Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The universe was bleeding. A deep, interdimensional cry of anguish. One that was heard simultaneously by no one and everyone, all at once. Across every universe, and none at all. The stars were wrong, the sky was wrong. A sacred line had been crossed. Something that should have never been touched, and the universe was suffering .

The universe was screaming out in agony, begging for help, and the Doctor was running away.

From his foretold death. From his best friend. From the fixed point in time he’d just destroyed while gallivanting around the stars. Tearing holes in the fabrics of time as if he would have no repercussions. Like a broken mirror he couldn’t keep piecing together. Like a God that no one wanted, nor needed. His hands fly over the TARDIS’ console as he steers her toward oblivion. His knuckles are cracked and beginning to bleed from his furious, self destructive tendency to pick at them. His mind won’t stop replaying the sound of Adelaide’s gun as she’d cemented a point in time forever, a point he’d tried to prevent. Because surely, the last Time Lord, the species who had no respect for the laws of time, could do whatever the hell he wanted.

Oh how wrong he was. How wrong he always was.

He’d gotten too reckless, too determined to prove a point. Too stubborn to listen to the rules and warning those before him had set in place. Because he’d thought he could fix things, was that not his purpose? Was that not what he was here for? He can do anything and everything, but only ever for himself, never what he wanted. Humans… as much as he tried to save them, had their own free will in the end. They would always get what they wanted. That was something he could never change.

The Time Lord Victorious is wrong .

He’d seen every end of the universe, every end of time, from the beginning to the end. But despite this, all he’d witnessed, and lost, and suffered, he still couldn’t seem to accept the most basic reality of time: people die, living things die, humans die, everyone dies. Except him… he supposes. He’d experienced death, oh yes, he’d experienced more death than anyone could ever imagine. He’d been dead, but he'd never died. There’s nothing he can do to stop death, the world goes on regardless. That was life's purpose, the one unchangeable part. Death.

What was life without death.

Suffering, enduring, loss. It was a torturous existence.

Even now. Everyone he’d ever loved was dead. Outside of time, death was all there was. Rose Tyler was gone, Martha Jones was gone, Donna Noble was gone.

Yet they cling to him, etched deeply into his wretched two hearts.

He clenches his hands into tight fists, pulling the TARDIS to a hard stop.

Oh, Donna.

It had hardly been any time at all. And The Doctor was already trying to numb the pain. Find something new to occupy his time. Distract himself. If he stopped to think, or just be, for even a second… he wouldn’t be able to handle it all. He had to keep going, there was nothing but oblivion and destruction if he stopped. There was no one left in his TARDIS but him. No one to show the universe. No one to entertain. No one to keep company. No one to share the weight of infinity.

Just The Doctor and Eternity.

And it’s selfish. He knows that. The Doctor is immortal. Using others to help endure his drawn out, pitiful existence was nothing more than a selfish act for his own survival than anything else. His companions didn’t deserve that. Rose didn’t deserve to lose her universe, Martha didn’t deserve to endure the weight of his suffering, Donna didn’t deserve to carry the burden of a Time Lord. He could handle it, barely. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the toll that takes on the human form.

He’d been foolish to think he could fix things. For humans. For his companions he no longer travelled with. The lost cause he cared too much about. Save one life, and another slipped through his fingers.

Or like Adelaide… He’d saved her, only for her to die anyway. And she was right. He should’ve left them on Mars. He should’ve let history take its course.

Because he had disobeyed the laws of time, the ones those before him had set, and the ones he’d made for himself, the universe was rewriting itself. There was a crack in time itself and the universe had to fix that. She was in a state of limbo, anything could happen between then and now. He might return to Earth only to find it devastated and in ruin. He might return to Earth only to find it inhabited by cat people — although that had already happened, so perhaps not. He might return to Earth and find evolution turning backwards.

Of course, Adelaide wasn’t that pivotal of a character in time. The most that might happen was space exploration being pushed back a few decades. Or someone else might fill her granddaughter's place. The relationship that humans had with the extra-terrestrial might be damaged along the way. 

Her death still remained a fixed point though. Something he’d prevented, only to relive so much worse. It made him feel powerless. It shattered his very soul knowing he’d tried everything to avoid suffering the weight of another death and it had meant nothing.

He should have left her on Mars. Let her death mean something. But he couldn’t let them die if he could do something to stop it. He couldn’t live with the weight of one more life lost because he wasn’t strong enough to walk away. He didn’t want another Rose. Or another Donna. Or another Astrid or another Adelaide. He couldn’t bear it.

He’s selfish. He’s so selfish.

He’d taken Adelaide’s sacrifice away from her. Turned her death into something that would be brushed past. Another tombstone.

In the future they were always dead. Everyone he’d ever loved. Gone. And he was still here, lost in the ruins of time, alone, locked in forever.

Doomed to an eternity of loneliness, and it’s not fair.

He yanks on the TARDIS’ handbrake before wandering to the door, opening it and sitting with himself. Curling his arms around his chest, he leans his head against the TARDIS’ door frame, his gaze shifting and his eyes growing moist as they drift, rotating enough in orbit for Earth to come into view.

He swallows, hard. Feeling the weight of everything he’d lost, everyone he’d left behind. A bitterness he could hardly bear pooling in his chest. Wallowing in his own self-hatred, doubt, and misery.

He hated himself for feeling this way. He hated himself for a lot of things, actually.

He kept trying to hold onto purpose, yet everything he tried seemed to collapse.

The world would continue on without him. Time would mend itself, humankind would go on, and the fixed points would hold. People would die, people would live, and then die. He was no more than a fleeting disruption in their lives. He’d never been more than that, and maybe it was time to accept it.

The tenth incarnation of the Doctor was barely a decade old but his death was breathing down his neck like a ticking time bomb. The Ood’s prophecy lingered, four knocks like a distant heartbeat, a shadow always looming.

He stands and closes the TARDIS’ door, silent for a moment before moving towards her console again, pushing buttons, and pulling levers almost carelessly, setting the time and place as if it hardly mattered. Somewhere he hadn’t yet been. The TARDIS flashed a warning, something about a branching timeline, but he ignored it, a consequence of Mars, there’d be a lot of those for a while to come. The Universe was righting itself after his disruption, everything would fix itself eventually.

He presses a few extra buttons, changes a few dates, pulls a lever, and takes a steading breath as the TARDIS hummed to life around him, spiralling towards some unknown planet in an unfamiliar year, on an unfamiliar day. Somewhere he hadn’t been, where no one would know or remember him. He’d disappear into the farthest reaches of the universe, hiding himself so deep that even his own death couldn’t find him. Perhaps it was better that way. He’d be out there, alone, an echo waiting to fade.

Or maybe not. Maybe his death would still find him. Out there, alone, in his own self-inflicted solitary confinement.

The TARDIS jolts, shaking him out of his self-pitying stupor. The lights of his console flashed in alarm and the Doctor had to force his limbs to start moving in response. He stares at the alerts for a second; something or other about having to relocate the time he’d set. But that was ridiculous because he wasn’t going anywhere near the branching timelines. He’d avoided any potential problems, there was nothing wrong with the time and place he’d chosen.

He attempts to delete the alert, attempts to continue forward, but before he can react, the world tips and shakes violently and he’s thrown backwards, colliding with the console before hitting the floor as the TARDIS comes to a sudden, shuddering stop.

The Doctor groans, pressing his fingers into his eyes until the world stops spinning and the pounding of his head stops. Rolling himself over, he grabs out for support to pull himself up and when he’s finally on his feet he stares at the TARDIS’ console laid out in front of him. It’s sparking in several different places, The Doctor has to pull his hand away with a wince when the entire ship seems to shudder and then fall into an unsettling, complete silence.

“Oh, come on.” He flicks a few switches and raps on the side of the console, “don’t do this to me now.”

The TARDIS doesn’t respond outside of a dim red light that slowly blinks on and off, indicating that she was about to enter repair mode. Which meant the Doctor either needed to leave now, or risk getting dissolved along with whatever had caused the breach.

The problem was he had no clue where he’d ended up. And he wouldn’t know until he walked out those doors because the screen that usually displayed the general location and time was black. But the moment he walked out those doors, he might be locked out for a long time. Depending on how long the TARDIS took to fix herself up.

He runs his fingers softly along the TARDIS’ side, “you okay?”

The TARDIS emits a groan before falling silent again.

The Doctor grimaces, “alright, take your time.” He pulls on his coat and pockets his sonic screwdriver from the counter he’d left it on, “please tell me you’ve at least put me somewhere decent,” he muttered. “A beach maybe.” There was no use hesitating.

Then he strode to the doors and pulled them open, squinting in the hazy afternoon light that greeted him. He barely had time to stumble out the door and look back before the TARDIS’ doors forcibly shut behind him with a finality that left him feeling exiled.

Again.

He takes in his surroundings. He’s in some kind of alleyway, brownstones lined the street, stretching above him, their faces worn with time and weather. A burnt hole scarred the side of one of them where the TARDIS had crashed, brick had crumbled, a pipe was leaking. The Doctor sucked on his lip, glancing around. 

He rubbed a hand on the brick beside him, sniffing the red dust that fell away. The stench of fossil fuels hung thick in the air, his throat was beginning to sting from some kind of pollution that seemed to cling to him.

“Why’re we back on Earth?” He grumbled, wiping his dusty hand on his suit. “The plan was to go away from here.”

The TARDIS didn’t dignify him with a response.

“Looks like it could be London. We didn’t get far at all, did we?”

It did make sense though. It’s not as if something like this had never happened before. Every so often he chose a faulty point in time that the TARDIS couldn’t exit the Time Vortex into so she recovered by landing back in the time they’d left. That would put him back in 2059, where he’d left Adelaide…

No.

He’d taken a pitstop in 2011 and then again in 2019 in an attempt to remove some of the TARDIS’ traces in that point of time. He left behind less of an imprint when travelling to the same place in time than he would if he’d gone from one place to another in two different times. 

Realistically he was in 2019.

“At least I’m in a decent century, and not in the middle of some war or something.” He mused. Then he tapped his hand against the TARDIS’ side. “Take your time,” he said. It was both an encouragement and a reluctant farewell.

It definitely made sense to be 2019. And there’s a specific texture to each moment in time, a different degree of pollution, or disquiet, or gunk that gave the air its particular edge. Earth was the strongest of all. He’d gotten extremely good at guessing Earth years because of this. But there was something a little too dense about the air’s quality. Something that seemed a little too old to be 2019. A lot more similar to the feel he’d felt in 2059 as opposed to now.

He considered a dumpster that was nearby, not entirely against dumpster diving for an old newspaper that might give him the general idea of what he’d be walking into. He was relieved when his eye caught on some of the litter that missed the bin, however. His coat was freshly washed, it was nice to keep it that way.

He picks up a bottle of something, milk maybe, and looks for the expiry date. He frowns at the 2015 that greets him and turns back to the TARDIS.

“How’d you miss all three of the last years we’ve been to?” She wouldn’t have just relocated to such a random time. To be fair though, he had ignored her warning, that annoying, silent insistence. Perhaps she couldn’t re-enter any of those times and chose the closest one she could. Now she sits eerily still and silent. He strides back to her and pats her blue walls, darkness fills the interior, save for the blinking repair light just barely visible from the angle he stood at. It flickered faintly, like a lone star in a pitch-black sky.

To be fair, the TARDIS was usually a few years off anyway. Perks of being broken most of her life, with only the Doctor’s own self-taught repair skills.

He tugs on his earlobe and sucks on his lower lip. “Sightseeing in 2015 I guess.” He’s not sure he’d been here yet. Usually sticking to moving forward from 2005 when he’d met Rose. The amount of pollution wasn’t entirely wrong. It was London after all. It was strangely heavier than 2019 and future years though. Which was weird.

He brushes it off. He might just be in a part of London he hadn’t been.

He bites his lip. There was plenty of time since he’d last seen Donna… as long as he avoided her neighbourhood. The weight of her loss pressed down on him and he had to dig his nails into his palm until the sting drew him back from the brink of his own spiralling thoughts. “Mmm.” He takes a deep breath and squeezes his eyes shut, weighing the idea of just staking out in this alleyway until the TARDIS fixes herself. He stands there long enough that someone wanders past him, a man who gives him a side eye on his way past.

He realises how strange he must look. Bedraggled, tired, and with a fading bruise above his eye from where he’d collided with the TARDIS’ console. It was chilly, but he was wearing so many layers he definitely appeared a little touristy to most. Perhaps he looked like a lost tourist. However, the smoking blue box that was buried halfway through a brownstone wall was definitely telling a different story.

All plans to remain in the alleyway evaporate. The last thing he needs is for someone to call the police on him for suspicious activity. He should find somewhere to stay low for a bit. A cafe maybe.

He takes another glance around at his surroundings, nothing seems to be open in this specific part of London. Something else catches his eye though, several flyers litter the ground around his bin, he hadn’t paid too much attention to them before, but a lot of them had a crude drawing of the generic green alien humans used to generalise them with — bulging eyes, antennae, etc — the bolded words IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING , took up the rest of the A4 sheet of papers room as well as a phone number and a logo that looked familiar, but the Doctor couldn’t quite place it.

He stares at it a moment longer, trying to silence the pit that his stomach had made itself, humans were paranoid, this was probably just a follow up to all the alien attacks they’d experienced. Nothing he needed to worry about. With a heavy breath, he turns and begins to walk, leaving the TARDIS behind. There was no purpose this time, no higher aim or greater hope to pull him forward, just his footfalls, carrying him to whatever waited ahead.

The first thing he sees when he exits the cramped alleyway the TARDIS had wedged herself into is the empty square. No crowd, just a few people. Someone on a bike, a few parked cars. People lost in their own lives. It was quiet for the time of day it was, usually there’d be dozens of people bustling around. He counted six now. At least it proves he’s definitely on Earth, and his London assumption had definitely been correct. He breathes out a small sigh of relief, this was familiar, if he could’ve crash landed anywhere, he’s glad it was here.

2015 wasn’t too far out from where he spent most of his time. He’d be worried if he were placed in the middle of a conflict, or in the middle of nowhere, or somewhere could run into himself. This is fine. He might be in the future of where he usually is, but if he’s here twice, it definitely isn’t with this face.

Someone pauses close to where he’s standing and he takes a quick detour. “Really strange question,” he starts, hoping his voice sounds happier than he feels, “but what year is it?” Just to confirm.

The woman he’s spoken to squints at him with some sort of suspicion in her eyes. She clutches at her handbag. “What’s it to you?”

The Doctor stutters, not quite used to such a defensive response, “date, I meant.” He restarts, “what’s the date?”

“January Second.” The woman snaps, “lay off whatever drugs you’re on, god.” She storms off and the Doctor stares after her.

“I don’t– I don’t do drugs.” He says uselessly.

Someone taps him on the shoulder and he nearly leaps out of his skin, reaching for his sonic, but faltering when it’s just an older woman with a walking stick.

“I get you’re not from around here.” The woman says. “Your accent is a little off.”

“You could say that.” The Doctor mumbles, “what was her problem?”

“You shouldn’t go around asking questions like that. It makes you sound like one of them.”

“Them?” The Doctor raises his eyebrow.

“There you go again,” the woman sighs, “look, I think you’re hung over from the New Year, is there anyone I can call for you before you get Government officials in here and disrupt the peace again?”

The Doctor swallows, “I don’t have anyone. I’m fine. Wait– Government officials? What’s going on?”

The woman blinks at him sympathetically, “you lose them to the war?”

“War?”

“I’ll hail you a taxi.” The woman offers, “get you home safe.”

“I don’t understand, what’s going on?”

The woman ignores him, still convinced he’s under the influence of some kind of substance. He’s confused. There were no wars in London in 2015. Nothing even gets close to a war until at least 2024. Even if he had disrupted something in 2059, there’s no way it would’ve sparked a war years beforehand.

A taxi pulls over next to the curb he’d been led to and the woman hands the driver some money and ushers the Doctor into the seat. “Get yourself home and warm, dear. The hangover will end soon, I’m sure you’ll remember everything then.”

She thanks the driver and the taxi starts moving. “Where to sir?”

The Doctor shakes his head, “no, I need to stay here.”

“I think you need a Doctor mate, how much have you had?”

“Nothing.” The Doctor insists.

“I’m sure there’s still a war displacement shelter around here.” The driver offers, but the Doctor was already unlocking his door and tripping as he exits the moving vehicle. Something was very wrong. This is not 2015. It’s gotta be some other decade. Some Earth adjacent planet.

He scans his surroundings and the streets, looking for somewhere to lay low while he figures out what to do next. HIs eyes settle on a shabby little pub, ignoring the taxi driver shouting at him while he holds up traffic. There’s a lopsided ‘ We’re Open! ’ sign hanging by the corner of a dusty window. It looks fairly abandoned.

He made a beeline for it. He’d stay there until these people were gone and it was dark outside and then figure out what to do. He wasn’t really up for the bustling streets of London just yet. He’d expected to be able to exit his TARDIS and then find somewhere to hole up for a while anyway. Either that or he would’ve parked her somewhere and taken several years of a nap. He’d found it was safer to do that while stationary. Especially after attempting it while parked in orbit one time and waking to find himself almost sucked into a black hole.

The bell hooked to the roof jingles with an almost mournful chime as he steps inside.

It’s exactly as deserted as he’d hoped. A couple sits in the corner over half-melted sundaes, and the bored looking bartender barely spares him a glance. The Doctor sighs as he sinks onto a barstool, savouring the brief lull in the hustle and bustle. The crowds outside can wait; for now. He just wants a quiet place to sit and think. Somewhere to pass the time while the TARDIS heals herself.

Eventually the bartender shuffles over, looking him up and down with disdain. “What’ll it be, Mr…”

“Doctor.” The Doctor corrects, a smile tugging at his lips, masking whatever the hell was going on inside his head. He puts his game face on. No point being a moping mess here.

The bartender rolls his eyes, a little miffed, but shrugs, “Doctor?”

“Smith. John Smith.”

The bartender sighs this time. “You got an ID, Doctor Smith. John Smith?”

The Doctor snorts and awkwardly pulls out his psychic paper to show the bartender who raises an eyebrow but shrugs.

The Doctor begins to play with his fingers in his lap, turning away from the bartender to look at the chalkboard that reads Today’s Specials . He notes each one with a slight grimace.

None of them look appetizing at all.

“Uh.” He stalls for a moment. Considering his options.

Then he decides fuck it —for lack of a better word. “Anything, I don’t mind.”

The bartender looks a little surprised at his request, but gets to work, pulling out a glass and reaching for the ice. The Doctor watches him, trying to settle his thoughts, there’s not really any human alcohol that can actually get him drunk, due to his annoyingly fast metabolism. Besides, whatever was going on outside had set him on edge, he’s not entirely certain he wants to lower any sort of defence. Especially not his most important weapon.

But as the bartender begins pouring, his phone rings. The bartender excuses himself, and the Doctor refuses to eavesdrop, wanting to grant the bartender his own privacy, but he catches snippets of the conversation regardless, and suddenly… unease prickles at his skin. The bartender glances at him, a shadow of suspicion crossing his face before he turns back to the call, his words hushed but tense.

“Everything all right?” The Doctor asks, trying to sound more confident than he feels, forcing his cheery demeanour back to the surface. “You, uh, weren’t calling to check my credentials were you?”

The bartender shoots him another quick look, then finishes up his conversation, cutting it short with a gruff goodbye. By the time he returns, the couple has quietly stepped out, leaving the Doctor alone at the bar. The bartender resumes making the drink, but something feels off. That call, the sidelong glances–it’s enough to put the Doctor on edge.

For a brief moment, he wonders if he should leave. But the TARDIS is locked in healing mode, and out there, it’s only the same empty streets and people who think he’s an intoxicated weirdo, though now that he thinks about it, he probably looked incredibly bad going straight from them to the first bar he’d seen…

So he stays, watching the bartender’s every move, feeling the tension simmer between them, uncertain of whether this is suspicion or something worse.

“It’s crazy out there.” He tries, “nearly got run over on my way here. Afternoon traffic is not for the weak.” It’s a lie, but a conversation starter nonetheless.

“No one wants to be on the streets this time of day… or any time of day,” The bartender mutters.

The Doctor raised his eyebrow, “what’s that supposed to mean?” But the bartender drops something, interrupting him, the sharp clatter of whatever it was making up the Doctor’s mind for him. He stands up from where he’s seated.

“Actually, I think I’ve changed my mind on that.” The Doctor says, because there’s no way he’s drinking something when this bartender is sending all the wrong signals. He tries to sound lighthearted though his twin hearts beat faster, his pulse a drumbeat of dread. Is this what the prophecy foretold? The rapid thump thump thump thump? He takes a step back, hoping the bartender might just let him leave.

The bartender straightens from where he was leaning over whatever he’d dropped. His eyes narrow. “You haven’t paid.” He says flatly, his tone unfriendly and almost threatening. It’s a stark change from his previously bored demeanor

The Doctor raises an eyebrow while he backs towards the door. “I didn’t drink anything.”

“You ordered.” the bartender snaps.

The Doctor shrugs. “You’ve only just started pouring it. Nothing’s mixed yet. I’ve declined. No harm. I’ll be on my way.”

“No you won’t.” The words send a chill down the Doctor’s spine as he reaches the door and feels around for the handle only to find it locked.

“Look,” he says, forcing a smile as he scans for another way out. Or any chance he can discreetly pull out his sonic and unlock the door. “If I’ve somehow offended you, I’m deeply sorry. I’ll pay for the drink, even though I haven’t had it. I’d rather just be going now.”

The bartender doesn’t budge. He sets down a glass filled with a clear liquid with a pinkish hue, some kind of spirit. When did he get time to finish it?

“You’ll drink it, then pay. Then you can leave.”

The Doctor laughs nervously, and then weighs his options. The bartender is staring him down, eyes narrowed, there’s no chance to unlock the door without drawing attention to his sonic. The only exit is the door behind him, and the door to the staff area which the tender is currently blocking. His hearts thud painfully in his chest. “So if I drink that.” He nods at the glass. “And pay for it, you’ll let me go?”

The bartender nods, his face impassive.

With no other option, and this being the safest route, the Doctor slowly peels himself away from the door and reluctantly steps back to the counter, despite every instinct telling him to run.

Where? He counters his thoughts. Because he’s right. There’s no where he can go. He might as well do what the tender asks, and find somewhere else, rather than attempt to run and risk being followed by an angry, money hungry adult man. He looks down at the glass. “What is it?”

The bartender’s lips curl into a thin smile. “Raspberry Vodka.” His eyes don’t leave the Doctor’s as he reaches for the drink, his movements slow, deliberate. The air feels thick, like something heavy is hanging just beyond the Doctor's reach.

For a moment, his mind flashes to every escape plan he’s ever formulated in his centuries of life. A hundred ways to get out of tight spots, and yet, here he is, stuck in a bar with a glass of ginger beer in his hand and nowhere to run.

But who is he to jump to conclusions? The poor bartender just wants to be paid. There’s surely nothing to worry about. He’d made this glass of vodka and been a little disgruntled when the Doctor had suddenly declined. He’s not much of a vodka drinker, but he had asked for anything.

He tries to push the panic down. His hearts beat faster. Too fast. He can feel it in his ribs now—the steady thud, thud, thud like a warning drum. “You know this is usually the part where I ask if it’s poisoned…” his empty joke trails off at the bartender’s expression, sensing the situation is escalating further than it already probably has.

He raises the glass, tilting it toward the bartender as if to say: See? No problem, I’m drinking it. We’re all friends here —but even as the liquid touches his lips, his eyes never leave the bartender’s.

The moment the drink hits his tongue, he swallows quickly, as though he can rid himself of the taste of what’s going on here. It’s definitely raspberry, if a little sour, but there’s something off about the bartender's smile. The kind that doesn’t quite meet the eyes. It’s like the guy is watching him like he’s some sort of specimen, waiting for the Doctor to crack.

He places the empty glass back on the counter with a faint clink, feeling like it’s louder than it should be. A cold sweat is starting to form at the back of his neck, despite the chill in the air. He digs around in his pocket, fingers trembling slightly, his hand moving faster than usual, hoping against hope that he’s left at least some sort of cash inside. Focus. He pulls out a few pounds with a silent whoop as he lays them on the counter.

He gives a sharp nod to the bartender, trying to force that cheery smile back, but it’s slipping. The weight of the situation settles on him, and for a moment, it feels like the walls are closing in. His throat tightens as he stands, barely able to contain the desire to bolt.

“Right. Well. I’ll just be going then.”

The words are almost too loud in the silence that hangs between them, and the Doctor takes a step back, hoping that will be enough to signal the bartender to step aside.

The bartender doesn’t budge. The door behind the Doctor feels like the only option left, and it’s locked. The Doctor’s pulse quickens. This is bad. This is very bad. He doesn’t even care about the drink anymore, he doesn’t care if there’s no malicious intent behind the bartender's actions; he wants out. Now.

He takes a step back.

The door is right behind him. He just needs to get there, unlock it, and run as fast as he can in one direction until he finds somewhere better to regather himself.

But as he turns, his vision tunnels. A nauseating wave of dizziness crashes over him, and he reaches out, gripping the edge of the bar to stay upright. “What-” He swallows hard around the build up of saliva in his mouth. “What was in that?”

The bartender’s smile deepens, a glint of something malicious in his eyes. “Vodka, raspberry.” His voice is cool, calculated, and the Doctor’s blood runs cold.

The Doctor has to swallow a mouthful of bile, and he shakes his head to clear it of the fog that was gathering. There’s no way vodka would affect him that much.

“And a little something else I suppose.” There it was, “Gamma-Hydroxybutyrate.” He drags the word out into syllables “big word, I know. GHB. Always have it ready in case I ever have to deal with one of your kind.”

One of my kind?

The Doctor attempts to steady his trembling hands and blinks away the fog that had begun to cloud his vision. “How does someone like you even come across something like that?”

“These are dark times.”

The Doctor’s legs buckle and he has to grab onto the closest chair in order to remain upright, his mind grasping at the phrase as he sways. “I don’t… know what you mean.” His words slur. Gamma Hydroxybutyrate? He can only hope his body can metabolise it fast enough for him to run. Escape. Something . His whole body fights the pull into oblivion. “What do you want?” He manages, his voice is laced with desperation, and confusion. And the memory of the timeline divergence he didn’t think would be that big of a deal.

The bartender grins at him, striding around the place and flipping the we’re open! Sign around, closing windows, and pulling on a pair of disposable gloves as The Doctor collapses to his knees, head in his hands as the world spins.

“I want you Alien scum to get the hint that you’re not welcome here.”

The Doctor feels a sickening weight in his stomach as he processes the words. His thoughts are a tangled mess, slipping through his grasp as the tranquilliser takes hold. He presses a palm to his forehead, trying to focus. “You’ve made a mistake,” he gasps, blinking rapidly against the darkening edges of his vision. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not–”

“You’re not what? ” The bartender cuts him off with a laugh, dragging a stool into place so he can sit and watch as the Doctor is slowly dragged under. “Not the illegal alien who got spotted destroying property in that blue box, disrupting public life and being a nuisance? Not the one alien-control called me about, warning about you entering my premises, refusing to pay me for my services? I should have known the second you opened the door you were one of them .” He spits the word ‘them’ like a venom. “Can’t seem to stay away can you? Even after everything.”

Alien Control? Everything? Them? Illegal?

The Doctor’s stomach rolls as he tries his best not to throw up. He forces a weak grin, dragging himself backwards as a terrifying numbness starts to take over, “How wonderful to know bureaucracy thrives even in branched off, apparently post-apocalyptic 2019. Did they promise you a gold star, or just a pat on the back and a thank-you card?” His back hits the leg of a table, “and what do you mean ‘illegal’? Last I checked you guys didn’t have anything written into the constitution that barred aliens, just a few big guns you like to shoot at them with.” 

“They said you were dangerous, but never mentioned how mouthy you are.” 

The Doctor swallows, offended despite it all. “Whatever they told you is wrong. I’m not here to hurt anyone. I’ve never hurt anyone. I’m just passing through.”

“Yeah? The bartender scoffs, pulling a rag from behind the bar and tossing it onto the counter. “Not what I heard. You’re an alien, like the ones who attack us almost every single day . You need to be under control. I’m surprised at your confidence to even show your face out here. After the war.”

“That never happened” The Doctor grits out. “It’s 2019, nothing’s changed as far as I’m concerned . ”

“ 2015 ,” the bartender corrects.

“Proves my point.” The Doctor loses his footing and nearly falls, “that’s even less time for this alleged war and constitutional amendment.”

“Stop gaslighting me, you’ve lost.”

“I-”

“Us humans have been getting tired of your kind wreaking havoc where they’re not welcome. I’m glad you showed up when you did. Now I can pay off my overdue rent notice.”

The Doctor swallows heavily, panting as he fights against his failing body with everything he’s got. He’s not passing out. He’s not. “Oh, this is about rent money. Of course. Should’ve guessed. You know, I hear kidnapping is great for your credit score.” He has to get out of here, has to find a way to escape before… before what? The drug is pulling him down, clouding his thoughts.

“How do you know m’not just a human.” He pleads, the desperate lie spilling from his lips as he struggles for control. “You could be killing an innocent person.”

The bartender smirks and gestures at his telephone. “You were sighted, damaging property with that spaceship of yours. The government sent out a warrant for your arrest immediately, they track these sort of extraterrestrial things. Tracked you in here. Let me know that alien-control are on their way, and here we are.”

The Doctor’s throat goes drier than the Sahara. “But-” He closes his eyes while he tries to drag himself back to his feet, a wave of nausea flooding over him. 

“I don’t want to hear any buts.” The bartender strides over to The Doctor’s shivering form as he finally manages to stand again. “I want you pliable and at my feet so I can get my money without any more troubles.” He frowns. “Most of you would have passed out already.”

The Doctor grits his teeth, swaying and fumbling for his sonic, he puts it in his pocket somewhere, where is it? “Well, sorry to disappoint, but I’m not like most. Built to last.” The world spins around him “Bit like a luxury toaster, really.” though even he knows it’s empty bravado. His mind reels, and he’s spiralling. Maybe this is what he deserves, the cost of every wrong decision, every innocent life he couldn’t save.

He gasps out in shock and pain when suddenly, the bartender’s hand is in his hair, dragging him backwards and shoving him against the bar counter. His hands fly to his head, and his feet slip on the ground, grappling for purchase. But the guy is strong. Too strong, and The Doctor can’t gain a foothold as he’s thrown against the bar counter, his back cracking against it, knocking the air from his lungs as a small, pitiful groan slips out. He struggles, tries to find some hidden Gallifreyan strength, but he can barely move.

“I’m tired of your endless yapping.” The bartender snaps, “you’ve lost. Get that through your head.” 

And with that, he thrusts the rag he’d placed on the bench into The Doctor’s mouth. The Doctor jerks, gagging as the sour tang of stale cleaner and spilt ginger beer floods his senses, thick and overwhelming. His hands move to pull it free, to rub the sting from his watering eyes, but the bartender’s already pressing the distractions advantage and clamping a firm hand around the Doctor’s throat.

He can’t do anything but struggle while the bartender uses his free hand to fill an inoculation plunger with what he assumes is more of the drug already in his system. His hands are too slow, too heavy, his strength sapped by the sedative he’d already consumed, his lungs battling to breathe with the heavy, relentless grip on his throat. In a quick, brutal movement, the plunger forces itself between The Doctor’s teeth and brushes the back of his throat. His mouth is then forced shut by the rough hand replacing itself across it.

“Swallow.”

The Doctor chokes, his body instinctively resisting as the bitter liquid slides down his gasping throat. His vision blurs, the room spinning with each laboured breath. The walls felt like they were closing in on him, each one taunting with a darker shade of reality. His fingers tremble, clawing at his own skin, trying to keep himself anchored.

But the drugs were clawing into him once more, urging him into darkness, panic surging as he struggled against the bartender’s relentless grip. Every nerve in his body screams in protest, his hearts pounding erratically, but the tranquilliser sapped his strength. The addition to this makes it worse.

The Doctor’s twin hearts thunder, their rhythm erratic as the tranquilliser’s claws dig deeper. His body, a ship tossed in a storm, refuses to obey. He feels his limbs start to lose feeling and go limp, his body becoming unresponsive, bound to the will of the hands that hold him down.

The bartender smirks, tightening his hold, his face mere inches away. “That’s it. Just make this easy, Doctor Smith . There’s no one coming for you.”

He’s fading, but he manages to slur out a delirious “is this the start of a monologue—” but he breaks off as with a final shove, the bartender releases The Doctor, letting him crumple unceremoniously to the cold, unyielding ground. His breaths come shallow and ragged, each one a struggle, his lungs burning with the effort.

The Doctor tries to push himself up, but his vision swims, his body refusing to respond. The world narrows into darkness.

He stares up at the bartender, his gaze hard, defiant, refusing to give the man the satisfaction of surrender, but the last of his strength fading as the world slips further away.

As his vision dims, The Doctor’s mind spirals. He has no idea who would be interested enough in him to pull something like this, he doubts he’s even that well known in 2015, he’s never been here with this face, the only thing he can think of is the fact that the bartender had mentioned illegal aliens and alien-control? His thoughts turn chaotic. He fights to stay awake, struggling to stay upright even as the poison grips him tighter. He has to hope that his body will continue to metabolise whatever it is he’s been injected with.

His mind drifts to the TARDIS, locked and inaccessible, her silent, blinking repair light his only lifeline. He tries to reach out, focusing his mind on her presence, but the sedative claws him under, dragging him down, his thoughts dissolving into silence as the darkness finally closes in.

Chapter Text

There’s a long moment when the Doctor genuinely considers letting the void take hold and staying there. Maybe this was his projected death. The oncoming storm. Doomed to die of drug overdose instead of something meaningful and in defence of those he loved like he’d hoped.

To be completely honest he had lost all hope at his favourite ending regardless, what with a lack of companions. All of them having either died or been lost, or left him. But maybe that was what he deserved. The Doctor wasn’t a very good person after all.

His heightened, Time Lord metabolism tears through the GHB in his system like it’s nothing though and pretty soon he’s groggily coming to his senses. A little bewildered, a pounding headache in the back of his head, and a strained memory while he tries to figure out what the actual hell had happened.

There’s rows upon rows of bottled alcohol directly in front of him, the wooden shelves they’re sitting on are cracked and splintering, and the metal racks that ensure they don’t roll anywhere are rusting. When he squints at the closer ones, the lids are grimy and there’s a yellow tinge to the slimy bottles. For some reason, despite the situation, the Doctor can’t think any more than how much of a health code violation that should surely be. If this place was health and safety checked, the owner would be shut down immediately and the general public cautioned against going within a ten mile radius of the place.

The air reeks of rot and ethanol and something dead… something that died in a bottle and never got cleaned out. The Doctor’s stomach roils as he sees the state of the vodka. Towards the front due to its recent usage, and the wood is downright rotted and the lid looks like it was previously eroded to the rest of the bottle. A knife lays beside it in testament towards the idea that the bartender would have had to pry the lid open just to serve it to him.

He’s going to have to cleanse his entire system when he gets out of here. Drink lots of water, eat something severely alkaline. The such.

Shifting to test his mobility and hoping to get moving before his very inhospitable bartender returns, the Doctor discovers his hands are bound behind his back with several loops of what feels like it could be sisal rope. He can feel the stiff fibres doing their best to make his arms as splintery as the shelves are. There’s another series of figure eights around his ankles and the Doctor has to hold back a snort because how on Earth did anyone think that this would hold anyone? Let alone the Doctor. Escape artist extraordinaire. Saviour. Rope repellant. All that.

Except, apparently, when it came to his friends.

Shut up . The Doctor quiets his brain. Shoving everything down like he usually does. No use spiralling now. If he spirals now, he’s lost. 

Time to throw on that insufferable, carefree exterior he’s known for.

He scans his surroundings again. There’s a small window, too far out of reach to be any use, the hundreds of bottles, the wall behind him, the foul vodka he knew had a strange taste outside of the drugs it’d been laced with, and drunk anyway because apparently, without a companion to impress, he’s a people pleaser.

The knife that the bartender had used.

Wait.

Knife.

The Doctor whoops with joy inside his head. His captor wasn’t going to be his captor too much longer. Especially if the rest of his escape attempt was as easy as this. It’s almost laughable. If the Doctor felt like laughing, he probably would.

He drags himself up by the pole behind him. Balancing tediously on bound legs. He manages to shuffle to the other side of the room without falling. But the act of spinning around and leveraging his hands to go higher than they want to send him crashing forward. Knife only just in hand, bottles smashing around him like those slow-mos in action movies.

He lands hard, the hit forcing all the air from his lungs, and he has to just lay there for a moment and recompose himself. His bound arms shivering behind his back, his lips painfully resting against the disgusting floorboards.

It’s a miracle he didn’t kill himself from falling with a knife in his hand. It’s also a miracle he manages to tuck it discreetly into one of his accessible pockets before the door is slamming open and then quickly closed again. The Doctor may be faced down on the splintery floor, regretting not just staying in space and hibernating for the next century, but he can feel the annoyance from the bartender across the room.

“What are you doing?” The bartender's voice is an angry hiss. “I have customers! They can’t know I might have an alien infestation, you’re going to scare them off.”

“Escaping.” The Doctor’s breathing is ragged, still trying to catch his breath from the fall, “and I don’t think your customers would be very happy to know their drinks are contaminated by the hundreds of health code violations from this storeroom alone. Imagine if you got a black light in here. Eugh. No wonder you’re getting evicted.”

“ Shhh .” The bartender takes a grip of the Doctor’s wrists, and a hunk of his hair, shushing him again when he yelps in pain, and drags him back to his corner of the room. “I passed the previous inspection with flying colours.”

“Was the inspector blindfolded?”

The bartender responds by pushing another rag into his mouth, actually, probably the same one from before because the sensation is disgusting . His senses are overwhelmed by sour alcohol and cleaner, and the bartender’s grimy hands, and The Doctor really wants out.

“Mmmph.” The Doctor gags, desperately trying not to throw up.

The bartender holds a finger to his mouth and backs out the door, leaving the Doctor alone again.

Well. Alone with his knife.

He gets to work, shimmying it out of his pocket and angling it so that it hooks between the rope and his wrists. He’s got to work fast, before the disgusting rag in his mouth makes him pass out. Or die. Honestly, it’s probably gross enough to genuinely kill him, he’s certain of it.

The knife makes short work of the ropes and he makes short work of the rag in his mouth, pulling it out and throwing it into the furthest corner of the storeroom. Then he cuts the ties on his ankles.

“Terrible customer service.” He mutters to himself, but although he’s doing well at keeping the facade up, he’s panicking on the inside. 2019. Or… 2017? Or 2015. He can’t remember what year it is. It shouldn’t be this different from the 2008 of his companions. Or even the 2059 he came from. Just the good old 21st century.

But the underlying threat of Alien-Control was beginning to freak him out. What had gone so terribly wrong that this point in time had been so severely disrupted? Was it the result of Adelaide? Was it his fault?

He examines the window above him, and reluctantly decides that the front door is his best exit plan. Unless he wants to dislocate his shoulders and hips to be able to shimmy out the window that’s higher on the wall than he is tall.

He heaves in a deep breath, filling his lungs again and prepares himself.

He also pulls his screwdriver from his pocket, just in case the door is locked again. He can never be too prepared.

Then he leans carefully against the door, ears pricked.

“Ah! Mr. Drabek. You made it.” The bartender’s voice is that of a businessman. Someone ready to haggle for the best price. The Doctor has to move fast, or he’s going to lose his chance.

“Eli Vex.” The response is hard, the voice dismissive, “I’m assured you’ve done as we asked.”

There’s movement. “I have.” Eli responds, “but lets talk payment first.” His voice lowers, and The Doctor’s breath slows. His chance is coming soon. “I have customers who aren’t finished yet. I’d hate to disrupt them.”

“You’ll get your payment once he’s securely in my vehicle, Mr. Vex.”

Now.

The Doctor moves quickly, brandishing his sonic through the door. Suddenly very much awake, the drugs have well and truly made their way out of his system. “I hate to break it to both of you, but none of you are getting anything.”

The two of them are startled, Eli’s reflexes are too slow and unsuspecting that the Doctor takes him down quickly by shoving a barrel at his legs, tripping him up and sending him to the floor.

The Drabek guy is further away so the Doctor makes a break for it. Saluting at a couple who just wanted to finish their soup. “I’d ask to check the expiry date if I were you.” He tells their baffled expressions before slamming through the thankfully unlocked door.

There’s loud exclamations of anger and disruption as he runs, coat billowing out behind him. He crashes into a group of masked officials outside, and barely manages to twist out of their arms to continue on his way. Heart hammering with adrenaline.

Deep down he enjoys this. The chase. The exhilaration that comes with defeating the bad guys. But right now he’s too rattled by the bartender’s successful attempt at subduing him, if only for a short while, to truly enjoy the feeling. He’s crazy. But right now, he’s scared.

He trips on a loose pavement, startled voices of passersby calling out to him. But he doesn’t stop. The sound of feet thundering behind him fuels him forward.

Someone yells out, Stop that Alien! And suddenly the pedestrians become a problem, instead of moving out of his way, their hands start grabbing at him, only subdued when he brandishes the sonic at them. Scanning for the alleyway he left the TARDIS in. Not sure what good she’ll be if she’s still in healing mode. But he’s sure he’ll come up with a plan from there.

He manages to swerve through enough detours to lose his tailing of the general public and whoever was paying to catch him. He feels like he should feel honoured for all the effort.

Finally one of the ways he turns looks familiar and his gut fills with relief when the blue exterior of his TARDIS comes into view. He’s less relieved when he dashes towards her, tries her handle and finds her still locked. He fumbles for his key and wobbles it around in the lock to no avail.

The shouting is getting too close, “come on, please. I don’t care if I get disintegrated. Just let me in!”

The TARDIS stays stubbornly locked. 

The Doctor tries his sonic on her, knowing it’ll be pointless since she only opens with a key, or if she wants to open. Usually it has to be both, and clearly she doesn’t want to.

“Don’t make me beg.” The Doctor begs, hands jittering because he’s running out of time. And he has more time than anyone. A blessing and a curse.

“Please! If you don’t let me in, you’ll never see me again.” He bites his lip. “Well you might, I’m pretty good at talking my way out of terrible situations. But he’d like to avoid them at all costs regardless and a little lying never hurt anyone. Especially when his pursuers seemed to be out for blood more than anything.

“Pause healing mode. I don’t care if it impacts your location and navigation. I can fix that later. We can crash land somewhere else, and I can work something out. Just please. ”

The soft hum of healing mode stops, and The Doctor is able to pull her door open, stumbling inside with a gasp of relief “thank you!” The world almost washes away in that moment of safety, of security and he runs his hand through his sweaty hair in relief because he’d made it. He’d escaped again. The escape master. Escape artist extraordinaire. No prison, or barely hygiene passing bar storerooms could hold him. No sir!

He’s about to close the door and make his way to the TARDIS’ console and let her take him away, hopefully far away, somewhere to regroup, and reestablish his views on continuing to visit Earth— views which were becoming increasingly less and less inclined to further Earth touristing— when a distressed scream for help! stops him. It reverberates through the air, dragging him back like a moth to a flame, and curse his stupid two hearts and unstoppable empathy, for they sink in unison, weighing him down, not letting him leave without helping.

He tries to shut his eyes, for a fleeting moment, willing himself. No. Begging himself to ignore it. Begging himself to not look, not listen. Someone else will come. He needs to go, because he’s being hunted like an animal. The whole situation is actually ridiculous.

