Doctor Who - 03 - The August Sky

.5. Tumbling Down the Well

Inside the blue box the Doctor faltered. There had been a moment of beauty there, under the Ood Sphere's marble-grey sky, with the song and the memory; but all that was left now was a painful noise. The Doctor leaned on the steering panel, hanging down his sore head.

"Some day my lifestyle is going to kill me," he said sarcastically, as he reached to the TARDIS's instruments and prepared for a take-off. "All that running and sticking my head where it shouldn't be stuck. Yeah, that's final. One day I have to stop running."

"And start chasing," a little voice in his memory added immediately.

"I feel sorry for you," the TARDIS sang. "I don't really know what a headache is, but it can't be light-speed-pleasant-timewarp-energy-good."

"Thank you, my old girl," the Doctor thought back.

"Lie back, and relax, and let me take you forward, and forward, and forward, as I've always done, across the vortex, into endless harmony of timelines and space-paths to chose from, to dance upon, to lose yourself and to forget your loneliness, your guilt, your pain, and your pride, and your constant hope that some day, somebody will prove you wrong," the TARDIS hummed, her wonderful engines picking up the cosmic rhythm. "We are alone in the universe, Doctor, we are so alone, we are the last two in existence, we are those they left behind, we are brilliant and we are mad, and we are alone."

"Yeah, I knew that, thank you," the Doctor muttered, flipping several levers. "By the way, if I try to save telepathic plankton by connecting it directly to my thought-stream again, can somebody, please, smack me? Hard. Actually, they can knock me unconscious."

"It's just a crush-meltdown-hunger-dark-untwining-collision," the TARDIS sing-sang dismissively. "You'll be energy-speed-whoosh soon enough, just wait and see."

"No, it's not," the Doctor protested. "It's not temporary, and it is not just a passing mood. I am wrong, and the world is wrong, and you are the wrongest of all. Can't you feel it? That... gritting... gritting in your engines. I can almost taste it. Bleurghh!" he shook his head like a wet dog. "It tastes, sort of, like marzipan – one that spent too much time in the sun. On the beach. All sticky and covered in sand. Just like crunching, and sweet, and funny-taste-must-have-gone-off marzipan."

He hesitated with his hand hovering over the date selector.

"I could go there to do it now, nothing to stop me, see, except..." he sighed and rolled his tongue inside his mouth, turning his eyes upwards and messing his hair, absolutely unaware of how crazy it all made him look. "I'm wrong. I know I am. I don't feel like myself at all, didn't feel like myself ever since they upside-downed my memories, no, even before that... There is something cosmically wrong with me and with the world. So... Am I going to fix it? Or am I going to break it even further? Hmmm?"

For a split second his face adapted the very same, half-questioning, half-amused look his first incarnation wore, when pondering difficult tasks. There was even that smidgeon of grumpiness, so typical to his elderly self, when he was still young.

"Nothing to stop you," the TARDIS sang. "Nothing to stop me. Let's see how far we can go. Let's go to the end of time. Let's go to the beginning of time. Let's disintegrate in the void of creation and destruction."

"Tempting," the Doctor said. "But no."

He withdrew his hand from the controls and stepped back from the panel.

"I think I need some sleep," he sighed. "Oww, not much for sleeping, me. But a must is a must. I have to separate myself from all the distractions, all the chit-chat, that unceasing whispering of the universe. Right. Zero room then. I just need to find it."