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The walking begins unconsciously. Sleep is far away now, with the way the dream lingers. The details of it unclear, the wisps of terror still curling in the edges of Peri's mind. Better to move. Better to do anything at all than sit in her bed jumping at shadows. Besides, the TARDIS is a good place for walking, the way it curls up and round and back on itself. A person could keep going forever, Peri is sure, through hallways that never repeated and never stopped. She’d asked the Doctor once if the TARDIS really did have an end and he’d answered with a lot of talk that had no real meaning. The word “transcendent” had been involved. "Inter-dimensionality." "Hypercube."
Still, it's comforting to walk with no expectation of destination. Dim lights soften the walls, turn them shades of greyish-orange. The light doesn't come from anywhere in particular, or maybe it comes from the walls themselves. Strange, smooth things; Peri runs a hand along one as she walks. Unlike anything they could build on Earth. The Doctor said they couldn't build them on his planet either, grew them instead, great nurseries of pods that might one day bloom into space-time machines. That the TARDIS is alive, might be alive, unnerves Peri. Mutualistic? Commensalist? Parasitic? Who is taking from the other, who benefits, what's Peri losing that she can't even comprehend with her human world-view, the one the Doctor so liked to point out to her whenever she asked a question he thought too short-sighted.
Up some stairs. Round the corner. Past a library, not one of the ones Peri has seen before. Likely not ever one she'll see again. The world is far away here. Reality temporary. Everything behind her may as well stop existing. The direction will be forward until she grows tired and then forward some more until exhaustion sets in, at last returning to her room and her bed and a sleep so deep the nightmares will be forgotten. The aliens are bad, the robots and slugs, but the ones looking like people are worse. The Master, Sharaz Jek, the Doctor's hands around her neck. The fact that she can't remember this last dream means nothing to her racing heart, the fuzz at the edges of her vision.
Down some stairs. Through some sort of dining room, feet dragging. If she was anyone else, she would have left by now. If she was anything else, she would be Boquila trifoliolata. Shape-changer. Normal people, Peri is sure, don't live like this, running from the frying pan to the fire and back again. She must have her reasons for still being here. Ahead of her, the hallway splits into two, the paths only differing in how one curves right and the other left. Which is to say they both curve inwards, the impossibility registering as a dull ache behind her eyes. She goes left, spiralling right.
The walls are gunmetal grey. They weren't, they were paler earlier, but now Peri presses her hands to it, makes a triangle with her fingers. Little shapes tessellating out, each one nearly identical to the one next to it until gradually and all at once it becomes something else entirely. Where is she? This isn't any part of the TARDIS she's been in before. A stairwell with two doors on the same level. She leaves out of the second one.
"Somewhere," Peri thinks aloud, "there's got to be a map." The thought comes slowly, the words slower. A few more corners, then she'll sleep. Once, she ran into the Doctor, very literally, eyes falling shut and not paying attention to the path in front of her. She'd asked him where his bedroom was and had ended the conversation unconvinced he slept at all. The Doctor had wrapped an arm around her shoulders and led her softly back. He'd changed so much since they'd first met. Every part of him replaced, growing into himself again, or a new version of himself. By comparison, Peri is so static.
"I fail to see what purpose a map would serve," says the Rani, who doesn't exist. Hallucinating is unusual for Peri, unusual in the sense that it's never happened before at all, but hardly surprising under these conditions. "The lack of one hasn't stopped you from disturbing me."
Peri ignores her. Her surroundings fizz, static on a television screen. There's a table full of objects and she picks one at random, holding it up to the ceiling light. Only in her peripheral vision is it clear, wobbling when she looks at it head-on, something inside shifting and changing.
"Put that down!" the Rani snaps. "Do you want to cut yourself on a five-dimensional saw?"
Up, down, left, right, forwards, backwards, kelwards, garwards, psyche, jint. "It's kind of funny, how brains work. I didn't even remember our conversation about all the different directions until now." The Doctor had demonstrated moving in four and five dimensions. All he'd done was make her feel sick.
"We haven't talked about anything. You are trespassing."
Peri means to laugh but the sound gets lost somewhere inside her. "This is the Doctor's TARDIS. And you're not real."
Hissing, the Rani grabs Peri by the shoulder, forces her down into a chair, shines a light into her eyes. "Reaction times slowed, nystagmus, generalised confusion. Symptoms consistent with sleep deprivation. Stay sat down before you blunder into something and kill us both."
She's solid, the Rani, real and concrete. The walls are gunmetal grey. "How did I get here then? What have you done with the Doctor?"
"I was hoping you'd tell me that."
The truth is simple, or it wants to be simple, or Peri want it to be. Number one: she left her bedroom earlier, though the past is defined by her current location more than her memory of it. Number two: she's walked here, having never left the Doctor's TARDIS and never entered the Rani's. Line the facts up all up except they keep dancing out of sight. Seed pods on the wind and Peri's being carried along with them. She's almost used to it by now. Wonders where she'll land at last, what will grow out from her. "How big is a TARDIS, on the inside?" she asks instead.
"How long is a piece of string?" the Rani sneers. "Be quiet until I figure out what to do with you." When she removes her hand, the Rani leaves part of herself behind, fine silver threads from her palm to Peri's shoulder. They're almost invisible when the light hits them wrong, glittering in and out of existence.
Peri stands, brushing them off. Opposite her is a door. There's no reason not to go through it, the Rani behind her muttering something but making no attempts to stop her. Beyond, the room isn't quite identical, a little larger, a little brighter, another way out on the other side. The Rani in front of her looks up from her work. There's a pot on the desk, the plant with large flowers and small, sharp leaves. "Did I say you could move?"