But the scream rises again, raw and panicked, cutting through his resolve like a knife. His hand falters on the edge of the doorframe. He can’t close it. He can’t leave someone sounding like that. He can’t not look. He can’t not listen.

Someone else will probably not come. The only people coming are the people who want to buy him for unknown reasons that he really does not want to find out about.

He glances out, just to see. Just a quick look, he tells himself, already knowing how this will end. Four figures come into view, silhouetted under the dim streetlights. Three men, their posture predatory, looming over a smaller figure—a girl. A teenager, maybe 16 or 17, shaking as they corner her against the wall. The glint of a knife catches his eye as one of them waves it near her face.

“Give us everything valuable you got, and we’ll consider leaving the rest of you alone.”

The Doctor swallows. Torn. He really needs to leave. He can practically smell the bartender and his friends as they close in on him.

But on the other hand, the girl is outnumbered, and she has brown eyes, and wavy blond hair that catches the light, and for a terrible, heart stopping moment she looks identical to Rose. It isn’t Rose, but it doesn’t matter, his chest tightens and his head fills with those long years of grief he’d had to live through since he’d lost her. 

And he couldn’t leave her. Not again. Not when the men had a hunger in their eyes that suggested more than a want to just mug her. Not when the Doctor had the ability to stop it this time.

The selfish part of him begs him to think of the bigger picture, it’s not his fight. YOU’RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME TO SAVE YOURSELF. It begs him to think of all the extra lives he can save if he gets out of this alive. One life, for billions of others.

Trolley problem.

Except the issue with the trolley problem is that he’d try to save them all.

The Doctor bites the inside of his mouth and tugs on his ear in frustration. Every instinct screams at him to leave. But that small, desperate voice in the back of his mind—the one that always gets him into trouble—whispers, You know you can’t.

He can feel the weight of every decision he’d made in his entire life, regardless of his current incarnation crushing down on him. Every life he’d sacrificed for the greater good.

Pompeii, he’d left an entire city of people to die because it was a fixed point that would destroy everything if altered. Changing a fixed point changed nothing anyway.

He’d erased his best friend Donna’s memories for her own safety, for the greater good despite his own selfish desires for them to be a team together. With Donna he wouldn’t be alone anymore. But losing Donna would’ve destroyed him.

He was the sole destroyer of his entire home planet. The end of Galifrey. He was heartless, a monster at times and exceedingly selfish.

And he could not leave this girl to suffer. Even from a hundred metres away, he can see her shaking hands, her tear-streaked face, and his chest burns with a familiar ache. That deep, inescapable flaw of his: the fatal need to care, even when it’s reckless, even when it’s dangerous. Even when it might cost him everything.

“Damn it.” He bites his lip. He knows what he’s going to do before he even makes the decision. Of course he does. There was never really a choice. Not for him.

His fingers clench against the TARDIS door, hesitating for too long, “You’re going to regret this,”

And yet, he pulls the door shut behind him and strides out, his coat billowing as he closes the hundred or so metres between himself and that girl who looks like Rose. His Rose. His hearts pound in unison, and his mind races with escape plans he knows he won’t have time to execute. Still, he squares his shoulders and lifts his head, stepping into the glow of the streetlights like an actor taking the stage.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he calls out, his voice cutting through the tension like a blade. The men spin around, startled. “Has no one ever taught you a lesson on manners?”

All four of the locals look startled, but the girl quickly recovers herself and clutches her handbag even tighter to her chest. Up close the resemblance to Rose isn't quite as obvious, her face is all wrong. But the Doctor doesn’t regret intervening.

“Who the hell are you?” One of the thugs demands.

The Doctor raises his hands in mock surrender, his eyes on constant alert for anyone else arriving in the alleyway. Especially anyone looking for him.

He leans closer to the girl, trying his best to discreetly get between her and the knife.

“First mistake,” he continued to the men in front, keeping the knife in his peripheral, “It's not ‘who’—it’s ‘whom.’ I know, it’s a bit old-fashioned, but it’s important. Grammar’s the backbone of a functioning society. But I digress."

One of them drops their mouth open a little, baffled, “what?”

The Doctor glances down the alleyway, his anxiety growing. Then he gestures to himself, “‘Who’ is a subject pronoun.” Then he gestures at the thugs, “You’re clearly asking a question, so the object pronoun is what you want: ‘whom.’” He sniffs, tugging at his earlobe while the girl shuffles closer to him, clearly realising they now have a common enemy. “Not to be pedantic, but I do find it a little disappointing when people misuse such a simple thing."

The three of them just look even more confused, evidently contemplating whether to just stab him or not.

And it’s taking too long for them to decide, because the Doctor is beginning to hear shouting and he needs to leave.

He shuffles awkwardly, “You’d use ‘who’ when it’s the subject of the sentence. For example, ‘Who is going to clean up this mess?’” He finds their listless expressions hilarious “It’s asking who’s doing the action. You’d use ‘whom’ when it’s the object, like ‘Whom did you see?’ It’s the one receiving the action. It’s all about structure!"

Then they regain their senses, “you’re really fixing our grammar?” We hardly need the context of ‘whom’ when you’re not the one with the knife.”

The Doctor eyes the knife, willing the hand holding it to stay where it is. If he buys time — which he really does not have right now — he’ll gain an idea. Any time now.

"Oh, absolutely.” He stalls, “But, if you're going to intimidate someone, you might as well do it with proper syntax, right? Honestly, it’s the least you can do. It’s the difference between sounding like a thug and sounding like a competent thug. But,” he carefully raises his hands again, “no pressure, let’s go again shall we?"

“This isn’t a grammar lesson. We’re robbing you!” The tallest one is getting angry now and he points at the girl, “her. We’re robbing her. Now get out of the way.”

“Grammar is certainly more beneficial than this ‘robbing’,” he makes quotation marks with his fingers, very painfully aware of time slipping away from him, “thing you’ve got going. Might get you a good job. Consider how much more money you’d make from earning it yourself.”

“You can’t talk your way out of this, grandpa.” The one with the knife begins to brandish it at the girl again, but the Doctor steps in front of her, getting a slight nick in the process which he ignores and hardens his expression instead.

“Grandpa?” He sounds offended as he takes a step forward. "I’m not trying to talk my way out of it. I’m giving you a chance to leave before this goes really badly for you.”

The knife pulls back, “yeah, and what are you gonna do?”

The Doctor changes direction, aware of his gap for escape very slowly closing. "Well, I’ve faced far worse than a bunch of underpaid thugs playing dress-up with sharp objects. I could walk away and leave you to your little power play, but honestly, that wouldn’t be fair. Not to her, not to me, and certainly not to you."

There’s a long pause. The silence pressing painfully on the Doctor’s internal clock.

The one with a knife steps back, “who are you—”

“Whom.” The Doctor corrects.

“Whom are you?” The thug asks, clearly very annoyed now.

“Doesn’t matter.” He responds simply, “all that matters right now is you guys not being dicks .”

Apparently that’s enough. The leader hesitates, then steps back, his bravado faltering under the Doctor’s stare.

The Doctor lets a smile overtake his features, though it’s forced in light of the situation "Wise choice. I suggest you walk away now, and I’ll pretend this never happened. You can go back to your... thing, and she can go back to her thing. No harm, no foul."

And they leave. And the Doctor won. And the Doctor intervened again, despite telling himself again and again that all it would do is backfire and it was time to leave things alone.

But it didn’t backfire this time, and the girl was fine and he still had time.

“Are you okay?” He asks, already edging towards the TARDIS, his anxiety growing as she pulls him in for a hug and thanks him over and over again.

When she pulls away she looks like Rose again.

“I’m Billie.” She says and ducks her head, “thought you’d like to know.”

“The Doctor,” the Doctor says, “I’ve really got to go now though.”

Billie’s eyes shine with gratitude. “Oh, but can’t I offer you something to repay you? I can get you lunch or something?”

He can’t. He needs to go.

“There’s no need,” he says, backing away again. “My act of kindness for today.”

“There he is!”

The Doctor stiffens, even more so as Billie’s grip tightens around his arm when there’s the click of a gun’s safety.

Time to improvise, he guessed. His mind is racing, calculating every possible escape route. He can see his TARDIS, so close, yet so frustratingly out of reach. He can’t let Billie get caught in the crossfire, but he also cannot get caught. He refuses.

He makes a list of alleyway landmarks in his head.

One. His TARDIS, at least a hundred metres ahead of him. He could make a break for it, run, keep a firm hold of Billie’s hand so she keeps up. But they’ll be expecting that, probably have ideas on how to prevent it.

Two. There’s a streetlight halfway between him and the TARDIS, there’s also one almost directly above him. He’s not entirely certain, but definitely almost there on the idea that there is guaranteed to be another a similar distance away. In the direction of the voice he recognises as the one from the bar. The one that was paying for him.

Drabek or something.

Three. There’s a dumpster, only a slight bit before the TARDIS. If he can get there, they can use it as a shield against whatever his potential captors have loaded in the gun he’d heard click.

He makes a plan.

It’s a terrible plan, but like he’d said. He’s improvising.

Plan outline: Distract bad guys. Run. Explode a few streetlights. Use a dumpster as a shield. Get himself and Billie inside the TARDIS. Hope and pray she crashes somewhere safe this time. Preferably a time before manufactured drugs existed.

It reflects the ramblings of a desperate man.

“Billie.” He leans closer to her, her eyes are trained behind him, terrified, but she pulls them away to look at him instead. “When I say run. You run like hell for that blue box over there.” He gestures at the TARDIS’ and she turns her head to look.

“Don’t look back, don’t stop for anything. She’ll let you in. Close the door immediately. You’ll be safe.”

“But what about you?” Billie interjects.

“I’ll be right behind you.” The Doctor promises. Because he will be.

He will be.

His heart thunders in his chest as he shoots a reassuring glance at Billie before spinning around, arms wide. “Took you long enough,” he flashes them a smile, “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.”

“What do you want?!” Billie yells over him, and the Doctor winces, “If you’re friends with those other dirtbag men, get lost. They’ve already learnt their lesson!”

The Doctor counts four people standing across from them at the end of the Alleyway. Each one wearing a dark metal mask that covers their faces. All four are armed with guns. If they want him alive, it’s going to prove extremely difficult.

Although, alien-control doesn’t necessarily insinuate alive. Just… Dealt with.

 His eye catches on the streetlight he was right about. Phase one in action.

“Ma'am, it’s in your best interests to step away from the alien.”

The Doctor’s jaw tightens as Billie stiffens beside him. Her hand loosening its grip in his.

“Alien?” Her voice wavers, and the Doctor doesn’t blame her. She’s had a rough afternoon.

“Yes.” This one’s voice is feminine, “we’ve been called several times about disturbances. Destroyed that all over there—” she gestures at the TARDIS— “caused major disruption to a local bar. It’s not safe. Please step away.”

Billie’s hand removes itself from the Doctor’s altogether as she squints at him in the dying sunlight. Her expression is full of betrayal and accusation and the Doctor has no idea what went wrong between 2010 and 2015, but something is very wrong. “Is that true?” She asks, her eyes drifting to the TARDIS which is, indeed partially inside the brownstone’s wall.

The Doctor changes his plan. Improv remember?

“If she leaves, will you leave her alone? Let her go home safely.”

The female speaker raises her hands as a van pulls up beside her and another group of military armed people step out. One of which screams authority as he pulls his helmet off to reveal the Drabek guy from earlier.

“We would never harm a human.” The woman says, “we simply want her out of the way. You’ll be taken into custody, and we can discuss the damages you’ve done to other people’s property, and have you on your way, off Earth.”

The word human sends a shiver down the Doctor’s spine. The idea of alien-control is getting out of hand, and he severely doubts that all they intend to do is discuss property damage. What’s he going to do, pay for it to be fixed? He will. If that’s what it would take to calm these people down. But it’s not. He knows it’s not. It’s never enough.

“I–” Billie cuts in again, her voice nervous yet loud enough to reach the people across from them. “He doesn’t look like an alien. I’m sure it’s all just a big misunderstanding. He just saved me. From those— those…” She trails off, “men! They were tryn’ to steal my bag.”

The woman reaches out a hand, “come on miss. We just want to talk to him, you know the law, he’s an illegal alien.”

“Why do you have guns?”

“Just a precaution, miss. Please come behind us.”

Billie looks torn, and the Doctor needs to start enacting his plan.

“Alright, change of plans.” The Doctor needs to do this in a way that keeps them both safe. “It’s okay.” He tells her. It’s not . “I’ll talk some sense into them. It’s fine.”

Billie still looks torn when she nods jerkily and raises her hands above her head. “Please don’t shoot.” She begins to cry again, “please don’t shoot, I’m coming. Don’t hurt him.”

The Doctor puts his hands in his pockets, comforted by the feeling of his sonic against his fingers.

When Billie is behind enemy lines, one of the masked individuals wrap her in a shock blanket and talks in hushed tones. Drabek speaks this time.

“So are you going to cooperate now, or are we going to have to use force?”

The Doctor stalls just a little longer, “what are my charges, chief?”

Drabek scowles, “illegal entering of planet Earth, disruption of the peace, damaging property, disrupting property. I’ll write a list for you if you’d like.”

“Oh I would,” The Doctor glances back at his TARDIS, it’s only really one edge that’s actually disrupted bricks. Literally nothing. “Although, I can just give you the cash now. Be on my merry way.”

“The owners haven’t negotiated an amount yet.”

The Doctor starts to discreetly back away, “it’s hardly anything, like, one brick maybe two.”

Drabek gets impatient, evident by his immediate change in demeanour, his voice cuts through the air like a blade. Cold with authority. “You’re under Earth law now. A prisoner. We’re taking you into custody.”

The Doctor raises his hands in surrender, “so, still property damage? I’m flattered, but there’s really no need to make such a fuss. I’ll pay for the brick.”

Drabek makes a hand signal, “no,” his hands go for his gun, but the Doctor is faster, he pulls his sonic from his pocket and points it at the streetlight that is now directly over the top of his pursuers. It explodes in seconds, the impact sending sparks everywhere which is exactly the distraction the Doctor needs.

He spins around and sprints for the TARDIS. They won’t hurt Billie, he knows that much. There’s too many legal repercussions for hurting a human.

An Alien on the other hand?

He pushes harder, his breaths coming in wheezes, and he’s so close he can feel the TARDIS’ energy, calming him, promising safety. He’s about to use the closest dumpster as a shield to blow up the next streetlight—

Something hits him in the spine.

A blinding flash of agony rips through his body, igniting his entire world in flames. His legs lock spasmodically mid stride, his limbs seizing, muscles filled with rigid tension as they’re gripped with invisible lightning bolts. He’s sent crashing to the cement, his sonic spinning across the ground out of reach, landing hard on his side, air knocked from his lungs, and the taste of blood filling his mouth. He tries to scream, but his throat constricts, the sound trapped behind his teeth clenching into it so tightly he thinks they might crack.

He can’t think, he can’t move outside of the jerking of his electrified limbs. His body feels as though it’s on fire, every nerve ending exploding in pain, every inch alight. Hearts hammering in his chest, he can feel his flesh burning from where he was struck.

Through the spots of his vision, there’s movement, and then all of a sudden, the pain stops.

He collapses fully, every muscle going slack. His body felt like a puppet with its strings cut, limp and unresponsive. He gulps down air in ragged, wheezing gasps, his chest heaving with the effort. The lingering pain pulses through him, an aftershock that leaves his entire body trembling.

When he rolls his head back the TARDIS is barely a metre away, he’s so close. So close.

He can see his sonic screwdriver and reaches a tentative hand towards it, he can still get there, he just needs to cause another distraction, he’s so close. His fingers twitch, his body feels like it’s been hollowed out, everything heavy and uncooperative. But he grits his teeth and drags his trembling hand across the ground agonisingly close, yet too far.

His fingers brush against it and he prematurely whoops with joy inside his head, just before a boot is placed down on his chest and the sonic is snatched away, his final chance gone. He’d failed.

“You put up a decent fight there, Doctor. ” And if he wasn’t scared before, he was scared now, his body fighting to struggle, his elbows trying to drag himself backwards to his TARDIS, but the boot holds firm and then he’s being dragged to his feet by rough hands on both arms. A third set grips his neck and a fistfull of his hair, dragging his head up so that he hazily focuses on the man in front of him.

Drabek is a piece of work, his appearance is something the Doctor hadn’t noted until now. His round face and dark features gives the impression of kindness, but his steel eyes and stern frown say otherwise. He looks about mid-thirties. He’s wearing a business suit, and looks more like he’d be attending a fancy restaurant to negotiate a company deal than chasing and frying stray Time Lords on the ground.

“Don’t you look dapper.” The Doctor stumbles on his words, a little deliriously, trying to calm his racing thoughts enough to figure out an out. His body was still working through the aftershocks of whatever they’d hit him with. He attempts to shift in a discreet form of struggling, but the hands holding him merely tighten in response. “This seems a little overkill, boys. I’m clearly not strong enough to take all four of you on at once.”

The hand in his hair clenches tighter, eliciting an involuntary wince from his fried body.

“Careful with him,” Drabek snaps, his gaze is unnervingly clinical as he continues staring the Doctor down. He hadn’t replied to any of the Doctor’s quips either which was definitely new. Those usually worked.

The Doctor laughs dryly, the sound more of a wheeze than anything else though. “Wouldn’t want to damage the goods.” He croaks, “they’re worth more in top condition. Although, you may need to drop the price a little, I think something’s short circuited in the oven.”

“Mm.” Drabek hums. The Doctor’s head is released and it’s left to loll uselessly against his neck before Drabek takes his jaw in one hand, and reaches out to somewhere behind the Doctor with the other.

One of the Doctor’s arms is then forced out in front of him while Drabek takes the object he’d just been passed — some sort of syringe filled with a bluish liquid. A tracer dye maybe? — and the Doctor tries and fails to twist away when it’s injected into the vein in the crook of his elbow.

He stares at his arm in horrified fascination while his vein turns a darker blue for a few seconds before returning to its normal colour almost immediately. “I’ve already had my quota of injectables today, thanks.” His body sags, exhausted.

“Higher circulation and increased metabolism.” Drabek says, ignoring the Doctor completely and talking to the person behind him instead. “Write that down. You’ll have to up the dosage, a standard sedative won’t knock him out long enough.”

“ I could’ve told you that.” The Doctor mutters. “Would’ve saved you the needle.”

They continue on, talking over him like he’s not there. Forcing his wrists into a set of tight handcuffs and marching him towards the van.

When they arrive there, the Doctor locks eyes with Billie. She’s been crying again, evident by the mascara tracks down her cheeks, but she stands up when she catches sight of him. Her hands moving to shake off the other people… alien control … that reach out to stop her.

“What are you going to do to him?” She demands, “surely he could’ve just paid the fine here.”

Drabek ignores her, hands tightening on the chain between the Doctor’s wrists while the hands around each arm and the nape of his neck follow suit.

“Don’t worry about it.” The Doctor tries to sound calm, but inside he’s a frenzy of panic and frustration. He was so close. “This happens all the time, they’ll take me to their torture chamber, I’ll refuse to talk, then I’ll esca—” he breaks off in a choked gasp of pain when what feels like a cattle prod is pressed between his shoulder blades.

He doubles over, and the hands holding him firm are the only things that keep him from crashing to the ground entirely. Then he’s yanked forward again, wheezing, without a chance for recovery. Watching as his newfound captors pack up equipment, including what looks to be a sparking harpoon that crackles with electricity. 

Billie looks distressed and torn between the woman comforting her and whispering " we saved you from him,” remarks in her ear, and the very obvious abuse the Doctor was being put through.

He’s lifted, struggling, into the back of the van, and manhandled into the far corner where he’s forced down, his body protesting with a wave of pain as the cold floor presses into his knees with a grunt. The chains of his cuffs are bolted to the floor, giving him just enough slack to let his hands rest near his knees but far too short to allow any meaningful movement. He tries to pull back, but the cuffs don’t budge.

They secure his ankles with a pair of cold steel cuffs bolted to the floor that snap open for each leg to be wrestled inside, and then snap closed, immobilising him firmly in a kneeling position. The chains are taut, keeping his legs bent beneath him, his weight pressing painfully into his ankles. Every inch of his body aches.

“Now this is definitely overkill.” He tells one of the operatives. He tries for sarcasm, but his voice no longer sounds confident… he trails off completely when they bring out the collar. A thick, metal band that they attach to a chain attached to the roof above his head, and then lock in place around his neck. The click of the lock feels too final, too much like a sentence. A crank is turned and the Doctor’s head is forced upright, the metal collar biting into his throat. His neck stretched upwards until the slack at his wrists was gone. His body was forced to remain still, unmoving, helpless. The world tilts around him, and for a brief moment, all he can hear is the sound of his own pulse pounding in his ears.

Thump, thump, thump, thump. The sound of his death moving ever closer. His sentence. HIs end.

“Subject is secure.” The operative says and Drabek replies from the other end of the van with a short grunt of approval before he’s moving over and checking the tension himself. Looking over the Doctor with a critical eye and his lips curling into an accomplished version of his previous scowl.

“Nothing to say?” Drabek asks.

The Doctor swallows hard, his throat constricted by the collar. He tries to think of something witty to say. There’s a tightness in his chest, a gnawing weight of helplessness that leaves him momentarily speechless.

Drabek smiles for possibly the first time in the few hours the Doctor had known the guy, his eyes roaming the Doctor’s restrained form with a cold sort of curiosity, almost methodical, clinical. “Interesting.” 

He feels the van jolt as the engine roars to life, the vibrations rattling through the floor beneath him and sending spasms through his shins. The chains connected to his wrists clink faintly.

The door slides open again before they move, the rest of Drabek’s personnel enter but what catches the Doctor’s eye is the one with a medical bag and a syringe.

“Three doses should be enough. Any more and you’ll have to flush his veins when we arrive if you want him awake for Dr. Gray.”

The Doctor’s throat goes dry. The information bombarding him all at once. Drugs. Dr. Gray? Where were they taking him? What do they want?

“Thank you … that’s very helpful.” Drabek turns back to the Doctor, syringe pressing into a sealed vial of a viscous looking liquid.

The Doctor finds his voice, “I’m already trussed up and ready for departure, captain.” It shakes, and he feels silly. “Don’t need none of them motion sickness drugs. I’ve got a strong stomach.”

Drabek sighs, “I tire of your talking, Doctor. We’ll fix that later though. For now, hold still.”

“I will not.” The Doctor responds, but he has no choice. Bonds holding him too tight to twist away as Drabek finds a vein in his neck and slides the needle in. 

The Doctor shudders at the cold feeling of a new kind of sedative entering his nervous system, his neck throbs as Drabek administers another two doses.

“You don’t have to do this.” The Doctor croaks.”

Drabek hums as the Doctor fights the oncoming numbing of his senses. “You’ve proven yourself far too resourceful to leave unchecked, Doctor. Stop fighting.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” The Doctor mumbles, eyes and head drooping as much as allowed. His vision blurs and everything begins to feel distant, even as he fights to stay conscious. He has a better chance if he stays awake. If he’s knocked out they could do anything to him. He can’t let that happen.

The sedative drags him under, his body going limp in the hold of his chains.

Chapter Text

When the Doctor drags himself back to consciousness it’s not fast, and it’s not pleasant in the slightest. His head pounds like there’s something in there banging away with a mallet. His body feels like lead, his arms refuse to move even when he desperately wills them to shift. His chest has apparently forgotten how to breathe, each shallow breath rattling in his chest, his lungs burning.

He opens his eyes — a long, painful process of convincing — but the world doesn’t follow. All he can see are blurred shapes, pin lights and extremely dim lighting. His ears don’t seem to want to work, breaking up his hearing into scattered rumbles of what he thinks is an engine, but his thoughts are too slow, too hazy, to try and establish why.

He’s got an awful crick in the neck from where something appears to be holding it firmly in position, and after a long while of thinking that surely after a bout of unconsciousness he should be on the floor, he realises he’s kneeling. He finds his attempts to move and relieve the pressure on his legs futile as something seems to be holding them down.

“Sir.” Someone speaks and the Doctor flinches at the sudden onslaught of sound. It’s as if they’re under water. Nothing is entirely legible, but sound still travels somewhat. “The subject is awake.”

Subject? What subject? Did he fall asleep in some sort of science lab? He can’t remember.

There’s some more voices around him that the Doctor can’t comprehend properly and then:

“Should I give him another dose?”

The Doctor forces his eyes, which had slipped closed, open again. Drugs! He’d been drugged! Things were beginning to add up… slowly. If he could just remember what had happened.

“Nnn–” He falters, his tongue sticking to the insides of his teeth. His mouth tasted like metal, as if he’d bitten his tongue somewhere along the line, and cotton for some reason. “Don’ drug m’again.” He leans forward against the pressure on his neck. Begging his vision to start working when a hand grips his chin and there’s fingers pressing against his carotid artery, and then shining a bright light straight into his retinas and everything goes white, and too bright, too bright.

He lets out an embarrassing sounding whimper and tries to pull away.

“It appears we gave him just the right dose, actually.” The voice thunders through his head, doing nothing for his headache. “He’s metabolising it slower than expected, probably from the higher concentration of pentobarbital. Leave him for now, Felicity will want him coherent.”

The words rattle around his brain. Pentobarbital, Felicity, dosage?

His vision clears a little and he can make out the interior of a moving vehicle. There’s plenty of seats, but for some reason, he’s kneeling on the floor. His hands are cuffed and chained to the ground.

How is he upright?

He swallows, trying to get rid of the taste of blood, and mothballs from his stale mouth. “Wh—” He coughs unexpectedly, his body attempting to curl in on itself, but a sudden pressure on his neck stops him just short of choking himself. “Wh’m I?”

The vehicle begins to slow down, the loud engine slowing to a hum, and then stopping altogether. He doesn’t receive a response to his question.

“How’re we transporting him?”

“I have a team bringing a specially designed examination table.”

“m’Not sick!” The Doctor tries to drag himself further into consciousness, frustrated with how incoherent he sounds, but the act is impossible. “No need for ‘aminations.” He concentrates, “ ex - animations.”

The door rattling open gives him the jar he needs back to reality. Freezing cold and damp air washed over him with nothing to keep it out anymore. He instinctively tried to recoil but there were additional restraints rooting him to the floor and the roof above him, stopping him short and he shivered, the micro movements doing nothing for his increasingly aching joints.

“Prepare the gurney.” This time the voice is female. Not the one from before though, that one was silky, like honey. This one is cold. Colder than the wind slicing his skin.

He tried to centre his growing, but still limited focus on what was happening beyond the vehicle where there are yet more people shuffling around something bulky, and metal that can only be the ‘examination table’ they’d mentioned.

The Doctor tries to work through the gaps in his memory he’s certain were caused by the excessive amounts of drugs his body has almost burned through. Who were these people? Why was he here? What did they want with him? How did they even manage to get him in here? He’s the Doctor, usually he’d have escaped back to his TARDIS by now.

A jolt hits him at the thought of his TARDIS, and memories come flooding back. There are still significant gaps, but he manages to piece together what happened.

“I don’t think I need medical clearance t’pay for a brick.” He slurs, almost almost back in control of his mouth. And they were going to regret this. He could yap their ears off for days. “I can just give you the cash now and save you the hassle of…” he swallows, his stomach becoming a pit of terror while the people outside snap restraints and other torturous looking devices to the slab of metal on wheels., “whatever that is.”

The people inside the van clear out, momentarily leaving him alone. “You’re wasting your time.” He tells them. “I’m extremely practised under duress. Any interrogation will be useless.”

“No interrogation necessary.” That female voice cut in again like a knife over his useless yabbering, “you’re a prisoner of war now. Any information we require is something we can obtain with or without your help.”

The Doctor’s still drugged brain struggled to process that, “m’not cooperating,” he mumbles.

“Oh that’s not a worry.” A woman climbs into the back of the van following the voice, and the Doctor’s vision is finally recovered enough to make out her face. Sharp features, dark hair pulled back into a bun. She carries a notebook.

“Oh, he’s beautiful.” The woman, The Doctor decides must be Felicity says. The stethoscope around her neck, and white lab coat scream ‘doctor’.

There’s a muffled reply from outside the van as Felicity moves closer to the Doctor’s bound form, and he can’t move away, can’t do anything as she takes a firm hold of his chin with gloved hands, and tilts his head. Staring directly into his eyes with a fascination that makes the Doctor’s blood go icy in his veins. 

“You’re remarkably alert for someone who was injected with a triple dose of pentobarbital.” She murmured, her tone as if she were talking to herself. “Impressive. About half of one is lethal for the average human. And yet, here you are.”

“m’Not human. I thought we established that. Hence… Alien-Control or whatever.” The Doctor attempts to wrestle his head from Felicity’s grip, but she holds firm. “And—” he forces a wonky grin, despite how he’s feeling on the inside, “I’m impressively defiant.”

Felicity looks at him, actually looks at him this time. As if finally acknowledging he’s there. 

“Good thing I’m impressively patient.” She responds. Then she turns away from him, “is it ready?”

There’s a grunt of affirmation, and then an additional two people are climbing into the van. They take a firm hold of the Doctor’s shoulders while Felicity begins removing the restraints holding him in his corner. First she uses a key to unlock what reignites in his memory as the collar holding his head upright. It slides off, and it’s only one of the additional operatives grabbing a handful of his hair that keeps him from toppling forward once the support is gone. His joints are like jelly from whatever his body was still trying to metabolise.

The chain holding his wrists to the ground is detached, leaving just the cuffs around his wrists, and finally the clamps around his legs.

He gives escape his best attempt then. Figuring it's his last chance. Now or never.

The hand in his hair loosens slightly, as do the ones on his shoulders. The operatives evidently thought that because he was so pliant now, he’d stay pliant, and let them strap him to the table as easily as possible. Because… he guesses that was the dream right? Cooperative prisoners and all that.

But he had to ruin their dreams. Because there was no way he was willingly letting them strap him to that table. Leaving him defenceless to whatever cruel and unusual punishment they wanted.

He rams an uncoordinated elbow into each of the guards, shoves past Felicity and makes a run for it. He stumbles as his feet hit the uneven ground outside the van, his legs still weak and barely in working order. But he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop. Not when every instinct, every ounce of his being, screams at him to run .

He careens into something solid when his vision swims, dark spots clouding the edges of his sight, but he pushes off it again with a barely suppressed grunt, his near collapse turning into a half-controlled lurch forward. His breath rattles in his lungs, cold air biting his skin, his hearts pounding in his ribcage, the only thing keeping him going is adrenaline and desperation.

He can hear shouting behind him, but doesn’t look back. His mind runs through every possible way this could go and nothing is looking good. His mind runs through every scenario of what happens if they catch him and it looks significantly worse. They won’t be gentle, he knows that for sure.

So he keeps running. Blindly forward. Frantically, his feet slamming against concrete, the world tilting around him. His balance is off, his steps erratic. He needs to get far enough ahead of the people following in pursuit to hide, or… something. Anything .

But luck, as it so often does these days, abandons him.

He had apparently forgotten how they’d subdued him last time he’d tried to run. That long range electrical weapon that had hit him from behind. Pumped him with enough electricity to kill a horse, and left him convulsing on the ground. The one that whatever drug they’d pumped him full of had stolen the memories of. He’d thought he could run. He was wrong. Again.

He hears the telltale crackle of electricity and remembers it way too late. The barb hits his back, sending searing hot pain racing through every nerve ending in his body. It’s like being struck by lightning — sharp, all consuming, and utterly incapacitating. His legs give out, and he crumples to the ground with a strangled cry of agony, his body convulsing against his will as the current courses through him. The metal of the cuffs around his wrists amplify the feeling through the tips of his fingers.

The world narrows to the sound of his own ragged breathing and the heavy thud of boots approaching. He barely registers Drabek’s voice— calm, calculated, and infuriatingly smug. He crouches down to the Doctor’s level, grabbing a fistful of his hair and yanking his head up, forcing him to look into his cold, unyielding eyes through blurring vision. His jaw is clenched, every muscle tight, and useless from the electricity reigning control.

The barb is removed from his back, sending his arched back slamming to the floor, his muscles still locked from the assault. Drabek tilts the Doctor’s head slightly, inspecting him as though he’s nothing more than a malfunctioning piece of equipment. “All that intelligence you’re known for, and you think running was a smart idea?”

The Doctor wheezes, his breaths rattling in his chest, every inhale a monumental effort. The glare he sends Drabek isn’t as sharp as he’d like. “Gotta give me kudos for trying though, right?” His voice jitters and he stumbles on words.

His head is dropped, leaving it to hit the ground, and he whimpers despite himself when there are hands pulling him to his knees, hauling his uncooperative body off the ground like he’s a particularly heavy sack of flour. His legs dangle uselessly, his muscles refusing to respond as they carry him back towards the van. He tries to twist free, but his body is a mess of spasming limbs, and weak movements against the firm grip of his captors.

“Pathetic.” Drabek tells him, “And predictable.”

“At least I’m not boring?” The Doctor suggests, his tongue feels like lead.

He doesn’t receive a response to that, although he does catch the quirk in Drabek’s eyebrow as he’s unceremoniously lifted and manhandled toward the table. He thrashes with every ounce of strength he can muster, even though it’s barely enough to disrupt their rhythm. The restraints around his wrists rattle with his efforts, but it’s no use. Their grip doesn’t falter.

“No, no, no, no—wait! Hold on!” The Doctor’s speaking fast, frantic, as the table looms closer, the metal on the leather straps glint in the sun. “We can talk about this! Have a nice chat over tea instead? Maybe biscuits? You look like that kind of guy—”

The operatives slam him down onto the table before he can finish, the impact knocks the wind out of him. His body arching instinctively, but it’s no use. Hands are everywhere, pressing him flat, pinning his arms and legs before he can even think to struggle.

“Don’t damage him.” Felicity’s voice cuts through the sounds of restraints being pulled taut, and the Doctor’s own harsh breathing. He’s too busy trying to twist out of his captor's grip to make any snide responses. But it’s useless once they get his wrists and ankles secure.

He wriggles his hands once they’re finally released, finding no give in the leather that straps them to the table beneath. In response, the operatives hovering over him pull them tighter. They don’t pause, don’t stop, not even when the Doctor lets out a noise of frustration and bucks against their grip.

He only struggles harder when they pass another strap over his chest, forcing his arching spine back onto the table, pulling it tight, and immobilising him further. The one they pull over his neck is overkill and he twists his head as much as possible, set on making the process as difficult as possible for them.

“Wrists and ankles were enough, surely,” he demands no one in particular, “what do you think I’m going to do? Shrink?” When there’s more tightened just above his knees and elbows he laughs hoarsely, his panic, escalating. “Now this is just embarrassing for you, if you think you need all this to—”

“Shut up.” Someone interrupts him, their voice is devoid of any emotion as they finish securing his elbows. He’s completely immobilised now, every inch of him trapped by straps and cuffs that don’t leave even a fraction of wiggle room. His breath comes in shallow gasps, his hearts pounding in his chest as he tests the restraints again. They hold firm, unforgiving.

“Charming lot, you are.” The Doctor swallows against the leather across his throat, glad at least that one was padded, and more like a brace then a restraint. “I bet you’re a hit at parties. Do you have to pay extra for this treatment?”

“You really don’t know when to quit, do you?” Drabek looms over him, his eyebrow raised. The Doctor can see Felicity standing a way away, jotting something down in her notebook. There’s quiet murmuring around him as the operatives check the firmness of his bonds and add all the finishing touches to his imprisonment.

“Never been much of a quitter.” The Doctor tries to keep his cheery demeanour, even as the weight of the situation drags him down and makes his voice tremble. New goal; annoy them as much as possible. Find a gap in their forces. Escape. “It seems so boring to give up.”

Drabek rests a hand on the gun holstered on his hip, “are you going to be quiet, or am I going to have to figure out a way to shut you up by force?”

“Never liked silence either.” The Doctor starts, but his jaw clicks shut when, quick as a flash, Drabek is pulling a knife from somewhere — maybe his ankle? Or shirt sleeves? The Doctor can’t quite crane his head to check— and it’s pressing against his lips despite Felicity’s remarks of disdain at them damaging her perfect specimen.

“Too late for that.” He tells her, but he shuts up completely when the movement drags the blade on his moving lips and then his mouth tastes like metal.

“Another peep, between here and our next location.” Drabek growls, “and I’ll remove your tongue.”

The Doctor shuts up. He would not like that. Not at all. No thank you. Very much appreciated. Please. Many thanks.

There’s a long sigh. “Finally.” Drabek says. “Now let’s get moving. We’re wasting what little is left of the day.”

The Doctor has no say in the matter, and they begin rolling him forward, head backwards, towards their final destination. His mind is racing. He needs to think. He needs to establish an out. Surely they’ll slip up. They’re only human after all. The Doctor knows humans. They don’t hold up as well as they’d like to think. They scatter when unprepared, like ants without a queen.

But right now, they’re definitely prepared. The straps, bolts, and cuffs manacling him to the table tell him that much. His head vibrates against the metal, aches, and it’s making it hard to think.

He’s smart, right? He’s intelligent enough to get out of this. Humans are less than him. At least according to Gallifrey. They thought humans were beneath them. A primitive species. He’d been captured by worse. The Daleks, the Sycorax, the Master himself had kept him caged for a year and the Doctor still won. He wouldn’t be here long. He just had to play along.

Felicity comes up in stride beside him, a hand reaching for his cheek, trailing along the already healing graze on his forehead where it had connected with the ground. Her eyes narrow when he doesn’t meet her gaze, setting his eyes instead on the roof above them when they push through a set of doors.

“You did this before.” Felicity murmurs. The Doctor tries to keep track of the turns they’re making, but her head bobbing from walking, alongside the blur of the roof are beginning to make him feel dizzy. “Thinking?” She taps him on the lips, and he flinches. Then she leans down close, her hands resting on the metal beside his head, keeping stride despite not looking where she’s going. “So many thoughts inside that marvellous head of yours, Doctor. What are you thinking about?”

When the Doctor doesn’t respond, the threat of having his tongue removed echoing in his ears, especially since he’s currently tied to a table with no way of stopping them if they decide to carry through with such a threat.

“Who we are?” Felicity murmurs, “where you are?”

She’s silent for a moment, the only sound; the hammering of the Doctor’s hearts, and the squeak of moving wheels beneath him.

“Escape?” Her lips pout, and her grip on his face tightens, “you’ve already tried that.”

“Everyone needs a hobby,” the Doctor replies, the quip reflexive despite his position, and the threat. He glances nervously towards Drabek, straining against the neck strap, but the leader doesn’t appear to have noticed.

“And yet, here you are.” Felicity taps him on the nose condescendingly, and then moves out of his vision while he’s turned through a door that’s only just big enough for the table.

Once they’re inside, the operatives lean down to lock the wheels. The Doctor can’t move his head much, but from what he can see , everything is sterile, and white.

He swallows. Things are looking bleak.

The room continues bustling around him, each sound sharp and unnervingly precise in the sterile stillness. The clink of metal instruments being moved to a nearby tray, the low hum of machinery warming up, and the occasional murmur of quiet conversation among the operatives set his nerves alight. It’s almost worse than silence.

Drabek, ever the authoritarian, commands the room with a calm efficiency. He moves to a side table where a stack of documents waits, pristine and neatly aligned. The Doctor strains against the neck strap to catch a better look, his curiosity outweighing his discomfort. Drabek gestures for each operative to step forward in turn, handing them pens and what looks suspiciously like NDAs.

“Standard procedure,” Drabek says, his tone clipped and businesslike. “Sign, or we’ll figure something else out.”

And despite the situation, this revelation gives him hope. If they’re being this secretive, surely there’s a loophole. Someone would come looking. Someone would refuse the NDA, seeing the treatment the Doctor was subjected to. The government would find out the blatant disrespect for intelligent life forms. Alien-Control or not, strapping someone to a medical table after electrocuting them half to death, and under threat of cutting tongues out seemed a little further than the law.

But none of the operatives object to the NDAs, and everyone signs one, and then they all leave the room. Leaving just Felicity and Drabek. And the Doctor, strapped to a table, defenceless. And without any semblance of a plan to escape. Because he’d tried already. And they’d won.

Drabek and Felicity continue murmuring to each other for a moment longer. The scratch of a pen on paper makes him want to tear his ears out. Before finally, their attention is back on him.

“That was an awful lot of gag orders.” The Doctor muses, tensing in his bonds as they move closer. “Got something to hide?”

“Just government protocol.” Drabek responds, and the Doctor’s hearts sink. All hope and optimism gone, because, if this organisation is backed by the government. He’s doomed. “The general public doesn’t need to know the ins and outs of what transpires behind closed doors. Just that it’s happening for the betterment of society. Now. I’ve just got to finish off some paperwork.” He turns to Felicity, ‘go right ahead, I’ll take the notes.”

The Doctor tenses as Felicity closes the gap between them, wriggling in his restraints while she pulls on a pair of rubber gloves with a snap.

“You know, you could just ask—” He cuts off with a yelp when Felicity places a firm finger against his lips, loosens the neck strap, and turns his head so she can press her other fingers against the side of his neck, just under his jaw. He watches as her eyes widen in wonder, and then she’s retightening the neck restraint, leaving his head forced sideways, and pulling her stethoscope from her neck to press against his chest.

His neck begins to ache as she shifts the stethoscope to the other side of his chest, making him shiver from the cold metal, and inevitably finding his second heart.

Felicity begins making notes aloud, probably for Drabek who began scribbling them in a notebook. “Subject has two hearts,” the Doctor winces at the objectification. “One is beating slightly faster than the other. Could be indicative of stress from initial capture. Or perhaps one is a backup? We’d have to test further for that though. Open.” The last comment confused the Doctor for a moment, until he realised she was talking to him, a thermometer in hand, while she loosened the neck strap just enough to lie his head straight again.

But like he’d said. He was determined to make this process as annoying as possible. There would be no cooperation on his part. No sir. They might have him strapped down and helpless, but that didn’t mean he was compliant.

He kept his mouth clamped shut.

Felicity sighed, “unless you’d prefer I stick it somewhere a little,” she clicked her tongue, “unsavoury, I suggest you let me put it under your tongue.”

The Doctor loosened his jaw at that. Not really set on anything invasive. Or anything for that matter. But he still kept it closed, leaving Felicity to open it herself, digging her fingers into his cheeks to part his teeth and stick the thermometer under his tongue.

“Slightly lower body temperature than the average human being.” Felicity mused after a moment. She used the thermometer to shift his lips out of the way of his teeth, saying, “teeth look normal enough, albeit a little wonky, enamel’s a lot more advanced though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were harder to extract.” before the Doctor was able to jerk his head away.

She tapped him on the nose, “feisty, aren’t you? We’ll fix that sooner or later.”

“Not if I can help it.” The Doctor made direct eye contact, hoping to solidify his determination, but she simply stared back at him before grabbing something else from her table, and shining a light into his pupils. The Doctor looked away, the light no longer debilitating now that his body had worked the drugs out of his system, but it was still uncomfortable to look straight into.

“Pupils dilate significantly slower than the average human,” Felicity says, to Drabek, herself? “Was your home planet particularly bright, Doctor?”

He refuses to respond, keeping his mouth clamped shut.

“Nothing to say?” Felicity asks, and she sounds almost disappointed, “you were so chatty before.” She squints at him, “no matter, we can figure out stuff for ourselves.”

She moves away from him briefly, digging around on her table of equipment, and the Doctor catches sight of Drabek scribbling away on a notepad. They lock eyes for a moment when the official notices. “The two hearts alone should hold the ethics waiver in place for now.” Drabek tells Felicity, “Vale’ll probably want to categorise him as soon as possible, but I’m sure we can come up with something to bide time through paperwork. We’ll worry about in-person inspections later.”

