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eve11Main Post and Chapter Index
**
They didn't stay put for long. Amy had never taken kindly to things that made her cry, and when she could no longer keep her tears in check by swiping at her cheek, she gave the derelict TARDIS console a shove for good measure and stalked out through the main doors. Rory followed, of course, pausing for only a moment to look back at the silent control room before hurrying outside after her. Rain spat at him, the wind picking up in anticipation of the gale.
"Amy!" he called, searching for her in the dusk. He saw a flash of movement at the front of the campsite by the old delivery van that had taken them across the country. He set off in that direction, catching her arm as she went for the door. "Amy, please! Where are you going?"
"I don't know." She shrugged him off, her words trembling with anger. "Somewhere that's not here."
"We can't leave the TARDIS--"
"The TARDIS?" She turned on him. "The TARDIS is giving up, if you didn't notice, and I'm through waiting!" She put a foot up on the van's external step and yanked the door open. "You can come if you want," she told him, "but I'm driving."
"Amy," Rory started. "That's--"
She reached for the steering wheel for leverage to help pull her into the cab, and found nothing but empty air. She fell back against Rory with a surprised grunt. He caught her easily, keeping them both on balance.
"That's the passenger side," he said gently, steadying her on her feet.
Amy found her balance again and slammed the door shut. "I hate America, Rory," she said, and once the tears came in earnest she couldn't stop. "I hate this miserable place."
Lightning burned away the shadows and the ground shook. Fat drops started pelting the sheet metal, and Rory could hear the rain sweeping across the valley. It wouldn't be long now, and they were closer to the van than the TARDIS.
"Come on," he said, reopening the door and ushering them both up into the cab. "Before we both get soaked."
They hadn't been back inside since parking at the campsite the week before. The cab was still warm with the last of the day's heat. The rain followed them in, spattering across the passenger side bench seat and hammering against the glass when Rory pulled the door shut. After a few minutes of fury, the storm settled in with a steady background beat, but Rory could still hear the sounds in the cab in the forefront: breaths, the rustle of fabric, the creak of the cushions with their movement as he and Amy settled in as well. The storm was a different kind of sound, Rory realized, so insistent that the brain automatically filtered it out. It was the kind of noise that filled one's head during 2000 years of quiet waiting; the kind you never noticed until it was suddenly gone.
He leaned back against the seat, one arm around Amy's shoulders.
"Something's gone wrong," she said, wiping her eyes. "We both know it."
"We only know the TARDIS has shut down. We don't know why," Rory said.
Amy shook her head. "We should have picked them up days ago. Something's happened."
Rory looked over at the empty driver's seat. The storm flashed and a glint caught his eye: the key, still in the ignition.
"We have to do something, Rory," Amy continued, her eyes traveling across the vintage instrument panel on the dash. "What if . . . what if he's . . . if they're both--"
She cut off. Her sudden silence set the rain beating sound at Rory's ears again. He rubbed tiredly at the bridge of his nose. "We can't just run away."
"I meant what I said. I can't wait here any longer. I can't."
Rory sighed. "I know. I can't either."
The storm passed, but the TARDIS seemed distant and uninviting, hulked in the shadow of the lakeside campsite underneath the stars. Instead, Rory found an emergency torch in the glove box and went around back, arranging the assortment of rugs and blankets that had been used to cushion the TARDIS' corners against the metal walls for her journey. "You won't scratch her," River had told them, but Rory had insisted. After all, there were rules to moving. And River had told them a lot of things.
They lined the floor, fashioned a few makeshift pillows, and laid down together in the rear compartment with a view of the lake through the open back doors. It would get hot under the high sun in the day, but they weren't planning to to sleep late.
"How long will it take to get to Salt Lake City?" Amy stretched out beside him, hands under her head.
Rory stretched out too. "Six or seven hours. It's a fair way north of here."
"Half a day." Amy groaned.
"It's the closest state capital with a consulate. Our best chance at contacting UNIT." Rory tried not to let his frown color his words. River had told them that, too, right before saying, I doubt it will come to that. But we may need two or three hours to get situated before throwing the psychic switch, so just hold tight.
It would be best for them to get an early start, he figured. Get some rest, pack up the TARDIS, and drive north through the worst of the isolated desert before the sun hit its peak. Before they changed their minds again, and the static noise of waiting consumed them both.
Amy blinked in the darkness. "This country is too big. If the Doctor were here . . ." Her thought trailed off. They were barely touching, but Rory could feel the tension in her frame; she was wide awake despite the hour.
"If the Doctor were here," he echoed after a moment, "He'd tell us that all of America would fit twice over in the Ladies' section of the Intergalactic Henrik's on Aquarius Six."
Amy huffed a laugh, more nerves than humor. "Aquarius Six?" She snaked a hand down and twined it with his fingers.
Rory squeezed her hand. "Something ridiculous like that."
She laughed again, melancholy, and let go. Rory closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
It was some time later when the rain stopped. For once, the Doctor could be no more precise than that. In the interim, time was as pervasive and patternless as the downpour sheeting against his body, the details like tracing the path of one droplet in the gale: unknowable. The vise hadn't let him dial anything down. The crash had hit his temporal senses like a bomb blasted at eyes and ears, overloading everything. Events that didn't scrape jagged probability against his nerves were muzzy and hollow instead. Aftershocks tore at him with the slightest change in likelihoods, history reverberating like thunder in the ground.
He knew where they were and why; River had thankfully shown him that much. The pain that had shot out from his touch on the vise had held no candle to the agony of the past, and it had grounded him enough to recognize the grip of temporal echoes. He caught fleeting impressions of the TARDIS, too: a sturdy beacon beyond the crest of swirling seas. It hurt too much to try to focus on her. To his strung-out time sense, it seemed he should need only to reach out a hand and she would be there, solid and present as ever. The empty distance between them, reinforced on his skin by the rain and the hands holding on to him, nonetheless was a shock each time he tried to touch her and found nothing but River and the storm.
