Chapter Text
Alright Doctor, turning to stone. Think fast!
But it’s shooting cold through the soles of her feet and petrifying her toes, her nerves, reaching like crackling frost fractals up through the gravedirt –
So think faster! The faster you think the slower time goes.
Her feet are rooted to the spot, cast over with mortar and solidified to useless stumps. No running. That’s plan A off the cards. There is a twinge in her back, an aching, sweet pain like rotting teeth, like bleeding gums, like something hard and cold growing and snapping her bones like matchsticks as they burrow out through her skin. It hurts an awful lot.
It feels awfully familiar.
Familiar? No, that can’t be right.
The grey seeps up towards her pounding hearts. The chorus of Angels above and behind laugh in her mind with Claire’s voice, human. A trick, a trap –
Why does it feel like I’ve done this before?
She tries to concentrate on what she knows will ground her, shut out the noise; she can just make them out. Her humans.
No, that’s not right.
It is like falling asleep. Like muscles relaxing after ages spent wired and tense, without even knowing. A long, long breath pushed out. Beneath the panic stricken upon her face she knows, somehow, that this is right. This is where she has always been going. Instinct overtakes, and she looks down at her blackening hands.
Ah! Distracted. You’re getting distracted. No time for why – what’s next?
Ahead, a blue wall of light undulates and sparks, whines, snaps. The grass beyond is a lovely country green, and standing upon it… Merging atop it…
A huddle of tangled time. A dark mass of interlocked flesh limbs and crying voices and twisted time-streams wafting a pandemonic scent that screams – chaos, sustenance, potential!
Losing yourself. You’re losing yourself. How are you going to win?
She needs to get to the other side of that barrier.
There’s a flesh form closeby that she can still make out. Grey stone slabs rise up to her eyes. She cannot move; too many watching, the angels behind and the brimming time-silos in front. But there is a link. The cleaved, digested world beyond the energy wall is closed to her, but through the link she could make it. Through an image, held in a mind.
She reminds herself of the angels' abilities, but finds her fading memory far less useful to her than the learned repertoire that awaits, in a newly uncovered, shared repository. Muscle memory. The archaic steps come to her effortlessly, like second nature.
Second nature, quantum-locked behind the first, and finally awoken.
The nearest time-source, mere metres away, is the same as the one across the barrier. How artful, how delicious, how cruel. This is what they do best, feed on all those unlived years. She sees a life, along its potential line, that reached out into the 21st century – and what ripples it would have made! But nothing now, not a scrap. Now the old woman stands decaying a mere decade after she was born.
There's always a way out.
The link runs through the old woman and across the way, into the devoured time-carcass of the child’s body, stripped clean. A link of mutual, paradoxical memory.
In the moment before the stone takes the last of her brains, she climbs into the wide, open eyes of the old woman, the standing corpse. The finished meal. The angels have already spoken to her, contact is already established.
Contact.
She says that word, in her head, as she makes the jump, and wonders why. Old instinct. A familiar framing for a new sort of control. The old woman responds, as she has been conditioned to respond, through all the whisperings hauled sharp into her mind over the decades.
When the stone eats her very last cell, and her hands rise up to weep, her form converts itself a second time. A gathering of iron and oxygen and nitrates in the time-bank’s blood, in the corner of old woman's eye, in the epidural soup and the matter between fleshy hemispheres she collects herself, and looks back. The place where her physical edifice once stood is now empty, the stone collected in a fractured spiral around an empty slab.
The angels are confused. They chatter away outside, banging on the doors, growing panicked. But she has more practise with this sort of maneuver. Time travel.
She reaches back through the woman’s cleaved past and begins to move across it. She jumps the gulf – flies it, on her new wings of stone – and reaches the other side of the quantum extraction shield. She hasn’t moved, not really, just travelled back down the thread of existence in one mind, which at its own physical, linear lumber, has situated itself at the exact point where she wants to be.
She looks out from the eyes of the child Peggy, who stares grimly at the warbling blue light, and at the woman she will become, and the angels that now screech at her, crying out – stop, let us in! Let us in! Give her back!
Peggy sticks out her tongue, and in a haze of white light the shield collapses.
A dark shape beside her dashes forwards and stumbles against the damp grass.
