Fight or Flight ( Doctor Who Fanfiction )

Siberia.

There's only so many ways to describe solitary confinement. Siberia left me with no metaphors to draw, or lessons to be learned. No way to artfully explain hell.

So, all I can conjure in retrospect is a dry play-by-play, and I'm sorry if it bores you. It bored me too.

Maybe someone who hadn't lived it would say it wasn't technically "solitary". I saw house staff, the guards who stood outside the door of my room and walked me to every psychiatric appointment on the top floor. Oh, and I saw my doctors.

The morning was begun each day with a basic physical. Dressing in black, I would walk slowly up gleaming stairs to my doctor, where he would take my blood pressure, run a blood test now and then, and record my height and weight so diligently you would think they changed drastically from the day before.

Then it was time to take my pills and consume a carefully prepared breakfast which I never once could taste. I took breakfast alone with my security details present. I faced away from them, and sat at a window on the highest floor, where over time I could see the suffocating torrents of snow slowly recede into a tentative summer with snow-capped mountains in the distance.

Promptly at nine o'clock, I walked quietly to the psychiatrist's office.

He spoke to me, I assume. Asked me how my medication was treating me, like I even knew what I was on.

At ten, I was ushered downstairs to an extensive session of psychotherapy. I don't remember what we talked about, but I remember he didn't like me because I spoke as little as humanly possible without causing him to alert my father of my incompliance.

Then came lunch.

Then a walk outside, all bundled up, accompanied by my security details. If the snow was too high, the groundskeepers cleared out a path for me through the garden so my routine would not be altered.

Sometimes I could see helicopters coming in to land on our roof. Businesspeople who my father flew out so he could work while not straying too far from his place as the head of my inpatient program.

Five o'clock was another round of therapy.

Dinner was seven sharp, and I went to change into my dinner clothes at six-thirty. I wore a red or black sari on most nights. Family colors, and all that.

I sat across from my father, where he updated me on his work and asked how my day was as if he didn't know exactly where I was for every second of it.

My mother traveled. She never came to Siberia for more than a day. She didn't like to see me like this, and had always been the one who preferred travel to working from home, so her jet was gone on most days.

The days blended together like that, in my part of the house. They went on forever and ever and somehow felt like only one day, on ever-hastening repeat. My life blurred past me.

I only felt alive on the days when she was home. She came to walk with me on those days, and told me about her travels. I couldn't think very well to answer her, my brain fogged and spaced out most days - looking back, I must have been on some sort of opioid - but I relished those times with her all the same. I could see some memory of Rue in her face, where my father could have been a different species from my baby sister.

We spoke Hindi at the dinner table when my mother was at home, and she would come tell me goodnight at the door of my bedroom before all my lights were cut at nine. She kissed my hair, and held my face in her hands, and told me she missed me. And she meant she missed me when she was gone, but I think she also missed when I was a whole person, instead of a shell who resembled her daughter.