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eve11Main Post and Chapter Index
**
River slowly regained consciousness to the fuzzy, distant popping sounds of sparking electrical equipment. Her head was throbbing, there was a persistent hum of modulating background noise surrounding her, and for a long while she couldn't figure out how to open her eyes. Then, memories resurfaced of dense, impossible air, and she inhaled sharply through her nose in sudden panic, expecting resistance but finding none. The deep breaths cleared her head, and the muffled background hum swam into focus.
". . . thought I'd lost my voice or something, was starting to wonder if they'd ever figure it out. Two days, I tell you. How can humans stand it, being so thick all of the time? River? River, are you awake yet?"
She was slumped against a cold, hard surface, one arm raised, her cheek pressed into something solid and firm that was jittering a staccato rhythm against her already pounding head. The Doctor. She blinked, focusing her gaze as her head lolled away from the contact, and corrected herself: the Doctor's knee, at any rate. The nervous rhythm stopped, and something tugged at her raised arm, jolting pain down her shoulder in a rude awakening.
"Ah-ha, there you are! You're waking up, about time. Be a dear and unstrap me. Where's the TARDIS?"
They were still in the examination room. He still had hold of her hand. Her vision cleared, and near images came sharply into focus--the metal angles of the chair and the details of the camouflage print on her trousers. But the view of the rest of the room . . . didn't. Everything beyond a few meters away was foggy, indistinct, and, as she looked more closely, ever so slightly swirling, like a water-color painting being spun around them in three dimensions.
River groaned and closed her eyes as a wave of dizziness washed over her. "Doctor, what . . . ?"
"You want to know what happened," his voice came from above. "Simple, it was Plan--" He paused and adjusted his grip on her hand, fingers searching her skin like a medic searching for a pulse. "Plan D!" he concluded. "Where as usual, I rescue you from the mess you're in." After a moment, he added, "And then you rescue me, admittedly. So, if you'd care to get on with it--oh, right."
He released River's hand and she winced, gingerly bringing her arm down. She braced her good arm against the floor and got her knees underneath her. "Plan D?" she echoed, fumbling one-handed with the buckle on the nearest ankle strap. She looked up at the Doctor but all she saw was the underside of his chin and the tip of his nose; his head was resting against the back of the chair.
"Plan D, yes," he said. "Three modes in your immediate past--A, B, and C--not to mention that ill-advised improvisation in the cells that really, honestly doesn't count as a plan, even for you. You have been busy, haven't you?"
"'Yes, but--" she stammered, still processing the view of the laboratory around them. She could make out the door in front of them, a white splotch that could be a lab coat, and nearer, a form sprawled on the floor, half-blurred at the edge of the line of distinction. "Doctor, 'Plan D' is not an explanation!" she finally decided.
"You want the particulars? Now?" He suddenly sat forward, the movement jarring the ankle strap out of River's grip as she struggled to undo it. "Bit busy for that, aren't we? I thought we were in the midst of brilliantly escaping from a maximum security top secret government prison."
The Doctor jostled her bad arm and River sucked in a breath. "Yes, I'm working on it! I can multi-task, you know. Tell me what happened, and stop fidgeting, for goodness sake!"
"The short answer is paradox and some misapplied extrapolation." The Doctor jerked his hand forward and frowned at the resistance. "If you'd just undo my hands--"
"If you'd just hold still--" River snapped, and then stopped, looking at him in sudden realization as he stared impatiently down at her. Pain forgotten, she sat quickly up on her knees. "Doctor? You can hear me? That awful thing . . . Sweetie, are you all right now?"
"You're asking after me, how domestic," he answered, and flashed a genuine smile before apparently remembering that he was cross with her. "Yes. All right. Never mind, never better. Now, I know you like to wait until I'm tied up to stop and chat but honestly, River--" He tugged tight fists sharply against both wrist restraints for emphasis. "Hands!"
"All right, all right!" River nearly laughed in relief. She hauled herself up and got to work freeing the Doctor's left wrist. "After all, why would I have been worried about you? 'Don't tell them anything,' you said, and then what? How did you undermine the device? What did you do?"