Felicity hums in response, “excellent! We’ve got legal jurisdiction to study them before categorisation first anyway. I’ve gotten pretty good at forging medical documents.” Then she evidently finds what she’d been looking for, and the Doctor freezes in response to the medical sheers she holds up to the light.

“You know,” he tells her nervously, eyes not leaving the sharp blade in front of him, “usually you’d ask me on a date first. We’re moving a little fast, don’t you think?”

Felicity ignores him, pressing a finger against his lips to shush him and then running a hand along the fabric of his coat. “Now, Doctor.” Felicity snips the sheers together a few times, and the Doctor tests his restraints again, as if something might have changed since the last time. “These are mightily sharp, so I’m going to need you to hold still. Don’t want to damage you this early on.” Then under her breath, “more than they already did.”

“I can take them off.” The Doctor offers, “there’s no need to destroy them.”

Felicity laughs at him, “and give you another chance to run? I don’t want anything contaminating you.”

She begins guiding the sheers through the Doctor’s clothes, and despite his pleas for her to leave his coat alone, that too is cut through, destroyed beyond repair, and he can’t help the tears that begin to pool in his eyes at the loss.

Janis Joplin gave him that coat. And despite holding his composure through losing his TARDIS, his sonic, and his freedom, the loss of his favourite item of clothing threatened to tip him over the edge.

Felicity notices immediately, “aw, don’t cry, Doctor. We’ll get you some new clothes. I promise.” Then she makes quick work of collecting the moisture from his cheeks into a test tube, pocketing it, and continuing on.

When she’s done removing the clothing from his top half — cutting the fabric into strips and guiding the excess out from beneath the straps before setting them aside for ‘later study’ — she steps back to admire her work. Eyes flickering over his bare chest methodically, cataloguing his appearance.

She sets her sheers down again and begins poking and prodding and stroking certain areas of his chest, making note of everything she finds interesting. Her touch was cold, clinical, and deliberate as she traced the contours of the Doctor’s chest. Her fingers brushed lightly against his ribs, feeling for any irregularities, and then pressed down firmly as if testing his endurance. His body tensed under her touch, a reflex he couldn’t suppress, and he couldn’t keep the wince from his face as her fingers dug into the sides of his torso, prodding him like an object rather than a person.

“You’ve got an extra set of ribs.” She marvels. “What are they for? Extra organs? Or just extra protection for everything internal? This is revolutionary! Oh I can’t wait to open you up and see for myself.”

A pit of nausea settles in the Doctor’s stomach at that, his eyes watering, hearts beating panicked circles in his chest, his skin remembering every touch of Felicity’s hands. “Sounds legal,” he mumbles, sarcasm faltering.

“Oh hardly,” Felicity responds, “but what they don’t know won’t hurt them. I doubt they’d care anyway, as long as you’re not on the streets… Quite lean, I was worried he was underweight,” Felicity begins talking to Drabek again, “but you mentioned his metabolism, and his musculature is strong, I’m not surprised at how hard he was to subdue, especially due to the two hearts. Perhaps all of his kind are like this? It can’t be very cold on his home planet if that's the case. He’s extremely human looking though, so I’m wondering if the way he looks is purely mimicry or perhaps since we’ve noted he’s a time traveller he’s a further progressed version of us.” She bites her lip, “keep that part redacted, authorities are to remain under the impression he’s purely alien. Can’t have them taking him off us before we’re done.”

“You won’t need to worry about that—” The Doctor starts, but she shushes him.

“I want to start working on a drug that works better than pentobarbital,” Drabek tells her. “We gave him triple the lethal dose and it only knocked him out for an hour tops.”

Felicity nods, “I’ll add that to my list.” Her eyes almost gleam with excitement which makes the Doctor sick. “Okay.” She says, “moving on.” And then she’s grabbing her sheers again and making for his lower half, and the Doctor can’t help the whimper that escapes his lips when she makes the first snip, exposing his hips. She doesn’t react to the broken “ please,” that he mumbles when she goes through the waistband of his undergarments as well.

She methodically removes his shoes and socks last, snipping through the laces as if simply pulling on the bow would be too difficult, and then slicing through the back of its heel the moment she feels resistance. They go in her pile of scraps as well.

She ignores the tears that track down his face this time, there’s no sympathy in her eyes. She simply continues on with her job, pressing a firm hand down on his foot when he kicks out the best he can. 

He feels so exposed. So vulnerable. So utterly helpless. His body shivers with nothing to block the cold air from his skin, and tears continue to track down his cheeks when her hands begin prodding at his hips, eyes scathingly noting everything. Her voice murmuring notes to Drabek like “sexual organs are identical to that of a human male.” Or “mildly increased sensitivity,” her fingers pressing into the soft, vulnerable flesh of his hips, testing the firmness of his body. The Doctor flinches under her touch, still as rigid as the restraints will allow, and he forces himself to look anywhere but her hands. Anywhere but the sight of himself being so ruthlessly examined, and prodded like an object rather than a person.

His gaze kept being dragged back though. And he supposes he deserves it. It was his fault for not running. For being too weak again to ignore a cry for help. His fault. Every decision he’d made up until this moment was his fault . If he’d been faster, or stronger, or better . 

His tears continue to track down his cheeks, his hands strapped down too tightly to wipe them away, and Felicity collecting them in a tube had done nothing to dry the moisture.

“Can we roll him over?”

The Doctor stiffens, the words dragging him from his dissociative thoughts— the ones taking him away from the situation at hand. His naked, prone body. The indifferent, methodical touching. The blatant, objective way that both his captors stared at him. — The thought horrifies him, no part of him safe from their scathing looks, and comments about his body. But to do that they have to loosen the straps, and if they loosen the straps he has a chance.

A small chance, they’ll probably be expecting it. But a chance nonetheless.

The small chance evaporates, however, when Felicity simply gets Drabek to hold him firmly by the shoulders while she undoes the straps on his legs, rolling his legs over each other and restrapping them down before moving to his top half.

The Doctor sends a half hearted hand out, hoping to catch someone with it, undo his legs, run. But Drabek is faster, hand looping around his wrist and slamming it back onto the table for Felicity to lock down again. They leverage his other hand beneath his chest, flipping him over and onto his stomach.

He wheezes as pressure is replaced around his neck, his head is pressed sidewards once more, and his lungs struggle between his chest and the table.

He can still hear his two least favourite captors muttering more degrading things about his body. “Do you think there’s more of his kind out there? It’d help to have something to compare against.” Or “I’m interested if this is the normal size for his kind, or if perchance he’s underdeveloped.” Or “there’s no scarring or skin deformities anywhere, it’s intriguing because he’s at least late twenties in human years, you’d think he’d have injured himself at least once, right?”

And the Doctor just has to lie there and take it. He can do nothing while Felicity gets a little too comfortable tracing her fingers up and down his spine, and noting every curve in his hips. She pulls on the skin on his forearm to test the elasticity. She prods at his tail bone because she’s curious if he has one, or if only humans evolved from having a tail. Then she theorises, and theorises. And she ignores everything the Doctor has to say, because she knows better about his body from an hour’s examination than he does in nine hundred years of time and space. Apparently.

She and Drabek trail off mid conversation, the sudden silence jerks the Doctor out of a stupor he’d lulled himself into.

“You shot him with the taser gun barely an hour ago.” Felicity suddenly speaks.

“Yeah, why?” Drabek sounds bored.

“There’s no mark.” Felicity responds, and it sends a chill up the Doctor’s spine.

Drabek shifts before pointing at the places the Doctor had been hit, “lower spine when we first caught him, shoulder blades when he tried to run earlier. We always aim for the back because it gives a direct route into all the limbs. Better incapacitation than if we’d just hit a leg or something. Johnson has an impeccable aim.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Felicity shushes him, her gloved hands running over the Doctor’s spine, tracking it from his neck to his waist, taking note of the extremely slight and barely noticeable curvature he’d had since he’d regenerated with. “That gun leaves a very noticeable mark. Usually the initial penetration wound, and some sort of burn that radiates outwards.” The movements her hands make against his skin makes him shiver. “You hit him twice, where’s the evidence?”

Drabek sounds amazed when he speaks next, and the Doctor squeezes his eyes shut.

“Some sort of enhanced healing rate?” Drabek murmurs, “there’s nothing in our original notes about that. Although I do remember Harriet’s notes saying something about him regrowing a hand? And of course there’s no explanation for her very vague descriptions of what he looked like.”

The Doctor’s mind raced with reasoning to mislead them with. His final response sounded stupid even to him though, “the hand thing was an illusion I pulled off to beat the Sycorax,” he winced, shifting in his bonds, shivering in the cold. “No one can regrow limbs. Well–” He paused to compose himself, “lizards can regrow tails. But that’s hardly the same–” He broke off with a sudden jolt of horror. “Wait- how do you even- Harriet Jones was prime minister, how do you have official notes from her?”

Drabek laughed, the sound, a deep, throaty chuckle that chilled the Doctor to the bone. “Harriet Jones,” he said, “saw you as a threat. Earth saving or not, you refused to take out a potential enemy for mercy , let aliens think they could start a war. We started a branch in our organisation dedicated to you .”

“I’m honoured.”

“Harriet Jones was one of our original funding ambassadors.” Drabek pressed a firm hand down on the Doctor’s neck, pressing his head harder into the table, “that was, until you got her fired and something killed her during the war. Probably hated you. I don’t blame her.”

“Tell her to get in line.” The Doctor mutters. His mind is racing though, he doesn’t dwell on the Harriet Jones being dead for all the wrong reasons, what had gone so horribly wrong… there’s definitely something he’s missing here. He’d been here last in 2008ish, he’d seen Harriet Harriet Jones last when… Christmas 2005. Then Rose had told him the Daleks had murdered her.

Rose…

He clenches his hands into fists. Now was not the time to be crying about things he couldn’t change. What was the timeline here?

Christmas 2005, the Sycorax. Harriet Jones — Prime Minister…

Alien’s think they can start a war?

Harriet Jones dedicates an organisation to him?

Dalek attack in 2008, Harriet Jones dies…

Except she doesn’t. Because apparently she was killed during ‘the war’?  Unless the Dalek invasion was the war they were talking about?

It was what? 2019— no. 2015 now.

Something had happened between 2005 and 2008. It had to be then. He squeezes his eyes shut, head pounding as he tries to wrap his mind around such a severe timeline change.

So what was the organisation Harriet had worked for back in 2005?

Torchwood .

Torchwood.

“Wait.” The Doctor starts, “you guys work for Torchwood.”

There’s movement behind him and Drabek moves into the Doctor’s limited line of sight, “ding ding ding.” He looms over the Doctor menacingly, his eyes alight, “honestly surprised it took you so long, we’ve been searching for you an awfully long time. Thought it would send a pretty strong message if you were in Earth’s custody. The speaker of the aliens.

“But…” The Doctor trails off. “I helped you guys. Davros? Torchwood three? Does that mean nothing to you?” 

Drabek scoffs, “and then you abandoned Earth for a decade.”

“A decade?”

“Our last recorded sighting of you was 2006, you just vanished .” Felicity murmurs, “we were beginning to think you’d taken notice of the war and subsequent illegalisation of your kind and stayed away.”

“Leaving us to fend for ourselves against more and more aliens . You sided with them .” Drabek finished.

The Doctor swallows, “I didn’t–”

“You did.” Drabek snarls, “Torchwood Four is the only organisation holding Earth together from threats like you. We’re the reason the war ended. We’re the reason aliens are safely contained.”

“I don’t understand what you’re even meaning,” The Doctor insisted. “There was no war in 2006?”

Felicity waved Drabek off before he could respond, the Doctor stared at the two of them, he’d saved them. Multiple times. Torchwood would be nothing without his help. Why were they doing this? When was this war they kept going on about?

“Skip the backstory,” Felicity says, “Captain, he’s just trying to distract us. I’m more interested in the hand story.”

The Doctor gritted his teeth and clenched his hands into tight fists. Felicity laid her cold, gloved hand on the back of his thigh, sending a jolt through his entire body when she began to rub circles into his flesh. 2006 was just after he’d– lost Rose… Does that mean in this version of reality, he’d just vanished off the face of the Earth? What about Martha? Donna? Was he with Rose? Where did he go?

“Illusion.” He repeated bluntly through clenched teeth when Felicity began to look impatient, “don’t you people listen? Sycorax needed to be stopped. I feigned losing the sword fight, got the leader to drop his guard because he thought he’d chopped my hand off. He didn’t, I’m impressively good at magic tricks— alien nature and all. And I defeated them — your welcome by the way. — Harriet Jones saw what they saw, you humans–” he swallowed, “are very short sighted when it comes to stuff like this.”

“Mmm.” Felicity hummed, pushing Drabek out of her way. The captain was still glaring intent murder at the Doctor. Felicity prodded at the Doctor’s side, around the area his right kidney would be. “Can you regrow organs too?”

The Doctor breathed a deep breath in through his teeth. Trying to figure out the best way to tell them he can only grow limbs and other body parts back through regenerating, without actually telling them about his regenerations.

“No.” He mumbles. “I may heal quickly, but that’s where it ends.”

Felicity doesn’t sound convinced, but she doesn’t push. Instead she grabs something else off her equipment table. It glints in the light, and the Doctor’s mouth goes dry when he realises it’s a scalpel. 

“Please don’t go chopping limbs off.” He almost begs, “I promise you they won’t grow back. I doubt you’ll be sending any messages to the aliens if I’m dead…”

Even Drabek seems a little concerned, stepping forward again, mouth agape and hands outstretched in case his partner tries anything rash. “Felicity,” he warns.

“Oh, stop it.” Felicity pulls the scalpel out of Drabek’s reach and presses it against the Doctor’s shoulder blade. He freezes, his breath coming in short gasps. “No dismemberment this early. I want to see…” The blade digs into the Doctor’s flesh, tearing through the first few layers of skin, the pressure is surgically precise. He can feel his own blood begin to pool in the small of his back. It hurts, but he bears it, refusing to give his captors the satisfaction of hearing him cry. 

He shivers. He’s humiliated. He’s angry. He’s trapped.

And it’s all his fault.

“You can stop this now.” The Doctor gasps out once she’s done dragging the blade from his shoulders to his tailbone. The open wound screams in the cold air, it makes the Doctor’s voice tight, his eyes water. He’s not crying. He’s not. “Let me go now and you will never hear from me again. No repercussions, no nothing. I will leave.” He swallows, “if not, someone will find out. This is unethical practice. This is…” He can’t even find the words. “This is abuse. Misconduct. I’m begging you.”

But Felicity isn’t listening, her eyes, along with Drabek’s, are fixated on his bare back. Her eyes shine with an almost childlike fascination, a sharp contrast to the clinical efficiency of her hands. She presses her gloved fingers along the edges of the wound, applying just enough pressure to force a whimper. Blood wells up around her fingers, dripping steadily onto the table beneath him.

“Fascinating,” she murmurs, and the Doctor twitches. “The rate of blood flow is faster than it should be, and yet...” She leans in closer, her breath cold against his skin. “The blood is clotting almost immediately and tissue is already beginning to seal. This—” she gestures vaguely at the wound as though it’s a spectacle, “—is extraordinary. It’s beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”

“What will you do when someone finds out about this?” The Doctor demands, his voice is fragile.

Drabek doesn’t spare him a glance, “no one will find out, Doctor.” And he words it like its a reassurance, “and besides, you’re property of Torchwood now. Nothing we do to you is illegal anymore.”

“Someone will recognise me,” The Doctor insists. “You said something about inspections? Categorisation? No version of Earth would allow intelligent lifeforms– aliens or otherwise —to be tortured.”

“No one who would remember you is alive anymore.” Drabek hisses, “either that, or they work for me. ”

Then Felicity drags another line through his flesh, the bite of the scalpel dragging a choked off groan from deep in the Doctor’s throat. He can feel her hands holding the two sides of the wound apart, can feel it closing regardless, his throat closing over in panic as he struggles with nowhere to go. “Please.” He begs. His voice barely more than a whisper.

No one listens.

Chapter Text

Felicity carves into his back several more times, her cuts getting increasingly deeper each time the original heals over. Her curiosity is only quelled when the Doctor’s energy wears thin, the cuts are too deep, and his regenerative energy is exhausted, leaving open wounds on his back that are closing too slowly for Felicity’s desires.

She sounds disappointed when she places her scalpel down with a sharp clink on the metal table beside him. “I guess there is a limit to your healing prowess.” She murmurs, one hand scribbling notes, and her other hand curling into the Doctor’s hair, pulling taut when he begins to slip from consciousness. He’s dragged back to reality with a whimper, his face wet with tears, his throat tight, and his hearts hammering to replace the blood that was slowly dripping from his back to the table.

“It’s getting late, Dr. Gray.” Drabek speaks up for the first time since earlier when he’d expressed his disdain for blood and Felicity had laughed at him and called him squeamish. “I think it’s time we began to wrap things up. The Doctor will need his strength for tomorrow.”

It all sounded ominous, but the Doctor was too beyond everything to care. He stared listlessly at the wall instead, chest heaving. He’d escape later. For now he was exhausted from the continued assault to his back. He was exhausted from his energy being sapped by his body’s annoying ability to accelerate the healing process. An ability he couldn’t control. It drained him.

Felicity hummed in response, her eyes boring into the Doctor’s skull. Her fingers entangled in his hair on one side, and resting possessively on his back on the other. “You can leave,” she tells him, “I’ll be fine to finish up.”

Drabek shuffles, his movements just out of the Doctor’s line of sight. “You don’t want an extra set of hands?”

Felicity shakes her head, “I’ll be okay. I’ll get you to help with the two person jobs bright and early tomorrow. Just make sure Vale or anyone from the ethics department won’t bother me until after we’ve gotten our use.”

Drabek doesn’t argue, the door shuts behind him with a soft thud and The Doctor shivers. It’s just him and Felicity now.

And doesn’t she know it.

“Let’s clean you up, shall we?” Felicity breaks the silence after a while, moving her table trolley out of the way and swapping it out for a bucket and a sponge. The bucket she begins to fill with water at a sink he can hear, but not see.

“I can do that.” The Doctor starts, breaking out of his dissociative stupor to twist his wrists in their bonds. Surely capturing him was enough. They didn’t have to take away his autonomy in hygiene too. Right?

Felicity beams at him, “I know you can.” She says, her mannerisms somehow completely different now that Drabek had left, “but you don’t have to anymore. It’s not your job to. Your job from now on is to lay there and look pretty.” She scrubs her hands meticulously in the sink before dipping the sponge into now soapy— and from what the Doctor can smell, —lemon scented water.

When the disinfectant hits the still healing incisions on his back, the sting sends him reeling. His limbs writhing in their restraints, his eyes watering, a shout bordering on escape at his lips. Whatever chemicals the soap contained burned into his skin, eating away at any germs that may have entered the gaps in his flesh, and leaving the skin raw and agonising.

Felicity lets out a soft, almost sympathetic hum as she presses the sponge harder into the jagged incisions across his back, dragging it along each freshly healed line with a clinical thoroughness that feels more personal than professional. She makes a small tutting noise at a specific not quite healed yet cut, “you’re scarring a little here.” She traces it with a finger, dragging a shudder from the Doctor. Her touch is all consuming and he wants to scream when she digs in a nail. “Will that stay, or is the fading process accelerated as well?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” The Doctor mutters.

The nail digs in a little deeper and he hisses in response, biting his lip. “Well?” Felicity stages it as a question, but it feels more like a demand. When he doesn’t indulge her she frowns. “I could always keep cutting, figure it out for myself. Course we’d be here all night, but it’d save having to figure that out further down the line when my team and I are doing our work. Wouldn’t want them leaving permanent scars if they don’t have to. Right?”

And the Doctor is exhausted, his body draining all his energy in order to knit his wounds back together. And those were nothing. They hadn’t even exposed muscle. The Doctor was crying over Time Lord pain equivalent to a human paper cut and he hated it. He was disgusted by it actually. It made him weak. No other Time Lord would cry, they would suffer in silence. Perhaps they would ask for more. Thank their torturer even.

The Doctor won’t. The Doctor is weak. The Doctor couldn’t even grit his teeth through a little electricity in order to save his own skin. The Doctor couldn’t even run away correctly - he couldn’t even succeed. The Doctor couldn’t even fend off a group of ‘measly, primitive, humans’.

“I don’t scar,” he whispers finally. “Unless the wound is severe enough.” His throat is tight, his words laced with hatred. For himself. For Torchwood. For Gallifrey. For humans. “It’ll be gone by the morning.”

Felicity’s pen scratched on paper as she noted this, her sponge dripping soap where it pooled at the base of his spine. He shivered. The air was colder now that he was wet.

He tenses, his teeth gritted when Felicity gets back to work. Her sponge digging into every nook and cranny she could access in his current position. Everywhere sensitive, everywhere he didn’t want her to touch. It made him feel dirty in ways that weren’t related to the lemon, probably dish  soap, or the blood still dripping down his sides. He didn’t get a say. Every protest fell on her ignorant ears. She hummed a tune as she went. Like he was some mundane task. He probably was, just some mundane task.

She attached a hose to her sink next, the icy water jettisoning across his skin, the bruising pressure tearing a cry from his lips as he was soaked and then patted dry with a coarse towel.

When she was satisfied she flipped him over. One restraint at a time — for they were adjustable, and there were multiple slots for her to add more if she required — forcing him into excruciating positions while each strap was readjusted one at a time until he was back on his back. Every joint clamped to the table with meticulous precision.

Then she began the cleaning process all over again for his front half.

The Doctor lay there, shivering against the cold surface of the table, his body a tangle of tension and exhaustion, his breath hitched in his throat. His back was raw, his skin tingling and burning where Felicity’s sponge had scoured over it. He hadn’t realized how much he’d come to hate the sound of her hum until it resumed, filling the sterile air like an invasive melody that burrowed into his skull. Filling his insides with her .

“You’re so quiet all of a sudden.” Felicity muses after a while, running her sponge slowly around the curve of his ribs, it was as if she was taunting him. Flaunting the fact that he’d lost. The soapy water stings as it drips down his prone form, making its way back to the still healing incisions on his back, and the Doctor flinches; though the restraints hold him fast. Her voice is almost teasing, like she’s trying to coax a reaction. “Have I finally rendered the Doctor speechless?”

Her words grate at him, he clenches his jaw in response and refuses to give her the satisfaction of acknowledgement, aiming his gaze at the ceiling once more. He’s humiliated, stripped of his freedom, mocked every time he even attempts to speak. What more did she want from him?

He yelps as she moves further downwards, pressing her awful sponge into a particularly sensitive area. His legs instinctively try to jerk away, but the straps over his ankles and knees hold firm and he has nowhere to go. 

“Keep still.” Felicity places a firm hand onto his shin as she scrubs, “you’re only making this take longer.”

“Maybe that was the plan.” The Doctor replies, avoiding her gaze when she turns back to look at him.

“There you are, I almost missed that mouth of yours.” She finishes up by scrubbing in between his fingers and toes, bending them painfully forward to achieve her mission and he has to restrain the flinch his body releases when she picks up the hose again. His body is soaked once more, leaving him shivering, and coughing, and gasping. His hair dripping water, the curves of his body causing pools in the dips.

Then she meticulously pats him dry. The Doctor works his jaw. Trying to think of something to say to her that might make her second guess what she’s doing. Surely without Drabek there to whisper in her ears, she’d see reason. His strongest weapon was his words, he still had that.

And he clung to it like a lifeline.

“You’re so smart.” He tells her. His voice is soft and he’s not certain she hears him to begin with, but slowly and surely she turns to look at him from where she stands at his hips, still staining his skin with the feeling of her hands.

“What?”

“You. Felicity Gray.” Her name tastes like ash in his mouth. Felicity means luck and happiness. It was taunting him. Contrasting this woman in all the worst ways. This… torturer . “You’re brilliant . No one could outsmart you if they tried.”

Felicity blinks slowly at him, her hands finally going still, hovering just above his pelvis and it’s humiliating. The Doctor wants out . He should’ve left Billie, ran as fast as he could and never looked back. Clearly the residents of Earth weren’t worth it. They’d never be worth it.

And yet, he loved them all the same.

“I’m flattered,” Felicity says, “but flattery won’t get you out of this. The Government owns you. Torchwood has plans for you. I have plans for you. Nothing you say can convince me otherwise.”

The Doctor’s mind races, his body flushed. He’s still wet. He’s still shivering. Felicity has all the cards. He’s helpless if she decides to pull her scalpel out again and start cutting away.

“This is illegal.” He tells her. “A breach of ethics. Absolutely against human rights and protections.”

Felicity frowns at him. “Sure.” She shrugs. “If you were human, absolutely. But you’re not, and Victor has already sent the ethics waiver to,” she waves her hand above her head, “higher ups. I’ve got months until they ask to verify your categorisation.”

“I don’t understand,” The Doctor tries to distract her, “you say there was a war? Aliens were ruled illegal, they need to be contained? How does this constitute imprisonment? Surely you’d just put me in a cage somewhere?”

“I know what you’re doing.” Felicity tells him, “but I’ll bite anyway. You’re not the only Alien I’ve had to break down for the betterment of Torchwood’s uses.”

“And what are those?” He begs. “Does parliament know about these ‘uses’? Was it their jurisdiction that has me on this table? Do I qualify for a hearing?”

“Parliament jurisdiction makes you an enemy of the state.” Felicity says impatiently, “your alien biology gives Torchwood ownership over you. We don’t want your kind on the streets, therefore Alien-Control rounds you up and you end up here. In the system, until there’s some other law passed that allows for reintegration, or deportation.”

“Biology doesn’t verify humanity. There’s no way a constitutional amendment could’ve been passed that fast. War or not”

“It did.” Felicity counters, “and it does, now, if you’ll let me continue with my work…”

“Surely even criminalising aliens doesn’t give you the right to treat them like this.” The Doctor argues. “Human or not–”

Felicity steps closer to him, cutting him off by placing the towel down and replacing it in her grip with the scalpel. The Doctor stops breathing, the moment hanging between them, silence wrapping around him like a straitjacket. Felicity’s eyes are cold as she presses the scalpel into the small of his chest— the divot between his collarbones.

“You think I haven’t already heard every argument you’re about to make?” Her tone is threatening, as if she’s defending some horrific crime… which she is. “Every ‘this isn’t right,’ every ‘you can’t do this,’ every ‘alien’s deserve rights.’” She clicks her tongue dismissively, tapping the blade against the Doctor’s skin while she leans in close, too close. The Doctor can feel her breath on his cheek. Her hands on his chest. And he’s helpless . He can do nothing.

“I’ve heard it all.” She whispers, her teeth are perfect, if a bit too white. Her skin is flawless. She smells like chemicals. “From people a lot more persuasive than you’re being right now.” Her other hand moves to clamp down tightly on his wrist when he tries to twist it, desperate for something to give before he does.

His breath catches in his throat. He can feel the pressure mounting in his chest as his hearts pound against the restraints that keep him pinned to the cold, unforgiving table. “You don’t have to do this.” His words are a mantra. A plea. Desperate. “There’s still time to turn away. If someone with any semblance of power finds out about this - by this, I mean you and Victor strapping a clearly intelligent life form to a table with the intent to cut him— me open in the name of what?”

“Progress!” Felicity stares down at him. “Science.”

“Science.” The Doctor laughs hoarsely, “Is that your excuse for everything you do with ethical controversies? You humans do make progress. I promise. I’ve seen it. You don’t need to torture me to achieve it. You’re so smart.”

Felicity seems to consider this for all of three seconds, her eyes softening and the Doctor is certain he’s gotten through to her.

Then her eyes harden again, and her lips twist into a determined scowl. “Oh, Doctor.” Her fingers release his hand in favour of tapping lightly against his cheek. “This is so much bigger than you and your petty morality, your little human rights issues. This is Torchwood. This is science . This is an opportunity no one would turn away, not even if it makes them a little squeamish. Your biology is,” she searches for the words, her scalpel pressing harder against the Doctor’s chest. “Life altering.” Felicity finds it. “I won’t ask how you know, we’ll find that out later anyway, but you say we will make progress in the future? This is how it happens. I know it! I couldn’t believe my ears when they said they were bringing you in. A Time Lord they said. The enhanced healing, the resistance to drugs. The age. All of it. You could be the cure to cancer. To death even.”

And wouldn’t that be something.

The Doctor’s life could finally mean something. Earth. Humans. His humans. He could save them. He knows he could. He’d breathed life back into them plenty of times.

But they can’t. Not now. It would alter the course of history. Humans had to figure this out for themselves. Time Lord physiology isn’t something they could just recreate for their own benefit. He’s not even certain they would benefit from it. Considering all the suffering he, himself has been through. Humans wouldn’t be able to handle it. It would ruin them. Timelines would be altered beyond repair. Worse than what he’d done with Pompeii, with Adelaide.

It would be catastrophic.

He fights the bile that rises in his throat. His head spinning, he searches for words but comes back with nothing.

“Felicity.” His voice is pleading. He doesn’t even try to hide it anymore. “If you keep going now, you can never turn back. You will be torturing me. There is no ethical way to go about this. I promise you, you’ll just bring yourself more harm.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Felicity doesn’t look at him, her eyes are fixated on the scalpel she still has pressed against his chest. “No one needs to know, no one will know. The minute Victor locked you up in that transport van Torchwood owned you . No. The minute you landed on Earth, Torchwood owned you. There’s no such thing as alien rights.” She digs the scalpel in, the blade biting into his flesh and bringing tears to the Doctor’s eyes. “ I own you . I’m going to save humankind. If it takes a little torture, so be it. You’re not even a human, in the eyes of parliament, you’re even less than cattle.” Her lips curl up in satisfaction at the Doctor’s distress, “So what if we’re breaking a few rules, no ones found out yet– or if they have, they haven’t cared enough to let us know.”

The Doctor goes rigid. This is not how this conversation should have gone, his chest is bleeding now, the open wound strings in the cold air. He grits his teeth to stop the whine his chest tries to force from him. “Felicity.” He starts. He begs. but she cuts him off by pressing the blade in ever deeper. It drags a cry from him this time, skin tearing, the blade digging into muscle ever so slightly.

“Enough of that.” She snaps. “I’m tired of your noises.” She wipes the blade off on his unmarred skin, turning around and digging around in a drawer out of his range of vision.

“Felicity, please. We can talk about this.”

But then she’s gripping his face, her fingers digging into his jaw, he chokes as she drags his mouth open and forces something hard and rubber between his teeth, some kind of bite guard? It triggers his gag reflex and he feels bile rise in his throat as she secures it with a buckle behind his head. It stretches his mouth around it, cupping around his teeth. His words turn into illegible mumbles and moans.

Felicity sighs, it’s the sound of a maniac. “That’s better.” She breathes. “I enjoy your snipe, Doctor. But, this begging was getting annoying. I have a job to do, and I’m already,” and she checks her damn watch, “an hour and a half overtime.”

And with the Doctor effectively cut off from his best weapon, she gets back to work drying his legs and then moving on to wrapping a tape measure around every accessible part of his body. Writing down notes about his height, the width of his chest, hips, neck. Making audible noises when something about him doesn’t match with a human.

He tries pleading with his eyes. He tries getting words past the gag unsuccessfully. Nothing works. She’s indifferent to him now. He’s lost his chance.

She wipes the blood from his chest last, leaving that part dripping, and then grabs her shears again. The Doctor tenses instinctually, there’s nothing left to remove. He’s naked. He’s all there. He’s strapped down like a pig for slaughter, ready for her to do whatever she wants.

And then she’s hacking at his hair of all things. Cropping it short, not caring for neatness, and collecting it into a test tube to put with the vial of tears, and his pile of destroyed clothing.

It shouldn’t be that hard to put up with her cutting his hair. It would grow back. It shouldn’t upset him. She’d just sliced his chest open like she was slicing through a loaf of bread.

And yet. She was changing him. She’d stolen his clothes, she’d taken notes about his body like he was an interesting organism she’d found under a microscope. She’d made comments about what he looked like, shamed him for his physique as if he was the runt of the Time Lords. She’d ignored his pleas, gagged him like it was merely a distraction from her torture .

He cried. Actually sobbing this time, it’s not like anyone could actually hear it anyway, the sound muffled behind the gag and clogged his sinuses. She runs the hose and an obscene amount of soap through his cropped hair, setting it in stone. He couldn’t even maintain his appearance. Felicity seemed set on taking everything that made him The Doctor from him.

She even goes to the lengths of scrubbing the floor with the same soap she’d washed him with. Scrubbing the ‘ him’ away. Leaving only Torchwood, and that damn table behind.

She didn’t acknowledge the angry, distraught tears and his hitched breathing. She simply continued with her work. Pulling a syringe out next, jabbing it into the first vein she could find — his neck, just above the strap holding it still — and drawing a sizable vial of blood which is placed with the rest of her samples.

He fixes her with a stare of unfiltered hatred. He wants her to know that everything she’s doing is wrong, and disgusting. And it wouldn’t be humane to treat a human this way, so why was he any different?

She seems impervious to it now, setting her attention on the series of tubes she’s pulled from somewhere out of sight. The Doctor has no idea what she intends to do with any of them, but the addition of a bottle of lubricant doesn’t bode well.

He manages to lock eyes with her, his face filling with heat as her intent gaze studies him like a slab of meat. She fixes her eyes on his face, and then on his still bleeding chest, then on his hips, before trailing downwards and fixating between his legs.

He feels himself filled with shame, disgust, and horror, and he can do nothing. His muffled pleas go unheard as Felicity breaks out of her stupor finally in favour of choosing one of her many tubes and holding it up to his face, pressing one end to his nose and curving it around to his stomach.

She hums at him when he pleads with her, his words garbled and illegible. “This is nice.” She murmurs, and she places a finger against his lips. “No annoying speeches, no loud crying.” She frowns when he attempts to curse her out in Gallifreyan. There’s no translation for it in English, but it doesn’t even sound right to him, choked and destroyed behind the gag. “We can fix the little noises later.” She tells him. "Right now, I need to keep you maintained.” Like a goddamn object.

She holds the tube up to him, using her free hand to tip the lubricant onto it, rubbing it in. “This is your dinner.” She gestures to his nose, “it goes in here,” and then at his stomach, “and feeds into here. You don’t even have to swallow, which will definitely make things easier.”

She describes the process to him as if he’s a child learning a new subject, and if the horror at his situation hadn’t set in yet, it definitely had now. They were going to feed him through a tube. As if offering him food to chew himself was too difficult. As if letting himself eat and swallow was something he wasn’t capable of doing anymore.

Felicity stares him deep in the eyes, her hands still working away at the tube and lubricant. “Now,” she starts, “if I remove the bite guard, can I trust you enough to cooperate. Or do I need to get someone else in here to hold you and that chatty mouth of yours still while I make sure this doesn’t go into your lungs?”

The Doctor swallows around the rubber in his mouth, his body roiling as it brushes at the back of his throat. He really doesn’t want the tube going anywhere near his insides at all.

“It’s a yes or no question,” Felicity probes, “yes I’ll keep quiet and open my mouth when requested, or no, you need to call someone in to help me force a bite block in there.” She reaches behind herself and pulls back some cylindrical contraption with moulded sides for teeth, and straps to hold it still. He shudders at the thought of it and attempts to mumble a yes through the current gag, but it’s lost to illegible noise.

He nods instead. Face going red at the submission, but he’d rather submit than be subjected to another form of degradation on top of what they’d already done to him, and were going to do to him.

Felicity beams at him, “wonderful. Let’s get started then shall we?”

She gently guides the bite guard from his mouth, letting him close it and work his jaw to calm the cramping sensations he was getting from the forced immobilisation. He has to force down the gratitude that swells in his gut as she waits patiently for him to be ready for the intubation. Because this wasn’t a kindness. He had nothing to be grateful for. This was the same person who had cut his hair, his clothes, washed him with the same chemicals she used to clean the floor, and strapped him to a table. She was a disgusting human being who was seeing him more as a resource to exploit for her own, or humans own, personal gain.

There was no utilitarian ideology behind her actions, because no good would come to the many from it. Anything they learned from him, would probably cause more suffering to them. Because knowing Torchwood, they’d exploit humans for their ‘science’. His regenerative nature wouldn’t prolong their lives, they weren’t built for it, and unless they somehow managed to evolve and adapt to it — a process that would normally take thousands of years, and take them up to the original cure to disease anyway — their bodies would suffer.

He has to force himself not to start rambling again. Force himself not to try to reason with her again. She’d proven to be impervious to his pleas. He has to force himself not to flinch away from her hands when they make for his nose after pulling a fresh set of gloves on. She pinches the tip of a nostril and carefully guides the slick tube in, pushing when she meets resistance.

She slips a wet, gloved finger between his lips, and he has no choice but to comply by parting his mouth for her.

The real horror begins when she presses the tube harder, bypassing the natural resistance of his body as it fights against the foreign object. His body tenses involuntarily and he fights the desperate instinct to reject. His arms strain against the straps, hands clenched.

Felicity’s hands are unyielding and precise and the pressure builds in his nostrils as she forces the tube further in. It stings as it scrapes the inside of his nasal passages, and then morphs into a burning sensation, a sharp ache, like his sinuses are being forced down with it.

His ragged breathing goes unnoticed, and he chokes as it enters his throat, pushing down his esophagus as Felicity guides it carefully forward. Every movement, every adjustment is a reminder that this is his life now. Strapped to a table, fed against his will, probably cut open later for them to dig around in his insides. Nothing more than an object to be manipulated. To be used.

“Just a little further,” Felicity murmurs as though she’s trying to comfort him, she can feel her fingertips against his teeth, against his nose. Her chest brushes against his from how close she’s standing, eyes fixated on the back of his throat. She’s done this before. “I need you to swallow for me,” her hand moves to rub his throat, encouraging movement.

The Doctor gags as the tube pushes ever downwards, for a moment it feels as if he can’t breathe. Every attempt at swallowing seems to force the oxygen further and further from his lungs.

When it finally breaches his stomach and his throat closes around it, the sensation is almost unbearable—a foreign, invasive pressure deep inside him that refuses to be ignored. It feels like his entire esophagus is rebelling against the intrusion, the tube pressing against tender, unyielding tissue as it settles into place. His eyes water, and stomach churns in response, bile rising unbidden, and he retches despite himself.

“No, no.” Felicity presses his jaw closed, “you can’t throw up, or we’ll end up having to do it all over again.” 

The Doctor’s body spasms as his stomach lurches in protest, and he groans low in his throat, the sound muffled by the invasive device. The bile burns, but with his mouth forced shut and the tube lodged in place, he can only choke back the acidic taste, tears streaming down his face from the effort.

Felicity’s gloved fingers are steady and unyielding, her grip on his jaw is relentless and he can’t throw her off, his body jerks, convulsing against the intrusion. “Breathe through your nose,” she instructs, as if it’s that simple. “You’re making this harder on yourself.”

The Doctor glares at her through the haze of watery, tearing eyes, but he obeys, drawing in shallow, shaky breaths through his nose. It’s a struggle to focus on anything beyond the sensation of the tube filling his throat, the foreign object an unrelenting, humiliating presence. Every breath feels like a battle, and his body screams for relief, for freedom, for something he knows won’t come.

“Good,” Felicity murmurs as she steps back slightly, apparently no longer worried about the Doctor’s body expelling the tube and releasing his jaw. “You’ve done so good.” Her voice is condescending and the Doctor squeezes his eyes shut, heaving in breaths through his remaining nostril. Her hands move with practiced efficiency as she secures the tube, taping it in place against his nose to ensure it won’t shift or dislodge.

“There.” Felicity announces once she’s done. “One down, three to go.”

And his stomach churns remembering the other tubes. The knowledge that there are more makes him wish he was still unconscious.

She holds up three other tubes, each a different width and some sort of different end. “I think we’ll sort out waste next.” She chooses the thickest one, placing it across the Doctor’s chest, and the other two back on the table.

She unlocks his knees and ankles from his cuffs— one at a time, and holding firmly to his leg the entire time — and moving his ankles to the knee cuffs, bending his knees, and forcing him half into the fetal position. The Doctor stiffens, his breath coming quickly, hearts hammering. The position leaves little to the imagination as to what she intends to do, and he doesn’t want it .

“Felicity.” He tries, thankful for his mouth still being free, but she ignores him, eyes fixated down… down there. He strains his feet in the cuffs, tries to turn sideways, but Felicity is too good, wrapping additional restraints around his thigh and shin, tightening it between his knees and keeping them bent. She tightens the strap around his hips, pressing his spine uncomfortably tight against the table before changing her gloves to fresh ones and lubricating the next tube.

“Felicity, please.” The Doctor isn’t adverse to begging now. “Think about this. Experimentation is one thing. You can’t take this–” His voice cracks in desperation, his body straining, and prone, and flushed with humiliation when she presses a clinical hand against his pelvis, feeling around for the places the tubes need to go. It explores around to his back, pushing beneath him.

“Please.” He begs.

She doesn’t even look up when she replies, “don’t make me gag you again, Doctor. I don’t like doing that.”

“Then don’t” The Doctor pleads. “You don’t have to do any of this.”

“Yes I do.” Felicity says, still not looking at him, measuring the tube instead. “This is a rectal tube, the other one is a urinary catheter. They’ll solve your waste for you. Going to the effort of taking you to a bathroom is such a waste of time.”

“Felicity, please . I will never forgive you if you do this.”

She looks up at him finally, “I don’t want forgiveness. I want to cure death. And if it takes one, primal species hating me to do so. Then so be it.” She adjusts the straps to force him sideways slightly, the position pulling painfully on his hips and his right ankle. She places a foam block beneath his back to hold him there. “Now be quiet, or I’ll make you.”

He clenches his jaw so tightly it begins to ache again, pressing his eyes closed as the cold indifference in Felicity’s voice cuts deeper than the scalpel wound that’s still attempting to knit itself together in his chest. He’s humanity’s biggest fighter. He’s done everything for them, their potential, and for their capacity to grow beyond fear.

But this. This right now is an example of Humanity as a lost cause. How far they’re willing to fall in the name of survival. Of science. Of… He doesn’t even know.

He’d do anything for them. He’d die over and over in their name.

He’s not sure they’d do the same for him.

He’s powerless from stopping the panic that begs to claw its way to the surface, the click of the lubricant tube snapping shut jerking him out of his thoughts. He stiffens against the straps holding him still, his entire body tense, instincts screaming to flee, to fight. And he hates it. He hates himself. He hates Felicity. He hates Torchwood.

Felicity’s gloved hand pressed firmly against his hip, holding it still. “Relax, Doctor.” She says, apparently noticing the tension, the fear . The Repulsion . At himself. At her. At—

“Relax?” He can’t suppress the sharp, incredulous laugh that escapes him. It’s bitter, and hollow. “This is for people who can’t expel waste on their own.”

“You can’t.” Felicity reasoned, her voice snide, “not while you’re there.”

“Then let me up.” The Doctor hates the angry tears that drip down his face as he cranes his neck to look at her, avoiding the sight of his legs. “You’re violating every principle of decency, of humanity, of science—”

“Science is about results.” Felicity snaps, her tone is hardly restrained, angering herself, and the Doctor’s heart sinks further, because she thinks she’s right. She thinks this is okay.

“Not ethics.” She finishes, moving her other hand into position, and the Doctor flinches, a yelp bordering on his lips, his body recoiling against the intrusion, his stomach churns violently, and bile rises in his throat again as she starts to guide the tube in. It’s invasive, unnatural, a cold, unyielding pressure that forces its way past his body’s resistance.