Peri doesn't turn around. Everything behind her may well as stop existing. "What's that plant?" She goes to inspect it but the Rani snatches her hand before she gets there.
"Are you an idiot? The sap's toxin will slough the skin off your bones in minutes." A moment longer as the Rani holds tight and Peri cannot pull away. "Or worse. I don't know the full extent of its behaviours yet. I have no desire for the Doctor to come storming in here blaming me for your stupidity." This time the Rani doesn't leave behind threads but thin roots, stretching from her palm and burrowing into the back of Peri's hand. Already they've grown deep, pulling taut and snapping as Peri yanks herself away, bloody gouges in her flesh.
"What was that? Did you know it could do that?"
"Will you listen to a word I say, girl?"
They can't help but communicate in unanswered questions. Her skin stings when Peri touches it, the holes left behind by that brief moment of connection. Her feet stumble over the door-frame. Maybe she'll wake up again, heart pounding in her ears, another nightmare to walk off. She'll meet herself coming the other way, an infinite number of Peri Browns unable to sleep tonight. Her eyes are heavy.
In the room beyond, the Rani has a microscope. In the one after, a desk full of seedling trays. Behind each door they grow bigger, flipbook motion, spilling up and out onto the floor.
"What colour are the walls?" Peri asks, scratching at the back of her hand.
"Why should I care about interior design?" the Rani says, slicing apart a leaf. She wears leather gloves. Then, after a pause: "White."
They're not. They were grey earlier. Now Peri can't even see them. She holds her palms out, makes a triangle with her fingers. Through them: green. Colours changing gradually, then all at once. She wasn't looking either. The light dapples through layers of leaves. "We're outside."
"We're in my TARDIS."
Sunlight is something the TARDIS has never been able to replicate, there's a specific tone it has, all those engineers and botanists on the Doctor's home planet couldn't make it right. The Rani, rooted in place. A breeze catches her hair. Fluffy seeds dance on the air currents. Thistle? It's a long way from Earth for thistle to be growing. She's a long way from her bed. The next door will lead to her room, Peri knows this, she's used to how the nights go by now. She just needs to find it. How long is a piece of string? Long enough for a whole forest. Long enough for a whole world.
Peri turns, closes one eye, centres the Rani in the space between her hands. The wounds have healed.
"Now what are you doing?" Brown leaves drop from the Rani's mouth.
"Is it parasitic?"
"Do I look harmed?"
No. The ice in the Rani's eyes has melted, the cruel line of her mouth softened. A blood red flower blooms out of the crook of her neck.
There will be a way out. Peri will turn around, leave the way she came, the walls will close in again, dark then light. When she checks, to reassure herself that the door is still there - the door she only just let go of, though how long ago she couldn't say now - she only sees trees. Everything behind her, stopping existing. Something small, alive, flits between the branches. Peri turns back to the Rani, tries to spot the point where she ends and the floor begins. Can't. "Weren't the gloves supposed to protect you?"
The Rani can still move her arms, lifts a hand up. Still wearing the gloves. Red, like the flower. Roots stretch out from the dark gap between leather and skin. "Protect me from what?"
Once, the Doctor had gotten sidetracked explaining Zeno's paradox of motion. Apparently, nothing could ever touch because it could never close the final distance, the last thousandth of a millionth of an inch. A question borne of the short-sighted human worldview, he'd said, even though Peri hadn't argued otherwise. She wasn't arguing now, pulling the Rani's glove off, all those roots bound into the rough shape of a hand, the distance between them almost nothing. Her vision swims. If the Doctor had been wrong all this time then she could stay here forever: the roots, already quivering, already seeking darkness, would never reach her. Inches away from taking the Rani's hand in her own but forever separate. All those questions hanging in the air. Here's an answer at last. The word "transcendent" comes to mind.
Peri doesn't move, not as the roots begin to burrow. It doesn't hurt, doesn't even panic her. For the first time tonight, her heart calms. Overhead, the sun is bright. She sags against the Rani, head on her shoulder, feels the roots pierce her cheek, fill her mouth. What had scared her so much, earlier? Nothing real.
"Haustoria," she says, tries to say.
"Elaborate." It's less hearing the Rani's words, more feeling them vibrate through her.
"They're haustoria. I was calling them roots, but they're not. Not all of them." Properly awake, she would have identified them immediately. Should have done. Now, it's almost a miracle the word came to her at all. Something splits the skin on her back, pushing its way to the light. She hopes it's a flower. The Rani is out of sight now, Peri can't turn her head, but her last memory is of the Rani in bloom.
"You're implying parasitism again." No real disapproval. The Rani's voice is slow, on the edge of sleep. When she shifts, Peri feels it, close as they are. Closeness defined not by distance but by the way they curl into each other, limbs and heads and leaves. Both of them are changing.
A haustorium binds their arms together. A vine, a liana, a rhizome. Definitions blur. There's something growing under her skin, deeper, through her muscles, twining around her bones. If the Doctor finds them, he can join them. Peri will tell him she feels safe for the first time in a long, long while, though she cannot move her jaw any more and cannot form the words. He'll understand. All those other unsleeping versions of herself can keep circling the TARDIS, looking for a peace that's always out of reach, always around the next corner. Here, it's warm. A bird sings behind her. Do plants dream? She supposes they might. Photosynthesis requires light and so in the darkness there must be time to rest. Dreams about nitrogen uptake, xylem and moisture gradients. Nearby buzzes an insect, the drone filling her mind, quietening her thoughts. Deep inside, three sets of heart beats drum, the line between herself and the Rani long since lost. Gradually, then all at once. People dreaming of being plants, plants dreaming of being people.
Unconsciousness steals up on her before she notices.