"Oh, it's all questions from you!" he answered, pulling his left hand free and immediately starting to work on the strap holding his right wrist in place. He chased away River's attempts at help with a petulant slap of her hand, so she just stepped back and let him work as he continued to talk. "Me too, I've got loads of questions. How's the weather been, what took so long, does this beard look as un-cool as it feels, did you happen to catch their names--the one in charge and the other one--because I've had a running bet with myself about it, did you find the bone knitters in the med bay for Amy's wrist, where's the TARDIS--hang on, those are all out of order."
"She's about forty miles northeast of us," River answered the last of the lot, her eyes traveling the impossible room again. "But she'll come when you call her. I was trying to tell you; plan A's a psychic switch. We can transfer it whenever you're ready. And what do you mean, 'paradox'? How does paradox get us . . . this?"
"You're asking about the quarantine," his voice came at her back, the slightly muffled sound indicating he was bent over, working himself free of the ankle straps. "My people have a trick for dealing with paradox. A temporal grasp, if you will. I don't just sense time, you know, I can massage it, stretch it, flex it like a--"
"--finger or an arm," River finished the sentence along with him, and turned around to find him mostly free but upright again and strangely still, squinting up at her curiously. "So you've told me," she said. "Or at least you will have. Doctor?"
The Doctor grumbled something about 'repeats' under his breath, then rubbed his wrists vigorously. "Well, a big enough, nasty enough paradox leaves an imprint that's easy to feel and grasp onto. With a good grasp you can quarantine it in a loop--sort of, not like a loop at all, like a bubble if it helps, but not like that either. A bubble!" he decided anyway, "so it doesn't pollute the original time stream while you clean it up. Which is what I've done here, quarantined a paradox in its own separate time stream." He stopped for a breath. "Paradox," he finished, "supplied by our antithetical timelines."
"But we've always been careful with spoilers." River turned toward the not-bubble again. She tried to touch what looked like an edge, but it was like orienting the wrong way looking into a mirror; everything fled from her outstretched fingers, no matter which direction she tried, as if she were always at the bubble's center. It made her head light, and she focused again on the Doctor as he kicked his ankles free. "Even I know that in the grand scheme of things, our timelines hardly count as a 'big, nasty paradox'," she said.
"Brilliant, you're following so far. But you've forgotten about extrapolation, supplied by them," the Doctor replied, gesturing vaguely at the room. He blinked, furrowing his brow at the scene, and then sat forward with his elbows on his knees and pressed his fingers to his forehead. "Hang on. Bit out of practice, haven't done this since the war. Half a moment."
After a few seconds, the bubble seemed to dissipate and the indistinct, foggy shapes around them gained definition, still frozen in time. River could make them out almost perfectly; guards with guns drawn, Duvall in his white lab coat, arms half raised in surprise, Ogden shielding his eyes from a shattering bulb. As the bubble's edge faded into the frozen moment, the nearer form sprawled half inside, half out resolved as well. It was the young soldier who had tried to pull her away at the last second.
"Right, that's better," the Doctor said, clapping his hands on his knees. River turned back around.
"Can the TARDIS land in this 'bubble'?" she asked.
"Not really a bubble. Mutually exclusive time streams. We're frozen to them; they're frozen to us. But the TARDIS exists across everything simultaneously so we should have a clear path to her." He levered himself up from the chair. "No time to lose, then. Let's go."
River blinked at him in confusion. "We don't have to go anywhere. Psychic switch, remember?"
The Doctor ignored her, his tone impatient, his stance tentative. "Of course, time will catch up with us the longer we stay in the quarantine, until everything re-integrates when the bubble bursts. So, which way? We really need to go."
"I told you--" River's confusion turned to mild alarm as he swayed in place, one hand still gripping the chair. "Doctor?" she asked, hastening toward him.
He took a halting step forward. "River," he said, color draining from his face. "Where's the TARDIS?"
Then his legs gave out and he crashed forward into her arms.
"Doctor!" River cried. She tried to catch him but her bad arm jolted sharply and she had to let go, falling backward. The Doctor collapsed onto his hands and knees nearly on top of her, bracing one hand against the floor by her hip and grimacing in pain. Energy crackled in the room. Shapes flickered and blurred around them, and a static noise filled the thickening air with echoes of shouting voices. Panicking, River tried to sit up, but the Doctor curled the fingers of his free hand tightly into her shirt sleeve and hissed "Stay exactly where you are!" desperately at her chest.