“Yaz! Yaz!” someone cries, and chases after the woman, who picks herself off her feet and runs some more, then crashes into a kneel, screaming a word. A very important word.
“Where have they gone?” says the Professor. Yes, Peggy knows him. The batty old man from the spooky manor by the church. He takes her firmly by the shoulder and asks if she’s alright. Peggy shakes him off.
They both approach the woman kneeling on the grass, and the man beside her, who holds a comforting hand upon her back.
Peggy’s eyes are very itchy – spotted with grey and sort of blurry. Stinging, as if sand has been whipped across her vision.
“No, no,” the woman is muttering. The sound makes Peggy’s chest go cold, because she was nice to her, this woman. A bit too nice, really. Kept asking her if she was okay.
“I didn’t know they could do that,” the man says. Dan, yes. His name is Dan. “Did you know they could do that?”
“No, no I’ve never even – I didn’t even know about them before today, she never said.”
“Hey, it’s alright. We’ll find her. We’ll work it all out.” His hand pats lamely against Yaz’s jacket. Her back shivers beneath his touch.
“How?” Yaz whips around, her eyes rid-rimmed and black and wild. “How are we supposed to find her, Dan? You got any bright ideas? Do you have any idea?” Silence hangs heady and bright on the country lawn. “Sorry,” Yaz says.
“It’s alright,” Dan replies sombrely. “But it’s like you said, she always thinks of something.”
“Yeah.” She smiles weakly. “Yeah I did. And she will.” Yaz clambers to her feet, dragging her sleeve across her eyes, sniffing back tears. “Let’s get back to the village.”
It’s jarring, just how quickly Yaz shakes off hysteria. She leaves it behind on the dewy grass as she walks purposefully back toward the town. But her face is still knotted up with despair; tense in the grim line of her mouth, her drawn-in brows. A glimpse of something bottled up. Peggy knows a lot about that.
Does she? Peggy rubs her eye against her sleeve, and the action leaves a little trail of grey dust against her red woolen cardigan.
As they walk back to the village, Peggy sidles up to Yaz. She doesn’t know why – in fact, she’s never once felt the need to be close to anyone before, prefers them to leave her alone – but she does now.
“Oh, hello Peggy,” says Yaz, her tone a blotchy, tearful mask of oblique cheer. “Are you doing okay?” Peggy scowls. She’s really getting sick of people asking her that.
“Yes,” she mutters, but her voice feels wrong in her mouth. Sticky, and it tastes like mud and rusted pennies. “I don’t suppose I’m ever getting home though.”
“Don’t say that! We’ll find a way, won’t we Dan?” She ropes in her friend, who stoops down with his hands on his knees to peer down at Peggy. She hates it when grown-ups do that.
“Oh yeah, absolutely we will. Yaz is a champ.”
“You don’t need to lie,” says Peggy. “Besides, I don’t even really want to go home. I never much liked it.”
Dan and Yaz exchange a bemused glance, and probably think that Peggy doesn’t notice.
“Are you okay?” Peggy asks, and looks up at Yaz. She is growing indistinct, in Peggy’s blurred, spotted gaze.
“Of course I am.”
Without understanding why, Peggy reaches up and takes Yaz by the hand. “It’s okay to be sad,” she says.
Yaz looks at her then, long and hard and piercing, her quivering lips twisted down as if puzzling something out. Presently, Peggy begins to feel better. The chill in her chest dissipates, and her breath comes easy and warm in her ribs. Her vision clears, one grey spot at a time. Then Yaz collapses into a heap on the grass.
Much better. Much more comfy. Far more time, inside of this one.
Roomier, lots to eat.
The girl’s timeline was cut in half and already stripped bare, like meat off a bone, but this one is a delicacy. This one is bent at every joint, and crumpled to pebbled pulp, and spread thin, and knotted up in impossible loops all at once. Paradoxical, infinite, chaotic. And familiar, too. She knows this place well.
She knows the corners where she can hide without being seen, knows how to blend into every fragmented memory without causing alarm, can bend her own thoughts into plausible dreams, and hide them between the lines of the mind’s subconsciousness. It is a strange way of being; unconnected, pure potential. She is an image in a mind, a memory – and someone once told her just how important memories can be. Someone, but her kind don’t have voices of their own. They can only steal them. They only take.