They were in the desert. The TARDIS was miles away. Time could no longer be trusted, and the only thing more terrifying than that was the thought of letting it go. But he had to, if only for . . . just until . . . just for a little while.
Some time later, the wind had died back down to crisp, dry air. The worst of the aftershocks had settled. The pain had receded to its flash point at the disc in the back of his neck, and the absence of rain refocused his senses.
He recognized desert night in the chill that clung to wet fabric and exposed skin, chased away in places by the still press of River's body against his. Her heart beat its rhythm into his temple and the bones in his cheek, a steady anchor that he used to map anatomy to the curves and textures he could feel. They were both sat on their knees on the ground, River straight and tall with one arm around his slumping shoulders. His head was resting high on her chest, cradled above by her chin and the sinews of her neck. Below was a hint of the soft fullness of her breast, and the firm interruption of a collarbone. His beard scratched against the buttons of her canvas shirt. His arms and shoulders ached from having one hand clamped around her wrist and the other tangled tightly in her clothes at her waist, his fingers brushing bare skin above her hip bone.
Snatches of old academy lessons surfaced from his memory, and his hands flinched. It was improper to have such close contact between such asymmetric timelines. Secrets could slip out, timelines twined to breaking. Foreknowledge could be accidentally shared with devastating consequences--
He worked his jaw. The facts were here and now. He couldn't feel River's dim probabilities right now, not with time torn up and the quarantine gone. His telepathy was blanked and blindfolded, so he couldn't let any thoughts slip through an undisciplined link. There was no link; it was only touch. Only touch, for weeks--just touch and time. His breath caught, the recent past a dead weight on his chest, and he fought a wave of dizziness. He'd never . . . that was important. He'd endured, but he had never accepted it, not for a second. So many faces he couldn't see. So many hands he couldn't stop.
They had to get moving again. He relaxed his grip and tried to gain his bearings on his own.
All around him, River stirred, like a mountain suddenly moving. He lurched, overcompensating for pitch and yaw in intangible space, and then the ground met him abruptly, scraping his cheek and rattling his teeth. He groaned; he must have done, a slow vibration that rose up and out from his throat. His fingers closed around wet sand and small stones.
River's hand touched his elbow. She said something aloud and the simple decisions of her speech grated so harshly he curled in on himself and told her to stop talking right now. Her hand flew from his side and she all but disappeared. Her decisions smoothed away but he felt a nauseating swell of chance fill the vacated potential. He tried to ground himself in time--an anchor of known words, phrases intertwined with the potential of here and now--but he couldn't pay attention to the mechanics; his words may have been English or fifty-first century Standard or Gallifreyan, or they may have been no words at all. Likelihoods slipped away to the pull of the past, his chest constricted, and he forced himself to
Breathe. In for a three count, and out again as the needles branched, burrowing and burning and worse; tugging, pulling, testing the path forward with minute shocks at brainwaves already dulled and half numb from the intrusion. The maddening itch of it all. Then the vise spun down for this cycle, its shrill pitch whistling away to nothing.
Breathe. In for a three count. Out again.
"Layer sixty-one, branching complete." The voice was tinny and distant over the intercom. "Activating signal interference."
A hand at his bound wrist checked his pulse, moved to his chest and checked his respiration for the sixty-first time. He'd been unable to make out the medic's features since layer eighteen. After layer forty-five it had been nothing but shadows of light and dark. He braced himself for the usual response--"Life signs stable. Continue."--and the click-whine of the vise spinning up for the next endless cycle.
It didn't come. Or rather it did, but he didn't hear it. He flinched in surprise when the vise started up again, a silent vibration in his skin. All the subtle sounds of the room were gone.
His hearts pounded. He'd hoped until then, that maybe the device wouldn't be so thorough. Deafness smothered his ears like a physical weight--worse, so much worse than being blind. A sighted individual could become accustomed to absence of light, often flirted with it in adventures and peril. But true absence of sound was a rare encounter, isolating and altogether alien. Life signs stable, he spoke into the silence, or it might have been a mad laugh. Continue. Layer sixty-two commencing. And oh god, he had better not be screaming at them when the pain hit or he'd never stop, he had better remember to
Breathe. In for a three count. Out again.
The Doctor collected his thoughts as the aftershock receded. It was little more than a ripple of recent history stirred up from the crash, that was all. It was likely the last of them. When he rediscovered the present moment, he also found River tapping insistently into his palm. Her decisions this time were bearable, smoothed across the painstaking pace of Morse code. After a while, he focused past the immediacy of dots and dashes to decipher her message.
ORT TRANSPORT TR
Yes, yes. Back to the truck. A very practical consideration, under the circumstances. He freed his hand from River's grasp, pushed himself up to hands and knees, and managed to find the correct equilibrium this time for sitting upright. God, he was tired. Everything hurt; everything was damaged. He needed to sleep. The vise wouldn't let him enter a healing trance, though there were some meditation techniques he could employ instead. Grounding the mind in the minute details of one small task, he knew, helped to optimize internal systems for healing without the conscious redirection of resources that a trance required. But right now, it was too much to contemplate. Simple oblivion was all he could manage, and it would be enough to start his senses recovering.
It wasn't the thought of sleep that terrified him. It was the thought of waking afterward, of not knowing where or when he was . . . anyhow, there was no time for that. The truck would likely need some repair; aftershocks hitting the engine's inanimate memory would manifest as age affecting the systems active at the time of the crash. There might be odd weathering patterns, or sudden corrosion. No time for dilly-dallying. He had to tell River. No time . . .