River took a dizzying breath and froze. The Doctor pinned her to the floor, his muscles tense with effort as he anchored himself against some unseen force. Then, eventually, the air thinned out and the room settled again around them. Soon the only sound was the close hitching of his breath at her ear. The only motion was the tremor she could feel in his arm as he loosened his grip on her sleeve. She sat up slowly, bringing a hand to his shoulder. He flinched away from her touch, and then let out a shaky sigh and allowed her to help him sit back, leaning against her side and her good arm for support.
"She eats paradox for breakfast, my girl. I should be able to feel her. Where is she?" he asked. His voice was rough and tired.
"You can call her here, can't you?" River tried to corral his quaking hands, but he just closed his eyes, took her wrist and guided her fingers to his palm.
"You'll have to spell it. Too many possibilities. I can't make out the details."
Dread settled over her. As the Doctor focused down at her hand, River caught sight of the metal monstrosity glinting at the back of his neck. No, no, no, she told herself; he'd beaten it. He'd beaten it and she'd never doubt him again.
"Doctor?" she asked, gently lifting his chin and searching his face for a sign of recognition. "Doctor, please tell me you can hear me. You were looking at me earlier. Please--"
"You're asking--" He stopped, swallowed against a catch in his voice, and tried again. "You're asking if I can hear you. If I can see you, or . . . or link with your mind. I can't. This vise--it's not taking orders anymore, but neither is it letting go."
"But we've been talking." River forced her voice to stay calm. "You're hearing me right now."
"Technically, I am predicting your timeline very precisely." He raised a finger as if in academic debate, his voice gaining strength and speed with the lecture. "Which I am able to do thanks to some dodgy modeling from the aforementioned vise, and the fact that we are in a paradoxical quarantined time stream. Paradox!"--he reached the finger out unerringly to touch her nose--"They thought they had my temporal grasp all sorted, but this place is so dull! So why would they have any reason to think about paradox? Or, more importantly, why would they have any data that could inform them of the inverse relationship between paradoxical and natural time sensitivity?" He stopped and frowned, drumming the air with agitated fingers. "I've lost you. Doesn't matter--"
Another spasm of pain coursed through his body, nearly sending him to the floor again. River caught his shoulders and righted him.
"Yes, it does!" she hissed. "Whatever's happening, I think it's getting worse."
He grimaced and took two steading breaths, before squeezing his eyes closed in reluctant agreement. "Time sensitivity is two separate and inversely proportional systems, and . . . they only knew about one of them. If you build a set of controls based on natural time sensitivity and then try to use them to throttle paradoxical . . . how are your maths, River?"
"My maths? Doctor--"
"Yes, it's important. Do you know what happens when you take the limit of one divided by X, as you force X toward zero?"
River sat back, realization finally dawning. "It increases," she said. "Exponentially. That's what happened, isn't it? They tried to stifle your time sense and instead, they ramped it up . . . enough for you to feel my imprint as a paradox and grab hold."
"See, now you're getting it! As my good friend George Box once told me, friends don't let friends extrapolate a simple regression line. Stupid thing!" He brought a hand to the back of his neck and growled in frustration when he couldn't stand more than the slightest touch against the device. "I couldn't force it to let go but I could certainly send its greedy little algorithms deeper down the wrong path. Help me up."
River did her best to support him, holding him steady while he gathered his legs underneath him, but she couldn't ignore the sight of the implant at his neck. The memory of those wires burrowing down into his skin made her almost physically ill. "How much deeper?" she asked. "I've never seen you do anything even remotely this powerful before. The damage it could cause--oh, Doctor, what have you done?"
He gritted his teeth, impatient hands fighting her help as much as he accepted it. "Yes, it's dialed up way past eleven on the meter. Yes, it's the only reason I can hold on to this quarantine for a tiny paradox such as ourselves, and also maintain it without twelve other Time Lords and a stabilizing matrix. And no, it's not going to last much longer, and it's going to cause a hell of a crash when time catches up with us again. So if you'd be so kind as to point me toward wherever you've parked the TARDIS, rather sooner than later . . ."
The TARDIS. River's heart sank. "Oh my god. How long--?"
"No more questions!" He shouted the slurred words outright and shook off her help, pushing her backwards and sending them both off-balance in the still room. River caught herself before falling, and he rounded back on her, frustration and fear finally sapping the rest of his patience. "TARDIS! Where! Now!" he snapped. "I don't like being kept in the dark, and I have been there quite literally for forty-two days, eight hours and nineteen minutes, and now you're here and she's nowhere! What have you done with her! And what--" He stopped suddenly. Then he turned slowly and pointed off to his right. ". . . is that?"
