"You're the doctor."
The human looked up at me.
"Yes," she affirmed, a human of straight lips and straight eyes, young, an adult, I wasn't perfect at judging age. Pale-haired, pale skinned, as if she didn't get out of the dark much. "I am. I am the doctor." Her voice was a murmur, she had a murky nebula in her hazel eyes.
She wasn't the same, as him, not the same, but she was another one.
Another secret-ripper, one who walked in the dark and saw more things than she should. Another one openly like him, a doctor. Rage snarled up into my ears, familiar, I couldn't finish him, I was weak. My fingers found her neck, I didn't know what I was doing, they squeezed.
"You. You fix me!" And then I will kill you.
"Ah!" The doctor flinched as I shoved her into a tree, writhing with her little human hands burrowing into mine. "Cannot... breathe..."
My lip snarled, I was here for what I came for, after all the days and nights and days and nights rising and falling without rhyme or reason, wandering through the godforsaken woods, to nowhere, with taunting arrows on a screen as my one and only guide, finally stumbling into this clearing on a crag for--something clicked by my head.
Fear registered in her hazel eyes, painted all over her face. I knew that look, it was one that said no with no power to make anyone listen.
Then it hit that the doctor wasn't afraid of me--she was afraid for me. I swiveled my neck, joints grating.
A black hole the shape of a cylinder was level with my head.
I let go faster than I knew how, throwing my arms to protect my face, trying to delete the shriek of the vicious contraption spinning around the gaping mouth of the cannon, the voracious blue in it's throat--shimmering, heat, heat that wanted to beat me and break me and rip up all my insides. The ground hit me so hard I felt pain. No. No, no, no, no, no. I didn't want this, leave me alone. The wilderness was swallowing, maybe it would swallow me, I was days, months into the woods; they swallowed the mountain, the rocky crag I had landed on, the clearing where the doctor appeared, whole. I had been following an old GPS for excruciating days without a clue of how to get on or off this godforsaken rock on my own, I didn't come here for fire, I didn't come here for this.
The doctor was doubled over by the tree, one hand extended in a plea to stop the monster behind the cannon. "Igor," she coughed incomprehensibly.
The giant leveled the blaster jutting out of the stump of his left arm at me. He towered, taller than me, head burnt into a charcoal outline blocking the sun from the sky, eyes so cold and electrically blue they burned. Staring at me. The blaster grafted into the gray stump of his arm continued to whine for my flesh. It first settled on my head, than my chest, then down on my abdomen where it stayed, crushing my stomach and lungs between feet of thin air.
"Don't," she croaked.
It stayed there, viciously, until the doctor could breathe and speak and plant herself between me and whatever creature from hell was already here.
She inhaled, she exhaled. I stayed on the ground, hating it--tearing every bit of my decision to come here, but I feared the nothingness cylinder, the fire in it.
"At least you've come to the right place," she muttered, feeling her throat. "Can you stand?"
The golem's cannon moved. He had fearsome, boxy tattoos on his head, maybe gang signs, he was bred, bred to destroy. Well made.
The doctor's gaze darkened to irritation, "Igor, please."
"You touch her, and I will kill you." His voice was deep and electronic, as if fed through a modifier to disguise it.
