensions, other than what he needed to know to pilot his ship through spacetime. It seemed like a whole different use of the word. So far, everything just looked like a random planet, but he supposed other dimensions had planets too. What someone with a machine like the Doctor’s had access to, he probably couldn’t imagine. Maybe he was lucky, and the Doctor had just tried to impress him. Maybe even lied a bit. Maybe this really was just another planet.
Except he had been desperate to his core to have trapped Ruby.
With nothing at all to go on, he kept walking, using the pale sun in the cold sky to keep direction. The craggy landscape was like a labyrinth, and he wanted to avoid going in a circle, ending up back with his unwanted company. If they had any brains at all, they should have remembered by now that he was the one who was most to blame for their situation.
He had no idea how long he’d been pushing on when a quick movement between the rocks, about twenty steps further, shook him out of his reflections. He froze, holding his breath, trying to catch any hint of someone sneaking up to him. They couldn’t have gotten in front of him, could they? As carefully as he could, he reached into his jacket. In the inner pocket, there was a small pocket knife he rarely left the ship without. He was a big fan of clever gadgets, especially the home-made ones, designed to his needs, but every now and then, nothing could do the job like a simple, tiny blade.
He’d still give his left arm for a gun right now.
There was a scuttling sound in the deathly silence that surrounded him, like little claws on stone, and soon he saw the source of the noise. On a larger boulder, a creature the size of a small dog had taken watch, regarding him with black, button-like eyes in an almost comically offended expression. It had a stocky body, tiny, round ears and two short but prominent front teeth protruding from the tip of his little snout. He exhaled slowly. It seemed harmless enough; but he already had two small scars on his arm that had taught him not to be too trusting of unknown wildlife. Two scars and weeks of Art mocking him, starting the second he was done cleaning the wound.
But the critter was good news anyway. The moist shine of its nose gave him a hint that it had to live close to water, and if its territorial stance was any indication, it didn’t live too far away. He searched for a while, lead by more sightings of the marmot-like animals, and eventually stood on the edge of a small ravine. Down there was lush green, the most beautiful sight; water trickled from moss-covered rocks, and under the leaves of shrubs and slender trees, a tiny stream shimmered in the light reflected by the bright stone walls.
All he could do for a few long moments was to take it in, his eyes prickling. How hungry his brain was for one single colour, after a day of stumbling through grey and dust. That innate creature knowledge. Green means life.
He hoped he had walked far enough to lose the Chuldur. If they found this place, they would put up camp and block his access to the water completely. And of course, being on his own, he couldn’t simply stay but had to hide at a safe distance. He hadn’t spent much of his life in a wilderness, but he was acutely aware of one thing: Water attracts predators.
Climbing down into the ravine, he tried to come up with a way to carry some water with him to wherever he was going to hole up. If he could drink it. He knelt down on the side of the little stream. The marmot creatures seemed familiar enough to make him hope they needed the same kind of water he did. No salt, no washed out poisonous minerals. The trouble with life was that it was determined to thrive on whatever’s available. You could never trust it to be like you. He took one small, careful sip. It tasted sweet and clean and made him violently aware of how thirsty he was. He had spent most of the day walking through dust and rocks, and even though the sun wasn’t nearly as warm as the desert landscape made it look, he knew he was already dehydrated. It was a short calculation. If the only water here was poison, he would gain no more than a few increasingly miserable days by not drinking it. He drank until he was full.
When it didn’t immediately kill him, he started looking around for a way to carry it. The only thing he had on him was his leather case, which was made to keep water out for a while, but not to hold it for several hours. It was also far from clean, although that wasn’t his biggest concern. Maybe it could at least serve as a makeshift canister until he had found shelter. He had already emptied it - there was only the useless trigger, which he had stuffed back into the case shortly after his arrival, and the remote for his distant ship - when he almost groaned with frustration.
A leaking case would leave a convenient trail for anyone trying to find him.
He’d have to stay close enough for frequent trips to the water then. At least until he could find a solution.
Although his maze-like surroundings made it hard to navigate, they were strangely reassuring. If the Chuldur decided to look for him, there would be a lot of places to search, and they didn’t seem to have a lot of patience for long and frustrating tasks. The cragged terrain offered anything from narrow crevices to caves the size of hallways, their ceilings high enough to stand upright and their far ends worming away into the hillside. He found the entrance of one of these caves by chance, hidden behind a toppled rock; he could squeeze through just so. It blocked much of the sunlight, but it would also hide light from a fire. Along the way he had passed patches of dead and bone-dry bushes and trees, so hopefully smoke wouldn’t be much of a problem either. All in all, things weren’t looking so bad.
He was about to sit down to get a moment of rest when, from the back of the cave, he heard a whisper of a noise. He reached for his knife again and went closer, slowly, to allow his eyes to adjust to the lack of light. Back there, the walls were much darker than the rocks outside. He couldn’t make out anything. Nothing stirred or gave another sound. He stalked deeper into the darkness, carefully setting his feet on the uneven ground, and stopped again to listen. He counted to ten, to twenty, and when all remained quiet, he turned around again, extending one arm to the wall to support himself.
The wall exploded underneath his hand. He had already pulled it back reflexively, feeling not stone, but something softer and fuzzy, but the cloud of frantic little animals bursting into his face took him completely by surprise. They swarmed around him in the same blind shock he felt, the flapping of their wings louder than anything he had heard in hours. He crouched down on the ground, holding his arms up to protect his face, but when it became clear that the little beasts were not attacking, he was surprised to find himself laughing. From relief, at his own fright, at the aimlessly fluttering animals. He had finally reached that point.