River followed his stance. He was pointing right at the sprawled shape of the soldier at the bubble's edge. His face fell, the anger and fear leaching out of him as quickly as it had come, and River suddenly realized there was more to that soldier's stillness than a frozen snapshot.
"Leave it," she said.
"What . . ." the Doctor said again, his quiet confusion almost more horrifying than his earlier outburst. He took an unsteady step and the room flickered around them. Pressure built against her ears and River took him by the shoulders, turning him away and snatching his hand up in hers. There wasn't time to dwell. She tapped out a quick message into his palm--TARDIS 40M NE--refocusing his attention.
The Doctor bent his head over her hand, muttering as he processed the information. "Meters, forty meters where? Forty--"
River brushed her hand across his palm to erase her words and started a new sequence. MIL--
"Miles." He gripped her hand, ending the message abruptly. "Forty miles . . . oh, River."
The weight of her words sunk in, and there was nothing River could do to soften the blow. He looked beyond tired. His grasp tightened around her fingers and he cocked his head, staring blindly at her face, brow furrowed, trying to work something out. Then, just for a moment, there was a spark of life in his eyes, and he flashed her a daft grin.
"Run for it, forty miles? Was that Plan C?" he asked, then affected a sober frown. "River, that's . . . that's an awful plan."
"Oh, and yours was better?" She guided his hand to the crook of her elbow on her uninjured arm.
"Rubbish. Simply awful." He gripped her elbow with one hand and her shoulder with the other, resting his forehead against his tense fingers at her neck and collecting himself for a moment before straightening up again. "It's no wonder you needed rescuing. You are very, very lucky I always come through for you."
River sighed. "I hate you," she said.
A small smile touched his lips, hardly visible in his profile at her side. "No you don't."
"I do." She took a cleansing breath. "Are you ready?"
"Ready to go?" he echoed. "God, yes. I thought you'd never ask."
**
Interlude II | Part 6
**
River slowly regained consciousness to the fuzzy, distant popping sounds of sparking electrical equipment. Her head was throbbing, there was a persistent hum of modulating background noise surrounding her, and for a long while she couldn't figure out how to open her eyes. Then, memories resurfaced of dense, impossible air, and she inhaled sharply through her nose in sudden panic, expecting resistance but finding none. The deep breaths cleared her head, and the muffled background hum swam into focus.
". . . thought I'd lost my voice or something, was starting to wonder if they'd ever figure it out. Two days, I tell you. How can humans stand it, being so thick all of the time? River? River, are you awake yet?"
She was slumped against a cold, hard surface, one arm raised, her cheek pressed into something solid and firm that was jittering a staccato rhythm against her already pounding head. The Doctor. She blinked, focusing her gaze as her head lolled away from the contact, and corrected herself: the Doctor's knee, at any rate. The nervous rhythm stopped, and something tugged at her raised arm, jolting pain down her shoulder in a rude awakening.
"Ah-ha, there you are! You're waking up, about time. Be a dear and unstrap me. Where's the TARDIS?"
They were still in the examination room. He still had hold of her hand. Her vision cleared, and near images came sharply into focus--the metal angles of the chair and the details of the camouflage print on her trousers. But the view of the rest of the room . . . didn't. Everything beyond a few meters away was foggy, indistinct, and, as she looked more closely, ever so slightly swirling, like a water-color painting being spun around them in three dimensions.
River groaned and closed her eyes as a wave of dizziness washed over her. "Doctor, what . . . ?"
"You want to know what happened," his voice came from above. "Simple, it was Plan--" He paused and adjusted his grip on her hand, fingers searching her skin like a medic searching for a pulse. "Plan D!" he concluded. "Where as usual, I rescue you from the mess you're in." After a moment, he added, "And then you rescue me, admittedly. So, if you'd care to get on with it--oh, right."
He released River's hand and she winced, gingerly bringing her arm down. She braced her good arm against the floor and got her knees underneath her. "Plan D?" she echoed, fumbling one-handed with the buckle on the nearest ankle strap. She looked up at the Doctor but all she saw was the underside of his chin and the tip of his nose; his head was resting against the back of the chair.