A tentative touch traced down his arm to his elbow. He brushed it aside and shivered. The cold seemed to settle in the folds of his clothes, blinking against his skin when he moved. Strands of wet fringe caught on his eyelashes and he swiped them away, irritated at the unruly lengths his hair seemed to have reached. He closed his eyes, as much for their own protection as for the mere fact that he couldn't seem to force his eyelids beyond half-mast. His hands trembled and he scrubbed them roughly over his scalp, stopping short of the back of his neck when the sensation threatened pain. He lifted his chin from where it seemed to have fallen to his chest.
Right then, the truck. He supposed the blasted thing was around here somewhere.
Ever patient, River gathered his left wrist and for some unfathomable reason pointed his hand off to the side and slightly behind them. Then she turned his palm up and tapped. Some time later, he managed to work out what she was saying.
30MTR. WALK?
Yes. Well. First things first.
THIS RECORD IS CLASSIFIED *TOP SECRET//BOARDWALK MISTLETOE//NOFORN*
PROPERTY OF UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
GROOM LAKE EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT AND XENOTECH RESEARCH FACILITY
04 AUGUST 1969
INFIRMARY LOG: Admissions
SUPERVISING PHYSICIAN: Cpt. Edward M Curtis, MD, AFMS
Page 6
21:12--James, K.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:14--Carillo, M.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:17--Ogden, C.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:18--Duvall, H.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:21--Sandia, M.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:25--Litzinger, J.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
CON'D NEXT PAGE
* END OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL *
The clouds didn't pass through so much as dissipate into late, moonless night. Stars winked into existence, a few at first, and then suddenly they spread like scattered sand across the night sky, outlining the shadows of surrounding hills from a backdrop of inky blue. Painted across the desert's barren bowl, time and space pressed a cold weight into River's skin, stiffening her fingers and grinding in her knees. Her muscles shivered, shot through with tremors. The short walk back to the ambulance seemed to take an age.
The Doctor breathed unsteady exhaustion beside her as they picked their way across hardscrabble and brush. He kept a desperate grip on her waist, his arms thin but wiry, still deceptively strong even after all he'd endured. The task was not enough to occupy his mind, always ten steps ahead of even his most frenetic physical pace. He murmured at her; sometimes it sounded like muddled instructions, and sometimes it was just declarations unknowingly spoken aloud. He couldn't keep his feet for more than one or two steps, and her one good arm wasn't enough to keep them both upright. They stumbled and fell more times than River cared to count, leaving her staring up again and again at the indifferent sky.
How many of those stars had they visited? River wondered. How many TARDIS trips blinking in and out across the vortex? The light that reached them now had taken no shortcuts; the view was a snapshot stretched across millennia. The hated slow path.
"Not far now," she said when they'd gained their footing again, but the Doctor still flinched at her spoken words, hitching a breath in the darkness. She didn't say any more, just steadied him for the next few steps. He sighed and scratched at his face.
"Beards," he muttered at the ground. "Not cool."
Finally, the ambulance's black outline coalesced from the deeper shadows, cutting across the stars and close enough to touch. River placed the Doctor's hands against its solid bulk, and his legs gave out in relief. They both collapsed, soaked and sapped of strength, against the rear door.
Searchlights panned the sky behind the hills to the west as River worked open the rusted latch. Groom Lake was on alert. She kept an ear tuned; there was no hint of sound yet from aircraft or vehicle patrols, but neither would there be any more storms tonight to delay them. Afterimages from the re-integrating timelines had likely affected some of the base personnel--those who had been close to collisions with the Doctor and River on the other side of the quarantine, at least. She had to hope that confusion and chaos from the temporal crash would buy them enough time.
By River's estimates, she and the Doctor had gone nearly twenty-five miles. A little over half of the journey. If the truck was a lost cause, they would have to walk at least one mile to the highway to have any hope of stopping and stealing a vehicle on a desolate stretch of road in the dead of night. At most, they would have to walk fifteen miles back to the TARDIS.
The searchlights dipped below the hills. River yanked open the door and set to helping the Doctor up into the rear compartment.
It was pitch black inside, cramped and stale. The Doctor took the metal step clumsily beside her, crashed to the floor, and snapped irritably at her when River offered more help. She relented, letting him map his surroundings as she felt for their supply pack and dug out a torch, setting it atop a high shelf and casting the objects he was exploring into sharp light and shadow. He veered toward the front compartment and found it blocked by her legs; she took his hands and guided him to the edge of the narrow berth running the length of the ambulance's right side.
He pulled away with a frown, trying to tell her something greatly important, but it came out as a mixed slur of languages that she couldn't hope to decipher. When he hauled himself halfway to his feet and nearly plunged head-first into the corner of the rusted wash basin across the way, River caught him by the shoulders and braced them both against the back wall. She uncurled his fingers from his palm, trying to give herself a clear voice for him to focus on.
REST she tapped into his hand, lowering them both down to sit on the berth. Plastic cushions sighed and cracked underneath them, disturbed from their desert-baked interment. The Doctor's breath quickened when he finally translated her letters.
"Can't. No time," he slurred, and swallowed thickly. He was shivering and barely awake, but frustration at his limitations kept him tense and haggard. He so hated helplessness. No matter age or history or oblique intersections of their timelines, from their very first clash in Berlin, River had always known his stubborn determination and had always loved him for it. But the best thing he could do now to help their situation was to trust her, to let himself sleep and recover for what time was available, before his body simply gave out from fighting it.
REST she signed again. His only reply was a string of broken Gallifreyan, cut off with a grimace and a half-hearted curse. She set the supply pack between them and helped him pull out dry clothes--a soft cotton scrub shirt and the lightweight jacket she'd brought for him. He made no effort to examine them and seemed only peripherally aware of their purpose, not making the connection until River tried to help him out of his soaked shirt. When her fingers brushed his waist, tugging gently up at the fabric, he recoiled.