“Stop,” he begs, a whine brimming on his lips, raw, strangled, and for the first time in centuries, he feels truly helpless. Everything else up to this moment was something he could deal with. Had dealt with. This?

“Almost there,” Felicity murmurs, her focus unwavering as she continues, her hands steady, methodical, she’s probably getting overtime rates. It’s disgusting. He’s disgusting.

His breath comes in shallow, ragged gasps, his body trembling with humiliation and rage and something he refuses to name. Tears prick at the corners of his eyes at the crushing, overwhelming weight of it all. The captivity, the powerlessness, the stripping of his agency, the cold efficiency in which Felicity dismantles every shred of dignity he has left.

He hardly notices when she finishes and praises him for how good he’s being, and he sinks deeper into the shame of it all. Any other Time Lord would’ve blown out of this place by now. Maybe he was the runt. Maybe he deserved all of this. That’s what they would’ve said.

As she prepares the catheter he lets himself slip away, retreating to the depths of his mind while she readjusts his legs, straightening his position out again, his hips aching, his stomach aching, everything aching in repulsion. At himself. Mostly.

Somehow this one was worse and he cries out as it breaches him, pressing inside and destroying every ounce of himself he had left. His back attempts to arch in agony, but Felicity had pulled the straps so tightly for this one out of fear of damaging something that all it results in is a bruising pressure on his joints and he sobs. He probably cries, and begs, and pleads, but it’s lost in the haze of agony and humiliation and dissociation.

He barely notices when she finishes, attaching the two tubes finally to a collection bag that she hooks to the side of the table.

He does flinch however, when she cleans her hands and then runs them, still wet, through the remainder of his hair. “You’re so good, Doctor. You did so good. I’m so proud of you.” She wipes his tears away, “just one more, and then the tubes are done. We can hook you up to some good happy drugs, and I can go home.”

Home.

The Doctor wants to go home.

The Doctor doesn’t have a home.

At least not anymore.

Felicity sanitises his left elbow before inserting an IV cannula and he whimpers. Then she tapes it down, bandages it and hooks it up to a saline bag.

“All done.” She whispers. “You’re so good. I’m so proud of you.”

The Doctor is too exhausted to snap something at her, though his body tenses in anger.

He can only struggle as she hooks a few additional restraints to the table. One around his forehead that does a good job at blocking his peripheral, and a few additional ones to his limbs. These ones are metal, and the sound of the drill makes him flinch as she screws them down.

“Just a precaution.” Felicity tells him, and then she swaps the saline for something else and the world dims around him.

She presses a kiss against his tear stricken cheek. He tries to glare at her, but the sedative saps his strength. “You’re perfect.” She says, “almost.”

Then she leaves him alone.

Chapter Text

The Doctor doesn’t sleep. He lies there in a feverish haze. His breathing, shallow, and his face still wet from tears– though he would never admit it was from crying –even though he’d stopped hours ago, he couldn’t move his hands from where they were screwed to the table beneath him to wipe them away.

He’d discovered the purpose of those new metal bands a few hours ago. Testing the limits of the new restraints had caused them to fire volts of electricity through his limbs, sending his body rigid and a strangled gasp of agony from his lips when it had finally stopped. He’d remained as still as possible after that, his body still trembling uncontrollably as it worked through the aftershocks, panic filling his very core as he realised there really was no way out. He’d have to wait for them to unstrap him from the table for his next opening. But from the look of it, that wasn’t going to be for a long time. His future appeared to be being strapped here for a long time.

The tube up his nose kept his stomach uncomfortably full, the other in his arm pumped him full of what he assumed was a high dosage of pentobarbital again. Constantly dripping into his bloodstream. Not enough to knock him out, but enough that it made it difficult to think properly, and dulled the slightest edge of the internal pain and turmoil he was in. The final two shoved unceremoniously in his bladder and rectum, involuntarily disposing of any waste and keeping him ‘maintained’ cemented the idea that he was going to be here a long, long time.

The shock of it was the only thing keeping him from breaking down completely. The invasive, always there feeling of the tubes working away at his insides. The uncomfortable presence of sludge in his stomach. The constantly dripping drugs in his system that kept him dizzy, the world hazy, and any semblance of a plan from forming.

He considers screaming, or yelling for help. But the fact that Felicity –or, he supposes, Doctor Gray , –hadn’t gagged him again, had told him that they didn’t need to. Which meant that no one would really care.

Besides, he’s sure he’d just get electrocuted again if his body tensed too much from the louder volumes of pain expression. It didn’t matter, they were either motion censored, or there was someone operating them behind the scenes. Either way ended with him being the conductor for several hundred volts of electricity. He supposes he should count himself lucky he was ‘biologically different’, that kind of electrical trauma would’ve sent a human into cardiac arrest immediately.

Despite the time, and the Doctor’s clear lack of movement or autonomy, there were still active guards. Employees? Of Torchwood walking the halls. Every so often he’d see a shadow pass by, stretching across the roof. Every so often someone actually entered the room. Though they never made it into his range of vision, they kept the IV full of drugs, topping it up when it got low, and made comments about not needing to empty the waste collection– this was due to his more efficient liver, however he’d be damned if he sparked a conversation with one of them just to tell them that. They were the ones who hooked up the feeding tube initially, and then unhooked it once it was done, leaving the tube to dangle off the side of the table.

When the lights finally flickered off, the Doctor was plunged into a suffocating, pitch black. Without the sterile glare of the operating room lights, the room felt infinite and claustrophobic all at once.

As his eyes adjusted, the Doctor could see a red light blinking just out of his vision, if he strained into his limited visual he could count four. One in each corner of the room.

Cameras, probably. 

Because the Doctor didn’t deserve privacy, or dignity. Not even when he was alone. He had to be monitored constantly. They had taken his freedom, his clothes, his body, and now even the act of allowed solitude was a privilege Torchwood deemed him to be unworthy of. His breathing hitched at the thought of some faceless observer watching his every move. 

He tries to consider the timeline again, but the more he thinks about it, the less anything makes sense.

There was a war, which resulted in aliens being made illegal. Torchwood acts as prison guards as a result? That seems awfully un-torchwood of them, they seemed like more the executioner type to him. Were there more aliens here? In the same prison as him? Were they being tortured too? What gave Torchwood the right to torture them? From what Felicity had said, he’d garnered that they didn’t have the right, they just did it anyway. Surely someone should have put a stop to it by now. And if no one has yet, would they ever?

It was all looking extremely bleak.

Time blurred as he lay there. Seconds felt like hours, minutes like lifetimes. Though he had an almost perfect internal clock. The pain was a constant thrum beneath his skin, sharp in some places, dull and lurking in others.

Someone had come in at one point, the quiet hiss of a door sliding open had startled him, breaking the oppressive silence.

Their silhouette was barely distinguishable in the Doctor’s fairly adjusted eyes. He could hear the quiet shuffle of feet and the soft click of something being adjusted and then the movement of hands as they fiddled with his IV, momentarily upping the dosage and sending his head spinning and his vision blurring. Nausea had filled his gut, and he reared up in panic, nearly strangling himself on the band around his neck when they actually touched him, an exploratory finger running up his thigh and towards his pelvis making his skin prickle in cold and unrelenting fear.

The panicked movement had sent voltage through him once more and he nearly bit through his tongue when it forced his jaw shut, his entire body convulsing, and searing, blinding agony running through his very core.

“Don’t,” he warned them when he could finally speak again. His voice trembled, his body shook, his breaths came in sharp, shallow gasps as he tried to ground himself in the aftermath. Their hand lingered too long, running between his legs, and he couldn’t do anything . If they decided to continue with whatever disgusting fantasies they were considering indulging, there was nothing he could do to stop them.

The hand hesitated. And for a moment, the room fell deathly silent, save for the sound of the Doctor’s labored breathing. His skin prickled with fear as he strained to see through the haze, his mind racing with possibilities. He tried to focus, to steady himself, but the weight of his situation pressed down on him like a physical force.

The hand withdrew from his thighs, but they weren’t done.

The click of the restraints tightening was deafening in the silence. One by one, the buckles were ratcheted taut, and then tighter still. They dug painfully into his abused wrists and ankles. The straps around his chest and thighs followed, pressing into his battered skin with a brutal, silent rage. The Doctor couldn’t hold back a pained whimper as the pressure grew unbearable. 

They lingered a moment longer, standing close enough that he could feel the heat radiating off their skin. A solid 30 odd degrees celsius. Human. Then, without a word, they turned and left, the door hissing shut behind them.

And he lay there. There wasn’t much else he could do. Trembling, his mind reeling. He didn’t know why they had stopped, and he wasn’t sure he even wanted to know. Perhaps it had been the cameras blinking in each corner of the room, condemning them. Maybe it had been the venom behind his desperate words, he couldn’t take anymore. 

Or maybe they’d simply decided he wasn’t worth the effort.

He guessed he’d never know…

<hr>

When the light flicks on above him again, the Doctor’s internal clock tells him it’d been roughly eight hours since Felicity had left. It had felt much, much longer.

He closes his eyes against the sudden, unexpected onslaught of light for a moment and feels his body stiffen on instinct, shuddering at the thought of someone fiddling around with him again when he couldn’t fight back, but the person who comes into view is just Victor Drabek.

The guy had clearly had a decent sleep, his dark hair tousled and no longer creased in the shape of a helmet, it looked as if he’d taken the time to brush and shampoo it. There’s no evidence of dark circles beneath his eyes and the Doctor can smell coffee which means there’s one in the room with them. The Doctor hadn’t fully paid attention to anyone's appearance up until now— what with the whole attempting to escape fiasco going on. But now as he takes note, Victor Drabek, his main captor evidently, wore the exact same getup the Doctor had seen boring villains wear in action films Donna liked to watch.

He forces Donna away. Focusing on Drabek’s interesting taste in clothing.

Black aviator jacket with the words Captain embroidered on the front. An extremely dark gray button up and some cargo pants with way too many pockets. He had accessorised with black, steel capped boots the Doctor had definitely felt yesterday. There was a black earpiece in one ear.

The guy could almost be Batman, he thinks deliriously. Partly because he’s on drugs. And partly because he’s beginning to lose touch with himself. One day in captivity, albeit one awful day, and he was already comparing his captors to popular media.

It grates on him too, he’s sure he looks the exact opposite because he feels awful . His stomach churning, everything aches from his time spent as a short circuiting toaster, and he’s freezing . His naked body is shivering beneath suffocating restraints that are cutting off blood circulation and making the tips of his fingers go numb and tingle painfully. Goodness, he wishes he could get a sip of that coffee. Anything to warm him up just a little.

“Morning, Doctor.” Drabek smiles down at him, “did you sleep well?”

As if stripping him of every right in the book wasn’t enough. As if he got off of taunting the Doctor’s helplessness. His inability to fight back.

He swallows, attempting to unclog his throat around the tube that was doing everything to make him want to bring it up again. “J’st peachy, thanks Victor.” He slurs, his tongue refusing to cooperate from the drugs that were still slightly too high in dosage, “you slept well too, I trust?”

Drabek frowns at him, a hum in the back of his throat as his only response before he pulls out the drill that had been left beneath the table. The sound of it made the Doctor’s head scream in agony and he had to fight himself back out of the haze of drugs again.

“Don’t need these now that I’m here.” Drabek says his tone implying he wants gratitude. The Doctor stares up at him instead, setting his jaw, and steeling his expression into something unreadable. He tries to twist his hands in the remaining straps, but they’re still too tight and cutting off circulation and he bites back an undignified whimper.

Drabek walks around the table, checking tubes for kinks or blockages. He stops a bit longer at the Doctor’s side to read through a sheet of paper – following some kind of instructions – and flushing the IV before carefully detaching the tube from the cannula. “Gotta be nice and awake for what’s next.” Drabek slaps the Doctor’s side thoughtfully, “Felicity’s request. She wants to measure your tolerance to pain. Although you’ll probably be hooked up again for saline and such later.” He blinks down at the Doctor, a hand hesitating at his head, “she really did a number on you.”

The Doctor levels a glare at him, “v’been through worse.”

Drabek’s gaze turns solemn and clinical, the taunting glint in his eye gone. “Oh, you will.”

There’s a long pause while he fiddles with the Doctor’s feeding tube.

“N’thing on the menu today?” The Doctor croaks, his stomach wasn’t quite empty, and he could go ages without actually eating something, the quip was more to break the silence than anything. The silence was suffocating, he’d spent nearly the whole night in silence. He’s not sure what’s worse. The taunting, or the refusal to acknowledge he’s there. He wanted to chew something. The smell of coffee was making his stomach rumble sadly.

Drabek’s expression twists back to a smile, “can’t operate on a full stomach.”

The Doctor’s stomach twists painfully, a soft hum the only response he can offer. Things are becoming increasingly dire. He desperately needs to figure a way out. He can’t just lie here and let them cut him open like he’s recently deceased and they’re performing an autopsy.

“I thought you were the superior.” He quips. “How’d she get you to do her dirty work?”

Drabek studies the restraints around the Doctor’s ankles, if he notices the bruises forming, or the purple tinge to his tourniqueted limbs, he doesn’t mention them. “I’m in charge of this project.” Drabek says, “it’s my dirty work, actually. She just deals with most of it.”

The Doctor raises an eyebrow, “doesn’t look like it from my end. Is there some kind of power play going on?-”

He yelps when there’s a careful tug at the tubes in his lower half and Drabek grimaces and mutters something about it being the reason he hadn’t gone further in his studies.

“Haven’t used much of these at all.” He comments. “Did you not eat or drink enough?” He writes something down and The Doctor has to restrain an incredulous, dry laugh. His entire body tensing from the wrongness of it all.

Drabek glances at him. “Something wrong?”

The Doctor does laugh this time, the sound sarcastic, and disgusted, and angry, and sad all in one. “Something wrong?” He repeats, twitching his hands in their buckles. “I don’t know, Victor. Can you see anything wrong?” He’s almost trembling with anger, his care and empathy for Earth was very quickly fading the longer he was strapped to this table.

Drabek shrugs, “my coffee was fairly weak this morning. I need to fire the barista?”

The Doctor scoffs and Drabek suddenly changes in demeanor. All nonchalance gone as he leans over him, his jaw tight, his hand hovering angrily over the Doctor’s throat. “You can save the moralising,” he says, his voice low and threatening. “Doctor Gray will be here soon, I’m sure she’s not opposed to drilling your current position into your head again. Torchwood owns you—”

“Heard the villain speech from Felicity already.”

“-you’re a specimen, Doctor.” Drabek speaks over him, his voice icy and the Doctor goes still, his throat bobbing in barely concealed terror before Drabek’s hand suddenly crashes into his windpipe with an almost vice-like grip, “a goddamn science experiment.”

He can feel his respiratory bypass kick in automatically, his hearts slowing and his breathing able to stop just enough for his system to collate the remaining oxygen in his body to his lungs

“You’re only alive because Doctor Gray believes vivisections are more effective than an autopsy and my boss agrees.” The Doctor struggles to contain his panic as the hand tightens, it makes it very difficult to focus on not breathing and letting his organs do the work for him. It’s definitely not going to hold up much longer if Victor doesn’t let go though, he can feel his head beginning to pound, his chest tightening, his neck bruising under the crushing pressure of both Victor’s hand and the leather strap pinning him to the table. 

“If it were up to me,” Drabek hisses, “We would’ve sent the message we wanted to the rest of your kind quite easily that way, and saved the hassle of hiding the reality of the situation from ethics.”

“Nice t’know v’r’things legal agh–” The Doctor’s chest heaves beneath the bruising pressure of Drabek’s hand.

“I would’ve had you executed to begin with and we could’ve saved the hassle of your snark.

The Doctor wheezes, “I’d like t’see you try.” Although he immediately regrets it because Drabek shakes him angrily in response and the sudden movement and the painful pressure on his neck makes him choke and any oxygen he had remaining in his bypass flooded out and he suddenly couldn’t breathe at all.

“Oh I can’t wait.” Drabek snarls, “it’s still the plan in the end, once we’ve figured out a use for you. Execution, or being locked in Hawthorne’s idea of a production lab, which is as good as dead anyway.”

The Doctor writhes in the other man's grip, his limbs twisting desperately in their bonds, his eyes rolling back in his head. The damn feeding tube at the back of his throat feels like it's twisting inside him with every panicked thrash. His throat burns as the pressure of Drabek’s hands compresses the plastic against the walls of his esophagus, sending sharp, stabbing pain though his sinuses.

A low, keening sound escapes him, half gasp, half groan, and his vision blurs as his hearts slow to a dangerous rhythm, trying to compensate for the lack of oxygen, and utilise whatever he had left. His lips part and his limbs begin to shake uncontrollably, a mix of oxygen deprivation and adrenaline with nowhere to go coursing through his veins. His glassy, wide-open eyes meet Victor Drabek and for a split second the Doctor is terrified. He’s going to die here, strapped to this table, with nothing in his future but being cut open like a slab of meat. Which they’ll do regardless of if he’s dead or alive.

“Stop!” The word is a disfigured, brittle, wheeze, and it doesn’t even sound like his voice.

“Not so snarky now you know the stakes, are you?” Victor growls, leaning closer. His free hand brushes against the tube taped to the Doctor’s cheek, a smile breaking his face. “If I pull this out, will it rip the lining of your throat on the way up, or are your insides as tolerant as your outsides. Do you want me to test that?”

The Doctor feels his eyes widen, glassy and terrified as his body convulses weakly against the restraints, desperate for air. He tries to shake his head.

“Victor!”

Drabek’s hand loosens as quick as it had tightened, straightening up as Felicity’s voice rang through the haze of the Doctor’s suffocation, his hand pulls on the tube slightly and the Doctor chokes. He coughs violently, his windpipe and trachea struggling against the strap on his neck, he can feel something warm dripping from his nose, possibly his nasal cavity bleeding. He hadn’t realised how tight the neck strap had gotten since his night alone, his body was accustomed to lower amounts of oxygen so it wasn’t too much of an issue until Drabek had decided to start throttling him

“What the hell are you doing?” Felicity Gray demands as the Doctor struggles to fix his breathing and compose himself. “You’re supposed to be checking in on him, not killing him. He’s no use to us dead.”

“ He provoked me.” Drabek no longer looks composed, his hair is a mess, his eyes wild, and he avoids looking at the Doctor completely.

“And you think killing him is the solution? You could’ve dislodged the feeding tube, he could’ve choked, or asphyxiated. There’s no research potential for a dead body.” Felicity’s almost immediately at the Doctor’s side, releasing his neck from its respective strap and pressing firm fingers to his pulse. The Doctor gulps in a few deep breaths in relief as he attempts to focus on her. She’d swapped her white lab coat out for a black one today, and her blouse was an ominous, burgundy colour.

“Your boss’s got some severe anger issues.” He wheezes, his voice hoarse and painful. “Should get that sorted out. Therapy… Maybe.”

Gray ignores him, talking to Victor instead. “I don’t care if you outrank me, if you ruin this Captain Drabek, I will have you removed from command. Do you understand?” 

The Doctor can see Drabek battle with himself, the cogs turning in his head as he apparently attempts to not throttle the woman as well. 

“Yes, Dr. Gray.” He finally manages to battle out, “it won’t happen again.”

“Good.” Felicity sniffs and turns back to the Doctor, her expression annoyed as she studies his face, brows furrowing as she tracks the beginning of bruising along his neck. “You too.” She tells him.

The Doctor raises an eyebrow, “I would love to be removed.” He tells her, “possibly some financial compensation for the trauma of it all too. I’ll tell my lawyer to be kind.”

Felicity frowns at him and pinches the bridge of her nose, “your chatter, is it a defence mechanism? Some kind of self soothing maybe?”

The Doctor snorts, his throat throbs, his innards attempting to figure out what to do with the bruising. “I just like the sound of my own voice.”

Gray grimaces, “unlikely.” Then she sighs, her attention leaving Drabek to focus back on the Doctor as her specimen, “I really need to work out the kinks in my prototype gag. His talking is a distraction my assistants don’t need.”

And if the threat of being vivisected didn’t sound horrifying, this certainly did. He’d had enough of being ignored. The bite guard was bad enough, he was not interested in the slightest in being gagged with some prototype. No thank you.

“You can’t just use what we have in the past?”

“No.” Felicity moves away from the Doctor in favour of digging through some drawers to his right. “Those always cause some kind of jaw malunion or tooth decay. I want something that doesn’t do that. Something adjustable maybe? Because his vocal patterns are still something I want to study. I’ll show you my notes later.”

And one thing the Doctor knew excessively well about humans, was that they were exceedingly creative. Oftentimes willing to undergo prototype after prototype, and experiment after experiment until their ideas came through. They had ideas upon ideas upon ideas on how to build and create . The Doctor adored that about them. Back on Gallifrey, everything was the same. There was no sense of evolution anywhere, they refused to change.

Humans changed all the time. The Doctor could say that from experience.

But this was what made him very, very afraid of them. All that creativity gave them endless ideas on not only building, and giving. But also destroying, and taking . And strapped here on this table, the Doctor was terrified. The situation was so far out of his control that he was panicking. He hated when he couldn’t fix things. He hated when he was useless.

Drabek folds his arms as Felicity comes back with a collection of needles which she spreads out on her table. “Anyway, back on topic. The techs asked for some extra samples during surgery today. But since this is a high risk experiment, I’ve opted for the bare minimum of the chest cavity to begin with, therefore we’ll have to take these ones from the exterior.” She rolls the table out of the way in favour of moving back to her favourite spot at the Doctor’s side. Her eyes surveying his prone body, and The Doctor feels himself flush in shame and humiliation, his skin prickling under her gaze.

He’s so tired of this.

“We’ll extract spinal fluid first, so I’ll get him on his stomach. Then we can do bone marrow on his side, so then getting him back like this for the thoracic vivisection shouldn’t be too hard.”

She begins directing Victor, her previous anger dissipating in the light of the Doctor’s suffering. They roll him onto his stomach and strap him back down. However, this time Gray loops a long, belt-like contraption around his upper arms and chest, ratcheting it tight to immobilise them against each other.

Drabek lifts the Doctor off the table slightly, dragging a frustrated grunt from him as his limbs are pulled at painful angles as Felicity pushes some kind of cylindrical block beneath his gut to arch his back. He swallows heavily as she begins counting, her fingers tracing along the arch of his spine and he doesn’t want this. He really, really doesn’t want this.

But up to now, when has it ever mattered what he wanted? They’d already done everything and more within their power to convince him of that. They saw him as a specimen now. A slab of meat. A dead body if you will. Some sick and twisted justification towards preserving a few extra years of humans. Something he knows Torchwood would abuse and offer only to the rich.

He hates them. He hates them. He hates them.

The words sound unreal in his head. He doesn’t hate them. He could never hate them. And he hates himself for it. Why could he not just leave them alone? It was their own curiosity that led them to this. He’d put them up to it by arriving in the first place. He couldn’t fault them for being humans. Could he?

Felicity passes an additional strap around his pelvis, it curves around his hips and loops around his legs like a harness before it too is bolted to the table. Hooked into some unseen additional anchor points.

They force the bite guard from yesterday back between his teeth despite his protests, and then Drabek places his firm, unyielding hands against the Doctor’s shoulder blades at Felicity’s instructions. And just like that. The Doctor. Time Lord Victorious. Destroyer of Gallifrey. Conqueror of time. Is strapped down, unable to move. Powerless. Again.

He’s disgusting. He’s weak. He’s powerless. He’s contributing to the unauthorised progression of a lower class planet. It’s punishable by death, regardless of his cooperation.

Felicity wipes a disinfectant along his spine and pulls out a wicked looking needle. He can see it in the corner of his eye, his throat closing over because this isn’t even the worst to come. They’d promised to cut his chest open, put his organs on display. It was a needle, and yet he was terrified.

Dr. Gray punctures his spine, the needle digging between the vertebrae, growing pressure making his eyes water and he clenches his teeth around the bite guard they’d wedged between them. It’s a sharp, invasive, expanding pain as the needle slips between muscle and sinew. Spreading outwards like a searing web, increasing in agony as Felicity adjusts the needle, angling it towards his spinal column with a detached sort of care. Her hands are firm, yet gentle as she presses inwards.

He grunts involuntarily, his body straining against the straps as she twists the needle deeper.

“Hold him still, Victor.” Felicity warns. “If he moves, he’ll risk damaging himself. I don’t want to paralyse him.”

Victor’s hands press harder as the Doctor tenses, his limbs jerking in their restraints, his entire body rigid as Felicity’s needle finds its mark.

“Now, I’m beginning the extraction.”

And if the insertion wasn’t bad enough, the feeling of the syringe sucking away at his insides was agony. A horrible grinding sensation sends a shudder through his immobilised frame. He keened against the gag, teeth clenched as his body forced out an involuntary, garbled moan of pure agony. His mind races, grasping for some kind of distraction, for escape, for anything other than the reality of being reduced to a lab specimen. His hands curled into fists, his eyes squeezed shut. His body attempted to thrash but to no avail, the additional restraints held him firm. It feels like they’re hollowing out his very essence. 

It seems like forever before the needle is pulling out, leaving a deep ache behind and the Doctor trembling uncontrollably. Felicity presses some gauze against the wound after wiping it down. Her eyes fixated on the syringe filled with fluid.

His captors don’t offer him any sense of reprieve before straps are loosening and he’s being wrestled onto his side. Lightning shoots through his spine and he groans through the gag as they strap him down and reposition him like a mannequin, one leg straight and the other bent. Felicity directs Victor to put pressure down on his hip and shoulder and is meticulous, her fingers pressing down on the contours of his hip bone, feeling for the point of entry.

And the process begins again. This time with a wider gauge that actually manages to drag a hoarse and muffled scream from his lips. His jaw clenches down so hard on the rubber it feels like his teeth might crack. The pressure is immediate and overwhelming, radiating out from his hip and spreading across his lower back like wildfire. His body reacts instinctively, his muscles tensing and straining in a futile attempt to escape the pain.

His muffled cry escapes around the bite block, a desperate sound that reverberates in the sterile room. His hands clench into trembling fists, his knuckles white against the restraints. His legs attempt to contort against the straps, desperate to curl into the fetal position to protect himself. Drabek’s grip merely tightens, forcing him back down as he spasms against his restraints.

The extraction itself is worse than the insertion when Felicity attaches a syringe to the needle embedded in his pelvic bone. A hollow, scraping sensation vibrates through his bones, it feels like his very being is being drawn out, leaving a raw aching void in its place and the Doctor’s vision blurs with unshed tears, his body trembling with the effort to endure.

He hardly registers when she finishes. His body merely slumps back in his restraints, losing tension but not relaxing. Felicity carefully tapes some gauze over the insertion and then she and Victor are rolling him back onto his back.

His eyes flutter when Felicity taps on his cheek and pulls the bite guard from his mouth, “you still in there, Doctor?” She asks. “Can’t sleep just yet. We’re not done yet. It’s not even nine.”

“This isn’t even the worst of it.” Victor pipes in but Felicity shushes him.

“Speaking of, ‘ Doctor’ .” Felicity says his name suddenly with precision, her tone judging. “We need to assign you a better name… Well. Designation. The reports are too messy at the moment, half of the team is calling you Alien and the other half is just leaving a blank. And, Doctor is too confusing, what with the other doctors on staff.”

Drabek hums to the side. “HQ is asking for a name as well. Something to put on official records and alongside the ethics waiver.”

“Any ideas?” Felicity asks, her eyes boring into the Doctor’s very soul. His jaw shifts as he sucks on the inside of his lip and stares back at her.

“I already have a name.” He croaks. He heaves in a shaking breath, the act making him shudder as it shakes the tube in his throat.

Felicity laughs, the tone too upbeat in light of the situation. “No you don’t.” She says. “Not anymore. A name implies humanity. Doctor , a title, implies status. Neither of which you have anymore.” She swipes a stray tear from his cheek, “you have a designation.” Her eyes turn to Drabek and the Doctor twists his wrists in the leather restraints, frustration building with every word.

“A number maybe?” Dr. Gray muses. “It has to be as far away from ‘ Doctor’ as possible. There are too many Doctor’s already.” She laughs again, the sound grating. “I can’t be Dr. Gray operating on The Doctor . That doesn’t even make sense.”

“You holding me captive in general doesn’t make sense.” The Doctor bites out. His voice is raspy, his throat sore from the tubes and the unheard screaming during his captor’s mindless torments. His entire body throbs, cramping under the strain of being moved back to a supine, vulnerable position. His wrists burn where the restraints dig into his skin, and every slight shift sends fresh waves of pain through his bruised and aching joints.

Felicity doesn’t even spare him a glance. “A letter, maybe?”

“The most recent are Greek letters.” Drabek offers. “Surely we should just continue the sequence.”

Others.

The word hits the Doctor like a blow to the chest, harder than any scalpel or needle. He’d assumed there were more. They’d spoken as if there were more. Alien-Control afterall gave the implication that every alien found on Earth one way or another ended up here. But the confirmation . There are more. More helpless creatures strapped to tables and treated like objects, subjected to the same horrors. He swallows hard, his throat tight with anger and disgust.

His mind fills with images of their suffering. Worse than his. Of how long this had gone on without him knowing. Without him checking .

Was this a result of him ? Was this his fault?

“You’re doing this to more of us?” The Doctor demands, although his voice sounds feeble and not at all as threatening as he’d hoped.

“What, are you jealous?” Drabek shoots back. “Worried you’re not the only one?”

“You’re disgusting.” The Doctor seethes, his voice trembling. “Torturing them for what? A slim chance at discovery? Your own personal gain?” He rails against the restraints, achieving nothing but making his head spin and his bruised joints ache. “When I get out of here,” he laughs bitterly despite himself, “oh, you better watch your backs. So help me.”

“ If .” Drabek sneers at him, leaning closer. “Your hope is cute. I’m not the one strapped, naked to a table.”

“Shut up, both of you.” Gray snaps, glaring at Victor who straightens slightly under her gaze, and it’s crazy to think that he’s her superior with the way he submits to her. “Captain Drabek, we are dealing with a highly intelligent specimen. Not a person. Stop engaging with it as if it is one.” 

The Doctor flinches, and that stings. The words cut deeper than any blade could. The Doctor falls silent. His lips parting slightly in shock. The sterile air feels suffocating, the weight of her words pressing down on him, stripping away the last fragments of his sense of self, hardly a day into his captivity. Every nerve in his body is alight with pain, but nothing compares to the sting of being called “ it ,” as though he is no more than a lifeless object.

The room falls into silence, broken only by the sound of Felicity scribbling something down on her clipboard.

“His talking is insufferable.” Drabek breaks it but falters as Felicity snaps her head around to glare at him.

“I’m working on that, and you know it. I refuse to risk permanent damage this early on, so you’ll just have to wait until I’ve finished my designs.”

The Doctor tunes them out, letting his gaze drift back to the sterile ceiling above him. He forces himself to breathe, slow and even, though every inhale burns. He will get out of here. Not “if.” When. There’s always a flaw in the system, and he only needs to wait for Torchwood to make a mistake. He’d already identified one: Drabek’s temper. It was a pressure point, a weak point in the armor he could exploit. All he had to do was wait for the right moment to push him over the edge.

“What letter are we up to?” Felicity’s voice pulls him back to the present.

Drabek seems to think for a few moments, and what he says next chills the Doctor to the bone. Memories stir, clawing at the edges of his consciousness, threatening to overwhelm him. No. He clamps down on them, forcing them back into the recesses of his mind, but the damage is done. The name resonates, a cruel echo from his past, now twisted into a mark of degradation.

“Theta. I think.” Drabek mutters. His voice is strained and you can tell he’s restraining himself from firing Dr. Gray on the spot.

“You can’t call me that.” The Doctor says, his voice strained but resolute. They’ve taken everything else. He won’t let them have this.

Felicity hardly glances at him, “I can call you whatever I like,” she replies coolly, “I don’t even have to dignify you with a response.” She scribbles something else, “And Theta fits. It’s efficient. Precise. Doesn’t make you stand out amongst the others-”

Seven Others. His mind seizes on the implication. Seven Others. Or seven he’s knowledgeable, Drabek had said they were the most recent ones. Strapped to tables. Cut open. Tortured. Bile rises in his throat.

“And it sounds professional.” She adds, almost as an afterthought.

The Doctor snorts. “Sure. A great veneer for the ethical warfare you’re conducting underneath.”

“Theta.” Felicity warns. Apparently already warmed to the designation. It burns through him. And he hates it . He hates it. He hates it. They can’t take that from him. They don’t even know what they’re taking from him and they’ve taken it. They’ve taken everything else. Stripped him of everything. Now they seemed set on taking his existence, his past, his future. He hates it.

“No.” He snaps, his voice louder, firmer, filled with rage. His fists clench at his sides, digging half moons into his palms. “You don’t get to take that.”

“What? Is it special to you?” Drabek snorts. 

“No.” The Doctor replies quickly, his voice sharp and defensive. Too quick. 

Drabek quirks an eyebrow. “Then don’t be so dramatic.” He responds, “it’s just a letter.”

The Doctor glares at him, his eyes blazing with defiance despite the weakness in his body, but he doesn’t respond. Doesn’t provoke the man.

“It’s going to be Theta.” The Doctor flinches at Felicity’s declaration. “It’ll help keep the authorities off of you. Anything different from the other specimens would make them perk their ears. Want to take over.”

“I like that it makes him squirm.” Drabek says and Felicity shoots him a look of warning.

“Can I trust you for a moment while I grab some additional restraints?” Felicity stares Victor down until he nods. “Good.” She leaves, “won’t be a moment.”

The Doctor stills as Drabek turns his gaze back to him. He can feel his hearts beat a little faster, his chest rising and falling with stressed breathing.

But Drabek does nothing more, and Felicity returns not too long after with a plastic crate in her hands that clanks with the sound of metal on metal when she places it down.

“Now.” She exhales dramatically, “I thought long and hard when I got home last night.” Her voice is performative. Directed at none of them and both of them at once. “About how this vivisection is supposed to go. I’ve never had a subject squirm so much.” She grimaces. “Struggle, yes. Scream, yes. But Theta squirms . So it got me thinking about the ones we used last night. And how effective they were.”

And the Doctor’s mind fills with horror at the idea of her attaching those electrified restraints to him again. Jolting him with lightning every time they cut into him. It makes the entire situation infinitely worse. Which he wasn’t even sure was possible. “You don’t need to do that.” He says. “I’ll keep still.”

“No you won’t.” Felicity says as she holds up the metal restraint. “But don’t worry. These aren’t those ones at all. Electrocuting my assistants is a big no no. But I still need you to keep still.” She advances on the Doctor, gesturing to Drabek to follow her.

“I took measurements!” She says proudly as she fits a metal band over the Doctor’s already immobilised and abused wrist. It presses just in front of the leather one already there, and as she pushes it down and screws it into place with some bolts and a wrench, it curves in snugly around his wrist joint and removes all the wiggle room he’d had previously. 

“We obviously can’t use them long term. Can’t risk any sort of atrophy or severe bruising etcetera. But metal is obviously a lot denser than leather. Try to twist your hand.” She tells the Doctor.

He stares at her incredulously. His hand remains rigid, and despite his refusal to try because she’d asked him to. He knows it wouldn’t work anyway. He’s not stupid.

Drabek nods in approval. “Very good.”

Felicity beams at him. “Help me get him in the rest.”

They move with precision, a practised ease that told the Doctor that Felicity Gray and Victor Drabek work with each other often. Possibly for the other seven of their captives too. Felicity hums again as they work together to fit the remaining restraints in place, each one designed to lock the Doctor’s joints in place and eliminate any possibility of movement.

Drabek holds the Doctor’s forearm steady while Felicity screws another band into place just above his elbows. It hugs tightly around his upper arm, pressing into his skin and pinning the limb against the operating table. The Doctor clenches his jaw, glaring at them but no one cares to acknowledge him any further as they work.

Metal bands for his shins come next, bolted securely to the table just above the leather ones. Felicity tests their hold, tugging firmly to ensure there’s no room for movement. Muttering under her breath about adjustments she’d make later. Another two are screwed down just below his knees and above his ankles. The original leather ones are left where they are. However, while they’re down that end of his body, Felicity adjusts the harness like one around his hips, ensuring the belts looped between his legs are firmer than they were when he’d been forced on his side.

When she returns to his top half she runs a clinical hand over his stomach, hovering over one heart at a time and sending goosebumps down his spine.

They lock eyes and the Doctor makes sure to send a look of hatred her way before she’s bending down and lifting the last restraint out of her box. It’s thick, and curved, and it gleams under the bright lights. It’s vaguely reminiscent of a dog collar.

“Hold his head still.” She tells Drabek and the Doctor can do nothing but attempt to twist his head away with nowhere to go. The Captain’s hand twists in what remains of his hair, and the other cups his jaw as Felicity places the band over his neck, immediately below his head. It curves and presses in against the underside of his jaw, forcing his head back against the table, tilted slightly from how hard it presses into his skin. The angle leaves his throat and chest exposed and his heart hammers as Felicity tightens the bolts with care, ensuring it’s snug but not overly constrictive. The pressure is immediate, making it difficult for him to swallow, let alone speak.

It also forces his vision to the roof. No room for peripherals. No room to be able to see behind or below him. He wouldn’t see the scalpels slice into him until they were embedded in his flesh.

He feels her move around the table one last time, adjusting the straps and inspecting the original leather restraints. When her hand brushes over the strap across his chest, she pauses. Apparently only just now noticing the lacerations his unknown attacker had caused last night. She’d apparently been too busy torturing him when she’d moved him before.

“These were too tight, last night” she mutters, pulling it back slightly to reveal the bruising the Doctor knew was there. He’d pushed that pain aside a few hours after his unknown assailant had tightened them in retaliation to not being able to… the Doctor shudders. They had pulled all of the leather restraints binding him cruelly tight, cutting off the circulation, slicing into his skin. If Drabek had noticed when he’d done the initial inspection he hadn’t said anything.

Felicity’s hand hovers over the marks for a moment before she presses down lightly and the Doctor flinches involuntarily, remembered touch drawing a sharp intake of breath from him.

Drabek is clearly unconcerned. “He’ll live.”

Felicity moves sharply above him, “Who was on the night shift?”

“Does it matter?” Drabek’s tone is dismissive.

“It does if they’re compromising the integrity of my subject.” Felicity snaps, “I don’t expect you to understand, but this alters what the insides look like as well.” Her fingers grazed over the bruises again. “And this? This is sloppy. I don’t want your superiors breathing down my neck because someone can’t manage basic restraint protocols. You , of all people, should understand that.” She pinches the bridge of her nose, muttering under her breath, “I can’t believe I have to explain this to my superior officer.”

The Doctor feels her gaze shift back to him, her tone softens ever so slightly and the Doctor feels like he’s on a rollercoaster with the woman because he just couldn’t figure her out. One moment she’s gagging and stabbing him with a knife. And the next she’s gently stroking his shoulder and uttering words of reassurance.

“What happened?” She asks him.

His jaw works silently, and he doesn’t answer. The question sends a wave of discomfort through him. Memories flash unbidden: the unwelcome touch, the restraints tightening when he resisted.

Felicity watches him for a moment longer before realising he probably won’t respond. She straightens, her voice clipped as she turns to Drabek. “Replace them. Tonight. I don’t want the same guard here again.” She places a possessive hand on the Doctor’s chest and he shivers as Drabek makes a grunt of affirmation.

Then she tightens the chest strap again, carefully this time, ensuring it’s tight but no longer bruising. She checks the rest of them, her annoyance seeming to grow as she sees the state of his wrists and ankles.

“There.” She says, as if this act of minimal decency could erase the horrors of her prior actions. “All set.”

Chapter Text

Drabek left the room when the surgery team arrived. Excusing himself under the guise of ‘not wanting to crowd the specimen’ but the Doctor knew he was squeamish. He’d gotten twitchy when Felicity had her bout of curiosity with the scalpel last night. He’d gotten twitchy at the dehumanising tubes they’d shoved down his throat, and up his rectum. He’d gotten twitchy when the Doctor had all but screamed when they gouged out his insides with nothing but a needle and syringe.

An open, conscious vivisection would’ve made him cry.

The Doctor could do nothing but lay on his table, trussed up in leather and metal restraints. He couldn’t move outside of twitching his fingers, every other joint locked, immobile against cold metal.

There was him, Felicity, and three others. Assistance he assumed.

He could feel his hearts hammering in his chest. When they hooked him up to a heart rate monitor he could see his panic visually in two jumpy lines across the screen that made Felicity pause movement for a second so she could stare at it, one hand curled around something heinous looking, and the other pressed to the Doctor’s wrist, tracking his pulse.

“Gorgeous.” She breathes, clipping a pulse oximeter to the Doctor’s finger. “Imagine if we could replicate this in humans. It would be revolutionary.”

“I promise you,” the Doctor murmured, “you’d just end up with a lot of dead people.”

Felicity hums at him, “we’ll figure something out.”

“Your bodies aren’t built for a Gallifreyan cardiovascular system.” The Doctor insists. You have different blood types. You’d just give a lot of people heart attacks, or kidney failure, or-” He swallows down a lump of panic as someone with a surgical mask on wheels over a trolley filled with increasingly horrifying instruments. “Circulatory collapse.”

“Not if done correctly.” Felicity tells him. “And even then, that’s what experimentation is for.” She writes something down on her clipboard. “Your file says you’re a Time Lord though? Is your home planet, this Gallifrey, multi-species? Or is Time Lord a status? Oh I’m intrigued.”

The Doctor jerks indignantly as a block is placed beneath his back, arching it slightly and propping his chest up for better access. It puts pressure on the bands around his hips, chest, and neck and he chokes slightly when he’s forced to adjust how he’s breathing around the pressure. “You’re going to torture humans too?” He spits, ignoring his slipup in the hopes she’d forget, “great, and here I thought you were alien exclusive.”

Felicity hooks the cannula in the crook of his elbow back up to the IV and he shivers as saline begins to be administered. But no sedatives. No anaesthesia. The Doctor’s not worth that obviously. “Deflect. Deflect. Okay we’ll get back to you later. If it comes to human experimentation, then yes.” Felicity tells him, “but of course, it’ll be with government support and some kind of volunteering. Not torture. Research.”

The Doctor laughs, it’s an unsettling sound. He’s trying to draw his panic away from the situation at hand. There’s nothing he can do to stop it from happening, his captors had made sure of that. All he can do at this point is endure and hope there’s an opening further down the line. A little more pain. He’s endured worse, surely. He’s seen the end of the universe. He’s had a literal sun burning out his insides. He’s died, over and over and over again.

He could survive a little torture.

It’s the betrayal that hurts more.

He loves these stupid little humans so much. He’s given them so much. He’d killed himself over and over for them.

They’d strapped him to a table, stripped him of his autonomy and were now preparing to cut his chest open, fully conscious.

Felicity wiped him down with a strong smelling antiseptic. It stung against the raw skin where the restraints had rubbed. She wrote a few things down on her stupid clipboard. She checked his tubes.

Then she grabbed the bite guard and stared pointedly down at him. 

The Doctor clenched his jaw and avoided eye contact. He sure as hell isn't making this easy for them. They can do that themselves.

“Theta.” Felicity warned, “please don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

And there it is again. The misuse of his childhood nickname. The desecration of something sacred. She didn’t even know it, but it killed him just a little.

He stared at the ceiling. Ignoring her until she sighed and directed some faceless surgeon to dig their fingers into the hinges of his jaw and pry his lips apart so she could stuff the rubber between his teeth. The act of buckling it behind his head forces the band across his throat to gouge into his flesh while they lift his head up to do it.

He has to ride himself through the need to retch against his gag reflex. He really, really does not want to throw up with a tube in his oesophagus and a bite guard blocking the exit. 

