Work Text:
Turlough had gotten used to the weighing pain around his neck and head since he had made his deal with the black guardian, and yet it had never been as strong as now in this… large… white… void. Where was he? Now his neck had started itching too, how annoying. He scratched mindlessly at his neck but was met with… feathers?
He patted desperately around the area where he scratched. His whole neck was covered in… feathers. Holding onto his adams apple, he felt movement too. Something scratching at the edges of his elastic skin. Suddenly he felt it, the suffocating down pressing against the walls of his esophagus. He gagged on it, but the writhing mass just clawed it’s way through his airways, filling him like a cloth doll. Wings beating and pulsating against the hollow balloon of his body, pulling on his body in all directions. Somehow subduing his survival instinct that had swiftly developed into panic he found himself with a sense of… acceptance. With no control over his body he shone his focus inwards, he was still there, right?
Nothing could take that away, he was just a mind after all. A brain commanding a heart commanding a body. Pushing blood through flesh… through feathers. Ever since he arrived on earth his body hadn’t felt a part of him anyways. Always dressed up as something he was not, a schoolboy from earth. He was just a mind commanding a heart commanding a uniform to straggle behind the other kids. He was just a mind commanding a heart commanding a pair of lungs fighting to push and pull on air that he was never meant to breathe.
Briefly finding some comfort in that thought, he was awoken again by a new presence in his body. Growing inwards from where his left wristbone used to be, he felt something long and slippery worming past the beings that had taken over his body, making his arm bulge. Finding a fat one right in the center of Turlough’s chest it swiftly wrapped itself around the thing and seemed to swallow it in one bite. The rest of the beings seemed to notice this newly formed threat to their safety, stopped their writhing, and briskly abandoned Turlough’s body, moving through the skin as if it was a sheet of loosely strung silk, leaving only the wriggling snake-like presence at the core of his empty chest, pulsing like a make-shift heart.
All sensation and warmth that has previously abandoned him had been returned to him, and it made him feel more alive than he had ever felt. Something about this new presence felt powerful, freeing. Just as Turlough had settled into this newfound sense of control, he grasped for his chest in pain as the creature seemed to have overseen an opponent and it had taken it’s chance to attack and find control over Turlough once again. Seeping Turlough in pain as the creature bit and clawed at eachother, keeling him over. He envisioned the mass in his mind, orbiting eachothers center of mass, finding eachothers weakest point. Black. Red. Black. Red. Black. Black. Black…
White. The TARDIS interior was always a plain eggshell white. Turlough was sitting up in bed surrounded by the many childish trinkets and toys collected in the room that he was assigned by Tegan. Sweat droplets had gathered and turned cold around his eyebrows. It was only then that he noticed the doctor standing in the opening of his door with a desperate expression.
“Turlough! Thank god, you’re awake” He quickly gasped for air, he appeared to have been running “There’s something wrong with Tegan”