"Plan D, yes," he said. "Three modes in your immediate past--A, B, and C--not to mention that ill-advised improvisation in the cells that really, honestly doesn't count as a plan, even for you. You have been busy, haven't you?"
"'Yes, but--" she stammered, still processing the view of the laboratory around them. She could make out the door in front of them, a white splotch that could be a lab coat, and nearer, a form sprawled on the floor, half-blurred at the edge of the line of distinction. "Doctor, 'Plan D' is not an explanation!" she finally decided.
"You want the particulars? Now?" He suddenly sat forward, the movement jarring the ankle strap out of River's grip as she struggled to undo it. "Bit busy for that, aren't we? I thought we were in the midst of brilliantly escaping from a maximum security top secret government prison."
The Doctor jostled her bad arm and River sucked in a breath. "Yes, I'm working on it! I can multi-task, you know. Tell me what happened, and stop fidgeting, for goodness sake!"
"The short answer is paradox and some misapplied extrapolation." The Doctor jerked his hand forward and frowned at the resistance. "If you'd just undo my hands--"
"If you'd just hold still--" River snapped, and then stopped, looking at him in sudden realization as he stared impatiently down at her. Pain forgotten, she sat quickly up on her knees. "Doctor? You can hear me? That awful thing . . . Sweetie, are you all right now?"
"You're asking after me, how domestic," he answered, and flashed a genuine smile before apparently remembering that he was cross with her. "Yes. All right. Never mind, never better. Now, I know you like to wait until I'm tied up to stop and chat but honestly, River--" He tugged tight fists sharply against both wrist restraints for emphasis. "Hands!"
"All right, all right!" River nearly laughed in relief. She hauled herself up and got to work freeing the Doctor's left wrist. "After all, why would I have been worried about you? 'Don't tell them anything,' you said, and then what? How did you undermine the device? What did you do?"
"Oh, it's all questions from you!" he answered, pulling his left hand free and immediately starting to work on the strap holding his right wrist in place. He chased away River's attempts at help with a petulant slap of her hand, so she just stepped back and let him work as he continued to talk. "Me too, I've got loads of questions. How's the weather been, what took so long, does this beard look as un-cool as it feels, did you happen to catch their names--the one in charge and the other one--because I've had a running bet with myself about it, did you find the bone knitters in the med bay for Amy's wrist, where's the TARDIS--hang on, those are all out of order."
"She's about forty miles northeast of us," River answered the last of the lot, her eyes traveling the impossible room again. "But she'll come when you call her. I was trying to tell you; plan A's a psychic switch. We can transfer it whenever you're ready. And what do you mean, 'paradox'? How does paradox get us . . . this?"
"You're asking about the quarantine," his voice came at her back, the slightly muffled sound indicating he was bent over, working himself free of the ankle straps. "My people have a trick for dealing with paradox. A temporal grasp, if you will. I don't just sense time, you know, I can massage it, stretch it, flex it like a--"
"--finger or an arm," River finished the sentence along with him, and turned around to find him mostly free but upright again and strangely still, squinting up at her curiously. "So you've told me," she said. "Or at least you will have. Doctor?"
The Doctor grumbled something about 'repeats' under his breath, then rubbed his wrists vigorously. "Well, a big enough, nasty enough paradox leaves an imprint that's easy to feel and grasp onto. With a good grasp you can quarantine it in a loop--sort of, not like a loop at all, like a bubble if it helps, but not like that either. A bubble!" he decided anyway, "so it doesn't pollute the original time stream while you clean it up. Which is what I've done here, quarantined a paradox in its own separate time stream." He stopped for a breath. "Paradox," he finished, "supplied by our antithetical timelines."
"But we've always been careful with spoilers." River turned toward the not-bubble again. She tried to touch what looked like an edge, but it was like orienting the wrong way looking into a mirror; everything fled from her outstretched fingers, no matter which direction she tried, as if she were always at the bubble's center. It made her head light, and she focused again on the Doctor as he kicked his ankles free. "Even I know that in the grand scheme of things, our timelines hardly count as a 'big, nasty paradox'," she said.
"Brilliant, you're following so far. But you've forgotten about extrapolation, supplied by them," the Doctor replied, gesturing vaguely at the room. He blinked, furrowing his brow at the scene, and then sat forward with his elbows on his knees and pressed his fingers to his forehead. "Hang on. Bit out of practice, haven't done this since the war. Half a moment."