"Hands off!" He swiped hard at her wrists, knocking her aside and sweeping the pack onto the floor in the process. His foot caught the bag and he kicked it out of range, propelling himself backward until he reached the far end of the berth, his shoulders against the corner formed by the back wall of the cabin and the outer wall of the truck. Over-alert, eyes tracking nothing, he splayed one hand flat against the smooth steel wall and gripped the edge of the cushion with the other, forcing words past shallow breaths. "Please, no more, no more hands . . ."
River closed her eyes. Impotent rage--at the desolate Nevada desert, at herself for acting without thinking, at every human being that had done this to him--dizzied her. Worse, an ache shot through her chest, fueled by memories of an intimacy that he had yet to forge with her. Touch was all he had; already the cruelest of senses to use across their unshared history, and all she could do was corrupt it even more.
She quickly buried the thought. She couldn't dwell for one moment on that distance between them; it hurt too much, and it wasn't fair.
"Stop, please, hands off," the Doctor breathed. "Just stop." It sounded like the last words he ever wanted to utter, a plea that would have fallen on deaf ears for months. There was nothing she could do. They were still miles from safety. The Doctor needed River Song tonight: the enigma, the woman who could face down an armada of Daleks with a one-liner and no fear. He didn't need the comfort of a lover's touch. He didn't need his wife.
"All right. I'll leave you be." She kept the words calm and impersonal despite the lump in her throat, but he couldn't follow her meaning and just hissed in pain from whatever temporal impact they caused. When she shifted her position, he felt the movement through the cushions on the berth and jumped, pounding a fist at the wall.
"Stop, stop, just stop!" he snapped, and River froze.
For the breath of a moment, the words hung in the air, and then the compartment descended back to stillness. She didn't move, hardly breathed while the Doctor tried to regain his equilibrium. Eventually, the fact that she had heard him--that she had listened--must have sunk in, and his panic started to fade. He loosened his grip on the cushion, mapping the edge of the berth with his fingers, before scrubbing his hand at his face. "River," he said, finally coming back to his surroundings. "River . . . where? No time." He lapsed into more broken Gallifreyan before cutting off with a growl of frustration.
Something in the phrase caught River's attention. It was the same Gallifreyan phrase he'd tried before, she realized. Same words, same cadence, same tone. And she had no idea if he was even aware of what he was speaking aloud, but she suddenly knew it, like pieces of a puzzle slotting into place. She'd never heard them spoken before, but she had read those words, studied them at university. It was a koan.
Temporal koans. Ancient Gallifreyan artifacts--what artifacts survived--were littered with them. Not quite poetry, not quite songs; they were something in between. Something that sang through timelines and potential the same way music sang through sound. She had never been able to explain to her professors that the markings embellishing the written words were time-sensitive. She had never been able to convey how she knew the pitches that resonated in different timescapes and skimmed across likelihood, how each koan was tied to one moment and one place, and always echoed against it when recited correctly.
He tried again, and cut off again. His fist poised to pound at the wall, but he stopped, hand trembling, at too much of a loss to follow through with the action.
River's breath caught. All those songs he'd sung. There was no way he would ever give Charles Ogden and Henry Duvall anything as complex or precious as a Gallifreyan koan. But a merging of words and melody--each one a crude, linear snapshot; each one a reference point to orient in disassociated time . . .
All those songs.
"No time," he murmured, hands falling to his side. "No time."
Spoilers be damned; she couldn't leave him like this. So River folded her hands in her lap, focused her mind on the timescape and the words she'd studied so long ago, and began the recitation.
She felt stillness weigh on him as she spoke, but he didn't flinch or cry out as he had before. So she continued--passive, unobtrusive, offering nothing but her best attempt at resonance and pitch anchored to his planet's ancient past. It took every ounce of concentration and temporal awareness she had; a melding of time, speech, and sound that, under normal circumstances, the Doctor would have been able to achieve with hardly any thought at all.
It must have felt like the faintest echo to him, but it was enough. By the second stanza, he was beside her again. He pressed one hand to her chest over her heart, feeling the fullness of sound in her lungs. His head sank to rest on her shoulder, and she kept her eyes closed for concentration and privacy, focusing only on words and likelihood. His hand mapped upward, hesitating at her face. His fingers traced her lips and jaw as she spoke, then searched for her temple and retreated again.
River came to the end of the verse, hitting the last resonance with an imperfect chord and wincing at the dissonance. But all she felt from the Doctor was a soft exhalation of breath--surprise, perhaps, or a silent laugh. Even with so much of his own time sensitivity damaged from the crash, even with her clumsy skill, he still recognized the recitation. He still knew the perceptions that were needed to communicate it. He raised his head in the darkness, his lips brushing against the shell of her ear.
"Who are you?" he asked, the Gallifreyan form for ever and always echoing along the koan's fading refrain. And then, either by decision or fatigue, he finally let go.
Tension melted from his muscles like a burden dropped to the ground. River sat forward, gathered the pack and placed the dry shirt and jacket in his grasp. She held back this time while he carefully navigated the change of clothes around the back of his neck. The scrub shirt alone took the last of his co-ordination and he sank down to the berth afterward, offering no resistance as River helped position him on his side. She fashioned the jacket into a makeshift pillow and put the pack on the floor in easy arm's reach, tracing his fingers across the hard shell of the canteen inside and tapping H2O into his hand until he grunted a wordless acknowledgement. She shifted position and started to reach for the torch, but she was surprised to feel the Doctor's grip tighten on her fingers before she could stand. She turned back to him.
"I can't stay," she said, smoothing her thumb across the back of his hand.
The Doctor didn't move or open his eyes, only said, slowly and clearly, "Check the wiring for corrosion." He released her hand and was asleep immediately.
"Of course, dear,” River said, looking up at the dull gray shelves surrounding them. Then she stood, collected the torch from its high perch, and set to work.
**
Part 8 | Part 10
**
They didn't stay put for long. Amy had never taken kindly to things that made her cry, and when she could no longer keep her tears in check by swiping at her cheek, she gave the derelict TARDIS console a shove for good measure and stalked out through the main doors. Rory followed, of course, pausing for only a moment to look back at the silent control room before hurrying outside after her. Rain spat at him, the wind picking up in anticipation of the gale.