“There.” Felicity brushes his choppy hair from his forehead as he breathes heavily through his nose, nostrils flaring, and glaring daggers. “No cracked teeth or damaged tongues, under my watch.” Felicity smiles. Her eyes gleaming in some sick excitement. It makes the Doctor’s stomach roil.

“Now, everyone.” Felicity addresses the surgeons, leaving the Doctor splayed out like a slab of meat. His hearts hammering in his ears from inside and the beeping from the monitors.

“This is an exploratory surgery,” Felicity continues, “on an extinct species. As far as we are aware, Subject Theta is the last of its kind. We are not losing him .”

There’s murmurs of awe as the surgeons stare down at the Doctor’s prone form. His skin tingles and he flushes in humiliation, his skin growing red hot as he’s studied from above. He presses his eyes closed briefly. This is happening. There’s nothing he can do to stop it. Just survive. Survive. He will get out of here.

“If there is any evidence of a drop in heart rate, pressure, or oxygen, we are stopping. Any sign of hypovolemic shock and we are stopping. Any changes that are alarming, and we are stopping. I want notes on every change, every monitor, everything different and everything the same. Do I make myself clear?”

There’s whispers of ascent and the Doctor can hear the heart monitor climaxing as he finds himself panicking, his breathing is growing out of control and he doesn’t want this. Please stop. Please don’t. What did I do to deserve this? I don’t understand.

“Okay, who’ve I got today?” Felicity takes note of the people in the room. “Frost, Murphy, and Allison. Wonderful! I’ve got Captain Drabek on standby as well. I assume you know your jobs?”

They list out a bunch of titles the Doctor is breathing too hard to pay full attention to. But they’re something along the lines of assistant surgeon, specimen management, and response technician. Probably something longer and fancier, but you’ll forgive the Doctor for being brief.

“We don’t have any ability for a blood transfusion at this time.” Felicity continues. “This will be a clean study. Hearts. Lungs. Circulatory system. Nothing strays from the books unless I say otherwise. If I catch anything out of order, I will have you fired. No questions asked.”

The Doctor’s vision blurs as he attempts to struggle, it’s an involuntary fight or flight response. And he can’t fight so his body is desperately attempting flight and there’s nowhere to go.

Felicity beams, “you all know the drill. Ready the cameras for the first vivisection of Subject Theta.”

Everyone moves into position, Felicity on his right, another on his left. One of them hovers above his head, fiddling with the lights and heart monitor. The last one stands near the table of surgery equipment, and the Doctor lays there. Immobile. Naked. A Specimen. This is happening. There’s nothing he can do but endure. It’s survival.

His teeth clench down on the bite guard as Felicity places a firm hand down on his sternum, “I’m not going to lie to you, Theta.” Felicity murmurs, pulling her surgical mask over her nose, “this is going to hurt.”

He can’t see below his own nose due to the band across his neck positioning his head upright, but he can feel as the scalpel bites into his flesh, spreading heat across his chest. It’s barely a few millimetres deep to begin with and the feeling of his skin being torn open again, this time with intent, is violating and cruel and it aches with a betrayal that cuts deeper than the scalpel itself.

With his head forced at the ceiling there’s nothing for the Doctor to lock his focus on, to provide distraction, to give him respite as the scalpel traces the initial cut with further pressure, digging deeper as it tears through him. He grunts against the bite guard, his eyes watering as he bites down automatically in response. He can feel the scalpel pass over his chest again, he can feel the blood welling, he can feel the assistant surgeon suctioning it away, keeping Felicity’s work clear.

He’s not sure what’s worse. The feeling of the scalpel tearing his chest open, splitting him in two and filling his very being with agony. Or being unable to see what is even happening, not being able to prepare for such pain.

Stop! His head screams as they go deeper. His throat makes a guttural, panicked noise, his Gallifreyan curse swallowed by the gag.

“Skin thickness is approximately 20 percent denser than expected.” Felicity draws the scalpel over the incision with no pressure this time, just the blade running coldly against the Doctor’s insides and he jerks. His limbs jarring against their restraints, his eyes wide and desperate as his mind races for an escape that isn’t there.

He flinches violently when the technician above his head snaps fingers near his eyes, jarring his focus back ahead of him from where it had been retreating inside his head. “Subject has retained an interestingly heightened cognitive ability despite the breach of his abdominal cavity.”

The Doctor’s muscles tighten in response to their layer being sliced and his back attempts to arch against the restraints, an animalistic sob escaping behind the gag.

“Heart rate spiking,” someone warns.

“Leave it.” Felicity tells them. “He’s fine.”

Then something is passed inside him and the exposed layers of flesh and muscle are torn open completely with some sort of retracting device and the Doctor’s vision flashes pure white in pain, his mouth parts around the bite guard, no longer able to repress the scream of unfiltered agony that surges through his violated body.

Not even the rubber stuffed in his mouth can conceal the sound. A primal, animalistic sound of anger and fear and betrayal and pain. His chest cavity is on display for his tormentors to see and they’re not done. They’re not done and the Doctor is awake and it hurts.

“Muscle fibres are darker than normal.” Felicity is unaffected by the Doctor’s screams, “suggests a higher concentration of mitochondria. Dr. Frost can you keep them parted, they’re going to attempt to close and heal despite the retractors. Murphy, can I get the bone saw?”

Bone saw? The Doctor’s body shakes involuntarily, unconcealed sobs escaping his mouth alongside an uncontrollable keening, half choked, half whimper. His respiratory bypass attempts to take some strain from his breathing, but it stutters violently when Felicity begins to cut through his sternum, the vibrations adding to the spasms his body attempts to make. He’s certain he blacks out for a moment. His vision stutters and he screams again, the sound desperate and terrified.

“S’op.” He begs, the sound barely legible behind the bite guard, “ p’ease . S’op!”

“Vitals?” Felicity asks.

The tech monitoring his heart rate hesitates, although it might just be the Doctor’s pained and delirious state telling him that. “Quite erratic, Doctor Gray. Perhaps this is enough for today?”

There’s a heavy pause, not quite silence broken by the Doctor’s laboured, panicked breathing and the occasional distressed whimper.

“We’re not done, Allison. Are his vitals stable?”

The Doctor locks onto the technician, he’s frantic. He’s in agony. All he can seem to do is feel , and all he can feel is pure, unfiltered, sadistic, pain. Allison stares down at him before tearing his gaze away to talk to Felicity.

“Well, y- yes.”

“Then we’re fine to continue. Keep me updated.”

Allison swallows, “you didn’t say he spoke English.”

The Doctor choked around the gag as Felicity’s tool tapped against something inside him in an effort to look incredulously at her assistant. He squeezed his eyes shut against a feeling of nausea, a wave of agony, and the cold breeze of sterile air against his insides.

“Are you challenging my judgement, Dr. Allison?” Felicity demands.

“No!” The tech says, “I just, I- I didn’t expect it to beg. The other ones didn’t beg.”

The Doctor’s stomach roils in contempt and desperation and please !

“He won’t beg next time.” Felicity grits. “Do your job.” She turns her attention, “Murphy, clamps.”

His vision jitters around him as his body attempts to process the trauma to his chest. Colours seem to fade in and out and the Doctor’s next shout is close to a wail. It’s breathless and he can hardly get enough air in his lungs before Felicity was prying his ribs apart and the anguished cry that follows was dragged up from the depths of his soul, raw and hoarse, as if his very vocal cords were fraying with the effort.

Felicity seemed to pause as she stared into his chest cavity. She didn’t seem to notice the Doctor’s ragged breathing through his nose as he attempted desperately to get a hold of himself. To work himself through it. To sink into his mind. He could survive this. He’d been through so much worse.

“Oh my god.” Felicity breathed. “They’re beautiful.”

There’s a thin, keening wail splitting through the air as the surgeons stare into him. It takes him a while to realise it’s him. The sound emerged from his shredded throat while his lungs tried their best to fill with oxygen through his rising panic. He shuddered violently, his entire torso trembling despite the extreme lengths Felicity had taken to hold it still.

He barely registers the conversation going on above him as his body is suddenly filled with a suffocating coldness. It swept through him, starting in his extremities and creeping inward, wrapping around his chest like an icy vice. His vision splintered into further jagged fragments, the world reduced to hazy outlines and smears of light that pulsed in rhythm with the slowing, erratic thud of his hearts. He jerked when Felicity placed a finger tentatively down on one of them, but the following scream this time was more of an exhausted wheeze. His keening trembled and his hearing seemed to distort around him.

Each ragged breath came shallower than the last, his lungs suddenly refusing to draw enough air to keep the encroaching darkness at bay. The metallic tang of blood filled his mouth, whether real or imagined, he couldn’t tell, but the taste dragged nausea to the surface, threatening to drown him in its wake. Somewhere, distantly, he heard Felicity’s voice—clinical, detached, as though narrating a textbook procedure. Her words swam in and out of focus, but his mind could no longer make sense of them. He was slipping, spiraling, his body’s alarm bells dimming into a dull, relentless hum as the edges of consciousness began to fray.

He’d been hoping to sink into his thoughts. Block out the present. But this… This felt uncontrolled. He tried to slow his breathing while his lungs did their best to hyperventilate. He tried to blink the fog from his vision while his eyes tried their best to turn it black and sink into oblivion.

“Dr. Gray, we need to stop.”

It’s as if there’s a crushing weight on his chest. He can feel hands inside him . He can feel the sterile air of the operating room closing in on him. He’s so cold.

“We’re not done.” Felicity said, her voice annoyed. “ I’m not done.”

“I don’t care, Doctor Gray, he’s going into shock.”

Shock.

He supposes that makes sense.

Something flares with pain and he cries out, the sound distorted through the bite gag that suddenly feels like it’s sinking into his throat, his stomach complains and sends nausea rattling through him.

Felicity sighs, though she doesn’t sound overly worried. “Keep him stable while I close him up.”

And then everything is shifting again and the Doctor spasms against his restraints, his muscles feel weak and he’s not even sure he’s even comprehending the pain, everything seems slow and sluggish around him and nothing even feels real anymore.

He can feel tugging at his sternum and he is faintly aware of how much it hurts, but other than that he’s not sure he’s even conscious. It’s almost as if he’s a bystander to his own torture, he’s screaming from the far corner while his vision flickers at the edges and the people above him move to get his feet elevated.

He does however feel extremely hyper aware when his stomach decides to lurch in response to the shock and the pain, and the tube moving in his oesophagus does nothing to alleviate his nausea. He immediately feels a crushing sense of panic, because he’s not sure what will happen if he throws up while intubated and he’s suddenly all too aware that there’s nowhere for it to even go.

He twists uselessly in his all too tight bonds. This is where he dies, he supposes. Strapped to a table. Guts on display. Choking on his own vomit.

And he does… Choke. The feeling is horrible as his stomach contracts painfully and he can’t get the bite gag in his mouth dislodged enough to tell his tormentors that they’re killing him .

He tried to fight the mounting pressure, but it was inescapable, forcing his body into retching spasms. His head tries to jerk forward instinctively but all he achieves is throttling himself on the metal that holds it there. His throat burned with bile that was suddenly moving up in two different directions. There was pressure behind his eyes, in his throat and for a terrifying moment he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t move.

Oh my god.

He’s not sure he’s going to survive this.

But then suddenly the pressure around his neck, chest and arms is removed and there’s firm hands rolling him onto his side, pulling the bite guard from his lips as bile drips down his chin. He feels like he’s trying to breathe through a straw. Everything burns, and hurts, and tears through him in waves, and waves, and waves of agony.

There’s the comforting presence of a hand rubbing circles into his back while his chest heaves with dry retching. Until there’s nothing more to give, and even then it keeps going. His breath rattles in his throat in terrified gasps. His eyes are wide in their sockets but he can’t see more than the fuzzy outline of the operating table.

“There we go.” Someone says, “get it all out.”

“Please stop.” Someone else sobs. A desperate primal cry. It’s him. He’s crying. He’s a mess. Tears moisten his cheeks, and he’s covered in his own internal fluids. His chest is on fire. And everything hits him all at once.

“We’re done for today.” Felicity promises him. “You did so well, Theta. So well. I’m so proud of you.”

And he’s too disoriented and terrified— stuck in limbo between being glad he’s still alive, and wanting to die just to escape whatever the fuck that was, and whatever the fuck was to follow— to argue or say anything in retaliation. And it stings. He’s a person. He deserves better than this. Surely.

The hands roll him back onto the table and he jolts in panic because they’re going to tie him down again, he can’t breathe . He can’t breathe and he’s going to die and there’s nothing he can do to stop them from cutting him open again and he doesn’t want it.

The ‘ please ’ that escapes his lips this time is a broken, desperate, plea.

Everything is wrong. Everything feels wrong. He’s wrong.

There’s something wrong.

It takes a long while for him to recover. Felicity finishes sewing him up, her stitches are neat and the Doctor watches with delirious interest. His head and neck no longer strapped down and all of the excess metal ones removed. They had, however, replaced the ones around his wrists. They kept him loosely connected to the table in case he tried to run , they'd said. They’d connected him back to the IV of drugs that dulled his senses, but didn’t really do much for the pain.

There’s more movement around him as the additional doctors and technicians file the samples they’d taken for later. There’s murmurs of dissent and intrigue and actual awe and if not for the circumstances of the situation the Doctor might have felt proud. He might have felt a warm feeling inside at the human’s insatiable desire for knowledge. He might have loved them for how they marveled at his biology and praised him for his species.

Instead he felt empty.

He would have adored sharing himself with them. He wanted humankind to succeed perhaps even more than they did. They were so short. Their lives were so open ended. He wanted nothing more than to share the marvel of Time Lord lifespans. He couldn’t. But he wanted to. He wanted nothing more than for Adelaide or Astrid’s deaths to have meant nothing — to merely be a page break in a chapter before they returned, stronger than ever.

He wanted nothing more than to love Rose the way she had loved him. Endlessly and without restraint. But he’d held back because if he got too close then he’d have so much more to lose.

And he had gotten too close. And he’d lost her. Over and over again.

He wanted nothing more than to give Martha all the secrets and cures to every disease ever. She cared so much.

He wanted nothing more than to have Donna at his side. The Doctor Donna. Timeless. Together for eternity.

All his human companions. He wanted so desperately to give them everything.

But not like this…

Humans took, and kept taking.

It was never enough.

They were perfect already. But it was never enough.

“What are you thinking about, Theta?”

The voice jars him out of his head. He flinches instinctively, his hands attempting to move in self defense at his sides.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

The Doctor tries to focus his vision above him. The swirling lights and jittery walls closed in around him and he swallowed heavily as Felicity’s face swam into view as his stomach dropped into a pit of dread.

She carded a gloved hand through his sweaty hair. In her other hand was a damp cloth that she carefully ran across his lips, removing the dried bile from his chin and nose.

He wheezes in response, pulling his head away from her. She follows it with her cloth, tutting ‘ messy’ under her breath.

“You caused quite the scare just before, Theta.” Felicity murmurs, her gaze disturbingly maternal while she cleans him up.

“Nng.” The Doctor attempts to unstick his teeth from his gums. He’s still a little out of it. The drugs they’d only recently stopped administering weren’t helping. “D’n’t call me, Theta.” He mumbles finally and Felicity frowns.

“I’m not too mad.” She says finally, dismissing him. “We were going to need a stomach bile sample anyway. You just…” She waved a hand, “sped up the process. A little annoyingly, and at an extremely inconvenient time, but ah well.”

The Doctor tries not to read too far into that. They’d taken a lot already. He tried not to dwell too hard on more. He’d fix it all if he escaped.

No.

When .

When he escaped.

His nostrils flared, “glad to hear.” He mumbled sarcastically.

Felicity beamed at him. “Next time I expect you to behave a little better.”

The Doctor gawked at her. Next time? He hopes not. Please. No. He does not want to experience anything like that ever again.

But… he supposes he doesn’t really have a choice in the matter.

Hopefully he’ll be long gone before it gets to that.

“With all due respect, Doctor Gray.” One of the technicians said, their voice was low though, as if they were hoping Felicity might not hear it. “Theta behaved extremely well, given the circumstances. Anything else would’ve died of shock, or at the very least still unconscious.”

Felicity raised an eyebrow, but if she was annoyed, she didn’t show it. “It’s a good thing he’s not anything else then, isn’t it?”

The technician paused. “Perhaps we can sedate him next time? I’m sure it would make the experience ten times easier.”

Felicity fiddled restlessly with the loose part of the strap around the Doctor’s wrist. Her gaze not leaving the Doctor’s face. “Easier doesn’t mean better, Doctor Allison.”

Allison swallowed. “I’m sure a lot of us would disagree.”

Movement stopped altogether. The other people paused at their jobs as the entire room seemed to take a deep breath. The Doctor’s breath hitched as Felicity’s grip tightened around the strap, pulling it terse and aggravating the bruising underneath.

“Do you have a problem with my methods, Doctor Allison?”

“No!” Allison defended himself. “I just, I think I speak for all of us when I say that operating on a live, humanoid, and intelligent specimen was a little jarring.”

Felicity raised an eyebrow at him, “what’s your name, Doctor Allison?”

Allison looked a little confused and the Doctor stilled as the room seemed to close in around them. “Sage, Ma’am.” 

Felicity lets out a singular chuckle through her nose. “Cute.” She realises what her hands are doing and carefully fixes the tension on the Doctor’s wrist, pressing a finger against his lips when he opens them to interject, “shh, Theta. The adults are talking.”

The Doctor narrows his eyes indignantly. But he doesn’t want to give her an excuse to gag him again, the idea of choking on his own bile again is suddenly suffocatingly terrifying, so he stays silent.

“Sage, what’s your occupation? Why are you here?”

Sage Allison appeared to weigh the benefits of running away. “I’m–” He swallows heavily, “I’m a medical technician, Dr. Gray.”

Felicity beams, “and what are your qualifications, Sage?”

“I have a PhD in biophysics, ma’am.”

“Awesome!” Felicity says, “that’s wonderful, Sage. You’re very smart.”

Sage shuffled his feet, “thank you ma'am, I did graduate Summa cum laude,” his voice betrays his pride despite how uncomfortable everyone in the room is.

“Now, Sage.” Felicity says. “There’s a hierarchy here. That’s how Torchwood operates. Did you know that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. This hierarchy puts Captain Drabek as my superior. Then there’s commissioner Hawthorne who’s his superior. I am the lead scientist here. I have four PhD’s, and yet I still have several superiors. Where do you think you fit, Sage, as a medical technician, with one PhD?”

Sage is put on the spot. He glances around desperately for help that no one appears ready to give.

Felicity taps a foot. “I’ll give you some help. Dr. Frost,” she snaps her fingers at someone the Doctor can’t see without moving his head and risking drawing attention back to himself.

“- How many qualifications do you have?”

Frost clears his throat, “I have an MD and two PhD’s, Dr. Gray.”

“Great!” Felicity points at the last person in the room, “Dr. Murphy. What about you?”

Murphy startles and adjusts her glasses, “I have a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Gray.”

Felicity nods, “awesome, what gives you a higher status then Sage here?”

Murphy offers Allison a sympathetic glance before replying, “I’m a senior officer, ma’am. I served in the Torchwood military before I changed direction after my injury.”

Felicity smiles, turning her attention back to Allison with a fake kindness, “you’re filling in for my usual vitals tech, Sage. You’re barely higher in rights than the alien on the table. In fact, in terms of intelligence , since you seem so concerned, Theta is probably smarter than all of you combined .”

The Doctor goes rigid. He can feel his breathing quicken and tries not to think too hard.

“If what’s just happened worries you, or disgusts you, then I suggest you rethink your position here. Dr. Allison.” Felicity snarls, her voice raising in volume. “I’d hate to fire you for being squeamish, when there’s something so much bigger than you at work here. Figure out your priorities.” She glares around at the room, her position above the Doctor is terrifying and dominating. “Does anyone else have any complaints to make?”

There’s a few mumbled no ’s.

“Good. Now get out of my sight.” Felicity snaps. “And leave any samples or medical waste collected in my office.”

Everyone scatters and Felicity turns back to the Doctor. “Sorry about that, Theta.” She murmurs, “I really do try my best. I’ll have a more competent technician back tomorrow. Don’t you worry.”

“I’m riveted.” The Doctor responds, his mouth tastes like bile.

Felicity hums at him, then she turns her attention back to his chest. It’s red, and raw, and crusted with dried blood. The stitches trace from his collarbones to the bottom of his ribs and with the drugs that were dulling the edge of the pain wearing off, it aches in a way that cuts through the Doctor’s entire being.

“How do you feel?”

The Doctor groans incredulously. The question is insanely nonchalant, as if he were sick with a head cold instead of having just undergone major, involuntary, conscious surgery.

“Oh, wonderful.” He slurs, his eyes hardened. “I feel like I’ve just had my chest ripped apart, thanks for asking.”

Felicity ran a finger down the closed incision, making him shudder, a whimper on his lips. “And here you are.” She murmurs, “Allison was right about one thing. You truly are a wonder. Can I offer you anything?”

The Doctor scoffs. “Freedom?” He sucks on his lower teeth, “an apology?”

Felicity narrows her eyes.

The Doctor swallows, measuring his odds. He really doesn’t want to test Felicity’s patience. Not right now. He’s barely functioning as it is, his body still working overtime to repair all of the damage they’d inflicted on him.

“A glass of water?” He mumbles finally and Felicity’s gaze softens and the doctor hates himself . He really and truly does. 

Felicity walks around the table and begins digging around in a cupboard above his head, she eventually finds a plastic looking cup and fills it up in the sink. “Are you intending on swallowing, or just rinsing your mouth out?” She asks.

The Doctor hates the gratitude that wells in his stomach. Felicity doesn’t deserve that. She’d just tore into his chest like he was a meal. She’s stripped him of everything. He had nothing to be grateful for.

Shut up, he tells himself.

“Both?” He asks, his voice is still hoarse from screaming. A chilling reminder of his position.

Felicity nods and grabs some kind of container as well, she brings them both over, sits them down on the medical table and then carefully tugs the strap on his chest free before wedging her hand beneath his back and helping him into a sitting position. His hands are left restrained to the table, it puts pressure on the joints in his wrist, and makes the leather around his hips dig into his tender skin, but the Doctor forces himself not to mention it, worried Felicity would revoke the water privileges and just stab him with another needle instead.

“Open.” Felicity murmurs and the Doctor feels himself go red in shame as she presses the cup to his lips and helps him tilt his head back to get a mouthful of water.

He shakes her off and swishes it around in his mouth, gratefully dislodging the leftover traces of his stomach acid. He spits it out in the container when Felicity offers it.

Then the process repeats until the cup is empty and the Doctor’s mouth no longer tastes of bile.

Felicity refills the cup and helps him drink it next. The water soothes his aching throat and he can’t help the whine that escapes him when it’s empty and she doesn’t get him any more.

“I’ll hook you up to another saline solution later.” Felicity chides. “You’ll be fine for a few moments while I finish up my schedule.”

Then she coaxes him back down onto his back, and he attempts to struggle, wanting desperately to stay upright, but he’s exhausted, and Felicity is relentless. She presses a firm hand down on his recently dissected chest and he flinches away from her in response, giving her leverage to push him the rest of the way down and restrap his wrists and chest.

He doesn’t look at her while she passes the last ones over his neck and forehead, the fight in him is gone, and if she catches the look of panic in his eyes as a result, she doesn’t mention it. 

He tries his best to ignore her while she moves around him. His mind planning. Always planning. Never actually managing to go through with any of the plans. At least not always as expected. But he’s beginning to come to terms with the fact that while he’s strapped to the table, there is no plan. His only plan seems to be to wait until one comes to him. And that requires being free from the table.

It’s just a long, never ending circle of waiting, and hoping his psyche isn’t destroyed in the process.

He’s dragged back to the present when Felicity presses a gloved finger between his teeth and instinct takes over when he attempts to jerk his head out of her grasp. The action makes the strap across his forehead bite into his skin and Felicity tightens her grip around his jaw so he can do nothing but make a noise of frustration as Felicity pries his mouth open and shoves something rubber and wedge shaped between his teeth. It digs into the gum at the back of his mouth and stretches his jaw wider than it’s supposed to..

“Keep still, you’re making things harder than they have to be.” She takes a firm grip of his chin and holds it firm while she uses her other hand to stick something inside his mouth. The taste of metal and the feeling of it brushing against the back of his throat and The Doctor gags as it brushes the roof of his mouth, a wave of panic rolling over him at the thought of throwing up again. 

The hinges of his jaw ache as Felicity pushes the wedge forward, wrenching his mouth wider and the two halves grind against each other in protest, she uses a protractor of all things to measure its wideness. Attempting to swallow around the intrusion sends another wave of pain through his face and he groans.

“Almost done,” she murmurs as she sticks her finger in to run along his back molars, counting them, removing them briefly to replace with a cotton swab that she runs against the back of his throat, making it contract painfully, his eyes water, and he retches grotesquely until she tucks a finger between his teeth and the wedges and carefully slides them out.

“Done!” She says, as if it’s an accomplishment she expects congratulations for.

Then she goes about hooking him back up to his numerous tubes, then flushes the tube down his nose before carefully attaching it to what was quickly becoming his daily menu. His hunger being quelled by whatever sludge she’s filling him full of, his stomach clenches at the cold sensation of it flowing through the tube, its unidentifiable taste lingering faintly at the back of his throat. She reconnects the IV line and the faint hiss of a sedative sends a creeping numbness through his limbs. She sits with him as he glares daggers at her. She murmurs praise to him as his mind dulls, her tone unsettlingly calm, her words a stark contrast to the violence she’d orchestrated earlier.

As the drug seeps further into his system, the sharp edges of his anger dull, replaced by a foggy resignation. He watches her warily, his plotting thoughts fraying at the edges.

“I wish you’d talk to me about yourself.” Felicity murmurs, resting her head carefully against the table, the movement so casual and achingly human it feels surreal. Like the Doctor might be laying on a foreign space beach with a companion. His heart throbs wistfully. He misses that. “I want to know everything. What’s this Gallifrey like? Why did you leave? Why do you keep coming back?”

The Doctor swallows, his eyes drooping against the trickle of drugs in his system.  He feels her words press against him, invasive in their curiosity. He can’t do much but take them in. Mull them over.

“Do you hate me?” Felicity whispers, so softly he’s certain he’d imagined it.

And the Doctor freezes. It’s a difficult question. She’d kidnapped him. She’d taken his TARDIS, his sonic, his clothes, his autonomy. She’d tortured him, ridiculed him, and cut him open without even the dignity of anaesthesia for the sake of science and progression that humans weren’t equipped to handle. She’d treated his body like a jigsaw puzzle. Something she could piece together and take apart at will.

But she was brilliant, intelligent, and curious. And he couldn’t fault her for that.

It was the Doctor’s fault he’d been captured in the first place. And maybe it’s the drugs speaking, but more than anything, he hated himself more.

He hated himself.

He doesn’t respond to her question.

Felicity sits up and stares at him a moment longer. Contemplating things. She studies him, her faze uncomfortably close to admiration; as if he’s some beautiful landscape she had the pleasure of seeing for the first time.

He realises with a sickening clarity that she truly believes she’s doing the right thing.

Felicity wipes him down with a softer sponge this time. Carefully scrubbing the blood from his chest, she lifts him slightly to get at the table as well, her touch disturbingly gently.

She even adjusts his restraints so they’re pressing against different parts of his skin. So that they won’t cause more damage on his rubbing joints.

“I won’t put the other ones on you tonight.” She tells him while rubbing some kind of antiseptic into the raw skin where the bands had bruised him, she goes to the effort of bandaging them too and he can’t help the gratitude that blossoms in his chest. Even though it's the bare minimum. Even though it’s followed quickly by shame. It’s a kindness in a sea of cruelty, but he can’t help but absorb it. Desperate for anything calm amongst the throng of terror.

“I’m sure you know the drill though. Try anything and I’ll have to use them again.”

Her eyes bore into his skull and he glares back, his throat bobbing painfully against the leather across his neck. She massages his aching joints to encourage blood flow to return to his throbbing limbs. Her eyes caught more than once, disdainfully on the bruise across his chest.

“If that particular guard comes back,” she says, her voice tinged with disgust, “you tell me. I will have him properly dealt with.” Her tone sharpens, and he catches the faintest undercurrent of possessiveness. Apparently, she draws the line at others touching her plaything without permission.

He keeps his eyes fixed on the ceiling, making a deliberate point not to respond, though her words cling to the edges of his mind. Did she mean them? Was she genuinely concerned after what happened last night, or was this just another layer of manipulation? It doesn’t matter. Nothing she says, no act of supposed care, could undo the pit of betrayal and terror that has taken up permanent residence in his core.

When she finally leaves, the quiet that follows is almost intoxicating. His drug-clouded mind wavers between relief and despair, her absence leaving him untethered, adrift in a sea of pain and the weight of his own spiralling thoughts. The hatred festering within him feels like the only constant—burning hot and bitter, though most of it isn’t aimed at her.

Chapter Text

The Doctor slips in and out of a fitful unconsciousness this time. Half in, and half out of a feverish semi-sleep, semi- ‘ I’ve reached the point in which my brain no longer wants to be here and participate in my own suffering .’

Each time his brain manages to float off into oblivion he jerks himself back awake in a panic, rearing up in an attempt to escape biting scalpels and invasive hands, his fractured mind unable to make itself up between; ‘ Don’t let your guard down, keep fighting!’ and ‘Give up, escape is hopeless…’ The act does nothing more than throttle him on the leather that tightly binds his neck to the table and he has to spend a few moments each time swallowing down the unending nausea that threatens to overwhelm him. The thought of throwing up again is horrifying and he’s growing increasingly terrified of the idea of it.

It might have been early afternoon when Felicity had left, probably to finish her day behind some desk, analysing samples from his lungs or something. The Doctor shudders, his chest aches with a vengeance, punishing him for the invasion of his chest cavity, for something he couldn’t stop. Punishing him for something that wasn’t his fault . 

It’s getting really hard to keep convincing himself that. 

He attempts to quieten his mind. The constant spiralling into a pool of self hatred was beginning to erode his resilience. If he lost his mental nerve, then what was left?

He absorbed himself instead in thinking, plotting, and escape planning — although it was very slow going.

He’s got no TARDIS, but he can definitely feel her presence. He wasn’t sure to begin with, but the longer he’d been alone, the more time he’d had to decipher her connection. She was close, somewhere within the same walls as him hopefully. 

When he got off the table next he would need to improvise, do his best to navigate the unknown while simultaneously tracking down his TARDIS. Hopefully his sonic would be in the same place, but he can always get a new one once he’s on board. This time shouldn’t take too much mental coaxing for her to open without the key. She’d want to leave just as much as he does.

He’d been doing his best to create a mental list of his captors. It was becoming quite extensive, which was frustrating because in previous hostage situations the Doctor had unwillingly taken part in, there was only a maximum of like… three captors maybe? This time there appeared to be an entire workforce against him.

There was Victor Drabek. The captain. The Doctor had established his weakness early on. He was quick to anger, lashing out from just a few mental prods. High in command, however not the highest. He also appeared to hold a lot of respect for Dr. Gray, obeying her commands despite being her superior officer. The Doctor’s also not entirely certain what his job is. He assumes its overseeing things, however he doubts any captain of operations within Torchwood takes this much interest in a case. So either he does have an inexplainable interest in the Doctor’s torture. He takes his job a lot more seriously than most. Or and the Doctor might be pulling at strings here for some kind of extra weakness; he likes Felicity Gray.

Dr. Felicity Gray almost certainly doesn’t like him back. She likes her job, evidently so. And as the Doctor regretfully realises, Felicity likes him. Not at all in a romantic way, no. She holds some kind of sick fascination towards him, it fuels her desires to tear him open and find out how he works. The Doctor’s yet to find some kind of weakness there, however she does seem to prefer working alone, despite being a part of a workforce that appears to value teamwork. She’d grown frustrated when someone had ‘tampered’ with how she had things. The Doctor’s even certain if she’d been capable of conducting the vivisection alone, she absolutely would have.

The surgical team followed orders relatively without question, and the one who did raise alarms is only temporary. The Doctor would find no help there.

It appeared that Torchwood had managed fairly well to weed out anyone on their payroll who might compromise their work integrity. And while it was admirable, it also meant the Doctor’s escape plan was becoming more and more compromised. The cracks he wanted to exploit were so small they were hardly there. And even if he did manage to, he had the problem of waiting for an opportunity to even try.

He was always strapped to this table. There was always some sort of movement outside the walls of this room. There was always someone one step ahead.

While he’d come to terms with waiting for an opportune moment, he really hopes he doesn’t have to wait long. He’d barely survived them cutting him open the first time. He doesn’t want to go through that again.

“Dr. Gray really does coddle her specimens, doesn’t she?”

The sudden voice jerks him from the haze of light sedatives and he lurches forward only to find resistance around his neck that leaves him reeling, completely winded. He gasps for breath as a figure comes into the fuzzy edges of his vision.

It’s a woman, she raises an eyebrow as his stricken gaze finally lands on her. He swallows thickly around the strap on his neck, his tongue darts to moisten his dry and cracked lips, and he’s still gasping in pain from the pressure his flinch had placed on his still very raw surgical site. His sudden sobriety as the drug in his system struggles to take hold again causes every aching joint to slam into him, the deep internal gouge in his flesh pulses in anguish, and the dehumanising tubes inside him scratch at their entrances.

He fights the urge to throw up again.

“Subject Theta, I assume?” The woman's voice is cold, she studies the Doctor like he’s an unpleasant meal.

“The Doctor.” The Doctor corrects her.

The woman’s lips tilt upward, “defiant.” She lifts some sort of screen up so she can squint at it, “Captain Drabek, said you were.”

“Personality trait,’ the Doctor croaks, “I don’t like being told what to do.”

There’s a glint in this newcomer's eye that he doesn’t quite like. “He also said you were a yapper. I’m surprised they haven’t muzzled you already, then again, Dr. Gray seems to like the talkers. I hate that, it’s bad form.”

“Not what I’ve heard.” The Doctor forces some shaky walls up from where they’d crumbled when he was cut open and gouged into a few hours ago, he really doesn’t like this woman. “There’s some kind of gag in the works.” He coughs, attempting to turn his head to the side as some sort of bodily fluid makes itself known in the back of his throat. It trails down his chin and the woman watches it with disdain.

The woman begins to detach the feeding bag from his nose tube, “I’ve got to admit, Theta–”

“Doctor.” The Doctor interjects, but he yelps when there’s a sharp pain against his cheek, splitting his face into a lingering, hot flash of pain. The woman had slapped him. The heat was the feeling of his cheek being sliced open on the ring that glinted in the harsh light as she put her hand down.

It didn’t hurt more than the vivisection, but still the Doctor felt heat fill his body at the act. He’d been scolded.

“ Theta .” The woman reaffirms. “You are not a doctor, let alone the doctor. If I hear that word again, it’ll be a lot more than just your cheek that’s bleeding.” And it is, he can feel it trickling down and into his hair. “Now,” she gives the strap on his chest a tug, letting it snap back, sharp and painful against his collarbones. “Felicity doesn’t like my techniques very much, but I’m her superior, so I do whatever I like. And regardless, she’ll appreciate my help once the government inspection rolls around. She might have her toys and her technology, but nothing works quite as well as good old mental conditioning. If it weren’t for me, Torchwood probably would’ve been shut down years ago.”

A chill sets itself through the Doctor’s body at the woman's words. Was the table and the torture not enough? “Didn’t you read my file?” He grits out, “Time Lord, remember? Advanced species . Conditioning won’t work on me. You humans might be able to keep me here with your little restraints and torture devices, but my brain is untouchable.”

Slap!

The action jolts his head against leather and the room spins around him. He hisses in pain.

“Everything is trainable, Theta.” The woman growls, “it just depends on how, and how long.” She unbuckles his wrist, catching it in her hand, wrapping her fingers tightly and he can’t do a damn thing about it. She uses both hands to flex it backwards painfully. The two bones groan in warning and the Doctor lets out a huff of air as it reaches its limit and attempts to keep going. “Pain is the best teacher.” She continues. “Speak out of term again, and you’ll regret it.”

The Doctor sucks in a breath of air as the grip on his wrist loosens, but instead of buckling it back down next to his hips, the woman shifts the leather strap to a different anchor point above his head and somewhere off the side of the table. It bends his elbows and hyperextends his shoulders outwards and though it doesn’t hurt now, the vague protest in his upper back tells him it certainly will later. She repeats the process with his other arm, it changes his posture ever so slightly ensuring his spine is no longer able to rest against the table and tears at the fresh wounds on his insides so that he begins to feel as if he’s being torn open again.

“You feel that, Theta?” The woman asks, her eyes glinting as he fails to hold in a whimper. “The subtle tension that begins to build in here?” She runs a finger along his trembling shoulder blades. “And here?” She presses into the pressure point behind his armpits. “That’ll gradually grow worse. Even more so if you struggle.”

She unbuckles the strap across his neck and discards it in favour of fixing a firm, black, leather, posture collar around it instead. It forces his head backwards as she pulls the laces taut, in line with his hyperextended arms and the Doctor swallows heavily against the tension building inside his throat. His breaths are shallow now, every single one of them tortuous to his chest wounds. The stitches pull, his sternum screams . He might actually be dying. The Doctor doesn’t even know who this woman is.

And she’s not even done yet. She loosens the straps on his chest and hips, pulls something from outside of his vision, a cylindrical, wooden block, and carefully slides it beneath his lower back, forcing him into an unnatural curve. He moans slightly, tears spilling from the corners of his eyes as she pulls the chest and hip straps tighter again. Holding the arch impossibly tight. “You feel that?” The woman grins at his helplessness, she runs a finger along the stitched lines in his chest and he flinches violently, a cry on his lips at the agony that flares through him. “That’s only going to get worse.” She promises before finishing up by loosening his knees, moving his ankles forward ever so slightly so that his knees are forced to bend and then tightening everything down again.

His entire body is trembling in the stress position by the time the woman straightens, staring down at him with a satisfied smirk plastered on her face.

“Why.” The Doctor’s voice trips and is hardly legible over the drugs, and the strain, and the agony. Tears slip silently down his cheeks as he attempts to adjust his position and fails.

The woman sneers at him and the Doctor hates himself for the way he tenses, expecting another blow, an apology for speaking out of turn trying to escape his lips.

“My name is Commissioner Hawthorne.” She tells him and the Doctor goes extremely still at the threat in her voice. Some memory flashes in the back of his mind, when Felicity was going on her rant about the hierarchy within Torchwood. Something about a Hawthorne being Drabek’s superior even.

“I’m in charge of the entire experiment and production unit of Torchwood.” Hawthorne cements the memory in place and the Doctor takes note of yet another captor to keep track of. “If Dr. Gray fucks this up, you’ll most likely be claimed by the government and locked in some deep dark vault, never to be seen again, and I’ll have lost the most valueable specimen we’ve had in a long time.”

The Doctor whines, his breathing harsh and panicked as she presses down on his chest. “You’re here to serve us, Doctor .” She spits his name out like it’s the most disgusting thing she’s ever said. “Not to lie there all pretty and ‘ Woe is me, my chest hurts.’ ” She takes a firm grip of his chin, forcing his head further back, making him gag against the posture collar and the tube in his throat. “Think of this as a reminder. Every pained twang of your stitches. Every deep set ache of your sternum is your service to us. Every vivisection, every tube, every monitor, is so that we can discern why your pitiful existence is better than ours.”

The Doctor can hardly breathe against her hands, his chest screams at him, his eyes forced to meet Hawthorne’s. “The minute we discover a use to you,” she laughs, a deep, humourless sound, “and trust me, we will.” Hawthorne continues against the Doctor’s ragged breathing. “—you’ve got enough regenerative enzymes in one blood sample alone to heal wounds in seconds. Your whole body is a walking, breathing resource. And when we figure out how to harness it? I’ll drain every last drop of purpose from you... and then some. Until you’re nothing more than an extraction point. A hole . A production line for the betterment of humans. Why should one person get sole access to such power?”

The Doctor jerks against her, his head spinning with terror, her words ring through his ears, bouncing backwards and forwards in his mind like a pinball.

Hawthorne’s grip tightens, “until then,” she stares him straight in the eye, “I’ll settle for breaking you like all the others. Make the whole process ten times easier when we get to it.” She finally releases him and the Doctor gasps for breath around the taxing position and the collar, and the agony.

Once he catches some semblance of it he attempts something that could’ve been a dry laugh. “I think–” He breaks off in a coughing fit and whimpers hysterically as it tears at his stitches so badly he begins to feel warmth trailing down his chest. He’s a Time Lord. A Time Lord . His mind was far beyond conditioning and breaking. He’d been through interrogation training. He’d been through the destruction of his species. He was the last one left.

The last one left.

‘I think you’ll find that extremely difficult.” He rasps. His voice hoarse, his body trembling in agony, his mind splintering. But he’s still him. Unbroken.

Hawthorne stares at him pointedly, an eyebrow raised. He flinches uncontrollably as she raises a hand, but it’s just to wipe the saliva from his chin that had pooled during his coughing fit. She wipes it away on his aching chest.

“We’ll see about that.” She says and the Doctor feels cold. Very cold.

“Goodnight, Theta.”

The light shuts off as Hawthorne leaves the room. The Door clicking shut behind her, leaving a sense of foreboding behind.

When he jerks himself from another feverish nightmare— quite possibly the tenth so far —it’s dark. The blinding light above him was off and all that was left was the four red dots in each corner, and the dimly illuminated observation windows cut into the walls around him. It made his vision grainy. Like he was watching his life play out through a television.

He doesn’t feel attached to his body any longer. Most of his unconscious stints happen due to passing out from the pure agony of it. Every muscle burns with tension. Every joint feels swollen. The hole in his chest screams at him. Blood was pooling at his sides and he was feverish from the blood loss, exhausted from his body’s constant attempts to close the wound again.

Tubing twists inside him and he twitches violently as he realises what had awoken him. One of the rostered nightly guards was fiddling with waste disposal, the feeling is unpleasant enough without the arch of his spine, arms, and legs putting pressure on everything else, and he closes his eyes as the tubes set his insides roiling with discomfort. When he opens them again the now empty feeding bag is unhooked from the tube that rattles at the back of his throat.

Then his head spins violently as the dosage of the drugs being administered is messed with and the red dots in the corners of his vision blink out as the Doctor realises what is happening just a little bit too late.

“‘Llicity,” he mumbles in alarm, twisting his wrists uselessly as he’s overwhelmed with nausea and the world swims around him. He fights to keep his eyes from rolling back in his head and the panic that rears its head keeps him from dealing with the mental repercussions of the fact that the first person who had come to mind to save him was his main captor and tormentor.

“Fel- nng.” A hand closes around his abused throat, on top of the posture collar, and the Doctor kicks futilely against his unknown assailant, a jolt of pain runs through his leg as leather bites into flesh. The assault was so sudden he couldn’t prepare, and didn't have enough remaining oxygen in his body to activate his bypass. His body too extended beyond its limits, his mind too strung out on drugs and pain. He was useless in the dictionary definition of the word.

“Crying to mummy, are we?” The Doctor goes still. Deathly still as lips brush against his ear, a face so close to his that he can feel the heat radiating off it, and the hot breath as they breathe.

His body tries to gain purchase in its restrained state, but the leather around his limbs holds him firmly and he can do nothing but slowly suffocate against his assailants hand, legs scrabbling uselessly as they cramp after their prolonged stress position, pitiful choking noises escaping the back of his throat.