The sun had already disappeared behind the bleached out rocks when he stepped outside again. He had meant to get a supply of firewood as soon as he had found a place to sleep, but time had passed much quicker than expected. He didn’t want to risk being surprised by darkness, which rose quickly now. And he was finally exhausted. Back in 1813 it would be morning, after a far more intense night than he could ever have predicted.
Cursing old Earth fashion, which had put him in a coat that barely covered his front, he curled up and wrapped his arms around himself. He would have to find fuel for a fire tomorrow, and while he was at it, something to put between him and the ground, to keep it from leeching the warmth from his body.
But at least he could close his eyes. He hadn’t seen a trace of the Chuldur or heard even the echo of a noise all afternoon, and he was sure he had lost them. A small voice, the paranoia won by many years of surviving in bad situations, wondered if the Chuldur might be able to sniff him out like a pack of hunting dogs, taking their time but closing in. He pulled his coat tighter. There wasn’t much sense in worrying about it. If they could trace him, alone as he was, he didn’t stand a chance anyway.
The cold woke him up some time later. For a moment, he felt disoriented without the muted, comforting light of the screens and consoles in his ship. He sat up in alarm, thinking that the engines must have failed, leaving him stranded in space. Again. Then the hard ground underneath reminded him that he was stranded somewhere else, with nothing to repair and five murderous creatures on this heels. He slumped back down and covered his face with his hands. They were ice cold. He had to get up and move.
A hint of brightness was coming from the narrow entrance, enough to guide him outside.
There was no moon and not a single star, at least none he could see from his place between the cliffs. Not even the smudge of a distant galaxy or nebula. Only the faint greenish glow of the planet’s atmosphere and the darkness of space beyond it. Was something blocking the light? Unless he was far out in the void, he should be able to see something in the sky. And even if this star’s galaxy had ejected it into the nothing in between, it could not be completely out of sight. Could it? Maybe he was facing the wrong direction.
What if this dimension only had one star, with one planet orbiting it? But there must have been stars, their sun couldn’t be the only one. If life had developed, there must have been more than their small world. Shouldn’t the sky be full of… well, leftovers?
So where was everything else?
He remembered one night on a different planet, in a rocky desert much like this one. They had walked a short distance from their ship and camped outside, with a warm sleeping bag for two and no fire, to watch the stars arching like a dome above them, twinkling through the cooling night air. It had been their reward to themselves for a drawn out, exhausting job in an overcrowded, clamoring megacity on an equally overcrowded planet, where only feverish neon lights bounced off the thick clouds of pollution in the sky. The desert had been Art’s idea; he knew how much Rogue hated that feeling of being smothered. The coordinates were already programmed into the flight computer when he walked back onto the ship, mission complete and batteries drained.
It would have been nice to at least see the stars.
And still, the sky didn’t seem empty. There was something he couldn’t grasp, something huge and imposing, invisible, churning away in the void. Something behind the night sky - no, he was jittery, nothing more. The journey had scrambled his head, not to mention the hours and hours of vigilance the day had asked of him. Of course he was paranoid.
For a few moments, he felt unbearably lonely. This night should have gone differently. They should be celebrating, relieved and proud, that their daring plan had worked so well. And the evening that had started so alone and moody on a balcony above a joyful crowd should have ended with… what? Not with him alone again. Hopefully with a happier kiss. He wondered if there had been a chance, just the tiniest one, of him falling asleep close to someone again.
He should have known it was a long shot. To be honest, he had. But the only other option would have been to walk away from the Doctor, and… there seemed to be nothing else worth walking towards anymore.
So he had ended up all on his own anyway. That was nothing new, but this unexpected splinter of hope life had paraded in front of him, just long enough for it to catch on, stung. Still, he felt better than he had in years. As if he had been pulled back into reality, a solid, living body, when he had all but faded away. A heartbeat instead of a clock that had lost its hands, ticking away without purpose. What a strange thing, this yearning for a man he had met less than a day ago. The strange, beaten up happiness of missing someone else at last. Someone he could hope to see and hold and maybe even kiss again, with a bit of luck. Someone to move on with.
He still dreamt of Art that night.
The next few days he kept himself busy. He found a dried-out valley, a dead version of the one with the spring, where he found enough firewood to build a respectable stash in his hiding place. After countless frustrating attempts, he was able to create a spark with his knife and one of several different stones he had collected. The bat creatures in his cave turned out to be effective protection against the pesky insects that started to swarm around dusk, so he didn’t bother them; but he found more of the kind in other caves, and they were easy to catch.
The possibility of running into the Chuldur at his only source of water, a risk he had to take a few times a day, worried him. There was no trace of them yet, but he did not allow himself to hope they might not have made it very far before succumbing to dehydration. For all he knew, they needed far less water than he did. He found a solution through sheer stubbornness, in the shape of a dead tree trunk, about as wide as his thigh, which he dragged back to the cave. It cost him days, endless patience and painful cramps in his hands, but with the help of fire and his tiny knife, he made a crude wooden jar big enough for a day’s supply of water. It was strange though, how the days passed. There were some that didn’t seem to end, while others slipped away in what felt like no more than a few hours. He wanted to put it down to being distracted by his work, but there was no denying that he got so much more done of the same work on some days than on others. Without a watch though - he had such a good one on his ship, along with so many helpful tools, only one universe away - he couldn’t prove it, and he had to drop the thought.
He etched a second jar from the trunk, so he could wash himself in the shelter of his cave. He still had to wash his clothes at the stream, one piece at a time. The Chuldur never showed, and while he didn’t completely relax, he felt a growing sense of control over his situation. From the little green valley he collected moss, which he dried; it was a bit softer to sleep on and protected him from the cold ground at night.
After that, there wasn’t much to do but to wait, through long days and much shorter ones.