"Amy!" he called, searching for her in the dusk. He saw a flash of movement at the front of the campsite by the old delivery van that had taken them across the country. He set off in that direction, catching her arm as she went for the door. "Amy, please! Where are you going?"
"I don't know." She shrugged him off, her words trembling with anger. "Somewhere that's not here."
"We can't leave the TARDIS--"
"The TARDIS?" She turned on him. "The TARDIS is giving up, if you didn't notice, and I'm through waiting!" She put a foot up on the van's external step and yanked the door open. "You can come if you want," she told him, "but I'm driving."
"Amy," Rory started. "That's--"
She reached for the steering wheel for leverage to help pull her into the cab, and found nothing but empty air. She fell back against Rory with a surprised grunt. He caught her easily, keeping them both on balance.
"That's the passenger side," he said gently, steadying her on her feet.
Amy found her balance again and slammed the door shut. "I hate America, Rory," she said, and once the tears came in earnest she couldn't stop. "I hate this miserable place."
Lightning burned away the shadows and the ground shook. Fat drops started pelting the sheet metal, and Rory could hear the rain sweeping across the valley. It wouldn't be long now, and they were closer to the van than the TARDIS.
"Come on," he said, reopening the door and ushering them both up into the cab. "Before we both get soaked."
They hadn't been back inside since parking at the campsite the week before. The cab was still warm with the last of the day's heat. The rain followed them in, spattering across the passenger side bench seat and hammering against the glass when Rory pulled the door shut. After a few minutes of fury, the storm settled in with a steady background beat, but Rory could still hear the sounds in the cab in the forefront: breaths, the rustle of fabric, the creak of the cushions with their movement as he and Amy settled in as well. The storm was a different kind of sound, Rory realized, so insistent that the brain automatically filtered it out. It was the kind of noise that filled one's head during 2000 years of quiet waiting; the kind you never noticed until it was suddenly gone.
He leaned back against the seat, one arm around Amy's shoulders.
"Something's gone wrong," she said, wiping her eyes. "We both know it."
"We only know the TARDIS has shut down. We don't know why," Rory said.
Amy shook her head. "We should have picked them up days ago. Something's happened."
Rory looked over at the empty driver's seat. The storm flashed and a glint caught his eye: the key, still in the ignition.
"We have to do something, Rory," Amy continued, her eyes traveling across the vintage instrument panel on the dash. "What if . . . what if he's . . . if they're both--"
She cut off. Her sudden silence set the rain beating sound at Rory's ears again. He rubbed tiredly at the bridge of his nose. "We can't just run away."
"I meant what I said. I can't wait here any longer. I can't."
Rory sighed. "I know. I can't either."
The storm passed, but the TARDIS seemed distant and uninviting, hulked in the shadow of the lakeside campsite underneath the stars. Instead, Rory found an emergency torch in the glove box and went around back, arranging the assortment of rugs and blankets that had been used to cushion the TARDIS' corners against the metal walls for her journey. "You won't scratch her," River had told them, but Rory had insisted. After all, there were rules to moving. And River had told them a lot of things.
They lined the floor, fashioned a few makeshift pillows, and laid down together in the rear compartment with a view of the lake through the open back doors. It would get hot under the high sun in the day, but they weren't planning to to sleep late.
"How long will it take to get to Salt Lake City?" Amy stretched out beside him, hands under her head.
Rory stretched out too. "Six or seven hours. It's a fair way north of here."
"Half a day." Amy groaned.
"It's the closest state capital with a consulate. Our best chance at contacting UNIT." Rory tried not to let his frown color his words. River had told them that, too, right before saying, I doubt it will come to that. But we may need two or three hours to get situated before throwing the psychic switch, so just hold tight.
It would be best for them to get an early start, he figured. Get some rest, pack up the TARDIS, and drive north through the worst of the isolated desert before the sun hit its peak. Before they changed their minds again, and the static noise of waiting consumed them both.
Amy blinked in the darkness. "This country is too big. If the Doctor were here . . ." Her thought trailed off. They were barely touching, but Rory could feel the tension in her frame; she was wide awake despite the hour.
"If the Doctor were here," he echoed after a moment, "He'd tell us that all of America would fit twice over in the Ladies' section of the Intergalactic Henrik's on Aquarius Six."
Amy huffed a laugh, more nerves than humor. "Aquarius Six?" She snaked a hand down and twined it with his fingers.
Rory squeezed her hand. "Something ridiculous like that."
She laughed again, melancholy, and let go. Rory closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
It was some time later when the rain stopped. For once, the Doctor could be no more precise than that. In the interim, time was as pervasive and patternless as the downpour sheeting against his body, the details like tracing the path of one droplet in the gale: unknowable. The vise hadn't let him dial anything down. The crash had hit his temporal senses like a bomb blasted at eyes and ears, overloading everything. Events that didn't scrape jagged probability against his nerves were muzzy and hollow instead. Aftershocks tore at him with the slightest change in likelihoods, history reverberating like thunder in the ground.
He knew where they were and why; River had thankfully shown him that much. The pain that had shot out from his touch on the vise had held no candle to the agony of the past, and it had grounded him enough to recognize the grip of temporal echoes. He caught fleeting impressions of the TARDIS, too: a sturdy beacon beyond the crest of swirling seas. It hurt too much to try to focus on her. To his strung-out time sense, it seemed he should need only to reach out a hand and she would be there, solid and present as ever. The empty distance between them, reinforced on his skin by the rain and the hands holding on to him, nonetheless was a shock each time he tried to touch her and found nothing but River and the storm.
They were in the desert. The TARDIS was miles away. Time could no longer be trusted, and the only thing more terrifying than that was the thought of letting it go. But he had to, if only for . . . just until . . . just for a little while.