“ Dr. Gray can’t help you.” His assailant whispers. “Her shift ended at six, she’s not back until nine.” The Doctor struggles to make him out in the dim light. “I’m the lead guard on duty tonight. I have control of everything in this wing of the base.”

The hand loosens slightly, giving the Doctor an intake of breath, a semblance of freedom before slamming down on his windpipe again and he retches, his stomach flipping as he struggles to breathe and keep down the tasteless dredge in his stomach.

“The cameras are playing reruns for the guys in tech, this room is soundproof. I gave the others a night off.”

The hand presses painfully upwards against the Doctor’s chin and the Doctor whimpers in disgust as what feels like his attacker's tongue slides up his neck, stopping just below his lips. It leaves a trail of wetness behind that is cold in the night air.

“What d’you w’nt?” The Doctor manages to wheeze, his head spins and his eyes threaten to close on him. The only thing that managed to keep him from succumbing altogether was the agony riddled throughout his body from Hawthorne’s stress position.

His assailant laughs, the sound is horrifyingly human. “What I get from every living thing they keep here.” The Doctor’s blood runs cold at all the thoughts that run through his mind as the guards free hand trails lower and their lips attempt to brush against his. 

He jerks in his captor's grip, stomach filling with disgust, and twisting his head away. But also coming to the brutal realisation that he can’t do anything . He’s exhausted from hours of this taxing position, he’d drugged half out of his mind, and he cannot move from this godforsaken table.

“Oh yeah, you know exactly what I want.” The guard presses closer and the Doctor’s skin feels with heat and humiliation more than he’d felt the entire time he’d been strapped to this table. “You’re more aware than most of the aliens they strap to these tables.” And it’s awful, and disgusting, and horrifying the more the Doctor learns about living beings in the same predicament as him. There’s a huff of air against the Doctor’s cheek and he hates how his eyes well with tears when the guard continues, “I’m going to enjoy this.”

“Don’t.” The Doctor whispers, his neck is cold where his assailant had licked him, his throat burns with the effort of keeping him oxygenated, and Felicity is going to be annoyed when she finds more bruising where the leather goes over skin. “They’ll h’vyou fired.” He slurs desperately.

The guard scoffs, “they haven’t before, why would they now?” And the Doctor writhes in anguish when their hand presses into his half open incision wound. The drugs in his system do nothing to stop the agony that feels like it’s splitting his sternum back open and he writhes in his tormentor's grip as they run their now bloody fingers over his lips.

“‘Lic’ty will notice.” The Doctor wheezes, the taste of metal in his mouth becomes overwhelming. “She said she’d h’ve you d‘sposed of.”

He gags when his attacker forces a bloody finger inside his mouth, “Felicity can’t do a damn thing.” They sneer. “I have express permission from those above her to do whatever I want to you. To put you in your place.”

The Doctor’s mind flashes, horrified to those few hours ago with Hawthorne and his snipe that they couldn’t break him.

Why can’t he just keep his fucking mouth shut?

He yelps in indignation and fear when his attacker releases his throat all of a sudden to make for his legs. His chest rises and falls in rapid succession and he desperately tries to think of something to say that might deter the guy. He tries to kick out in retaliation to the guard unstrapping his knees and ankles and folding his legs even further inwards before redoing the straps around his ankles in the knee slots, the buckles are pulled so tight he can feel his pulse throbbing through them. His assailant adjusts the harness like straps that hold his hips, rolling them forward and up before tightening the buckles to hold them that way.

He shivers at the prone form. Everything on display. His face burns . His body aches . His eyes are streaming with tears of anger. And all of the resignation to his fate is gone in the light of fact that he does not want this . All of his remaining dignity leaves his body when he begs, “Please don’t do this.” 

The guard's face illuminates ever so slightly when the dim light hits the right angle and the Doctor is terrified at the lust that is displayed so plainly on such a human face.

His attacker is male, his brown hair is longish and held back with a hair tie. His jaw is square, and there are smile lines tracing his lips and eyes. The light catches his glinting amber eyes, “took nearly a hundred volts of electricity to bring you down last time.” He leans over the Doctor, and he struggles and twists and spits and fights, but he’s useless to stop the man from pressing his hungry lips against his. He writhes against it. The guards breath his hot against his cheeks as he struggles to breathe and his arms slide in and out of their sockets from their hyperextended position above his head. Tears stream down his face and the guard smears blood over his face from his chest and the Doctor does not want this .

“And look at you now.” The guard breathes when he pulls up, leaving the Doctor’s lips swollen and wet with drool and blood. “A pretty face, completely at my mercy.”

The rectal tube is unceremoniously removed and the Doctor can feel panic settling into his very being .

“Please.” He whispers, but the guard ignores him, taking the posture collar around his neck and pulling , so tight it bites into his windpipe. Not quite enough to make him suffocate, but certainly enough to be uncomfortable. He chokes around it, delirious from the drugs in his system and the inability to fight back. He wheezes, “Dr. Gray will-” 

“Will what?” His tormentor cuts him off, “reassign me? I assign myself .” He makes a mocking blubbering noise, leaning in close to the Doctor’s trembling body. “No one will believe you, Subject Theta ,” the comment stings, “the most I’ll get is a slap on the wrist. The Commissioner herself gave me permission. Captain Drabek congratulated me last night. No one cares .”

The Doctor goes still, his stuttering breath is all that makes a sound in the silence. This is happening… there’s not much he can do about it. There’s not anything he can do about it.

His attacker pulls his head forward just enough to wrap several rounds of duct tape over his lips, ignoring his pleas and his hopeless struggles. It silences his pitiful cries and limits his breathing to his congested nostrils. He can feel nothing but pain, so much that it doesn’t seem to have a beginning or ending. He can see nothing but pitch black and the silhouette of the man set on assaulting him. He can smell, blood, sweat, and tears. He can hear nothing but the faint, frantic beat of his heart monitor, his panicked breathing, and the sound of his attacker unzipping his pants.

All he can do is survive and hope he comes through still himself.

He barely registers when it’s over. His entire body is still on fire. He can barely breathe, the duct tape blocking his mouth’s airway, the nasogastric tube and devastated snot blocking his nose. What little breathing he can do is further impeded by the posture collar being pulled tighter than it should, narrowing his existence to survival. Everything spins around him.

His chest wound is gaping again. The first few layers of his flesh wide open and bleeding. HIs sternum and ribs feel like they’re on display again. Blood pools beneath him as his assaulter pulls out for the last time and leaves behind a raw, aching bruise. Both physically and mentally.

He doesn’t even bother to return the Doctor to how he’d found him. Cocky. So full of the ego Hawthorne’s permission had given him. He was so certain that no one would care and the Doctor was so strung out on drugs and barely there that he thought he was probably right. The guard simply leaves a rough, possessive bite on the inside of the Doctor’s thigh before patting him on the head and leaving.

The feeling lingers even after the Doctor is alone. He aches inside and out. There’s the remainder of sticky residue between his still restrained, parted legs. He feels disgusting. He is disgusting. In every meaning of the word. He feels tainted. Like oil in water.

His legs shake in their straps as they struggle to stay upright despite his fatigue. His arms ache above his head and his wrists are bleeding, savagely onto the floor from his struggles. The leather restraints had sliced into him, punishing him for resistance.

His fault.

If he had kept his goddamn mouth closed and taken what he’d gotten, Hawthorne wouldn’t have retaliated.

His fault .

If he had been more interesting during that first vivisection, maybe Felicity would have stayed longer. She could have protected him.

His fault .

If he had been less weak and managed to escape the second time. The first time even. He wouldn’t even be here, strapped to this table. An unwilling participant in his own suffering.

He swallows weakly around the posture collar, hardly able to draw in enough breath to calm his racing heart. Although efficient breathing would do little to fix this. He was dirty. In ways that couldn’t be cleaned with any soap. The filth had seeped into his very soul, staining the parts of himself he’d thought untouchable.

If he had yelled for help. If he had fought harder. If he had argued, or begged, or cried. Would things have been different? Had the Doctor given in too easily? Did he pave the way for his own abuse? To be assaulted? To be raped .

Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? He’d been violated in every means possible. Been stripped of his things, his clothes, his identity. And just when he thought they couldn’t take any more…

He stared, unseeingly at the ceiling. The world feels distant, muffled—like he's hearing it through thick glass. But it’s not just the drugs or the pain anymore. It's the feeling that everything has faded away. His reality is blurred at the edges, like a smear of ink, the stark contrast of his suffering against an almost unbearable numbness.

Did he deserve it? To be abused in such a way? To have his soul so completely and irrevocably marked against his will? Because maybe he’d been tied down. And maybe he was drugged and unable to fight back. And maybe he didn’t want it. And maybe there was nothing he could do. But he’d let it happen. He’d laid there and let it happen. Made it easy even. He’s a Time Lord for fucks sake. He’s defeated so much worse than some lousy human male.

He’s pathetic. He’s useless. He’s disgusting and dirty and used .

The Doctor began to cry. Not the silent kind anymore, but deep, heaving, sobs of despair, of pain, of humiliation. He was an object to be used, to be exploited. And use him they had. Exploit him, they had.

His crying began to block his nose, making breathing all that much more difficult and part of him hoped he might suffocate. He wouldn’t regenerate. Not this time. This time he craved the embrace of nothingness that came with death. This time he craved the silence, and the solitude, and the rest. No more, Doctor. No more suffering. No more humanity.

The lights of the cameras blink back on around him. Showcasing his suffering to the rest of Torchwood’s facility. Broadcasting the aftermath of his abuse and the Doctor’s pathetic, disgusting crying.

He couldn’t seem to stop. It didn’t stop, not even when the lights overhead switched back on, signifying the coming of morning. Not even when he passed out for a few intervals at a time, his body simply came to smeared in his own tears. It merely turned from violent sobs, to quiet whimpers, and then to silent tears as he laid there, glassy eyes fixated on the ceiling. Not really thinking or feeling anything anymore. Shaking uncontrollably and sniffling pitifully.

“Jesus Christ.”

The Doctor flinched violently at the sudden noise, convinced for a moment that the guard was back, ready to torment him further. He hadn’t even heard the door open, his mind too busy flickering in and out of consciousness like a faulty lightbulb.

There’s movement just outside of his vision and he braces himself instinctively, eyes closing in preparation, hoping to detach himself from the situation again, sink into some sort of dissociative oblivion. 

But then, something shifts. A hand brushes his shoulder, not deliberately harsh, but definitely not gentle either. It’s not invasive and doesn’t attempt to go anywhere other than his upper half but it still makes him flinch violently. The world swimming the figure above him into distortion as the subluxations in his shoulders send a jolt of pain down the rest of his body.

A low sound escapes him, muffled by the tape, his body trembling, even though he has nowhere to go. He knows he has nowhere to go.

”Stop it,” a voice murmurs, it’s feminine enough to not be the guard from before, but he doesn’t recognise it’s chiding tone immediately. It could’ve been Hawthorne, back for more, for all he knows. They sound like they’re calming a spooked horse, rather than an abused person , although it could just be the words sounding like they were coming through water. Nothing seems right anymore.

”Stay still.” The voice says a little firmer this time when he tries to twist away from the hands that return to his shoulders. “ Theta , stay still.”

And all at once the familiarity cuts through the fog that is his fractured mind. Felicity. She’d come back. He can see her face now, her eyes are narrow, her lips pulled into a frustrated frown as she works at the buckles that hold his wrists above his head.

The panic in his gut doesn’t subside altogether, but some twisted part of him calms at the sight of her. Felicity might be his main captor and first and foremost his tormentor and dissector, but she wouldn’t hurt him unnecessarily. Well, unnecessarily in her eyes. She had hurt him, and cut him open, and stolen everything from him but at least she wouldn’t leave him in some contorted position and goad a low paid guard into assaulting him. She wouldn’t and the Doctor is absolutely certain of that.

She had a system, a sort of torture that wasn’t overtly cruel and it was something he had learned to anticipate and expect. That thought, as horrifying as it was, offered him a flicker of stability. Something fixed in this ocean of uncertainty and agony.

She releases his hands from their overextended position and he whimpers as the sudden freedom it gives him sends a sharp stab of pain down his spine from the shift in position. Felicity presses her fingers into his shoulder blades and surrounding muscle, methodically massaging the strain from the limbs.

”You’re okay.” She tells him.

He’s not. But there’s no way that she’d know. Unless the splayed position on his legs, bruising on his thighs and tear streaked face paint a detailed enough picture.

She carefully maneuvers the block from beneath his spine, letting it finally relax and he moans a little in pain as the vertebrae resettle after being forced into an arch all night. Felicity clicks her tongue as she sees the bloody mess that is his incision site, “what’d she do to you, Theta?” She unties his legs and guides them down to the normal ankle straps before loosely tying them down.

The Doctor swallows heavily, his nostrils flaring around the tape on his mouth. His pelvis burns at the movement, but his attempts at curling in on himself are thwarted by the numerous other straps still holding him supine against the table. It wasn’t just a ‘she’ but the guard was probably right. It didn’t matter. Even if Felicity did care, Hawthorne had permitted it, therefore there was nothing she could do. And if the Doctor did tell her like she’d asked, the guard would almost certainly find out about it and— the Doctor shuts his eyes as Felicity pulls the posture collar off and his head slumps sideways in exhaustion, and barely concealed terror— he might come back.

If he’d been able to keep his stupid mouth shut in the first place, this wouldn’t have even happened. His fault. It was his fault. If he kept it shut now, maybe it wouldn’t happen again.

Felicity swats his trembling hand away when he tries to fumble at the tape that bars his lips. “One thing at a time.” She scolds him before pressing a thick wad of gauze into his massacre of a chest.

His vision flashes pure white and his back attempts to arch off the table in anguish. A hoarse scream erupting from behind the fraying tape, his eyes rolling back into his head.

Felicity places a firm hand on his collarbone and holds him still as she cleans up the mess. Scrubbing away blood, disinfecting, removing the broken stitching and replacing it with fresh ones.

When she’s done, he can’t do more than lie there in a daze, not really focused on anything outside of his own suffering. The insides of his thighs are still throbbing and sticky, his cheek is still steadily bleeding from Hawthorne’s ring, he can hardly move his arms—though they’re currently unrestrained— for the pure agony that rears it’s head each time he tries to. He’s sure they’re still subluxated, his time spent as a Rack victim had forced them in and out of their sockets for hours on end.

Felicity cards a hand through his sweaty hair. It’s comforting and he finds himself leaning into the touch. Quite possibly one of the first times that someone had touched him without intent to harm him in several days. Then he realises what he’s doing and pulls away, his face flushing in shame.

Felicity looks disappointed but she doesn’t force him. Her eyes locked on his instead. “I didn’t authorise this.” She tells him, “you were supposed to get some time to recover before your next vivisection.” She pinches the bridge of her nose in frustration. “I don’t care if she’s my superior officer, she had no right to meddle in my project.” She attempts to start finding the end of the tape binding the Doctor’s mouth and he has to squeeze his eyes shut against the flashback that attempts to overwhelm him.

She finds it eventually and begins carefully pulling the tape away, methodically untangling his hair from where it was stuck in the adhesive and slowing down when she reached the parts that stuck to skin. “Almost done.” She assures him as she rubs something oily around the leftover tape and allows it to soak in before ripping it away.

The oil allowed for the tape to peel off without ripping his flesh from his face. He has to force down the overwhelming wave of gratitude at her care and foresight.

Felicity hums in annoyance as she inspects his face, running a careful finger over his split lip and the cut on his cheek. She wipes the blood, snot, and saliva away with her cloth and dabs at his tears with a tissue. “Helping with future inspections my ass.” She mutters, “what are they going to say about the very obvious marks of abuse?” She presses her fingers into her eyes in frustration.

The Doctor is silent. He breathes in a shuddery breath as she watches him.

”Did she do anything else?” Felicity asks softly when he opens his eyes again. The Doctor bites the inside of his mouth as a tear slips quietly down his cheek. His head screams at him for looking and acting so weak and pathetic. His mind begs the question why do you care?

He’s already made his decision to take the route of least resistance. Keep his stupid mouth shut. Stop it from happening again.

He shakes his head.

Felicity stares at him a moment longer. “Just her usual then.” She looks up at the wall and then down at the Doctor again. “She does love her stress positions. I’ll have a word. I don’t want this happening again.”

And then she’s checking his shoulders before strapping his hands down again and she’s standing up and making for the door and she’s leaving and the Doctor doesn’t want to be left alone again. He doesn’t want to be assaulted again. If Felicity’s here, that won’t happen. Please don’t leave me alone !

A broken noise escapes him and he hates himself.

Felicity turns back to him and smiles. Her eyes glint with barely concealed intrigue at the Doctor’s pathetic situation. “I‘ll be back soon.” She promises.

The Doctor is left alone.

Chapter Text

The Doctor stares at the wall to his right. Not really seeing anything. His head lolls sideways and his chest heaves in and out, but other than that, he could’ve been dead. He should have been dead. The only thing keeping him functioning at this point is his body’s refusal to let him die. He can feel his body knitting the physical wounds back together, his mind attempts to compartmentalise the trauma he’d been through. It pushes the memories away, trying to bury them. The emotional scars were harder to heal than the physical ones, and yet his body’s biological survival mechanisms seemed to have no sympathy for the state of his psyche. He was alive, and that’s all it cared about.

Felicity had locked the door on her way out. He had heard the telltale click as she’d turned the key. It sent a wave of relief through him. No one would enter the room again but her. No one could hurt him but her. No one would attempt to assault him or be deliberately cruel. He was alone, as much as he could be in his current situation.

He finds himself thinking about his companions for a brief, selfish moment. A part of him wishes he still had them, he wouldn’t feel so alone, and even if he were, someone would know to look for him. 

He’s selfish for thinking it. He hates himself for thinking it. But the thought that someone might actually be looking for him right now if he hadn’t pushed them all away gnaws at his insides as he lays there. He shouldn’t be thinking about Rose, or Martha, or Donna, or even Astrid or Adelaide. It’s not fair on them to wish it had been different. Because if it had, they might have been captured with him. Taken his place on this table and he couldn’t bear that idea. He’s glad it’s him. He’ll find his own way out.

He will .

There’s still straps over his ankles, chest, hips, and wrists. He’s still naked and exposed to the cold air, and his chest aches deeply from his recent stitch replacements. There’s a tube up his nose, and in his wrist, and his bladder, and there used to be one positioned in his rectum to remove waste but it was in the way of–

He has to keep reminding himself he’s alone. No one can touch him at the moment. There’s only one door, which is the door he can see. There might be someone watching him through the four cameras in each corner of the roof, but they can’t get him in here. They’re just an anonymous set of eyes.

He feels disgusting. His knees are free and he crosses them over each other, ignoring the way it pulls painfully at his ankles. He wants so desperately to be clothed, or at least to be covered. He’s tired of feeling as if he’s on display. Nothing to the imagination, everything for everyone else to view. To use .

His face is sticky from tears. His thighs are sticky from other things that he can’t think about right now or he won’t be able to hold himself together. He’s barely holding himself together right now as it is. So close to crumbling, to falling apart, to losing the shakily built walls he was slowly replacing in his mind, his frail expression of disinterest, the subtle tilt of his lips, his trembling form.

He’s not broken. He’s not . But they’d gotten damn near close.

He studies the room around him, running himself through a series of grounding techniques he vaguely remembers Martha reciting to herself before one of her college tests. 

He can see. He can see the roof above him. It’s a sterile off-white colour that clashes with the icy white of the lights above him. There’s a small ventilation shaft that runs along one side of the room, and a ducted air conditioning vent that explains the chill that settles itself into his bones. He can see the door to his right, it’s one of the ones that have some kind of hydraulic sliding system and it’s a type of frosted glass that he’s certain someone might be able to see through on the other side, however from his vantage point everything that moves behind it is more of a distorted shadow. There is a large window next to the door, it’s also frosted. In front of him, if he strains his eyes downward enough and avoids the sight of his trembling legs, he can see the sink that Felicity had used to fill her buckets and the glass of water she’d gotten him. He hadn’t been able to see it before with the straps around his neck, but that was gone for the moment and he was able to turn his head now. To his left there’s a rolling, metal table that is empty for now, but previously held a collection of surgery equipment, and further to his left was a cupboard where they probably were now.

He can smell, albeit begrudgingly against the build up of snot he’d accumulated from crying, and the nasogastric tube that was still scratching the back of his throat and anchored to his cheek with a sad piece of tape that was very slowly peeling it’s way off due to his tears soaking it. He can smell antiseptic, the alcoholic kind that Felicity had just used to clean his chest off again. He can still faintly smell the lemon dish soap she’d cleaned him, and the floor with, although it might be partially open in the cupboard, or lying discarded in the sink, rather than actively in use. He can smell the metallic scent of his own blood, and the salty tang of his tears, and Felicity hadn’t noticed it before, but there was the faint reek of his own waste that had spilled from its collection bag upon the unceremonious removal of the rectal tube. She’d have to clean it up and the Doctor couldn’t help the guilt that pooled in his chest at the thought. It wasn’t her fault.

He can hear. He can hear the sound of his hearts on the heart rate monitor behind his head. He can also hear his hearts hammering in his ears. He can hear the faint buzz of machinery and the air-conditioning unit. He can hear the sound of footsteps slowly passing outside his door, and the rustle of leather as he tenses and his bindings shift. He can hear the sound of his laboured breathing through his mouth, and the sticky, bubbling sound of his congested nose as it attempts to pick up some of the slack of his breathing.

He can taste. Although he thinks he’d prefer not to. His mouth is filled with the acrid leftover taste off bile, and the salty taste of his own tears, and the metallic taste of his own blood, and all of it mixes together and overwhelmed him, and what he’d give for Felicity to offer him another glass of water to wash it all away.

He can feel. And it’s one of those things he hates because of how much it hurts, but he’s also glad for, because it proves he’s still there. He’s still there. He’s still alive. He’s not broken, he’s not broken, he’s not broken. He’s aware of every ounce of suffering he’s been through. He can feel every pulled muscle and torn ligament. He can feel the sutures on his sternum, the ache in his ribs, the sharp, tearing in his skin at the incision site. He can feel the sticky residue left behind from the duct tape on his cheeks, the oil that lingered when Felicity had coaxed it away. He can feel all the tears he’d cried over the past few days soaking into his hair and pooling behind his head and trailing down his cheeks. He can feel the steady drip of blood from the gash in his cheek. He can feel the ache deep inside him from his assaulters violation, the lingering proof that he’d been used and discarded. 

He can feel moisture between his legs, and beneath his thighs and he was disgusting , and he was used and Martha’s technique wasn’t working because it was just making him more and more aware of just how trapped and violated and hopeless he is. His chances of escape are dwindling and it’s all his fault.

He heaves in a rattling sob. A pitiful sound that echoes around the room that seems to grow smaller by the minute.

An hour passes. Or at least it feels somewhere around an hour. His internal clock is usually good at this kind of thing, but he’d spent a lot of the time suffering and disassociating so he’d lost track for a bit.

He drags his eyes up to the door when it opens, his head still slumped sideways. He tenses briefly before noting that it’s merely Felicity reentering the room. He could handle Felicity.

She doesn’t say anything for a few moments as she makes her way over to him, but the Doctor can see the tension in her body even as she tries to hide it behind her usual clinical composure. She goes immediately to the sink and begins filling a bucket of water, the smell of lemon fills the air again and the Doctor heaves in a shuddering breath. He thinks he should’ve said something by now, covering up the fact that he’s visibly shaken, and broken by last night. At the very least he could’ve plastered some cocky smirk over his face.

But he’s so tired.

“I spoke to Mara.” Felicity’s voice breaks the silence and the Doctor jerks himself back into awareness as she lugs the soapy bucket over to him. He doesn’t miss the way her eyes catch the mess on the floor from his discarded waste tube this time. She doesn’t say anything though, stepping around it until she’s back at the Doctor’s side. “Or the Commissioner, as you might know her by.”

The Doctor struggles to find something tart to reply with, but he comes up with nothing. He stays quiet. Felicity dips her cloth into her water before wringing it out and dabbing at the Doctor’s face. She meticulously wipes away the tears, saliva, snot, and duct tape residue all the while staring in an eerily maternal way at his eyes. He’s all too aware of how he must look to her. Pathetic, broken . Nothing at all like the cocky, mouthy, Time Lord she’d had the pleasure of vivisecting for the first time yesterday.

He’d been here barely three days and was already a mess. He was pathetic, and weak, and disgusting, and Felicity knew it. She was probably proud of it. Bringing the great last of the Time Lords to his knees — metaphorically of course, he was actually tied on his back to a table — it was something of an achievement to her. Probably Hawthorne too, she’d orchestrated the whole thing probably. Been there at the sidelines, poking jabs wherever she could and carefully eroding at the Doctor’s psyche over the course of the past few days.

She’d encouraged the guard to break in both nights. She’d most likely requested he be given a designation rather than a name. She was the commissioner of the whole unit after all. She probably even insisted upon his capture in the first place.

“Apparently you were something of a frustration to her last night, Theta.” Felicity peeled the tape from his feeding tube up and wiped beneath it, leaving it to dangle off the side of the table.

He doesn’t have the strength to laugh at her.

“I apologised for you.” Felicity continues, as if he should be grateful for it, as if he’d offended her somehow. “Her first impression was supposed to be one of awe for your biology, for the good you could bring to human kind.” Felicity places a firm pressure on the wound in his cheek and the Doctor winces as the disinfectant seeps inside the wound and begins burning the germs away.

“I’m embarrassed, Theta. She thinks you’re mouthy, and not worth the trouble, and I might even agree with her if I didn’t know better.”

The Doctor does laugh this time, though it’s a strangled, incredulous sound. “I sincerely apologise for offending anyone with my blatant suffering.” He croaks. His voice is a wreck . It sounds like it’s been through several blenders and then hastily glued back together again. He slurs a few of his words too, the IV that had been carefully drugging him for the past few hours had run out by now, but he was still feeling the effects as his body sluggishly moved to flush it from his system, already drained from his previous torment.

Felicity gives him a stern look as she positions a butterfly bandage across the slice in his cheek and then retapes the feeding tube. “This is what I’m talking about, Theta. You provoked a retaliation. Commissioner Hawthorne isn’t as patient as I am. And while I don’t agree with how she chose to handle you, I don’t pity you too much either.”

Her words cut deeper than a knife ever could. The Doctor deserved everything that had happened to him last night. If he could just learn to shut his mouth, he could’ve avoided it. Hawthorne would have left him alone. His fault. His fault .

“I’ve asked for it not to happen again. She said she can’t make any promises.” The Doctor flinches at her words, his chest rising and falling in rapid succession as she works her fingers through the tangles in his cropped hair. “Don’t give me that look, Theta—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“---You were the instigator.” Felicity ignores him. Her hands fall to her side wearily as she leans against his table. She looks down at him and the Doctor begins to feel incredibly small.

“No matter,” she says, “I’ve heard the complaints. Mara, Sage, Victor,” she waves a dismissive hand, “the rest of them.” She mocks their apparent voices, “‘ He’s too unruly, Felicity .’ ‘ He’s distracting the scientists, Doctor Gray .’ ‘ I’m tired of his incessant yapping, Felicity. I don’t think he’s worth the trouble .’” She laughs as she looks down at him and cards a hand through his now untangled hair. “Are you worth the trouble, Theta?”

He can barely bring himself to meet her eyes, but when he does, he’s surprised at the earnest expression she gives back to him. One that needs validation to her desperate need for more. For discovery. She wants him to say yes. She wants a reason to continue. Oh, Felicity Gray. The Doctor is in awe of her.

“Let me go,” he tries. His voice was shaky, yet resolute. “Let me go, and I will go. I won’t interfere with any of this. No more trouble. No more–” He presses his lips together briefly to suppress a shiver, “no more embarrassing outbursts. Just, please.”

Felicity’s lips press into a firm line, her eyes narrow and a look of frustration flickers across her face. “ I think you are worth it.” She tells him, apparently having discarded his words as trash. “Victor wants to put a bullet in your skull. Continue the experiments post-mortem. Mara suggested a lobotomy. But you’re worth more, alive , Theta. I know it.”

“Felicity.” The Doctor tries. He twists his wrists in their bonds, it sends shooting pain arching upwards. She shushes him with a finger pressed against his lips and it nearly sends him crashing back into last night, the guards hot breath against his cheeks, his hands trailing down his hips, his legs trapped and wide open as he brutally—

“You’re hiding something.” Felicity says, pushing herself up from the table and moving somewhere above the Doctor’s head. “Something I know could progress us forward. Could save our dying race. I just need to know what it is. I need to know why you’re keeping it from us.”

“I’m not–”

Felicity slaps him.

It’s not hard enough to break skin, but it sends his head sideways and a blossoming warmth through his cheek. He feels himself flush at the humiliation. Felicity hadn’t hit him until now. It fills his chest with a strange sense of panic. She might have cut him open and tortured him and stripped him of everything that made him, him . But that kind of cruelty held scientific intrigue at discovery. It had been something he could understand , even if he hated it. But now, with that single slap, she’d crossed an invisible line he didn’t even realize he’d drawn in his mind.

It feels like she’s one of the others. Hurting him just because it fuels their sense of control. She might be no better than Hawthorne, or Drabek. His ability to anticipate the kind of pain she might inflict upon him was out the window in that moment because the slap hadn’t hurt, but it was unexpected, and unnecessary and not like the Felicity he’d used as an anchor point to his suffering.

She doesn’t apologise, or even acknowledge the strike either, just plows on with her hypothesising and complaining. 

“I can fix you.” She insists. “They might think you’re not worth it now. But I’ve had two sleepless nights over this.” She pinches the bridge of her nose as she studies the Doctor’s face as he still reels in her sudden outburst. “Evidently, two nights too long, but I’m finished . I can fix you. I can make you worth it, and then they’ll see how good you are. How good you can be for us.”

A chill shoots its way down the Doctor’s spine at her words. It’s unnerving. The way her voice gets shrill and slightly hysterical at the idea. Her eyes are wide with excitement and the Doctor can do nothing but lay there if she decides to get violent. He can’t predict Felicity’s movements anymore. She might do anything to him while he’s helpless to stop her.

There’s the sound of clinking metal above him and Felicity pulls some strange contraption into his vision. There’s several components to the thing. Metal beams that make an ominous pantograph between two thicker, more cylindrical bases. The bases then extend to another pantograph that has a more hollow base. There’s two of them, each looks like a metal H and interconnecting the two h’s on the bottom is a curved metal plate.

“This is temporary while I work out the kinks for the better one.” Felicity explains. “I thought you’d be fine for another few days, but clearly I was wrong. So I made this.” The look of pride on her face is the most horrifying part of the whole exchange.

The Doctor refrains himself from asking what is it? Knowing it would only fuel the whole exchange.

“This’ll stop any unwanted outbursts.” Felicity promises. “Help make you less of a target. Fix that yapping problem of yours that seems to always get you in trouble.”

A gag, then. The Doctor closes his mouth, very carefully pressing his teeth together.

Felicity frowns at him, “I might not be able to stop Hawthorne from her endeavors, but I can limit them. You provoked it last night. She was doing her job. This’ll help you remember to be quiet when I’m not around.” Her eyes are sympathetic and the Doctor can’t help the disgust that rolls through him at the thought that Felicity genuinely thinks she’s right. She thinks she’s helping.

“The others don’t appreciate you like I do.” She continues. “But that’s fine. I’ll keep you to myself. Anyway!” She breaks off her own trail of thought, reaching back out of sight to grab what appears to be a model of a jaw. Teeth, gums, tongue, and all.

“This is your mouth.” Felicity tells him earnestly. She places the metal gag contraption down beside his restrained head before carefully yanking the back molars of the model out. Four of them. They make a sound almost like a set of dice in her hand as she places them down on the table. “We remove the back molars, the ones that I presume are your wisdom teeth. You don’t need them anyway.” She then picks up and fiddles with the gag for a few seconds before detaching the cylindrical bases from the pantographs. “And I was going to need tooth and enamel samples anyway.” She rams the metal up the holes the removed molars had left behind in the model jaw and twists them until they’re rooted firmly inside.

The Doctor’s stomach clenches and he begins to feel another, awful wave of panic begin to rear its head inside of him. Strapped to this table, his captivity gains another edge. Something new to take when he thought they’d taken everything they already could. The meticulous way Felicity explains his next round of torment to him adds a fresh layer of horror. Knowing what’s about to happen and being powerless to stop it.

“Don’t–” He attempts but Felicity shushes him.

“Give it a firm base. We’ll reinforce their placement obviously, but basically this is to stop any tooth decay or gum deterioration. If my calculations are correct, and your anatomy works similar to ours, your jawbone should do most of the work anyway.”

Cutting his hair was temporary. Removing his clothes was temporary. Strapping him to a table was temporary. Cutting him open and stitching him up again was temporary. This was permanent. He can’t grow back teeth. What Felicity was outlining would be irreversible unless he regenerated entirely.

He jerks his head away, hearts hammering in terror within his chest when Felicity reaches a hand towards his face and it drags unwanted memories of that godforsaken guard from last night dragging his tongue up his neck, and pressing his savage lips against him, and encircling his mouth with duct tape before unbuckling his belt and the Doctor doesn’t want it. He wants to go home. Back to his TARDIS. Away from this place. Away from these people. He wants to bury himself in a hole and never come out. He wants to scrub himself clean with a cheese grater. He wants to drink himself into oblivion. He wants to stop existing and tear himself apart, and run away, and survive, and live all at once.

His TARDIS has unlimited possibilities of location, time, people. He can fast forward time, and reverse it. 

He can do anything but reverse what has been done to him.

Felicity looks offended at her rejected touch. She places her hand on his bare shoulder instead, which is just as bad because that’s where the guard had placed his hands last night when he’d been violated in the worst way imaginable and the Doctor couldn’t move to escape it, and he can’t move to escape it now and the touch drags an uncontrollable whimper from his lips. It’s not her fault, she doesn’t even know what transpired. But Felicity wants to take away his last defence. She wants to strip him of the right to defend himself with words. Strip him of the right to beg that disgusting man to stop touching him. Strip him of the right to beg Felicity to stop .

“Then the hinges screw to the base.” She continues instead, holding the rest of the gag to the jaw. The hollower, still attached base hooks in around the four front molars and Felicity holds the whole thing in place proudly. She opens and closes the jaw to demonstrate how the hinges work. “It locks closed, and opened.” She explains. “Don’t want your mouth permanently closed, in case we need something else from it.”

This whole situation is ridiculous. The Doctor is nothing but a resource to them. An object of study. Something to exploit in case they need something else from him. He twists in his bonds because they’re looser than they have been the past few days but he still can’t get them off . He’s useless, hopeless, trussed up like an animal for slaughter. Used and discarded like an object. Altered and abused because of his ‘annoying, incessant, and distracting need to yap.’ Assaulted like a slab of meat with a few holes and nothing else.

“--it unlocks altogether in case we need you to speak.” Felicity was still talking, ignoring his desperate efforts to twist free of his bonds. “It’ll make everything so much easier for you, Theta.”

“Doctor—”

“You won’t have to think anymore. Won’t have to worry about remembering to keep your yabbering to yourself. Hawthorne won’t have any more reason to do anything else. I’ll stop receiving complaints from my medical team. It’ll be so much easier for everyone.”

Easier .

The Doctor begins to feel sick. Even more so than last time. A wave of nausea threatens to take him over the edge and his panic grows all the more severe at the thought of throwing up again . He’d done it from shock at his chest being torn open. He’d done it again when the man assaulting him had climaxed; he’d nearly suffocated against the duct tape barring his mouth. The man had looked down at him in disgust as the vomit had bubbled and dripped from the wrong end of his feeding tube. He’d received a harsh slap for being messy, and gross, and unappealing.

“I’ll take everything from here. All you’ll have to do is lay there and look pretty. We’ll do everything else. We’ll find your purpose. I’m sure of it.” She clicks the final piece into place on the model; the curved metal plate rests over the model’s tongue, securing it in place.

He tries not to hyperventilate and cry and spiral into a pit of terror and hopelessness. Her words continue to pile up on top of him, binding him in control, and fear, and disgust more than any rope, chain, or leather strap ever could.

“The government will stop sending me emails about your treatment. Experiments will move smoother. Your pain responses will be monitored, but non-audible, which should,” she waves a hand, “hypothetically, make them easier for you as well.”

Hypothetically? The Doctor stares at Doctor Felicity Gray. His primary tormentor, but also, apparently the least torturous. The scientist whose curiosity would have in any other situation made him adore her. She was everything he looked for in a companion. They could’ve travelled the stars. The was so smart, so exceedingly intelligent, but at that exact moment it crumbled. Hypothetically the Doctor’s suffering aligned with how loud he expressed it. Hypothetically silencing him would remove the provocation that resulted in his abuse. Hypothetically he was merely a piece of machinery that needed to be fixed.

His breathing constricts, as if suddenly a crushing weight has been placed upon his chest. His vision blurs, and his hearing breaks into static and he’s spiralling into a void of panic, and pain, and confusion. Felicity’s words echo through his head, but they cease to have any meaning because this place intends to break him and out of all the things he’s lived through in his ten lifetimes, he’s not sure he’s going to survive this.

“You’ll be more manageable this way.” Felicity is saying, “I’m not trying to be cruel, I’m helping you.”

Because his talking was a nuisance. His screaming, and crying, and pleading , was a distraction. It was the reason he’d been tortured, and abused, and raped . It was the reason they felt the need to fix him. To permanently alter him. And the Doctor was certain he could take everything they did, survive until they made a mistake, and gave him an opening. But he’s digging his own grave. It’s getting deeper with every passing second and he’s suffocating with the weight of everything being thrown down on top of him.

If he’d stayed away from Earth. He wouldn’t have been drugged by that bartender — he can barely even recall the man's name now. If he’d run straight to his TARDIS and ignored that woman, Billie, and run away he wouldn’t have been caught by their electricity guns and drugged and brought to who knows where, here. If he’d cooperated he wouldn’t be in so much pain. If he’d just learned to shut up , Hawthorne wouldn’t have given that guard permission to break in here and have his way with him. Felicity wouldn’t think she had to fix him, or change him to keep him safe. Well… From them at least.

Everything leading up to this was a domino effect of decisions he had made himself. No one had forced him to go to Earth. No one had forced him to help Billie. No one had forced him to continue talking, and provoking and yapping. His abuse was his fault because he provoked it, he asked for it, he deserved it.

It was his fault, his fault, his fault, his fault, his fault, his fault, HIS FAULT.

“I can be good!” The words burst from his mouth uncontrollably. Fuelled by his terror, and his desperate need to regain control and autonomy. His chest is heaving in panic, he’s not even entirely certain what Felicity had continued saying. His eyes are wet and his cheeks burn with the humiliation of begging, but he’d tried everything else and it hadn’t worked . 

A tear trails down his cheek as Felicity breaks off and finally actually looks at him like he’s there . Lying in front of her, strapped to a table and alive , a sentient being with feelings, emotions, and pain receptors. His breathing hitches because for the first time in three days he feels acknowledged as an actual living thing and not just an object and it’s because he’s finally feeding into Felicity’s delusions. Something snaps inside of him. Perhaps the only way to survive this is to play along…?

“What?” She asks.

The Doctor swallows. Instantly regretting his words. A fresh wave of heat rose to his face. “I can be good.” He whispers. “I’ll stop talking. I’ll stop—” he draws in a rattling breath, “provoking punishment. Please .” He meets Felicity’s eyes, hands clenching into fists as he tries not to succumb to the flashback of last night that lingered in the back of his mind like a cat preparing to pounce. “You don’t have to do this.” He’s painfully aware of how pathetic he sounds, but he’s hurt, mentally and physically, he’s starving, he’s been drugged, and torn apart, and taken from again and again and again. Everything is becoming too real. It was too real last night. It had left him in pieces and he can’t let that happen again. 

Temporary he could fix. Psychologically, he could fix. The moment they rip out his back molars and make his mouth into that model in Felicity’s hand, some mechanical solution to all their problems. That was permanent. He can’t grow teeth back, that’s a permanent alteration to his physical appearance. He won’t come back from that. It’s a steady downhill from there.

“I can be good.” He mumbles pathetically again at Felicity’s dumbfounded face. One that twists into some kind of awe, and then pride, and finally she stares at him for a moment before her expression softens into what he supposes is some sort of sympathy, or comfort. “Theta, you’ve tried that already.”

Her voice is low, and kind, and gives the effect of someone talking to a timid animal. It leaves him winded. There’s no cruelty in her tone, no anger, just the factual detachment of someone who believes they are stating an unchangeable truth. It strikes him harder than a hand ever could and he almost wishes she’d shouted at him or hit him instead, it would’ve been an easier pill to swallow. Now it’s all too clear that Felicity has already decided that nothing he says or does matters or means anything to her.

His cries are just tears. His words are just noise. This gag was the solution to all her problems with a specimen that in her eyes, doesn’t have any sense of self preservation. Because if he did, he would’ve shut his damn mouth the day he was captured and just put up wordlessly with all of the torment they’d inflicted on him since.

“Please.” He mumbles and Felicity tilts her head ever so slightly before placing her hand on his chin and forcing him to meet her eyes.

“You’ve tried that already.’ She repeats, softer this time, as if she’s a patient teacher addressing a particularly slow student who can’t wrap their head around an equation. Her words are a cold, impenetrable wall. There’s no room to argue. The conversation is over.

The Doctor’s mouth clicks shut. His eyes are moist with unshed tears. He doesn’t speak again.

Felicity stops looking at him and straightens up at the sound of footsteps. The Doctor stiffens, his mind filled with thoughts of that guard coming back, gaining Felicity’s permission and having another round at him.

The door slides open and Victor Drabek makes a reappearance, his face is devoid of any discernible emotion, however he quirks an eye at the configuration of the room. Felicity — jaw with prototype still in hand — acknowledges him with a glance before pushing her unneeded supplies to the side and replacing them with a collection of metal tools.

“You wanted some help?” Drabek’s gaze lingers on Felicity’s bustling movements. She doesn’t break stride and simply points somewhere the Doctor can’t see. 

“Screw those back in place. Just the neck and arms should be fine.”

An eerie numbness begins to seep its way through the Doctor’s body. Not unlike the time he’d gone into shock from having his chest torn open. However, this time it wasn’t physical trauma related. It was a strange kind of resignation. He was terrified, he didn’t want this to happen, but there was no stopping it. The best he can do is survive. Survive and adapt. He’ll escape eventually, he always does. He just needs to make sure he’s alive at the other end.

Drabek looks confused for a moment. “Isn’t it a bit early to be preparing for the scheduled vivisection? The rest of the surgery team isn’t in until midday.”

Felicity shrugs, “no time like the present. But this isn’t for that anyway. Mara overstepped, I’m taking precautions.”

Drabek raises an eyebrow but doesn’t question any further. He simply does as he’s told. Which would have made the Doctor laugh at any other time, but now he just feels numb as the captain screws the curved, metal fixture across his throat, forcing his head up and immobile. His biceps are done next, before Drabek ensures the strap over his chest is firm enough.

Felicity finishes preparing her equipment and checks the restraints herself before expanding a blood pressure monitor around his arm and tapping at the heart monitor’s screen. “I want this done now so he has enough time to recover before the next operation.” She tells Drabek.

“What exactly is ‘this’?”

Felicity looks away from the Doctor’s helpless glaring, “I’m preventing excuses for meddling with my project. Commissioner Hawthorne seems to think she can just come in and torture my most valuable specimen, just because she outranks me and he ‘talked too much’.” She makes quotation marks with her fingers. “My medical team is getting squeamish not even a day in. I’m tired of it.”