After a few seconds, the bubble seemed to dissipate and the indistinct, foggy shapes around them gained definition, still frozen in time. River could make them out almost perfectly; guards with guns drawn, Duvall in his white lab coat, arms half raised in surprise, Ogden shielding his eyes from a shattering bulb. As the bubble's edge faded into the frozen moment, the nearer form sprawled half inside, half out resolved as well. It was the young soldier who had tried to pull her away at the last second.
"Right, that's better," the Doctor said, clapping his hands on his knees. River turned back around.
"Can the TARDIS land in this 'bubble'?" she asked.
"Not really a bubble. Mutually exclusive time streams. We're frozen to them; they're frozen to us. But the TARDIS exists across everything simultaneously so we should have a clear path to her." He levered himself up from the chair. "No time to lose, then. Let's go."
River blinked at him in confusion. "We don't have to go anywhere. Psychic switch, remember?"
The Doctor ignored her, his tone impatient, his stance tentative. "Of course, time will catch up with us the longer we stay in the quarantine, until everything re-integrates when the bubble bursts. So, which way? We really need to go."
"I told you--" River's confusion turned to mild alarm as he swayed in place, one hand still gripping the chair. "Doctor?" she asked, hastening toward him.
He took a halting step forward. "River," he said, color draining from his face. "Where's the TARDIS?"
Then his legs gave out and he crashed forward into her arms.
"Doctor!" River cried. She tried to catch him but her bad arm jolted sharply and she had to let go, falling backward. The Doctor collapsed onto his hands and knees nearly on top of her, bracing one hand against the floor by her hip and grimacing in pain. Energy crackled in the room. Shapes flickered and blurred around them, and a static noise filled the thickening air with echoes of shouting voices. Panicking, River tried to sit up, but the Doctor curled the fingers of his free hand tightly into her shirt sleeve and hissed "Stay exactly where you are!" desperately at her chest.
River took a dizzying breath and froze. The Doctor pinned her to the floor, his muscles tense with effort as he anchored himself against some unseen force. Then, eventually, the air thinned out and the room settled again around them. Soon the only sound was the close hitching of his breath at her ear. The only motion was the tremor she could feel in his arm as he loosened his grip on her sleeve. She sat up slowly, bringing a hand to his shoulder. He flinched away from her touch, and then let out a shaky sigh and allowed her to help him sit back, leaning against her side and her good arm for support.
"She eats paradox for breakfast, my girl. I should be able to feel her. Where is she?" he asked. His voice was rough and tired.
"You can call her here, can't you?" River tried to corral his quaking hands, but he just closed his eyes, took her wrist and guided her fingers to his palm.
"You'll have to spell it. Too many possibilities. I can't make out the details."
Dread settled over her. As the Doctor focused down at her hand, River caught sight of the metal monstrosity glinting at the back of his neck. No, no, no, she told herself; he'd beaten it. He'd beaten it and she'd never doubt him again.
"Doctor?" she asked, gently lifting his chin and searching his face for a sign of recognition. "Doctor, please tell me you can hear me. You were looking at me earlier. Please--"
"You're asking--" He stopped, swallowed against a catch in his voice, and tried again. "You're asking if I can hear you. If I can see you, or . . . or link with your mind. I can't. This vise--it's not taking orders anymore, but neither is it letting go."
"But we've been talking." River forced her voice to stay calm. "You're hearing me right now."
"Technically, I am predicting your timeline very precisely." He raised a finger as if in academic debate, his voice gaining strength and speed with the lecture. "Which I am able to do thanks to some dodgy modeling from the aforementioned vise, and the fact that we are in a paradoxical quarantined time stream. Paradox!"--he reached the finger out unerringly to touch her nose--"They thought they had my temporal grasp all sorted, but this place is so dull! So why would they have any reason to think about paradox? Or, more importantly, why would they have any data that could inform them of the inverse relationship between paradoxical and natural time sensitivity?" He stopped and frowned, drumming the air with agitated fingers. "I've lost you. Doesn't matter--"
Another spasm of pain coursed through his body, nearly sending him to the floor again. River caught his shoulders and righted him.
"Yes, it does!" she hissed. "Whatever's happening, I think it's getting worse."