Some time later, the wind had died back down to crisp, dry air. The worst of the aftershocks had settled. The pain had receded to its flash point at the disc in the back of his neck, and the absence of rain refocused his senses.
He recognized desert night in the chill that clung to wet fabric and exposed skin, chased away in places by the still press of River's body against his. Her heart beat its rhythm into his temple and the bones in his cheek, a steady anchor that he used to map anatomy to the curves and textures he could feel. They were both sat on their knees on the ground, River straight and tall with one arm around his slumping shoulders. His head was resting high on her chest, cradled above by her chin and the sinews of her neck. Below was a hint of the soft fullness of her breast, and the firm interruption of a collarbone. His beard scratched against the buttons of her canvas shirt. His arms and shoulders ached from having one hand clamped around her wrist and the other tangled tightly in her clothes at her waist, his fingers brushing bare skin above her hip bone.
Snatches of old academy lessons surfaced from his memory, and his hands flinched. It was improper to have such close contact between such asymmetric timelines. Secrets could slip out, timelines twined to breaking. Foreknowledge could be accidentally shared with devastating consequences--
He worked his jaw. The facts were here and now. He couldn't feel River's dim probabilities right now, not with time torn up and the quarantine gone. His telepathy was blanked and blindfolded, so he couldn't let any thoughts slip through an undisciplined link. There was no link; it was only touch. Only touch, for weeks--just touch and time. His breath caught, the recent past a dead weight on his chest, and he fought a wave of dizziness. He'd never . . . that was important. He'd endured, but he had never accepted it, not for a second. So many faces he couldn't see. So many hands he couldn't stop.
They had to get moving again. He relaxed his grip and tried to gain his bearings on his own.
All around him, River stirred, like a mountain suddenly moving. He lurched, overcompensating for pitch and yaw in intangible space, and then the ground met him abruptly, scraping his cheek and rattling his teeth. He groaned; he must have done, a slow vibration that rose up and out from his throat. His fingers closed around wet sand and small stones.
River's hand touched his elbow. She said something aloud and the simple decisions of her speech grated so harshly he curled in on himself and told her to stop talking right now. Her hand flew from his side and she all but disappeared. Her decisions smoothed away but he felt a nauseating swell of chance fill the vacated potential. He tried to ground himself in time--an anchor of known words, phrases intertwined with the potential of here and now--but he couldn't pay attention to the mechanics; his words may have been English or fifty-first century Standard or Gallifreyan, or they may have been no words at all. Likelihoods slipped away to the pull of the past, his chest constricted, and he forced himself to
Breathe. In for a three count, and out again as the needles branched, burrowing and burning and worse; tugging, pulling, testing the path forward with minute shocks at brainwaves already dulled and half numb from the intrusion. The maddening itch of it all. Then the vise spun down for this cycle, its shrill pitch whistling away to nothing.
Breathe. In for a three count. Out again.
"Layer sixty-one, branching complete." The voice was tinny and distant over the intercom. "Activating signal interference."
A hand at his bound wrist checked his pulse, moved to his chest and checked his respiration for the sixty-first time. He'd been unable to make out the medic's features since layer eighteen. After layer forty-five it had been nothing but shadows of light and dark. He braced himself for the usual response--"Life signs stable. Continue."--and the click-whine of the vise spinning up for the next endless cycle.
It didn't come. Or rather it did, but he didn't hear it. He flinched in surprise when the vise started up again, a silent vibration in his skin. All the subtle sounds of the room were gone.
His hearts pounded. He'd hoped until then, that maybe the device wouldn't be so thorough. Deafness smothered his ears like a physical weight--worse, so much worse than being blind. A sighted individual could become accustomed to absence of light, often flirted with it in adventures and peril. But true absence of sound was a rare encounter, isolating and altogether alien. Life signs stable, he spoke into the silence, or it might have been a mad laugh. Continue. Layer sixty-two commencing. And oh god, he had better not be screaming at them when the pain hit or he'd never stop, he had better remember to
Breathe. In for a three count. Out again.
The Doctor collected his thoughts as the aftershock receded. It was little more than a ripple of recent history stirred up from the crash, that was all. It was likely the last of them. When he rediscovered the present moment, he also found River tapping insistently into his palm. Her decisions this time were bearable, smoothed across the painstaking pace of Morse code. After a while, he focused past the immediacy of dots and dashes to decipher her message.
ORT TRANSPORT TR
Yes, yes. Back to the truck. A very practical consideration, under the circumstances. He freed his hand from River's grasp, pushed himself up to hands and knees, and managed to find the correct equilibrium this time for sitting upright. God, he was tired. Everything hurt; everything was damaged. He needed to sleep. The vise wouldn't let him enter a healing trance, though there were some meditation techniques he could employ instead. Grounding the mind in the minute details of one small task, he knew, helped to optimize internal systems for healing without the conscious redirection of resources that a trance required. But right now, it was too much to contemplate. Simple oblivion was all he could manage, and it would be enough to start his senses recovering.
It wasn't the thought of sleep that terrified him. It was the thought of waking afterward, of not knowing where or when he was . . . anyhow, there was no time for that. The truck would likely need some repair; aftershocks hitting the engine's inanimate memory would manifest as age affecting the systems active at the time of the crash. There might be odd weathering patterns, or sudden corrosion. No time for dilly-dallying. He had to tell River. No time . . .
A tentative touch traced down his arm to his elbow. He brushed it aside and shivered. The cold seemed to settle in the folds of his clothes, blinking against his skin when he moved. Strands of wet fringe caught on his eyelashes and he swiped them away, irritated at the unruly lengths his hair seemed to have reached. He closed his eyes, as much for their own protection as for the mere fact that he couldn't seem to force his eyelids beyond half-mast. His hands trembled and he scrubbed them roughly over his scalp, stopping short of the back of his neck when the sensation threatened pain. He lifted his chin from where it seemed to have fallen to his chest.