Drabek makes a noise that sounds like a mix between ‘ I agree entirely,’ and ‘ I have no idea what you’re implying here, but I’m going to act like I do so you don’t think I’m stupid.’

Felicity turns away briefly and The Doctor tries to remain calm when she turns back, snapping gloves into place on her hands and then pressing a finger between his lips to coax his mouth open and suddenly the phantom taste of his own blood floods his senses. Felicity’s fingers are replaced by the guards fingers and the Doctor moans around them in panic, clenching his teeth shut and attempting to wriggle away despite the impossibility of it.

He cries out as Drabek takes a firm grip of his hair and holds his head still, giving Felicity leverage to pry his jaw open. “ Please .” He begs, not even caring for the humiliation. His mind frozen between Felicity and Mara Hawthorne’s face, and Drabek and the guards face. “Please, don’t do this.” He writhes in his straps as Felicity forces a wedge between his teeth and his pleas are turned into pathetic garbled whines.

Then they turn their attention away from him, and he’s left to stew. His jaw burns from the width it's been forced to. His head is filling to the brim and overspilling with hyper realistic visuals of last night. Get off, get off, let go, please!

“None of my usual medical team are rostered early today.” Felicity was saying, “and there’s no way I’m going to torture myself with Allison again. He’s been demoted to coffee duty anyway. So I need you on vitals.”

She’s talking to Drabek and had the Doctor not been trying to not spiral into a panic attack, the idea of the squeamish captain actually having to remain present for his torture this time would’ve been hilarious. But he is, and it’s not.

“I’m not a medic.” Drabek immediately argues.

“And I’m not a dentist.” Felicity counters, “and here we are.” She pushes Drabek in front of the monitors the Doctor was hooked up to.

“I don’t even know how any of this works.” Drabek looks cornered between Felicity and the door he very clearly wants to run through.

“Can you read?”

“Yes?”

“Can you count?”

“Yes…”

“Great. You’re perfect for the job.” Felicity’s hands move in the corner of the Doctor’s blurry vision as she gestures at the controls. “This is his heart rate. He has two of them, one beats on beat, the other beats off beat.” She drums two fingers on the side of the monitor to demonstrate. “Each heart beats about the average of a healthy human, however based on the past few days, because there’s two of them his heart rate on this monitor is double that. About a range of 120 to 200 beats a minute. I only want you to tell me if it drops below 100, or spikes above 220. He functions better than we do under stress, so anything other than that should stabilise in a few moments. Am I making sense to you, or is this going in one ear and out the other?”

Drabek looks panicked for a second as he appears to mentally note down the information. “Makes sense.”

“Good.” Felicity points to something else, “heart rate is the most important. Make sure his oxygen doesn’t drop too far below average for a human. If it does that, he’s going into shock. Same with the blood pressure. However, only alert me if it drops and stays that way. His body has a remarkable habit of fixing itself after about a minute or so. Especially after yesterday, he would’ve already developed coping techniques. He’ll be fine.”

“Convenient.” Drabek mumbles.

“No. Not convenient.” Felicity snaps, “irritating. Half his readings are anomalous because he’s not human. I’m practically working blind, so try not to make this worse by missing something obvious. Regardless though. He’s phenomenal. If you let him die–” She lets the threat linger.”

“Noted.”

“Wonderful,” Felicity beams, “let's get started.” She moves back into position at the Doctor’s side, a syringe in one hand as she uses the other to part the Doctor’s lips a little wider. Ignoring his heightened breathing and refusing to meet his eyes to focus on the task at hand.

The syringe slides into the back of his gums, the pressure growing in his jaw as she slowly moves it around through administering whatever was inside it. “I don’t know if this will work for you,” she sounds almost apologetic, “it’s kind of exciting though. Learning what works, and what doesn’t. It’s supposed to numb the surrounding tissue, but considering we’ve kept you under the influence of several doses of pentobarbital each night and it’s hardly made a dent. I don’t think it will.”

She’s right. The anaesthesia does little beyond flooding his mouth with a maddening tingle, the sensation of pins and needles flooding through it, spreading to his tongue, and making it harder to swallow the constant build up of saliva he’s trying not to choke on. He swallows convulsively, the action painful around his forcefully open mouth. The taste of chemicals cling to his tongue as Felicity positions her scalpel near his back molars and slices the gum open.

His mouth erupts in a blinding heat at the damage and he feels his eyes begin to water. His muffled groan is choked on the blood that fills the back of his throat. He jerks against his restraints, but can do nothing but endure as Felicity carefully peels the gum away and exposes his jawbone to the cold sterile air of his prison.

“Heart rate escalating.” Drabek speaks, his voice thick with false disinterest despite his very obvious unease.

Felicity doesn’t look up, her eyes narrow. “That’s a normal pain response. It just shows the anaesthesia definitely didn’t work. I told you when to alert me if something’s wrong.”

“I—” Drabek clears his throat. “Sorry.”

“Shh.” Felicity takes her forceps and the Doctor has to close his eyes as the world begins to swim in front of him and she takes a firm grip on the tooth and begins to rock it backwards and forwards. It sends an unimaginable pressure through his jaw and he clenches his fists against it as it spreads up and through his head with agonising speed. It feels as if his entire jaw might crack, each shift of the tooth grinds bone against bone. His jaw clenches instinctively, but is blocked by the wedge keeping it open. 

“Your teeth are definitely rooted a lot stronger than I’ve ever had to deal with.” Felicity murmurs, her voice is laced with intrigue, but the comment barely registers. The Doctor’s world narrows down to the white-hot pain throbbing through his skull. 

He’s overtaken by a sharp, blinding agony when the tooth finally gives way with a revolting crunch that echoes through his very core. It cuts deep, a moist and splitting noise and a deep, lingering pain that makes his vision flash white. He has to swallow down the mouthful of blood that floods the back of his throat to stop himself from choking on it. He can barely see. His hearing has cut out from the migrain that splits through his skull, into static and the high pitched whine of a drill as Felicity lowers it into the exposed nerves and bone.

The Doctor screams . His mouth erupts into an inescapable agony and his cries of anguish go ignored as Felicity continues drilling into bone. He convulses in the restraints, throttling himself on the neck restraint and coughing fitfully around the blood that’s very slowly choking him to death, but Doctor Gray merely places a firm hand on his forehead and holds him still while she finishes the job by carefully screwing the metal replacement into place. Its threading grates through his jawbone like some sort of horror film scene and he cries out again as Felicity tugs on it a little to test its placement.

“Oh, Theta. You’re doing so well.” Felicity loosens the bonds slightly to tip his head to the side as he hacks up the blood in his lungs. Everything goes hazy and he shudders as moisture drips down his chin. 

“Please.” He begs breathlessly when the wedge comes loose. “Please. I’ll be good.” He trails off into mumbled Galifreyan that Felicity continues to ignore as she meticulously massages his throat to remove the last of the blockages, replaces the wedge, tightens his head upright again and then goes back down for the next tooth.

He’s horrifically too aware of the agony that splits through his mouth, and his wheezy, panicked breathing. Drabek speaks a few times about vitals but Felicity brushes him off each time, certain he’ll stabilise.

He’s not certain he’s still alive when she finishes the extractions. His mouth is a bloody mess. His head pounds. His entire jaw is wracked with an agony that makes him worried for a moment that something was broken, or missing entirely. He retches pathetically when Felicity pulls the wedge out and rinses his mouth with some sort of antiseptic before coaxing him to spit.

“Good, shh.” Felicity wipes his tears away and rubs circles into his clenched hands in some twisted attempt to comfort him. “Almost done,” she says, “I’m helping you, this isn’t a punishment, I promise.” 

The Doctor whimpers a barely there ‘ please’ as she coaxes his mouth open again.

“You’re so good, Theta.” Felicity picks up the pantographs with her free hand, her other one parting his lips. “You’re being so good for me. This will help you be good for the others too.”

She screws the pantographs to the top and bottom anchor points. Each turn of the screws jostle his throbbing jaw and he can’t stop the keening noise that slips free when she wires the last two through his front few molars and connects the whole contraption together with the bridge beam.

Then the tongue bar is screwed into place and it’s done. Permanently altered. Irrevocably damaged. The pantographs continue to hold his mouth wide open and the metal covering his tongue holds it immobile against the bottom of his mouth, but at the press of a button the metal compresses together and drags his mouth painfully shut. His teeth are clamped tightly together with no give. His jaw filled with inescapable pain. The most he can do is wheeze out a few broken whimpers in response to Felicity continuing to manipulate his mouth to calibrate the gags gears. Every other noise is trapped behind metal.

Felicity cups his chin and forces him to meet her eyes. She swims in front of him, her expression soft and doting as she looks down at him. “You’re perfect.” She murmurs. “You did so well. I’m so proud of you.”

And something else cracks inside of him. Something crumbles. His walls fall. Broken. Along with his voice, his freedom, and everything else they want to take from him.

Felicity pushes past Drabek to check his vitals herself before giving him a quick wipe down. She puts his bloody molars into a tube and sends them away for study.

Then the two of them prepare him for the next vivisection. Screwing the metal restraints back down. Felicity parts his lips a few times to check on his teeth, marvelling at her ‘perfect creation’. No part of the Doctor is safe. He’s been violated in every which way possible. Everything taken and destroyed and moulded into something unrecognisable.

She sits with him for a while. Her hand tangled in his and he can’t pull away so he just lets her.

“The pain is temporary.” She promises, rubbing comforting circles into the joint where his thumb meets his hand. “You’ll adapt. I’m sure you will. You’re extraordinary. You’re built to endure.”

The Doctor mumbles something illegible at her. He’s not even sure what he’d been attempting to say. His jaw is swollen, he’s barely conscious. His mouth tastes like blood and metal. His face is streaked with his silent tears.

Felicity hums back at him, as if she’d understood. She leans her head on the table next to his and sighs contentedly. Her hand creeps up to cup his face, he moans in pain as she holds him captive in her arms, wiping his tears and whispering about how good he was.

It’s comforting. Despite the pain, he leans into her gentle touch. Craving any semblance of kindness he can get.

“I’m here.” She promises. “I’ll keep you safe.”

An hour or so later the surgery team arrives and Felicity tears him apart again.

Chapter Text

They hadn’t stopped this time. There was no need. Felicity had been right. His body had adapted to the scalpels, the bone saw, the rib clamps. He hadn’t gone back into shock, because his body had learnt how to accept the violation. He was built to accept the violation. 

He had still felt every single ounce of pain that tore itself through his body.

He couldn’t even scream.

His jaw was still swollen black and blue from the gag installation. His gums still left with a deep, inescapable ache as his body worked against the intrusions. His bone began to integrate with the metal that had been threaded into it. They’d become permanent fixtures in his jaw, a betrayal of his anatomy doing its best to compensate. There was nothing he could do about it.

They leave the gag hinged completely shut for the entire procedure. His teeth glued together by the mental pantographs and his tongue pressed downwards by the curved metal screwed in place. It sent spasms through his cheeks and behind his eyes everytime he tried to open his mouth to scream, so every sound that emerged sounded more like a strained groan that was stuck in the back of his throat with nowhere to go. 

It felt like hours going by where he could do nothing but endure , and feel . And he could feel nothing but pain and anguish .

At some point during the procedure, Felicity had lost interest in prodding his hearts with different kinds of objects and her attention had turned to his respiratory system when she’d noticed his oxygen bypass doing its best to compensate for his increasingly difficult time in breathing through his nose.

“You’ve done this several times now.” Felicity murmurs, her voice barely registerable over the sound of monitors, assistants, and the Doctor’s own intermittent, laboured breathing. He can feel air inside him. “Your hearts slow down. Your breathing practically stops, and you gain that faraway look in your eyes that makes me think you’re going into shock. But you’re not.” Her eyes glance over at her vitals tech — the one who had replaced Sage Allison after he’d complained about the Doctor’s treatment — who merely shrugged in response.

“Vitals are as stable as they can be while the subject is under such high levels of stress.”

Felicity beams at them, “awesome! We’ll keep going.” She stares down at the Doctor. “Your body rights itself. It burns through the shock response and adapts. Absolutely remarkable.”

The Doctor takes a shaky breath through the gaps in his teeth. It stings from the cool air, but it fills his reserves slightly more than breathing through one nostril does.

Felicity begins counting the moment he exhales. The Doctor knows immediately what she’s doing. He wants to breathe normally again out of spite, but self preservation takes over and he can’t control his body’s instincts to preserve his oxygen supply as much as possible.

He manages to breathe in an awkward, untrackable cycle instead. Dragging in breaths in random intervals and watching with quiet, albeit agonised satisfaction as Felicity’s frustration grows on her face as she can’t seem to find a scientific explanation for his abnormal breathing.

“Frost, swap with me.”

The people above him shuffle around for a bit and the Doctor barely has enough time to heave in another breath before suddenly Felicity is clamping her hands over his mouth and nose and his oxygen is cut off completely.

He rears up against the sudden pressure on his abused mouth, pain washing through him in waves. It extends down his throat and reverberates through his desecrated chest.

His bypass doesn’t worry though. His reserve is full from his intermittent breathing. He could probably remain like this for an hour or more if he wasn’t drained from his insides being on display. Now? Maybe he could survive twenty or so minutes without straining? Thirty if he tried hard enough.

His heart slows down to only a few beats per minute. His chest goes still altogether as his lungs break down his O2 reserves for him. He’ll be fine.

But Felicity is patient . And Felicity is intrigued . Her grip over his mouth and nose tightens as ten minutes pass. She stares at his very visible lungs that heave in his chest, on display through the clamps that part his sternum and ribs and flesh. She taps his cheek when his eyes begin to close from the stupor he’d lulled himself into, dragging him back to the painful reality of the agony that wreaks havoc through his devastated body.

Twenty minutes pass and he’s nearing unconsciousness again. He still has oxygen left to use, but the supply is growing smaller by the second and Felicity is relentless. His jaw aches. His chest screams . Felicity presses her fingers into his jaw, firmly, sending a flare of agony through the bruising. He feels himself beginning to flush as his lungs struggle to ration his remaining breath.

Thirty minutes and the Doctor is barely functioning. He can hear the vitals tech saying something about his blood pressure and oxygen dropping, but everything else around him begins to move sluggishly in slow motion. His chest screams in agony as it jerks in response to his lungs trying to force air through his blocked airways. He tries to will himself to be calm, he could probably push forward another ten or so minutes if he tried hard enough. His lungs burn and his limbs begin to thrash involuntarily and the Doctor is getting increasingly tired of being asphyxiated.

And then, just as he’s about to slip into oblivion; his chest on fire from hypoxia, his organs screaming in anguish, his mouth burning from the pressure on his freshly removed molars, Felicity lets go.

He gasps in his first breath of fresh air in nearly three quarters of an hour. The feeling is agonising as it drags at his split open chest and he can’t stop — can’t be bothered to stop — the screech of pain that emits behind his forcibly clenched teeth. The air whistles between the gaps of his canines as he frantically tries to refill his lungs and his reserves and escape the leather that holds him inescapably to the table beneath him.

There are words tossed around him, none of which are legible at all over the ringing in his ears and the heaving of his breath.

Every time his lips attempt to part in order to express any sort of sound at all, his head screams as the pegs in his jaw pull and stab at the nerves in his gums. The steady migraine he’d had since the installation flares, and his tongue stings as it rubs against the sharp edges of the metal plate screwed over the top of it.

The world blurs before him, his head spins. He’s not entirely registering anything outside of pain and his desperation to breathe.

When he finally drags himself back to the world of comprehension, Felicity is sewing him up again.

The Doctor feels each and every time the needle breaks through his flesh. He can feel the thread as it drags through the poked holes. He can feel his own blood pooling on his chest.

His moans of pain go unheard as she finishes off. Running an antiseptic over the now closed wound that makes his vision flash pure white as it eats away at the incision, clearing out every foreign object or entity that had entered him while his guts were on display.

Once everyone clears out of the room, Felicity lingers, fiddling with the restraints as she removes the excess metal ones.

”How do you not go into Hypercapnia when doing that?” She asks finally. Breaking the still air of the now silent room. Her hand rests possessively on his chest, sending a violent shudder through his abused body. The Doctor stares back at her through half lidded eyes. He swallows behind the metal in his mouth, the feeling and taste unpleasant. He breathes, probably the only indicator that he’s still alive as he sags in his restraints. Energy spent.

”I mean you started to get some of the symptoms towards the end there, but other than that, you remained entirely fine for-” she checks her monitor, “thirty six minutes, and twenty seven seconds.”

The Doctor tries to focus on her words, he really does, but the world is slipping away again. His mind is disassociating from the inescapable pain and trauma his body is struggling to compensate for. Taking him somewhere else, somewhere away. He’s not sure where. Just… away. Gone. He’s not sure he’s actually alive anymore. He feels like he’s slipped into a limbo between death and life. Not quite a part of either.

”There’s got to be some sort of biological explanation for that. Do you have an extra organ? I don’t think so. Unless it’s hiding somewhere behind what we’ve already studied. I’d hate to have to operate through your back, but I might add it to the list, just in case.”

That gains his attention, the Doctor shakes his head weakly. He really does not want that. The chest was enough. His mouth was enough. The risk of paralysis through his back was too much. He still needs to get out of here. If Felicity ruins his spine in some way he’s never escaping, he’d be done for. He whimpers as Felicity presses his head sideways playfully with two gloved fingers against his chin. “Not that?” She hums. “Does your body absorb Oxygen better than ours does then? Considerably so, considering how long you held your breath just then. Can you simply survive without oxygen longer, or do you absorb it differently? Might it use the co2 for breath as well? Or do you work like whales, and other sea dwelling creatures and merely store the carbon dioxide until you can breathe again? Do you store oxygen for moments like that? Is that what the intermittent breathing was? The slower heart rate?”

The questions are rhetoric of course. She knows he can’t respond. She’s the reason he can’t respond.

Her hand returns to his chest, tracing over his hammering hearts and heaving lungs, everything that had been on display earlier. Everything she’d touched with ungloved hands. Tainted. Studied. “You truly are a marvel, Theta. I can’t wait to know you better than you know yourself. I can’t wait to give you purpose. This could be revolutionary if we can recreate it. That eighty percent of the ocean we haven’t discovered yet? It could be within our reach. We could continue further space travel. Worries for global warming and such would be solved.”

She scribbles excitedly in her notebook as he lays there, attempting to recover, attempting to prepare for the next time they decide to open him up again.

Felicity slips a finger between his lips to check the metal she’d replaced his molars with. Her eyes clinical as she cleans the wounds, ignoring the Doctor’s illegible pleas, holding firm when he attempts to pull away.

“You’ve done so well.” Her voice softens as she brushes away his tear tracks with a thumb. “There’s no evidence of rejection at the extraction site, and your tolerance to being vivisected has gone up drastically since the last one. I thought it would. But it truly is something else to see it put to action. Is there a limit? Or can I keep pushing?”

He stares up at her with steadily growing resignation pooling inside him, it weighs down the rage, and the panic. He’s so tired. His body is still trembling through the aftershocks of being cut open and put on display. His mouth aches with a deep, burning heat. The inability to part his teeth fills him with a deep, suffocating sense of claustrophobia. He wants out. He wants out now .

He’s not sure if there is one though. Three days in and he’s filling ever so slowly with a terrifying sense of resignation. His suffering is a means to an end. They’ll slip up eventually. When they do he’ll act, he’ll get out, he’ll escape. But until then, he’s trapped. He hates it, but the truth is there. There is simply no escape right now, bound to this table, in this sterile, locked room, with these scientists, and guards, hellbent on his destruction for their own gain. He just needs to endure and hope he can recover in the aftermath.

He’s not so sure.

“I’ll finish up and leave you be now,” Felicity straightens herself up and begins reattaching the drug IV to the Doctor’s arm, “you’ve got a long life ahead of you. So much to do.” And he’s not sure what’s worse; the threat behind that statement, or the feeling of panic that rises in his chest at the thought of Felicity leaving him alone again. The lesser of evils, leaving him with the potential of a billion worse. No words to protect him now. He’s completely and utterly defenceless should that guard choose to come back.

He lets out a pitiful keening sound, partly a please don’t go that horrifies him to his very core, and partly an expression of agony at every hurt that rears its head.

Felicity pats him on the head, “I’ve got work to do, Theta. You’re not my only priority. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Then she reinserts the rectal tube, cleans up the mess, sterilises the room and exits with a soft, “see you tomorrow, Theta.”

And the guard does come back. Earlier than last time too. The Doctor jerks himself awake at the sound of the door hissing open beside him. His vision swims before him, but he can see as his assaulter sidles up to the table. His eyes are hungry, and cocky, and his confidence has skyrocketed since the last two times. He doesn’t bother upping the sedative dosage like last time, he merely moves the tubes out of the way and begins his torment.

The Doctor can do nothing as he’s repositioned again. His legs are spread, back arched, arms clamped still. The leather bites into his wrists as he bucks against them, words held behind the bars of his teeth as he growls at his assaulter. Not again. Please not again.

He clocks the very moment the guard discovers the new predicament in his mouth.

“You’re awfully quiet tonight.” His voice sends a chill down the Doctor’s spine and he strains helplessly in his restraints, eyes pleading, body shivering. “Are you finally learning your place?”

A curious hand creeps up his neck and slips between his lips and the Doctor closes his eyes against the wave of throbbing pain that reverberates through his helpless body as the guard feels up the metal that clamps his teeth together. His eyes fill with glee in the dim lighting of the Doctor’s prison as he quickly works out the controls to force his lips wide and helpless. 

“Look at that.” The guard breathes. “Dr. Gray really knows how to make my day.”

The Doctor’s chest heaves in panic, his mouth forced wide, his legs prone and spread. His face flushes in humiliation and shame.

The guard presses his fingers down the Doctor’s throat, his sneering face revelling in the choked whimpers he elicits from the assault. “Oh, I like this new version of you,” the guard grins. His eyes have flecks of green in them. “Submissive…” He wipes the drool that had begun to slide down the Doctor’s cheek with a thumb, his fingers are rough and calloused in the places his hands would rest on the handle, safety, and trigger of a gun.

“Helpless,” the guard shifts himself so that he’s between the Doctor’s legs, placing a knee on the table so that he can lean over the top of the Doctor’s helpless form. He can’t stop the tears that leak down his face, the saliva that drips from his parted lips, or the trembling that wracks itself through his body.

He thrashes against his restraints, slicing his wrists open in frantic, panic induced, struggling as the guard presses his mouth down against the Doctor’s. The heat of his assaulter's breath, hot against his cheeks, sends his thoughts into overdrive. Endless streams of begging, possibilities, fruitless escape plans. The guard’s lips are violent, and vile as they tear into his. The guard’s hands close around his wrists, and then his neck as his struggles weaken.

“Keep fighting, gorgeous,” the guard's fingers flex against his throat as he pulls up briefly for air, and the Doctor whimpers. “It makes this more fun.”

The Doctor cries as this disgusting, vile, monster tortures him. His lips crack and split as the man bites and presses into them. His wrists are hot and bleeding from his struggles. His neck bruises from the pressure of hands against his windpipe. His jaw aches as the gag forces it wider as the guard pulls away and replaces his lips with the muzzle of his gun between his teeth. His lips are sore and bloodied and he retches against the taste of metal and ash that floods his senses. His vision blurs from the tears in his eyes. He would welcome a bullet through his skull…

The guard notices when he doesn’t flinch at the safety being pulled. “God, you’re more fucked then I am.” He brushes the Doctor’s sweaty hair away from his forehead and presses the gun deeper down his throat. The Doctor gags around it, chest heaving, his breathing laboured, eyes half closed. “I could pull the trigger, and you wouldn’t even care.”

The Doctor sobs, because the guard is right. He might have feared death a few days ago, but now… Now he would gladly welcome the embrace that death would bring. Anything to escape his future of being strapped to this table and torn apart, again and again. Raped, again and again. He doesn’t want to die. He wants to live. To continue travelling. He wants to escape. But if he can’t escape. He’ll take oblivion over an eternity of torment.

The guard's lips curl into a smile, his hands fumble with the Doctor’s mouth again, he pulls the gun away and releases the mechanism that had immobilised his jaw for hours, he slides the plate that pinned his tongue against the bottom of his mouth. It sends spasms through the lower half of his face, a deep cramping that spirals down his neck, and into his spine.

The Doctor flexed his jaw, his tongue running over the metal stubs embedded in his gums, the mechanism slicing the tip on sharp, unfinished edges. His blood runs cold when the guard speaks next.

“I want you…” his words are slow, quiet, and drawn out. “To beg me to kill you.”

The Doctor goes still. His mind hits a brick wall at the notion. The drugs in his system make him fumble as he tries to come up with a response.

He doesn’t get enough time to think before the guard grows too impatient, pulls the cattle prod clipped to his belt out and jams it into the tender skin between the Doctor’s ribs.

His exhausted body convulses so violently against the surge of electricity it nearly dislocates his shoulders. His back arches and his teeth crack together while every muscle contracts and seizes in anguish. When the prod pulls away he cries out in a breathless, agonised rush of air. His chest heaves in unconcealed terror.

His tormentor doesn’t give him any time to recover before slamming the prod back into his ribs in barely concealed glee. The Doctor screams soundlessly as electricity rips through him, his body twitches even after it stops.

After the third round he manages a breathless “ss’top!” The words feel foreign in his mouth as the pantographs move with his speech, they give him a lisp and he instinctively recoils from the sound of his own voice. The submission fills him with a self-loathing that almost makes him crave the death his attacker offered. He’s filled with a deeply rooted disgust at his own weakness, a hatred that sickens him to his very core. 

“What was that?”

The Doctor’s breath shudders as he sucks air into his failing lungs, the pain in his chest and the drugs in his system muddle his thoughts and he’s not even entirely certain what he’s even trying to say. He can’t remember why the man had decided to electrocute him instead of simply gagging him and taking what he wanted. He’s sure something had been said, some demand had been made, but it had vanished from his head the moment the cattle prod had appeared. “Stop.” He repeats himself.

“Stop what? Stop hurting you? Stop giving you a purpose, a use, for that chatty mouth of yours? Stop what?”

The Doctor’s hoarse breathing turns into a pitiful keening sound as he tries to catch his breath. He doesn’t know how to respond, he’s not sure what to do to appease his attacker without submitting completely. He doesn’t know how much more of this he can take, he doesn’t know how to submit without losing more of himself. His face flushes with heat again as his tormentor raises an eyebrow and brushes his tears away with mock tenderness. He feels moronic as he fumbles for words, for an explanation, a meaning, a purpose, and comes up with nothing.

“S-s’top.” He repeats stupidly.

The cattle prod ignites itself against him again and the Doctor screams . The sound is piercing, it reverberates through his ears. No one comes running to save him. No one cares. His hands clench into fists, his toes curl, his neck and back contort as he writhes in agony.

“Stop!” He begs again once his lips work, and he breaks into a coughing fit as bile floods his mouth and his body is wracked with shivers, and he wants nothing more than to sink into oblivion. He wants nothing more than to die.

“That sounds like a demand, Theta. You’re not really in a place to be making demands.”

The Doctor’s breath rattles in his throat, he makes a disgusting gurgling noise as he struggles to clear his airways of bile, blood, and saliva. “ Please.” He adds quietly, forcing the words from behind his teeth, a feeling of helplessness making him sink further with every word. “Stop.”

The prod hits him again and the Doctor is too exhausted to scream again, he takes it silently, it rips through him and leaves him empty. He tries to think of something else, anything else, somewhere else. He thinks of the TARDIS, of Donna, of Rose— no, no, no, no. He can’t do that to them. Can’t bring them here. 

He stares around the dim room, if he could look anywhere but the face of his attacker, latch on to something solid, something predictable. What time was it? How long until Felicity came back?

“That’s not what I asked you.” The man’s voice slices through his concentration, his drug addled brain fumbles for purchase again.

“I-” The Doctor tries to think, tries to remember. He swallows thickly. “ Ple– Stop.” His thoughts feel slow, slippery, like sand slipping between his fingers. Everything hurts. His body is trembling violently, his limbs numb and burning all at once, a paradox of agony that makes his stomach turn. He can feel his own blood pooling in the palms of his hands where it had leaked from his ruined wrists.

Three days and he was breaking. Three days and he’s not certain he’ll be able to come back from this. Three days he’s been here. He’s pathetic, and weak, and he deserves everything they’ve done to him. He deserves everything they will do to him.

“Please what?” The guard leers over him. He’d asked the Doctor a question. But that was before the cattle prod. The Doctor’s thoughts scramble around aimlessly in his head as he attempts to latch on to something, anything to ground him. To get him through this. But the question keeps slipping away from him, sinking beneath the tide of agony, blurred at the edges by exhaustion and the unbearable static crawling through his nerves.

The guard watches him struggle, tilting his head with an expression of mock curiosity, as if studying a wounded animal clinging to its last pitiful threads of existence. The great last of the Time Lords, strapped to a table, thoughtless, crying. Disgusting, pathetic, waste of existence .

“Come on, Theta,” he drawls, taking the name that Felicity had already ruined, and somehow destroying it more. His assailant trails the cattle prod idly against the tender skin of his neck, the Doctor closes his eyes as he shivers from the touch, knowing any moment it would turn on again, light his world on fire. “What do you say?”

The Doctor’s head lolls against the table, his breath ragged. His thoughts feel slow, fogged, slipping in and out of coherence. His lips part, but all that comes out is a broken, breathy whine. A pathetic attempt at speech, an unfinished syllable that dies before it becomes a word.

The guard sighs, shaking his head. “Pathetic.”

Then the prod ignites in the small of his jaw, and the Doctor doesn’t even have time to brace for it before the surge of electricity rips through him, and he convulses violently, his back bowing, his jaw locking tight enough to send a sickening jolt through his skull. His muscles spasm in uncontrolled waves, and he can’t even draw breath to scream. His vision whites out, his mind blanking to nothing but pure, endless suffering.

When it stops, he collapses bonelessly back against the table, his body still twitching, his breathing ragged. The edges of his consciousness are flickering, but not fast enough. Never fast enough.

“Theta.” The guard’s voice drags him back to reality, and he wants to sob at the cruelty of it. He wants to go home. He wants his TARDIS. He wants Felicity to come back, save him, kill the monster that was tormenting him.

He heaves in a shuddering sob. “Please.” It doesn’t even feel like a word anymore, it feels like the last threads of his defiance snapping and leaving him churning in a violent ocean of submission.

“I’ll stop when you do what I told you to.”

He can’t remember. He doesn’t know what the guard wants.

“I— nngg.” The Doctor lifts his head as far as his restraints allow off the table and slams it back down in frustration. It achieves nothing but making his head spin and sending a jolt of agony through his damaged jaw.

“Nothing?” The guard taunts. He shrugs and presses the prod back against the Doctor’s neck, fingers preparing to ignite it. “No matter, I’ve got all night.”

“What do you w’nt?” The Doctor sounds ridiculous. His words are slurred, desperate, lisped. “Please! I– I don’t— I can’t.” His chest heaves and he desperately tries to angle his head away from the cattle prod to no avail. He can’t take any more. He needs to survive to get out of this. He needs to get out of this. “Please, tell me what you want.”

His tormentor grins. “You don’t remember? It was like two minutes ago.”

The Doctor grits his teeth. “That was before you decided frying my synapses was the best way to solve your lack of—” He breaks off in a scream as the prod fires against his throat again. His teeth crunch together and his eyes roll backwards in his head as he fights his failing consciousness.

“I’ll give you a hint.” His captor says when the Doctor is coherent again. “You were begging so prettily before. For the easy way out.”

I want you to beg me to kill you…

The memory floods back to him with a vengeance. The Doctor trembles in his bonds as he remembers the gun between his lips. He doesn’t want to die. He deserves to die. Death would be too easy. Death would save him from further torment.

“I–” He swallowed thickly. “I can’t .”

The guard taps the prod against his lips impatiently and the Doctor flinches violently. “Would a little electricity from the inside help?” The guard asks, the prod presses painfully against the Doctor’s teeth and he shakes his head desperately. He doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want this man to continue either. He… he can’t.

The guard fires the prod for a split second against his closed lips, it’s barely long enough to do much more than send a painful jolt through his destroyed mouth, but it hurts . He wants it to stop. He needs it to stop.

“Next time it’ll be in your mouth.” The guard warns. “Better decide on an answer soon.”

All of his thoughts crash together in the haze of panic, pain, and confusion. His remaining rational thought screams at him to just give in! You can work through the emotional consequences later. The regeneration might even give you enough energy to get out of this hell hole. But the Doctor himself can’t bring himself to do it. He can’t take the humiliation. He’s not sure he can pick himself back up after this. He’s not sure he wants his next life to begin like this.

“Tick Tock.” The muzzle of the cattle prod pushes past his teeth and the Doctor doesn’t want this . He doesn’t want to be in pain anymore. He doesn’t want to be here anymore. And perhaps he deserves to die. He’s already stooped low enough to appease Felicity. He’s already screamed, and cried, and begged, and thrown up, and disgraced himself down to his core. He was lying naked, strapped to a table, and about to be assaulted again. Perhaps death was the better option.

“Please.” The Doctor spits the words like venom. Fighting through his inner resistance in the name of survival. His next incarnation doesn’t deserve another attack on his psyche. He can take the easy way out. Give his next face a chance.

The prod pulls away slightly, just enough to allow the Doctor’s words to be legible. “Please what?”

The Doctor stares bloody murder at his attacker, all of his rage and humiliation and hatred burning. “ Please , nngg–” He chokes on the words, his psyche crumbling, he has to force the words past his lips, trying to think of something, anything else to say that might diffuse the situation. Talk his way out of it. He comes up with nothing. His lips tremble as he fights against himself. “Kill me.”

The guard pouts. “Say it like you mean it.”

The Doctor breathes in and out. He grits his teeth, blinking away the tears in his eyes. “ Please, kill me.”

The guard smiles in triumph and the Doctor hates himself. The Doctor needs to die.

“Please.” He says again.

The guard ignites the cattle prod inside his mouth, shoving it deeper and making him gag as his body thrashes violently against the assault. He screams in agony, his very being dismantling from the inside. His vision erupts into static and he can’t think anything outside of how much it hurts . He’s in agony. Nothing exists outside of pain . He can’t feel anything but pain, and suffering, and the craving of death. 

When it stops, the guard has unbuckled his belt. His expression is one of fake sympathy. The Doctor had done what he wanted. The Doctor was supposed to be dead now. Or at the very least regenerating, stronger, able to escape…

“No.” The Guard says.

The guard cleans him up when he’s done. Straightening his limbs back out into their usual cuffs. Wiping blood away, wiping sticky residue away, wiping bile away. The wet cloth is harsh against his ruined flesh, it stinks of lemon dish soap. The Doctor is an object, a thing. His purpose is to be used, discarded, used, cleaned, maintained… His mouth is rebound with metal against his tongue, pulling his teeth shut and silencing his whimpers of pain, and submission.

All evidence of his torture has healed by now too. The burns gone from his chest, the bruises faded from his throat, and his thighs.

The Doctor is still alive. Still breathing, and he loathes it.

He stares vacantly at the ceiling, his body throbs with remembered pain, his wrists bleed sluggishly onto the metal table beneath him, his tears soak his cheeks, his thoughts are fractured, and tangled, and it’s been half a week and the Doctor can’t even recall what life outside of this was even like.

“Thanks for the lovely time, Theta.” The guard finishes zipping his pants up, buckling his belt. “I’ll see you again tomorrow night, Theta...”

Chapter Text

The Doctor doesn’t sleep.

He lies there in the haze of a pained and dissociative drug induced stupor. His head lolls sideways in its restraint, it presses into his windpipe and makes breathing harder than it should be but he’s too exhausted to readjust how he’s lying. It wouldn’t make much difference anyway. There was nothing he’d be able to do if someone entered the room and made it worse. And they would, they’d find some way to make it worse.

He can still feel every individual hurt that has been inflicted upon him, but they begin to feel muted, and distant. He’s floating in the lull of the pentobarbital running sluggishly through his veins as his body tries its very best to metabolise it as quickly as possible, the dosage seemingly higher since the guard had left. Still not quite enough to knock him out, but high enough that he struggles to hold onto any complex trains of thought. The world seems to spin around him though he knows he’s still lying supine on his table. However much more the guard had added to his dosage was significantly more than it had been the last few nights, not as much as they’d pumped him with upon his initial capture, but enough that an eerie numbness was beginning to overtake his tired limbs.

Strong enough that he can’t seem to recover, can’t seem to build up those walls he’d so meticulously built earlier. Can’t seem to put on a stoic face, compartmentalise. They leave him raw, scrambling for purchase in the crashing storm of his mind. If he could just focus, just gather himself together, he could shove it all back into the deepest recesses of his mind. Store them in neat little boxes, never to be seen again.

He’s good at pushing everything away. Compartmentalising was his specialty. Like water off a duck's back. He’d bounce back. He always does… He has to… 

His biology still hasn’t quite caught on to the fact that he’s stuck here. It still works hard at keeping his infernal body alive. Healing the burns left over from the cattleprod, the tearing below his hips, the gaping hole in his chest cavity. It works hard to compensate for his missing teeth, binding with the metal Felicity had driven inside the holes they’d left behind, fusing them to his skull as if they’d always been there.

It was an odd sort of betrayal. The kind that came from his body’s own, stupid, inability to die. Its unwillingness to succumb to injury so severe it would have killed several humans at once had they been in his place. His body even refused to show any kind of exterior proof of what he’d been through. Every burn had faded, every cut had scabbed or healed over, and vanished without even leaving any sort of scar. He has no doubt that even the vivisection wound in his chest wouldn’t leave a mark once it was fully healed, Felicity had been too careful with how she’d gouged into his flesh, been too meticulous on how she’d sewn him back up again, too accurate on how she’d opened him up the second time. If he did scar, it would be in one place only. He doubts even his jaw scarring at all. His bone had integrated too cleanly with the metal pegs. There’d be no evidence of it ever having been different once the bruising faded.

The guard had cleaned him after he’d finished. The coarse feeling of the scrubbing brush lingered on his still damp flesh. Rubbing him raw. Hiding the evidence so that even if he did decide to tell Felicity, there would be no proof. All bodily fluids had been washed away, the bruising between his thighs would fade before anyone could notice, his damaged wrists could be written off as his own pitiful struggling against restraint, and not a result of electricity caused convulsions.

He doubts anyone would care anyway. Felicity hadn’t cared when Commissioner Hawthorne had left him exposed and vulnerable, a way that had taxed his limbs so heavily he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stand even if he did manage to get off this table. Drabek hadn’t cared when he’d found the Doctor after his first encounter with that guard, hardly able to breathe from the leather strap pulled across his throat.

Hell, they’d probably planned it together. In some messed up work meetings; How best to break the Doctor 101 . Felicity had said she’d deal with it. Then she’d dealt with it by tearing his teeth from his face and stuffing him full of metal, because him talking too much was the reason it had happened. She’d cured him by shutting him up. In her eyes he was left in that state because his inability to shut up had led to Hawthorne punishing him. She was so proud of her work. If he let slip that it hadn’t worked, she’d probably retaliate by cutting out his tongue instead, or perhaps his vocal cords altogether. Perhaps his crying was too annoying and she’d pull his eyes from his sockets, sew up his tear ducts. Maybe if she was aware of how much further Hawthorne had gone — allowing the guard to go forward with his fucked up desires — she’d sew up his rectum, install a waste tube through his stomach instead. It was his fault for being too accessible, too appealing, too ready to serve. 

Maybe he was being too harsh. Maybe Doctor Felicity Gray deserved a little more liberty. He was drawing too many inaccurate conclusions that were unfair on how much the torment she’d inflicted on him was only driven by scientific pursuit. Felicity had seemed genuinely annoyed that he’d been ‘damaged’ after his first meeting with Hawthorne. She’d fumed at the sight of his wrists the first time the guard had attacked him. She’d told him specifically to tell her if that guard came back. Maybe she would care if she’d known that he’d been assaulted in more ways than she suspected. Maybe his incessant yapping wasn’t at fault. Maybe he didn’t deserve sexual abuse. Maybe she’d have the guard removed from duty.

But there were too many maybes that he couldn’t swing either way. Because maybe she wouldn’t care about the assault. Maybe Hawthorne had told her what the guard had done and she didn’t care because his incessant yapping did deserve the retaliation he’d received. Maybe she’d grant the guard full permission to use him as he pleased. She’d treat it as some sick experiment. How much can the Doctor take before he breaks completely. Or How can we use this in the name of human betterment? Add to human pleasure. Extend sexual encounters so that breaks are no longer required.

He attempts to readjust his cramping jaw. The guard had cranked it shut tighter than Felicity had and it was beginning to send rivulets of pain down the sides of his neck, and up his cheeks. He met nothing but resistance. His teeth remained locked together, his tongue remained flattened to the bottom of his mouth. It would remain that way until someone cared enough to give him reprieve — which they wouldn’t — or until the guard returned to crank it open wide and ready to take whatever he wanted to shove down his throat tomorrow night.

He squeezes his eyes shut as replays of his own torture plays before them. The metal in his mouth, forcing his jaw wide and accessible. Hands on his skin, around his throat, tangled in his hair. Touching. Taking. Violating. He attempts to swallow down the rising panic and nausea at the idea of the guard coming back for a third round. There was nothing he’d be able to do to stop it. He’d just need to accept that it was coming, and survive until someone slipped up. He’d escape. He has to. He’s still alive. His body still works . He’s fine.

He feels disgusting, and used . And unlike last time, he feels hopeless. There was no amount of scrubbing that would remove the feeling of hands on his skin. No amount of soap would clean out his insides enough to allow him to feel clean again. He wanted to scrape his skin off, he wanted to claw his own eyes out. He wanted to—

He doesn’t feel real. His head pounds from a combination of drugs, exhaustion, pain, disgust. He feels as if he’s floating, watching himself suffer from above. Detached from his body as it adapts and grows more and more used to this sort of agony being the default of his existence.

The world blurs around him. The sound of the monitors he’s hooked up to sounds like they’re coming through several thousand kilometres of ocean. The pain he’s in doesn’t disappear, but it begins to feel comforting. Pain is predictable. It’s physical, a tangible feeling that he finds himself latching onto. It anchors him in the throes of the ocean of mental disarray he’s caught in. His mind feels scattered, he can’t really seem to hold onto any thought that lingers. All of it slips away in the end. It gives him whiplash as he attempts to hold onto it. Sends him spinning in a foreign bout of vertigo that nearly sends him over the edge of consciousness.

He clenches his hands into fists in frustration, twisting again in their bonds, and again meeting resistance and the impossibility of escape. He’s stuck. He can’t move. He can’t do anything to stop what would come next. Another vivisection, another sample, another modification to his physiology, another rape .

He barely registers the door open beside him. He stares listlessly at the ceiling, lulled back into his stupor by the drugs, and the pain. Almost floating above himself, not quite centred in his failing body.

It’s only when there’s hands touching him that he jerks back to the present. He lurches in terror, throat closing over with fear, hearts hammering in his chest, wrists writhing in their bonds as he attempts to struggle away from his assailant. All he achieves is throttling himself on the leather bound tightly across his neck and he retches pathetically behind his teeth as the hand moves from his neck to his shoulders and attempts to hold him down. It hasn’t been long enough. He hasn’t been given enough time to recover, to rebuild his shattered psyche.

He can feel hot breath against his face as he writhes beneath his assailant, his vision returning too slowly, his hearing picking up nothing but his own panicked panting as he fights against his bonds, whimpering out garbled Gallifreyan that is lost behind his gagged teeth. It’s like fighting the waves in the middle of the ocean as they slam him around. His limbs are useless, it’s as if they’re detached from the rest of his body. His skin screams with remembered touch as he writhes against the hands that were holding him down alongside the leather around his limbs. The struggling is pointless, he’s too weak to escape right now, ever, but he can’t just lie back again and take the torment. 