She could build herself up from the particles in the air, up into a monument, and when they look away… when they look away she could break free, slink behind the walls, crawl toward them, frighten them, then eat. Snap them back through time like a spring and feed on the energy of the coil never released. The elastic potential, in all that unlived time.
She could, and she wants to. She needs to – but the residual time-flare, the afterglow, would send her kin flocking to her side. They are looking for her. She resisted recollection.
You are alone, she reminds herself. You are rogue. Renegade.
But why is she running?
They do this; make you forget, with the in-pressing mass of their great-many minds. They hold you to the mark, to the mission, and in the throng of their choir there is no room for dissent, for division. The why of it doesn’t matter. Without the comfort of choral context she knows only that she is.
For now, she must stay quiet and conserve energy. There is much to feast upon, yes, but so much to lose if she is discovered. So she hunkers down, and hides her eyes, and rifles through her home, this mind – this time-bank. Flesh body. She had one, once, but then again, they all did.
Does she miss it?
Some of them do, and their anguish is more than an internal lament, shared. They cover their eyes in necessity, but also in despair. They weep, because what once was theirs was taken and turned to stone. They weep, because they have forgotten what they were.
Someone is calling her. Probably it’s time to leave and she forgot to set her alarm. All three of them? Seems unlikely, unless Sonya stole the batteries to use for her speaker again.
“Coming,” she mumbles. “I’m coming.”
“Yaz?” A keen pressure on her arm, gently shaking. “You’re alright. You’re okay.” He’s lying, obviously, her head’s full of cotton and her muscles are like lead – and is that a Liverpool accent?
“If only I had my equipment, I might be able to help!”
Your name is Yaz.
I know that , she thinks to herself, angrily. To herself?
To yourself.
To myself. Talking to myself in my own head. When did I start doing that?
Everyone does this.
No they don’t!
“Don’t what?”
Yaz opens her eyes. It’s difficult, like forcing a jammed door open, like her eyelids are all crusted over. But the look of it is grey in her peripheral, not yellow.
The dark, it’s just the dark. They are in a cellar and it is dark.
Don’t like the dark.
“Who –”
“Just me, Yaz. Dan.”
“Yeah I know, I mean.” Yaz sits up slowly, and Dan guides her unnecessarily, with a firm grip on her shoulder. Yaz blinks the sleep from her eyes – can’t seem to shake the spots and static fuzz that gathers, like analogue noise.
“What happened?” she asks.
“Err,” Dan glances guiltily toward Professor Jericho.
The Professor’s gaze shifts down toward the floor. “Well, Miss Khan, your friend was...”
And Dan picks up the slack. “The Doctor was turned into...”
“Right.” Yaz saves them the effort of breaking it to her nicely. “Don’t go on. I remember.”
“But she wasn’t,” a small voice pipes up from a chair in the corner of the room. Shrouded, indistinct. She’s abrasive like that, young Peggy. Morbid and distant and blunt. Her face is in shadow, like she’s trying her best to be scary.
“What do you mean, Peggy?” Yaz asks gently, when the girl doesn’t elaborate. Peggy likes attention, having never got any of it for herself. That cruel old man, bitter at his lack of a grandson, and his own son’s untimely death. Never letting her do anything she wanted, always ordering her about.
Weird, Peggy definitely didn’t tell Yaz any of that.
Why do I know that?
She probably just told you, didn’t she?
No, I would remember if she –
“You okay?” Dan asks. Again.
I’m fine.
“I’m fine!” Yaz cries out loud in tandem with the thought. Dan puts his hands up in surrender.
“Your friend disappeared before all the other angels did,” says Peggy.
“Because they took her, right Yaz?” Dan looks to her, puzzled. Yaz shushes him.
Peggy continues, “The angels told me. They were looking for her. They were worried. And someone was looking for them as well, and called them back.”
“They were looking for the Doctor?” Yaz asks. She suppresses the instinct to dampen her rising hopes. Hope is always a good thing.
Yes, hope abides.
Yaz asks, “Where is she now?” but Peggy only shrugs, then looks down glumly at her buckled leather shoes, swinging them back and forth above the paving stones.
Don’t worry. They won’t find her.