Right then, the truck. He supposed the blasted thing was around here somewhere.
Ever patient, River gathered his left wrist and for some unfathomable reason pointed his hand off to the side and slightly behind them. Then she turned his palm up and tapped. Some time later, he managed to work out what she was saying.
30MTR. WALK?
Yes. Well. First things first.
THIS RECORD IS CLASSIFIED *TOP SECRET//BOARDWALK MISTLETOE//NOFORN*
PROPERTY OF UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
GROOM LAKE EXPERIMENTAL AIRCRAFT AND XENOTECH RESEARCH FACILITY
04 AUGUST 1969
INFIRMARY LOG: Admissions
SUPERVISING PHYSICIAN: Cpt. Edward M Curtis, MD, AFMS
Page 6
21:12--James, K.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:14--Carillo, M.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:17--Ogden, C.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:18--Duvall, H.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:21--Sandia, M.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
21:25--Litzinger, J.: Patient presented with blackouts/fatigue, nausea, disorientation, auditory/visual hallucinations. Admitted for observation.
CON'D NEXT PAGE
* END OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL *
The clouds didn't pass through so much as dissipate into late, moonless night. Stars winked into existence, a few at first, and then suddenly they spread like scattered sand across the night sky, outlining the shadows of surrounding hills from a backdrop of inky blue. Painted across the desert's barren bowl, time and space pressed a cold weight into River's skin, stiffening her fingers and grinding in her knees. Her muscles shivered, shot through with tremors. The short walk back to the ambulance seemed to take an age.
The Doctor breathed unsteady exhaustion beside her as they picked their way across hardscrabble and brush. He kept a desperate grip on her waist, his arms thin but wiry, still deceptively strong even after all he'd endured. The task was not enough to occupy his mind, always ten steps ahead of even his most frenetic physical pace. He murmured at her; sometimes it sounded like muddled instructions, and sometimes it was just declarations unknowingly spoken aloud. He couldn't keep his feet for more than one or two steps, and her one good arm wasn't enough to keep them both upright. They stumbled and fell more times than River cared to count, leaving her staring up again and again at the indifferent sky.
How many of those stars had they visited? River wondered. How many TARDIS trips blinking in and out across the vortex? The light that reached them now had taken no shortcuts; the view was a snapshot stretched across millennia. The hated slow path.
"Not far now," she said when they'd gained their footing again, but the Doctor still flinched at her spoken words, hitching a breath in the darkness. She didn't say any more, just steadied him for the next few steps. He sighed and scratched at his face.
"Beards," he muttered at the ground. "Not cool."
Finally, the ambulance's black outline coalesced from the deeper shadows, cutting across the stars and close enough to touch. River placed the Doctor's hands against its solid bulk, and his legs gave out in relief. They both collapsed, soaked and sapped of strength, against the rear door.
Searchlights panned the sky behind the hills to the west as River worked open the rusted latch. Groom Lake was on alert. She kept an ear tuned; there was no hint of sound yet from aircraft or vehicle patrols, but neither would there be any more storms tonight to delay them. Afterimages from the re-integrating timelines had likely affected some of the base personnel--those who had been close to collisions with the Doctor and River on the other side of the quarantine, at least. She had to hope that confusion and chaos from the temporal crash would buy them enough time.
By River's estimates, she and the Doctor had gone nearly twenty-five miles. A little over half of the journey. If the truck was a lost cause, they would have to walk at least one mile to the highway to have any hope of stopping and stealing a vehicle on a desolate stretch of road in the dead of night. At most, they would have to walk fifteen miles back to the TARDIS.
The searchlights dipped below the hills. River yanked open the door and set to helping the Doctor up into the rear compartment.
It was pitch black inside, cramped and stale. The Doctor took the metal step clumsily beside her, crashed to the floor, and snapped irritably at her when River offered more help. She relented, letting him map his surroundings as she felt for their supply pack and dug out a torch, setting it atop a high shelf and casting the objects he was exploring into sharp light and shadow. He veered toward the front compartment and found it blocked by her legs; she took his hands and guided him to the edge of the narrow berth running the length of the ambulance's right side.
He pulled away with a frown, trying to tell her something greatly important, but it came out as a mixed slur of languages that she couldn't hope to decipher. When he hauled himself halfway to his feet and nearly plunged head-first into the corner of the rusted wash basin across the way, River caught him by the shoulders and braced them both against the back wall. She uncurled his fingers from his palm, trying to give herself a clear voice for him to focus on.
REST she tapped into his hand, lowering them both down to sit on the berth. Plastic cushions sighed and cracked underneath them, disturbed from their desert-baked interment. The Doctor's breath quickened when he finally translated her letters.
"Can't. No time," he slurred, and swallowed thickly. He was shivering and barely awake, but frustration at his limitations kept him tense and haggard. He so hated helplessness. No matter age or history or oblique intersections of their timelines, from their very first clash in Berlin, River had always known his stubborn determination and had always loved him for it. But the best thing he could do now to help their situation was to trust her, to let himself sleep and recover for what time was available, before his body simply gave out from fighting it.
REST she signed again. His only reply was a string of broken Gallifreyan, cut off with a grimace and a half-hearted curse. She set the supply pack between them and helped him pull out dry clothes--a soft cotton scrub shirt and the lightweight jacket she'd brought for him. He made no effort to examine them and seemed only peripherally aware of their purpose, not making the connection until River tried to help him out of his soaked shirt. When her fingers brushed his waist, tugging gently up at the fabric, he recoiled.
"Hands off!" He swiped hard at her wrists, knocking her aside and sweeping the pack onto the floor in the process. His foot caught the bag and he kicked it out of range, propelling himself backward until he reached the far end of the berth, his shoulders against the corner formed by the back wall of the cabin and the outer wall of the truck. Over-alert, eyes tracking nothing, he splayed one hand flat against the smooth steel wall and gripped the edge of the cushion with the other, forcing words past shallow breaths. "Please, no more, no more hands . . ."