He grimaced and took two steading breaths, before squeezing his eyes closed in reluctant agreement. "Time sensitivity is two separate and inversely proportional systems, and . . . they only knew about one of them. If you build a set of controls based on natural time sensitivity and then try to use them to throttle paradoxical . . . how are your maths, River?"
"My maths? Doctor--"
"Yes, it's important. Do you know what happens when you take the limit of one divided by X, as you force X toward zero?"
River sat back, realization finally dawning. "It increases," she said. "Exponentially. That's what happened, isn't it? They tried to stifle your time sense and instead, they ramped it up . . . enough for you to feel my imprint as a paradox and grab hold."
"See, now you're getting it! As my good friend George Box once told me, friends don't let friends extrapolate a simple regression line. Stupid thing!" He brought a hand to the back of his neck and growled in frustration when he couldn't stand more than the slightest touch against the device. "I couldn't force it to let go but I could certainly send its greedy little algorithms deeper down the wrong path. Help me up."
River did her best to support him, holding him steady while he gathered his legs underneath him, but she couldn't ignore the sight of the implant at his neck. The memory of those wires burrowing down into his skin made her almost physically ill. "How much deeper?" she asked. "I've never seen you do anything even remotely this powerful before. The damage it could cause--oh, Doctor, what have you done?"
He gritted his teeth, impatient hands fighting her help as much as he accepted it. "Yes, it's dialed up way past eleven on the meter. Yes, it's the only reason I can hold on to this quarantine for a tiny paradox such as ourselves, and also maintain it without twelve other Time Lords and a stabilizing matrix. And no, it's not going to last much longer, and it's going to cause a hell of a crash when time catches up with us again. So if you'd be so kind as to point me toward wherever you've parked the TARDIS, rather sooner than later . . ."
The TARDIS. River's heart sank. "Oh my god. How long--?"
"No more questions!" He shouted the slurred words outright and shook off her help, pushing her backwards and sending them both off-balance in the still room. River caught herself before falling, and he rounded back on her, frustration and fear finally sapping the rest of his patience. "TARDIS! Where! Now!" he snapped. "I don't like being kept in the dark, and I have been there quite literally for forty-two days, eight hours and nineteen minutes, and now you're here and she's nowhere! What have you done with her! And what--" He stopped suddenly. Then he turned slowly and pointed off to his right. ". . . is that?"
River followed his stance. He was pointing right at the sprawled shape of the soldier at the bubble's edge. His face fell, the anger and fear leaching out of him as quickly as it had come, and River suddenly realized there was more to that soldier's stillness than a frozen snapshot.
"Leave it," she said.
"What . . ." the Doctor said again, his quiet confusion almost more horrifying than his earlier outburst. He took an unsteady step and the room flickered around them. Pressure built against her ears and River took him by the shoulders, turning him away and snatching his hand up in hers. There wasn't time to dwell. She tapped out a quick message into his palm--TARDIS 40M NE--refocusing his attention.
The Doctor bent his head over her hand, muttering as he processed the information. "Meters, forty meters where? Forty--"
River brushed her hand across his palm to erase her words and started a new sequence. MIL--
"Miles." He gripped her hand, ending the message abruptly. "Forty miles . . . oh, River."
The weight of her words sunk in, and there was nothing River could do to soften the blow. He looked beyond tired. His grasp tightened around her fingers and he cocked his head, staring blindly at her face, brow furrowed, trying to work something out. Then, just for a moment, there was a spark of life in his eyes, and he flashed her a daft grin.
"Run for it, forty miles? Was that Plan C?" he asked, then affected a sober frown. "River, that's . . . that's an awful plan."
"Oh, and yours was better?" She guided his hand to the crook of her elbow on her uninjured arm.
"Rubbish. Simply awful." He gripped her elbow with one hand and her shoulder with the other, resting his forehead against his tense fingers at her neck and collecting himself for a moment before straightening up again. "It's no wonder you needed rescuing. You are very, very lucky I always come through for you."
River sighed. "I hate you," she said.
A small smile touched his lips, hardly visible in his profile at her side. "No you don't."
"I do." She took a cleansing breath. "Are you ready?"
"Ready to go?" he echoed. "God, yes. I thought you'd never ask."
**
Interlude II | Part 6
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Date: 2015-10-17 05:13 pm (UTC)And I just want to read a whole textbook on Time Lord senses now. :)
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Date: 2015-10-17 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-17 11:13 pm (UTC)