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The Doctor had dreamed. He dreamed of time, space and an infinite vastness of blue. He also dreamed of pain, blindness, deafness and of limbs being torn off one by one. When he woke up from his mad dreams it was both with relief and with fear that he sat up in a bed in the world of those awake.
He was sitting in a bed in a one room house. Amy and Rory were sitting at the only two chairs at a crude wooden table. Both rose from their chairs and moved to the Doctor’s bedside.
Amy opened her lips and spoke. The Doctor just stared at her lips without comprehending what she was saying. He could speak English. He could do so fluently and sound like a native of England, America, Australia or any other English speaking place in any time period. Normally, he did not have to draw upon his own knowledge of the language as his psychic link with the TARDIS would do it for him.
The Doctor adjusted his thinking to speak in English, ignoring what that meant. Amy had just asked him how he felt and that they were worried about how he had suddenly passed out.
The Doctor smiled and said “I’m fine.”
The Doctor stood in front of the TARDIS. He could only make out a general blur of blue under the hard sap of a temur tree. The sap of a temur tree was a naturally occuring insulator for psychic transmissions. It was wonderful for helping overly sensitive telepaths getting peace when they did not want to deal with their abilities, but horrible for a Timelord separated from his TARDIS. He could not hear even the faintest whisper from her.
With the tools onboard the TARDIS he could easily break through the amber. On the other hand, with the tools available in the abandoned village they had landed in it would take him days to cut through. It was alright though, he would just start working until he came up with a masterful plan to get through to the TARDIS faster.
Amy and Rory had scouted the area. There really was no sentient life anywhere in the area. On the other hand there was plenty of food that they could forage for and the village had furniture, clothing, materials and almost anything they could dream of that did not need a motor or battery. There were a great many mining tools, which they brought to the Doctor.
They found him standing next to the encased TARDIS, under the shade of the large, heart shaped leaves of the temur tree. The trunk was thicker than a house. The Doctor did not turn to acknowledge them as they approached. He was moving his limbs in circular motions one at a time. It was like he was checking to see if they were still there.
“Doctor, we brought the tools you asked for,” Rory said.
The Doctor spun around, a look of honest surprise on his face. “Good, good, well everybody grab a pick and let’s start digging.”
To describe the process as boring would be an understatement. There were no aliens chasing them, no deadly plague threatening to kill them and the weather was not that bad. As they dug through the amber the Doctor would talk on and on. He talked about how it had been a freak accident that they had parked the TARDIS under a temur tree whose trunk had been about to burst to expel excess sap and how this had been a mining village until the ore had seem had dried up. When he spoke his accent kept changing and the slang was often so different that Amy and Rory would have to stop to try and figure out what he was saying. Luckily, the Doctor was repeating himself a great deal, so by the third or fourth repetition they could decipher it.
“Doctor, are you going to keep working all night?” Amy asked.
“Is it that late already?” The Doctor looked up from the hole he had chipped into the amber. Sure enough, it was noticeably darker than it had been before.
“I suppose it has gotten a bit late.” The Doctor slowly lowered his pick to the ground and wiping his brow.
“Come on, Rory made dinner.”
The Doctor followed her back to the house that they had taken over. He kept on fussing with his bowtie, playing with random odds and ends he drew from his bottomless pockets and touching everything they passed by. When he touched something he would mentally say the name of the object over and over in his head. He would say it in Gallifreyan, English and then in at least five other languages. His lips would move to form the words but he did not actually voice them out loud.
The Doctor did not want to sleep that night. He would focus on things with all of his attention and remind himself that it was real, that he was not already asleep. If the waking world felt like a dream then what would a dream feel like?
Mentally, he kept on reaching out for the TARDIS, trying to feel her there. Even when separated from her by large distances and gaps in time he could still feel her there. Right now it was silence, darkness, nothingness. The Doctor pulled a red blanket tightly around himself, perhaps a bit too tightly, and held onto it until his knuckles turned white.
Against his will and without his consent, a deep sleep forced itself onto him.
“Oi, Doctor, wake up,” Amy said as she shook the Doctor’s shoulders.
The Doctor shot up into a sitting position so fast that his head hit Rory’s. The Doctor did not notice the pain as he could feel the TARDIS in his head. He looked around and he was in the control room.
“It was all just a dream,” the Doctor mumbled.
“No, it wasn’t,” Rory said as he rubbed his forehead.
“You wouldn’t wake up. We spent two weeks digging the TARDIS out of that tumor sap,” Amy said.
“Temur sap,” the Doctor said. He shot up to his feet. Everything was as it should be. “I must have exhausted myself by constantly trying to reach out to the TARDIS. Temur sap is a telepathic insulator so it was like running into a stone wall over and over again with a feather.”
“We know,” Rory said.
“You told us all about it over and over.”
“Sorry, about that I was just a bit distracted.”
“We know,” both of them said.
“So how about we go somewhere a bit less boring, more interesting and with no temur trees at all?” The Doctor hopped up to the consul, already ready to move on from this event.