River closed her eyes. Impotent rage--at the desolate Nevada desert, at herself for acting without thinking, at every human being that had done this to him--dizzied her. Worse, an ache shot through her chest, fueled by memories of an intimacy that he had yet to forge with her. Touch was all he had; already the cruelest of senses to use across their unshared history, and all she could do was corrupt it even more.
She quickly buried the thought. She couldn't dwell for one moment on that distance between them; it hurt too much, and it wasn't fair.
"Stop, please, hands off," the Doctor breathed. "Just stop." It sounded like the last words he ever wanted to utter, a plea that would have fallen on deaf ears for months. There was nothing she could do. They were still miles from safety. The Doctor needed River Song tonight: the enigma, the woman who could face down an armada of Daleks with a one-liner and no fear. He didn't need the comfort of a lover's touch. He didn't need his wife.
"All right. I'll leave you be." She kept the words calm and impersonal despite the lump in her throat, but he couldn't follow her meaning and just hissed in pain from whatever temporal impact they caused. When she shifted her position, he felt the movement through the cushions on the berth and jumped, pounding a fist at the wall.
"Stop, stop, just stop!" he snapped, and River froze.
For the breath of a moment, the words hung in the air, and then the compartment descended back to stillness. She didn't move, hardly breathed while the Doctor tried to regain his equilibrium. Eventually, the fact that she had heard him--that she had listened--must have sunk in, and his panic started to fade. He loosened his grip on the cushion, mapping the edge of the berth with his fingers, before scrubbing his hand at his face. "River," he said, finally coming back to his surroundings. "River . . . where? No time." He lapsed into more broken Gallifreyan before cutting off with a growl of frustration.
Something in the phrase caught River's attention. It was the same Gallifreyan phrase he'd tried before, she realized. Same words, same cadence, same tone. And she had no idea if he was even aware of what he was speaking aloud, but she suddenly knew it, like pieces of a puzzle slotting into place. She'd never heard them spoken before, but she had read those words, studied them at university. It was a koan.
Temporal koans. Ancient Gallifreyan artifacts--what artifacts survived--were littered with them. Not quite poetry, not quite songs; they were something in between. Something that sang through timelines and potential the same way music sang through sound. She had never been able to explain to her professors that the markings embellishing the written words were time-sensitive. She had never been able to convey how she knew the pitches that resonated in different timescapes and skimmed across likelihood, how each koan was tied to one moment and one place, and always echoed against it when recited correctly.
He tried again, and cut off again. His fist poised to pound at the wall, but he stopped, hand trembling, at too much of a loss to follow through with the action.
River's breath caught. All those songs he'd sung. There was no way he would ever give Charles Ogden and Henry Duvall anything as complex or precious as a Gallifreyan koan. But a merging of words and melody--each one a crude, linear snapshot; each one a reference point to orient in disassociated time . . .
All those songs.
"No time," he murmured, hands falling to his side. "No time."
Spoilers be damned; she couldn't leave him like this. So River folded her hands in her lap, focused her mind on the timescape and the words she'd studied so long ago, and began the recitation.
She felt stillness weigh on him as she spoke, but he didn't flinch or cry out as he had before. So she continued--passive, unobtrusive, offering nothing but her best attempt at resonance and pitch anchored to his planet's ancient past. It took every ounce of concentration and temporal awareness she had; a melding of time, speech, and sound that, under normal circumstances, the Doctor would have been able to achieve with hardly any thought at all.
It must have felt like the faintest echo to him, but it was enough. By the second stanza, he was beside her again. He pressed one hand to her chest over her heart, feeling the fullness of sound in her lungs. His head sank to rest on her shoulder, and she kept her eyes closed for concentration and privacy, focusing only on words and likelihood. His hand mapped upward, hesitating at her face. His fingers traced her lips and jaw as she spoke, then searched for her temple and retreated again.
River came to the end of the verse, hitting the last resonance with an imperfect chord and wincing at the dissonance. But all she felt from the Doctor was a soft exhalation of breath--surprise, perhaps, or a silent laugh. Even with so much of his own time sensitivity damaged from the crash, even with her clumsy skill, he still recognized the recitation. He still knew the perceptions that were needed to communicate it. He raised his head in the darkness, his lips brushing against the shell of her ear.
"Who are you?" he asked, the Gallifreyan form for ever and always echoing along the koan's fading refrain. And then, either by decision or fatigue, he finally let go.
Tension melted from his muscles like a burden dropped to the ground. River sat forward, gathered the pack and placed the dry shirt and jacket in his grasp. She held back this time while he carefully navigated the change of clothes around the back of his neck. The scrub shirt alone took the last of his co-ordination and he sank down to the berth afterward, offering no resistance as River helped position him on his side. She fashioned the jacket into a makeshift pillow and put the pack on the floor in easy arm's reach, tracing his fingers across the hard shell of the canteen inside and tapping H2O into his hand until he grunted a wordless acknowledgement. She shifted position and started to reach for the torch, but she was surprised to feel the Doctor's grip tighten on her fingers before she could stand. She turned back to him.
"I can't stay," she said, smoothing her thumb across the back of his hand.
The Doctor didn't move or open his eyes, only said, slowly and clearly, "Check the wiring for corrosion." He released her hand and was asleep immediately.
"Of course, dear,” River said, looking up at the dull gray shelves surrounding them. Then she stood, collected the torch from its high perch, and set to work.
**
Part 8 | Part 10
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Date: 2015-11-15 10:50 am (UTC)Also, Amy, Rory, NOOOOOO! They're coming! Don't LEEEEEEEAVE! :)
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Date: 2015-11-16 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-11-16 02:36 am (UTC)