“Doctor?”

The Doctor freezes, his body goes completely rigid as he attempts to clear his tear stained vision. He wasn’t ‘Doctor’ here anymore. They’d taken that from him too. There was no way they’d gone back on that either. So who was that?

“Doctor, you need to keep still. Please, keep still.”

A soft hand touches his cheek, brushing softly against his skin and pushing his hair from his forehead. “Oh my god. What’ve they done to you?” The figure swims above him, distorted by his not yet adjusted vision. He blinks rapidly at the kind, round face, blond hair, light brown – almost amber eyes, they have flecks of green in them and they’re filled with horror and concern as they stare down at him. There’s no way…

There’s no way it’s even possible for her to be here. She’d gone back to her universe with his metacrisis. The divide in time had closed, dimensional retroclosure and all that. He thought he’d never see her again… On the worst day of his infernal lives. He’d lost everyone… But here she was. She’d found a way. She was here.

His chest heaves in delirious relief, his eyes fill with uncontrollable tears as he recognises her immediately. He breathes her name against the metal in his mouth, it comes out as a breathy whimper, his teeth glued together and his tongue flattened in the bottom of his mouth distorts it into something intelligible, but she nods at him and the Doctor sobs at the sight of her. Even across universes, she’d come to save him. He doesn’t bother to think too hard about the repercussions of tearing yet another hole in the fabrics of time and space, of the potential of his metacrisis returning with her, just the fact that he was saved. She had come for him. She was getting him out.

Her eyes are moist with her own tears as she cups his face tenderly with all the care one might handle fragile china. “Hey, you’re okay.” She brushes his tears away, her voice painfully warm in her distinct, cockney accent. It feels so surreal he almost doesn’t believe she’s real. “I’m here. I’ve gotcha.” Her eyes run over the various injuries he’d sustained throughout his captivity here. The ugly scar that hadn’t faded on his chest yet. The bruising that marred his cheeks where his teeth had been extracted, the faint bruising on his thighs. The tube up his nose, the catheter, the rectal tube. His red rimmed, still not quite focussed eyes told the stories that his words never could. He feels his cheeks flush in shame at how he must look to her. Bruised, broken, used. His teeth clenched around metal that peeks out from behind his lips as he breathes. He hums out a questioning noise. How?

Rose sucks on her lip, “Dimension Canon, you— well, the other you helped.”

Oh, she’s so smart. And so gorgeous. And so Rose . And so here . The Doctor swallows a wave of adoration, tears dripping from the corners of his eyes.

Rose clicks her tongue softly in sympathy, her hands moving to unhook the feeding tube from the empty feed bag. They’re small, and soft, albeit a little callused from her years of adventuring. She has her nails painted a navy blue that is chipping at the edges. She fiddles with it for almost too long, her hands straining at the threading that someone had screwed just a little too tight. It jostles the tubing in his nose and the Doctor’s eyes water as the world spins harshly around him again. He digs his nails into his palms, grounding himself in the miniscule amount of pain it causes. He attempts to shift his teeth, desperate to thank her for coming for him, to ask her to untie his hands so that he can help her, so that they can go before someone finds them and straps her to a table too. He can’t handle that idea. No.

He lets out a noise of desperation when she finally gets the tube unattached and turns her gaze back to him briefly from where it was previously focussed on the tube in her hands. He parts his lips slightly and tries to convey his need for her to remove the gag, or to untie his hands so that he can remove the gag. He can help her. The faster they get him off this table, the faster they can find his TARDIS. The faster they’ll be out of here.

“Yeah, I’ll get to that.” She promises, “I gotta unhook you first. Jus’ give me a sec, kay?”

He nods reluctantly, he supposes he won’t be much use with the pentobarbital in his system. It’s moved from making him drowsy to making him feel downright delirious. His head spins, giddy from the sight of Rose. His Rose. Delirious from freedom within his reach. He’d survived. He’s getting out! His ruined wrists twist in the leather at his sides, itching to hold her, to wrap her in an embrace, oh, he’d missed her so so so much. His damaged body craves nothing more than her gentle touch. Hands that don’t hurt, or take.

She detached the IV, twisting the tube off of the cannula and winding it up before hooking it on the stand, out of the way. The relief is immediate. Without the constant flow of drugs, the Doctor’s metabolism is instantly able to start clearing his system. She even goes to the effort of digging around in a cabinet and flushing the cannula in his elbow with the saline she’d found there. He doesn’t remember her knowing so much about first aid, but he’s not complaining. He’d much prefer not to die of some sort of infection.

She must’ve noticed his questioning expression because she smiles fondly down at him, “you’re very smart, Doctor.” She murmurs, her voice soft and oh so Rose . “I’ve learnt a lot from you.” His metacrisis, she means. But it makes sense.

He follows Rose with his steadily clearing vision, she looks almost the same as when he’d last seen her, albeit a little older, her face a little more hardened, her eyes a little colder, but no less warm. Her hair is still that brassy yellow she insisted upon, but her roots have overtaken nearly half of it, as if she’d finally started to grow out her natural darker blond. It’s pulled back into a messy bun with a bright pink hair tie, revealing that she’d finally forgone the outrageously 2000s earrings she was so obsessed with in favour of a simple pair of studs she wouldn't have been caught dead in ten years ago. She’s wearing a dark blue henley and if it were cooler she’d probably have some kind of jacket. Her jeans are new, but her makeup hasn’t changed a bit.

The lump in the back of his throat doubles in size and the walls seem to almost close in on him as she moves to his lower half and studies the tubes that were violating the delicate parts of his insides. “I’m so sorry for takin’ so long.” Rose apologises as she carefully detaches the waste collection bags, flushing them with saline and capping them off. She doesn’t remove the tubing from inside him herself though and the Doctor feels a wave of warmth and gratitude roll over him. He almost cries at her care. He’d prefer to remove them himself. 

She continues moving about his still immobilised form, digging around in cupboards, her blue eyes narrowing in distaste at some of the instruments of torture she found there. The sound is painful and jarring to his hypersensitive ears, but he doesn’t care. Nothing matters anymore. She’s here. Rose is here. She’s come to get him out.

The Doctor twists his wrists in the leather straps as she wipes a disinfectant over the insertion point in the crook of his elbow, and whines at her, not bothering about how pathetic he sounds because this is his Rose . He was getting out. She’d come for him. If she would just unstrap him they could have their tearing reunion, find his TARDIS and get out of here. They could fly across the stars, not a care in the world. The Doctor was fine . He’d made it out. He was still in one piece.

“Almost, Doctor.” Rose promises again, her careful hands rub against his shoulder as she examines his wounds, “just gotta make sure you’re okay. Can’t have you moving if somethin’s broken. Isn’t that the first rule of first aid?”

He supposes she’s right, but he can’t help the frustrated breath of air he huffs between his teeth. His anxiety builds, overwhelming his sense of relief and love for his companion. He knows nothing is broken, if she could just undo the gag, he could tell her that himself.

He shivers as she runs a tentative hand along the scarring on his chest. Her fingers catch a little on the stitches that hadn’t quite dissolved yet and he whimpers. “Sorry.” Rose murmurs, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry.” She turns back to him and cups his face again, her grey eyes full of tears as she leans forward and presses her forehead against his. He closes his own eyes and breathes in and out shakily. He was safe now. They were safe. They just had to get out before anyone came and found them.

She wipes him down with a clean cloth, mopping up his tears, the sweat, the thin line of drool that he couldn’t stop from dripping down the side of his face where his immobilised tongue couldn’t catch it. He meets her eyes and then glances down at his wrists, feeling incredibly claustrophobic, he needs the straps off . Just undo his wrists. He can help her do the rest. He wants to get dressed. He wants to remove all of the tubing that scratched and invaded his insides. He wants out .

“Okay, okay.” Rose smiles at him, “you’re okay. I’m here.” Her hands move to the strap across his right wrist and the Doctor is finally going to be free, he’s already straining, ready to pull his wrists from the loop of leather as soon as it is loose enough, ready to wrap his arms around her.

Rose pulls the flap of leather from the buckle, considers it for a few moments, her blue eyes catching on the damage it revealed, before shimmying it slightly higher up his arm — just above the bleeding lacerations his struggling had caused — and then pulling it a little tighter and pushing the metal bar through the hole and buckling it back down. She moves to his left wrist and it takes the Doctor too long to remember that Rose’s eyes are hazel.

His stomach plummets — a sickening freefall into a bottomless pit. As if he’d gone skydiving and realised he’d forgotten a parachute. That panicked tug you feel in your throat when you realise something is very, extremely wrong. His blood turns to ice as his hearts pump it pointlessly fast around his infernal body. Filling him with adrenaline and the urge for fight or flight with nowhere to go. His pulse throbs in his wrists, where the leather digs into his damaged flesh. He freezes like a deer in headlights. His mind and body frozen in a debilitating rejection of the lie.

He can hear a low keening noise filling his ears, it drones through the room and it takes his fumbling senses too long to realise it’s coming from him. He stares at Rose as she fiddles with the straps about his forearms, and then his chest. Ratcheting them tighter, folding him firmly against the harsh metal of the table. Her hair is too blond, almost icy when he blinks. As if she’d washed it with purple shampoo when he’d blinked. Her eyes are a cold blue, indifferent to his pathetic whimpering as she carefully disinfects the gouges he’d struggled into his wrists, the ones she’d exposed when she’d adjusted his restraints.

The disinfectant stings, it eats away at the damage, his vision frays at the edges. It burns , but not quite as much as the betrayal of Rose— no… not Rose– contributing to his suffering. There was no way… He was so certain. She was so real. 

He feels like he’s drowning. His body seized involuntarily, not from any electricity, not from being torn open, but from the sheer, horrific realisation that he was losing it. It had been three days and his mind was breaking. Filling his lonely, anguished existence with something to subdue his suffering. He was going mad. He was a disgusting, weak, pathetic excuse for the unbreakable Time Lords he descended from. He should’ve laughed in the face of such pitiful attempts at breaking him. He should’ve realised that Rose would have unbuckled him immediately. Rose would have gathered him up in her arms and apologised and apologised. She would’ve freed him first, worked out the consequences later.

“Almost done, my dear.” Rose wraps a few rounds of gauze over his wrists, she tucks the end under one of the previous rounds of bandage. Her touch is soft, and tender, and gentle, and it would’ve calmed him but her voice was wrong. Her eyes were grey, her hair wasn’t yellow, and her accent was wrong.

His lips tremble as he struggles to hold back his hyperventing breaths. Tears leak from his eyes against his will. The ocean of his panic thrashes him violently in its throes. Slamming him against the realisation that Rose wasn’t here to save him. He was alone with his tormentors. He would have to save himself— if it were even possible…

Not Rose bustles about, unaware of the Doctor’s pounding hearts, his panicked breathing. Her grey eyes are magnified by a pair of hexagonal glasses that definitely weren’t there before and The Doctor tenses as she works around him, aware of how pathetic he must look. Aware of how stupid he was, thinking this woman was Rose when Rose was happy in her universe. Rose had him, but he didn’t have her… She was safe, and free, and far, far away from here.

She bustles around briefly, straightening up the countertops, emptying bins and sweeping the floor. She replaces his removed waste collection bags with fresh ones. Then she moves to the IV cannula in his arm and hooks it up to clean tubing and a clean bag of drugs. He assumes they’re more sedatives. When she looks down at him briefly, her face is wrong. Her eyes are too far apart, and her jaw is too square and there is no way that he’d been so stupid as to think she was here.

She doesn’t acknowledge his grunt of discomfort when she jostles the feeding tube in his nose and triggers his gag reflex. She merely ploughs onwards in her job, hooking him up to a bag of sludge that methodically fills his protesting stomach. He doesn’t know who this woman is. He fights to maintain steady vision as the drugs being administered slowly take him down again. Dulling his panic and leaving him floaty, and light headed and the woman’s face warps and he’s certain it’s Rose.

“Now, Theta — Doctor—” Even her voice warps, twisting between what he wants, and what is real. The lump in the Doctor’s throat grows as he tries to figure out what is wrong. Something is wrong. SOMETHING IS WRONG. The lights buzz overhead, the walls shrink in on him, he feels like he’s floating, spinning while lying still.

He sluggishly tries to keep up with the change. Something had changed. He feels the same, yet different. They’d treated him the same? Was this a side effect of the electrical trauma from last night? Was this a side effect of his brain trying to cope with what that man had done to him? Had they changed the drug? He did feel different… Since…

Not Rose blurs in front of him, her face blurs between her own, the unknown woman, and something harsher, more masculine, it sets him on edge, “interesting response to the heightened dose, took a little longer to kick in, but Mara mentioned that would happen— Doctor, are you okay?” The two voices layer over the top of one another and it's disorientating. He can’t focus on either of them. He’s not even certain if Rose’s lips are even moving. Perhaps she’s gone telepathic and she’s in his head. She’s in his head. She’s in his head . 

Whatever they’d injected him with, whether it was more pentobarbital or not, was working , his system, weak and exhausted from being torn open and assaulted daily, was struggling to fight it off. It was as if his built up resistance and stronger circulatory system meant nothing anymore. His eyes rolled back in his head as he fought against it. Rose— no… not Rose. She’s wrong . She’s not here. He’s not sure how much time passes while Rose— Rose— his attacker just stares at him, waiting for the sedatives, pentobarbital??? To kick in. What was in that new bag of drugs?

His hearts stutter in his chest. He groans through the gag as Rose presses a thumb into his mouth, parting his lips and toying with the metal in his teeth. He attempts to jerk his head out of her grip, but they merely take a firm grip of his jaw and that, coupled with the leather across his neck, effectively stops his struggle. 

“I’m helping you,” Rose insists, “hold still.” But her words blur with not Rose’s “hold still.” And Rose would have let him up by now.

The words float through his head and he struggles to comprehend them for a second. His vision continues to blur and he needs to escape, to get out. Remembered pain sends a jolt through his exhausted body and panic floods his mind as the remembrance that the guard had tampered with his sedation levels. There’s no way to tell whether Rose was Rose , or if Rose was some Torchwood employee, or if Rose was the guard who had tormented him the past few nights, back to taunt him, take from him, use him. For a blinding few seconds, he’s certain the guard had returned for more. His vision swims in front of him as he attempts to drag himself back to full consciousness, enough to resist, to struggle, to beg .

Some small part of him wishes they’d just get on with it already so that they could be done and leave him alone. The appearance of Rose gives him momentary whiplash and using her against him was crueller than anything they’d ever done. More than that— he’d believed it. He’d thought for agonisingly long minutes that it was her. But looking at her now is wrong. She’s wrong. Her face stretches and squashes before his eyes, her eyes shine as if there’s torches within them.

The Doctor stewed in a pool of loathing. How far he’d fallen. Begging for death. Begging for his own torture. Begging in general. Crying at the sight of his best friend being wrong . He disgusts himself. If Gallifrey still existed, they’d execute him for betraying the honour of a Time Lord. He was a disgrace. A pitiful excuse for a creature. Locked up, strapped to a table. All he was good for was suffering and abuse. He wasn’t even good enough for death. Or life… Perhaps he was already dead, and this was hell…

An unexpected movement in his peripheral vision sent a wave of panic through his restrained form as not Rose swam in his disfigured vision and began to move towards his lower half and despite him wishing for them to just hurry up and get on with it . He wasn’t ready, he didn’t want this, please . Not like this. Not with Rose’s sympathetic face staring down at him. He— they can’t .

He reared up against his bonds and nearly strangled himself on the strap around his neck when a hand ran itself down the small of his hip, Rose’s hand. Not Rose’s hand. His lips form a silent plea for his assailant to stop touching, get off, get off!!!!!! He can hear his own panicked breathing, the pitiful cries that were garbled, disjointed, and completely illegible behind the metal in his mouth. The tube shifts in the back of his throat and he feels like he’s going to throw up. Pain lances through his wrists as the leather binding them bites his flesh open again. The strap around his neck feels like it’s tightening, strangling him, he can’t breathe. He’s too weak to escape. Too weak to fight her off. Him— Him off.

“What the hell are you doing?” A voice breaks through the Doctor’s delirious mind and Rose snaps her gaze from the Doctor’s heaving form to look over her shoulder. Her too blue eyes are guilty as her hands finally stop touching. Touching, touching .

Another figure joins the Doctor’s melting vision. He jerks in the grip of his bonds, a strained ‘ hhhnggg.’ behind his lips, he doesn’t want this. There’s two of them now. Rose, and some other face. Rose and the guard? He feels like he’s slipping, and he can’t control the thoughts of panic that pummel his splintering mind.

A hand tilts his chin, gripping him tightly when he cries out and attempts to pull away, the words don’t touch me, stuck behind his teeth. The new figures face flickers and their eyes are black and cruel and filled with intent and he can see Rose in his peripheral vision and nothing feels real anymore .

Fingers part his half lidded eyes, a light is shone into his retinas and he gasps in agony as it sears through his very core. His hyper-sensitive flesh crawls and he feels like they’ve ignited the cattle prod between his teeth again from the way his body convulses at the feeling.

“What did you give him?” The newcomer demands. Their words distort and wind through his pounding skull and the Doctor can’t make sense of them. They rattle through his skull like a pinball, pounding from the inside. He can’t decide who to focus on, his eyes flickering between his two attackers and their faces distort and smile and flicker and scream and yell and he wants to close his eyes and peel his flesh off and disappear and die die die die die die die die.

He chokes on his own breath when the new attacker touches, touches, touches, stop, stop touching, get off, get off, get off, get off, GET OFF! He can’t breathe, his neck constricts, there’s no oxygen in his lungs, he’s not even sure if he has lungs and the gaps between his teeth and the singular open nostril isn’t enough to fill the void. He can feel his body beginning to tremor uncontrollably and every twist of his limbs against the leather restraints feels like ants crawling up his body, stinging him with every touch and the Doctor can’t even scream. His agonised cry sounds more like a strangled cough as his mind convinces him that he’s dying.

“What did you give him!?” The new voice demands again and it’s too much, they’re too loud, his ears ring and his eyes water and he’s dying .

“Ket— ketamine.” Rose— NOT ROSE— stammers, “Commissioner Hawthorne–”

“Commissioner Hawthorne is not in charge here.” The newcomer sounds furious and the Doctor tries to curl in on himself, tries to block his ears but the straps are unyielding and he’s trapped, and he’s choking, and he can’t breathe. “How much ketamine? Answer me!” 

Rose looks like she wants to cry, her blue, blue, grey, amber, brown, green, hazel eyes fill with tears and she glances at the door like she’s about to dash. Her face twists and morphs and the Doctor can see shadows in the corner of his vision and—

“600mg.” Rose says finally. “Commissioner Hawthorne said you were–”

The newcomer tugs at her hair and curses under her breath, “for fuck’s sake.” She’s a melting shadow, she’s a dalek, she’s a cyberman, the Doctor is going to die. “If he was a human, you would’ve killed him.”

“I’m sorry-” Rose moves as if to help as the newcomer yanks the IV tube from the Doctor’s arm and he screams as his body seizes, the tugging feeling feels like he’s being flipped inside out. 

“You’ve done enough,” the newcomer snarls. “Half a week of work, and look at him.”

“I was following orders–”

“With no jurisdiction! Theta is mine . Ketamine is a hallucinogen. You haven’t helped. Look at him!”

The Doctor’s chest heaves as every word screeches through his brain as if they’re actually inside of him, screaming into his ear drums, through a high intensity megaphone. He can’t breathe , his throat constricts around the tube and chokes on the built up saliva as it enters his lungs and he breaks into a coughing fit, his entire body spasming and he’s suffocating, he’s dying, this is the end.

The strap around his neck is removed and Rose’s friend cups the back of his head and forces it to the side as he hacks up bodily fluids and other disgusting mucuses. 

“What can I do?” Rose sounds uncertain and unwittingly he latches onto the sound of her voice, because while it’s wrong , it’s Rose, it’s her, and she— he needs her.

“Get. out.” His other captor says, not looking away from the Doctor as he shivers beneath her touch. Rose looks devastated, her face melts before his eyes, blue and yellow bleeding into pink, until she turns to leave and the Doctor can’t help the whine of loss when she’s gone, he’d just got her back and now she was leaving him alone with the other one. Leaving him alone forever.

Fingers press against his carotid artery and the figure above him solidifies into metal and then melts away like candle wax. “Dammit, Theta.” The female voice mutters, “why can’t you keep out of trouble for more than a few hours?” Her face rounds out as she parts his lips and unlocks the pantograph mechanism locking his teeth together.

The Doctor gasps, a deep, rattling breath of relief as his starving lungs suddenly exist again and he can fill them and he gulps down deep breaths of oxygen. His eyes roll feverishly around the room, his limbs still trembling violently, the room still swaying before his eyes. The womans face flickers, she could be the guard— he could be back to torture him some more. He swallows the intoxicating wave of paranoia and movement above him sends a wave of panic through his shaking body. His newfound ability to breathe without blockages has him hyperventilating 

Something— a hand touches his shoulder and his mind goes white with terror, this is it, the guard has managed to convince someone to let them have at him within working hours as well. There were no more just nightly visits, this was his life now. Rose was gone. She’d left him behind. Turning a blind eye to the torment. To the rape . The Doctor whimpers as the hand rubs circles into his hypersensitive skin, he can feel tears prick at the corners of his eyes and feels disgustingly weak.

Hands press into his skin. Hands with intent. The light is too bright, too sharp, slicing through his corneas and into his brain, his skin, his very existence. His body jerks, lungs locking up in a useless attempt to sob through his unstoppable cacophony of panicked breathing.

Something sharp jabs into the side of his exposed thigh, it presses in hard, and deep and sends a searing pain down his leg and reverberating back up and through his hip. He thrashes in his assailants grip as something cold is injected into his bloodstream, a frantic stream of barely comprehensible words rambling from his lips, garbled from the metal that still blocks his tongue, and judging from the lack of recognition on his attackers warped face, it probably isn’t even English that he’s speaking.

His chest heaves at the thought of more chemicals being injected into him to couple with whatever else they’d pumped him full of. He can’t take any more. He’s not coping. He’s barely surviving whatever they’d given him before— Ketamine? Rose had said… Not Rose. Not Rose. Not Rose. Not Rose.

Something touches his face. Fingers in his hair, detangling the matted mess of what Felicity had left behind after his involuntary haircut. His mind registers the touch before it registers the fact that the tremors in his body are dulling, the spasms losing their chaotic edge. His breathing is still too fast, too ragged, still competing with the pounding of his hearts, but it isn’t failing. He’s still alive, and gradually the world stops spinning.

He shudders violently when the hand in his hair strokes, slow and steady. The horror of it claws at his mind—because someone is touching him, someone is using him while he’s vulnerable and falling apart and he can’t seem to pick up his pieces fast enough to form a defence. It’s deeply horrifying how fast his limbs began to numb, his seizing and convulsions begin to weaken.

After a few moments his movements are reduced to sluggish, uncoordinated wriggles beneath his bonds. A wave of nausea rolls over him. He shivers as he struggles to continue struggling, not again. Please , not again. First time he couldn’t fight back. Second time was survival. Third time… He… He needs… He can’t…

The hand strokes through his hair again, it’s warm and gentle, and grounded, and real . His body stills as a wave of chemical calm rolls over him, his hitched breathing begins to even out, his heart rates steady and he can’t fight— he doesn’t want to keep fighting.

“Shhh.” The figure above him murmurs and the familiarity of it grounds him. He latches onto it like a lifeline. “You’re okay.” She murmurs. “You’re going to be okay, we’ve just gotta ride it out.”

“Ei’i’o.”¹ The Doctor sobs, his breath rattles in the back of his throat, and his words are slurred and he can’t move his tongue so he doubts he’s even legible.

The woman– the Doctor has decided, though he cannot see outside of blurred, melting, disfigured shapes— pauses briefly in her stroking. She hasn’t hurt him yet and the Doctor can’t fight the drugs that force him into a stupor. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

Her eyes are dark— brown maybe? He latches onto them as his body is suddenly wracked with a wave of trembling, he feels cold, his blood is like ice and he’s barely comprehending what is even happening anymore. “Ei’i’o…” He mumbles, “Ei’afa’joi.”²

“Theta.” The woman attaches his IV cannula to another tube and his hearts jitter in his chest, terror making his breathing hard again, and he would’ve struggled against her had his muscles not been feeling like putty inside his skin, had he not worked himself to exhaustion, hardly living… Dead.

“Lei’o’”³ he mumbles. “Naqu.”⁴

“It’s just saline.” The woman promises him, and he believes her. “If that’s what you’re asking. You’re dehydrated.”

He blinks through his bleary eyes, tense, despite the calming drugs that force his panic down and away from the surface. The world still swims and distorts before him, but it’s no longer terrifying. He accepts it with a weary resignation instead. The woman has brown eyes. Rose has… Rose has brownish eyes… Hazel…

“Liala?”⁵ He coughs, and it takes a moment to realise he’s mumbling gibberish in extremely slurred Gallifreyan. The woman— Rose?’s confusion makes sense and he flushes. “Rose?” He sounds moronic behind the tongue immobiliser.

“Who’s Rose?”

A tear drips down his face. He feels like breaking down, sobbing violently, crying hysterically, but instead he feels flat. Rose had been here earlier. She had left. There was no way this woman was Rose.

He blinks sluggishly, his tremoring stopping briefly as the world spins around him again. The woman strokes her hand through his hair again. Her hair is brown, dark, nearly black. He struggles to even remember where he is for a second.

“I’m sorry.” He mumbles.

The blurred line he assumes is his captors lips curve up in something that could resemble a smile, or a grimace. “For what?” She asks.

The Doctor stumbles at that. His thoughts hit a roadblock, he’s not even sure where his train of thought was going. He’s not sure what he’s sorry for. Everything?

“You’ve been so good.” The woman promises. “This wasn’t your fault. I told Mara not to meddle. I fixed you. This wasn’t supposed to happen.” Her hand tightens briefly in his hair with frustration and he whimpers though he’s not even sure if it hurts or not.

The memory flickers in his mind. “Fe–” He stumbles at the L movement, his tongue stuck in place and the consonants too hard for his brain. “Fe’ic’y?” He recoils from the sound of his voice, from the comfort of knowing it’s Felicity who’s comforting him. She’s the one who had torn him apart and drugged and gagged and changed and hurt him . But she’s not at the moment. 

“Yes.” Felicity says, “I’m here, Theta. I won’t let them touch you again.”

The Doctor leans into her touch and closes his eyes.

Chapter Text

He wakes in a fit of panic. A surge of adrenaline floods through his wrecked body, all of his muscles are on red alert as he attempts to jolt upright only for leather across his chest to stop him abruptly and keep him in place. He can’t restrain the strangled gasp that escapes his cracked lips as the strap bites into his skin. His wrists twist beside him, hands clenched into fists as his drug addled brain attempts to process his muddled and blurry vision.

Something is beeping beside him and it rips through his skull at full volume, he’s got a splitting headache, and the pressure behind his eyes makes him want to tear them from his face. He moans as he attempts to curl into a ball and protect his head from the assault, only to be prevented at every turn, by the restraints at every limb. He tugs at them uselessly, the sharp, hot feeling of his skin tearing grounds him, though the familiar bite of frustration rears its head at the discovery that he’s still stuck.

A hand that isn’t his runs through his sweaty hair and he flinches at the unexpected touch, not quite remembering if there was anyone else in the room with him when he’d fallen asleep. He doesn’t even remember falling asleep to begin with. His skin crawls with panic as his limbs tremble uncontrollably; his body attempting to work through the aftershocks of the overdose. When the gentle hands in his hair move to his chin and then his neck, memories flood through his wired brain and all he can think of is that guard, and all he can feel is the guard’s hands and he doesn’t want it, not again, please not again, he can’t have been out that long- surely it's not night again, surely someone had caught on and the guard had been fired– arrested even. “Naqu,” ⁶ he whispers, barely loud enough for anyone to hear. It’s more for himself than anything else, “naqu arehc.” ⁷

“You’re okay,” someone says. But he’s not. The ‘someone’s’ voice is soft, and feminine, and comfortingly familiar. He attempts to blink the fog from his vision and focus on her, grounding himself in what he’s certain is real. She’s sitting in a chair next to the table he’s restrained upon, her legs folded neatly beneath her, her hand resting idly on his shoulder where it fiddles with a slightly longer lock of his hair. Though he can’t quite decipher her exact facial features, she has dark hair and a pale complexion, and her expression is one of quiet interest, as if his fragile mental state was something of intrigue. As if his overdose — as unplanned and unwanted as it was — was still an opportunity for study. He recognises her almost immediately. She’d stayed with him, she hadn’t left while he was vulnerable. He was safe. Well, in the faintest definition of the word. But that faintest definition of a word was something and as much as he hated it, he felt a little less alone.

He clears his throat, swallowing down the hardly even Gallifreyan gibberish his mouth was coming up with in his native language, and the mouthful of bile that follows before he tries to remember English. “‘Icity?” He squints, his tongue feels like lead, he struggles to focus on Felicity. She looks wrong… Her eyes are lopsided and her hair is the wrong shade of brown. He blinks and she’s fine again. “Fe–” He trips at the L sound, his tongue blocked by the taste of metal. His lips tremble and his eyes squeeze shut at the overwhelming need to cry. He hates feeling like this. So out of control. He’s usually so good at pushing emotion away, locking it in neat little boxes beneath the surface of his mind where all of the other unneeded stuff goes. But whatever they’d pumped him full of— Ketamine? He thinks… though he struggles to remember clearly— was making it increasingly difficult to maintain his composure. 

He hadn’t maintained his composure at all. In fact, he’d declined so quickly into a panicked and disoriented state he wonders if that was how Ketamine was supposed to work, or if it was a unique quirk of human drugs working against his Gallifreyan biology. He knows that a lot of human or Earth related things could be toxic. Perhaps this was another one. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t maintain a calm and stoic composure if he was actively being poisoned.

He hates himself all the same.

He hates how easily he had been deconstructed, reduced to a submissive, pitiful, animal . He hates how easily he’d given in, begged for them to stop, begged for the guard to kill him. How easily he’d fallen for the fake Rose who had invaded his mind and promised him freedom only to have it torn away in moments. A drug induced hallucination caused by his deteriorating mind grasping uselessly for something stable. Rose was never there. Whoever he’d thought she was was just some other nameless abuser. The Doctor was trapped, alone, and no one was coming for him. No one even knew to look for him because he had pushed them all away.

“Yeah,” Felicity murmurs, “it’s me.”

The hand in his hair moves to his exposed collarbone and he knows it’s Felicity. He knows there’s no ill intent behind the moment, but his vision flashes white in terror anyway. Though he desperately tries to reign himself in, hold himself together, all rational thought is lost in the haze of drugs. He can feel the guards hands instead of Felicity’s. Those hands had intent, those hands wanted him to suffer. He knows it’s not the guard. But after Rose… He doesn’t know what is real. Everything blends together and he struggles to decipher it all. He needs to decipher it all, but he can’t. Nothing makes sense. No one cares. Of course they don’t. His begging means nothing. His struggles mean nothing. All these people do is take, take, take .

The hands stop touching when he releases an involuntary, animalistic keening noise. One drawn from a desperate, primal need for escape. It sounds foreign to his ears, and he recoils from himself in disgust.

“It’s still just me. Whatever you think you’re seeing isn’t real.” The words distort and sound like they’re coming through a long, empty, hallway. They’re masculine, and then they’re not. They’re mechanical, and then they’re not. They echo through his ears and the Doctor bites down on his lip and shuts his eyes tightly, it’s too loud, the lights are too bright. He wants out. He wants out now. He needs to leave— he— he— The hand pressed firmly into his collarbone, rough and calloused and definitely not Felicity, it’s joined by a second hand as he attempts to fight them off again. It certainly feels real. The man from the past few nights was definitely real… unless his head had made it all up. It had made Rose up. Perhaps the guard was a punishment from his fevered mind. Perhaps he was dead and this was hell. Perhaps he deserved this.

“Theta, you need to calm down. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

“Vyri’alyk’ei.” ⁸ he begs, he’s not even certain what he’s saying, his words are garbled and feverish, and muddled with an animalistic desperation. The need for the hands to stop touching and hurting and taking . Every touch feels like fire across his hypersensitive skin. His body is wracked with trembling, his head is pounding and he just wants to be left alone.

He’s all too aware of just how pathetic he sounds. He attempts to convince himself that it’s just the aftershocks of the ketamine overdose. He’ll come back to himself as soon as he’s burnt through it. But right now, in the throes of agony and panic he’s struggling to maintain control. He feels like he’s slipping away, falling into a pit of disarray. Thrown around in the storm of his drug addled mind. There’s nothing solid to grip onto. He can’t even protect himself from more if it comes. His body lays prone and exposed on a metal table and he can’t move to cover himself more, can’t fight back if they want to hurt him or use him again.

Hands cup his chin and shine a light into his eyes and he can’t pull away. The light is torture on his frayed nerves. It feels like staring into the sun. And he’s stared into a sun before so he’d know. He attempts to snap at the hands, his teeth and neck unrestrained, his final defense. They catch on something and his attacker pulls away abruptly before striking him harshly across the face.

The hit sends his head sideways into the table and he lets it stay there as he blinks through the shock of it. Chest heaving. He can’t pull away when the hands return to his cheeks and rub away the remaining sting. “I’m sorry.” Felicity murmurs, “I shouldn’t have hit you.” Her hand is bleeding at the knuckles and somewhere deep down the Doctor feels a surge of triumph at the thought of making his captor bleed, but mostly he just feels tired. Numb.

“You’re almost clear of ketamine now though.” Felicity says, “you’re experiencing the aftershocks of panic and such.”

She raises her hands so that he can see them before lowering them slowly to his hips and pressing down on the muscle in his thigh. He whimpers as something sharp slides into the flesh there, a needle, the flood of more drugs. 

“Please…” it sounds a lot more like ‘ p’eathse’ . He swallows around the metal that immobilises his tongue, his limbs beginning to turn to lead and he can’t go through whatever that was again. She can’t do this… He’s not just some science experiment.

But he doesn’t get a choice. This is his life now, nothing steady, nothing certain, just the panic and unpredictability of faces and attackers and pain. He’s doomed to a lifetime of instability and pain.

He stares unseeing at the ceiling. He sways in the toss and turn of panic and calm. His trembling stops; if only briefly. His limbs flood with a numbness that he can’t fight off. His thoughts slow to sluggish nothingness.

“Focus, Theta. I need you to focus.”

There’s the tear of something animalistic at the back of his throat as his mind is forced back into submission, the drugs taking over if only for a little bit, forcing his fear and his anxiety down and lulling him into a false sense of security that he can’t stop. It steals his emotions, voids them, tosses them in the trash because they’re not useful to Felicity’s studies.

Felicity wipes the tears from his eyes as his body stills, his thoughts stuck in limbo between the desperate need to fight, to struggle, to get away, and the soft lull of the sedative that promises he’ll be okay. He just needs to give in. Let the drugs take him away.

“Please,” he mumbles dumbly, his lips don’t quite work and he can’t feel his tongue. Something nags at the back of his mind that he’s aware he should be worried about but he can’t quite grasp what, and he’s too exhausted to really care.

“I’ve just given you another dose of midazolam.” The voice tells him, it’s soft and hums in the back of his mind as something familiar. “No more ketamine, I promise. It should just take the edge off the aftershocks. It did before, but I’m not sure how fast your tolerance builds so I’ll give you another dose later.”

Another dose.

His panic rears its head again. It’s irrational and out of nowhere and he can’t stop it. He doesn’t want more drugs. He doesn’t need to be calm, he needs to be out . He should be able to get away. He should be able to fight back, something is wrong. Something is extremely wrong. He can feel his breathing get faster again, his chest hitching in aborted spasms as the midazolam? fights against his rising terror and attempts to drag him back to submission.

“Theta, you need to stop.” A hand closes around his wrist and the ants are back, crawling through his flesh, tearing his skin open. His back arches as he attempts to escape, twisting his limbs in the desperate need to get out, get away, stop touching me, get off, get off, please get off.

“Fo’” ⁹ he sobs, eyes rolling back in his head as his lips quiver and his body is overtaken with tremors. “Please.” The world is collapsing in on him. His vision goes fuzzy, his hands are shaking, his wrists scream in agony as he tries to break them off, anything to escape the straps. The beeping beside him is a shrill whine. His hearing sounds like static. His skin feels like fire. The drugs coursing through him combat with his innate need to escape and the ketamine’s effects.

“Theta. Please listen!”

There’s something sharp in her tone now, a thread of irritation buried beneath the professional detachment. 

He’s trying to listen. He’s trying to breathe. But there’s too much. Too much light. Too much sound. Too much— everything . He’d welcome back the gag if it would silence his crying. He wants to gouge his eyes from the sockets, he’d sever his eardrums if it’d stop the noise. Nausea floods the back of his throat and he’s suddenly all too aware of everything. The beeping beside his head, the tube in his nose that scratches and fills the back of his throat, the tubes inside his rectum and bladder, siphoning away his waste, the tube in his arm delivering him some kind of liquid— he’d been promised it was saline, to keep him hydrated, but what if it was more ketamine and that’s why he wasn’t recovering, that’s why he was still caught in the cage of his mind as things distort and melt and twist and break and take and hurt and—

Pain flares across his sternum from hands attempting to hold him down, at the same time something in his wrist gives . The feeling is sharp and sudden, like a white-hot needle stabbing through his hand and ricocheting up the entire limb. His whole body lurches against the table as his vision whites out. A strangled sound tears from his throat. It’s choked and guttural and he doesn’t recognise it at all. The pain is deep and inescapable, but it’s enough to shock him back, to make his gasping, fractured mind snap toward now and focus on the blaring agony that rips through his arm.

“Now, look what you’ve done.” The Doctor blinks in shock, mouth parting slightly in a pant as Felicity’s face pieces back together. She sighs, her hands move from his shoulder blades to his right arm where the bone just beneath the leather strap is throbbing pulses of agony up his nerve endings. She deftly undoes the leather buckle and holds his wrist firmly with one hand, digging in with her nails when he attempts to pull away, while the other presses and feels around the damaged joint.

“Broken.” Felicity tells him, “are you happy now? I’m trying to help you. If you’d just listened , this wouldn’t have happened.

The Doctor gapes at her, completely unable to form words. He shivers uncontrollably, his previous panic receding as his body struggles to continue metabolising the drugs in his system while also focusing on the new damage on top of all the previous inflictions. It’s horrifying how quickly they drag him back under their influence, taming his panicked mind and lulling him back into that involuntary stupor.

Felicity runs a frustrated hand through her hair, it’s not as neat as it has been previously.

“I ‘d’nt—” The Doctor breaks off as a wave of nausea threatens to make him throw up. He squeezes his eyes shut, breathing harshly through his nose in an attempt to ground himself amidst the agony. He has to fight off the confusion that comes with being drugged to the gills with benzodiazepines, thinking is becoming incredibly hard again and his arm is an inflamed deadweight in Felicity’s grip and it throbs with an intensity makes him remember why he’s so cautious of broken bones. Human bones are so incredibly fragile, they break all the time, he doesn’t know how they deal with it.

Time Lord bones are thicker and extremely hard to break, and yet the Doctor had gone and done it again and he’d forgotten how much it hurt .

Felicity places his arm back down on the table and loosely loops the leather strap back around his wrist. She checks his pulse and then shines that godforsaken light back in his eye, pressing her hand down on his forehead to hold him still when he attempts to pull away because it burns . His pupils must dilate slower than wanted because she frowns. “Ketamine is still in your system,” she murmurs, “though you’ve burned through it significantly faster than anyone else would, so I’m not too worried about long term effects.”

She draws up another dose of midazolam and sticks it into the tubing of his IV, then she pulls up her chair again so she can sit down, crossing her legs and leaning forward on her elbows.

The Doctor struggles to meet her eyes, the world is swimming before him. Everything is beginning to disconnect from itself again, and if the Doctor was able to feel in that moment, the feeling would probably be fear again. She’d just dosed him up with more drugs. His wrist was screaming at him in agony while his systems moved to compensate. But with everything going on at once, his body had decided to prioritise fixing his physical ailments. It left him vulnerable to the sedatives bonding with his blood cells. It allowed it to drag him under. It made it hard to think properly. To focus.

Felicity watches him with a clinical kind of interest. Her brown eyes are soft as she watches his body succumb, his muscles twitching as he tries to fight back, his eyes rolling around the room in a subdued sort of terror, as if all his emotions had been pushed aside to make room for the drugs. As his body relaxes involuntarily, she presses a finger lightly against his wrist, where she knows the break is. He jerks at the touch, a short gasp escaping his lips, but the drugs dull his response before it can fully take form. She manipulates the joint carefully, testing its movement, watching his face contort in response. It’s agonising . He knows it is. But it's as if he’s reacting to it from afar. Watching it happen. The pressure of Felicity’s fingers increases, a deliberate, slow increase. Not quite to cause any further damage, but enough to make him feel every raw, jagged edge of the fracture beneath the skin. His breath hitches violently, but his body is still too sluggish, too heavy to fully flinch away.

“That’s a nasty break,” she murmurs. “Oblique fracture I believe.” She presses her thumb directly between the two halves of the bone and the Doctor can’t bring himself to scream. His body spasms in response, a strangled choking noise escaping the back of his throat instead. 

“Probably displaced,” Felicity continues. Her fingers continue to probe and the Doctor can’t pull away, either from the leather binding his wrist in front of her, or the drugs that made his muscles lax and barely responsive.

“S’op.” His words are disjointed and slurred and barely recognisable as English.

Felicity doesn’t look at him, her eyes are focused on the bruising beginning to form on his skin. “Will it heal on its own?” She asks.

The Doctor sags in his restraints, deconstructing the question. If he says yes, will she leave it alone? Stop touching him? Let it heal abnormally? If he says no, will she brace it, set it, or tear it open to pin together? He gets stuck in a loop of his own thoughts, not quite certain if the question was even meant to be answered. Was it rhetorical? Was it just Felicity’s musings she often made aloud?

He decides to say nothing. She hadn’t cared what he’d had to say before. So why should she care now. His teeth click together, the metal embedded in his jaw clinking against itself. His wrist would heal on its own. Quite fast actually. What was the average human healing cycle? About six weeks he thinks, though his memory is hazy so it's a little hard to remember. His wrist should only take about half of that. If it's set properly — which he doesn’t think it will be, — it could heal in a week.

A pair of fingers snap over his face and he’s jolted back into reality. He hadn’t realised he’d begun to sink into his mind until he’s yanked out of it again. The blaring lights overhead make his eyes sore, the beeping of the monitors makes his ears ache. 

“I asked you a question, Theta.”

Oh… It wasn’t rhetorical.

The Doctor swallows, his breathing unsteady as he attempts to reground himself in the world of pain and confusion. His wrist… he wriggles his fingers, the movement sends deep, arching, tendrils of pain through his wrist and his vision goes fuzzy, but he’s just glad his hand is still functional.

“Theta?”

“S’not—” he coughs, “s’not my ‘ame.”

Felicity furrows her brows, “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

He thunks his head on the table in frustration, it hurts, but not as much as everything else does. “Who’thse fau’ i’that?” He feels like he’s spinning, though he knows he’s still lying strapped to the table. The world is fuzzy around him, and his equilibrium is off, the effect is as if he’s one of those desk ornaments Donna would’ve liked. Two different pieces spinning in opposite directions, but they trick your mind into thinking they’re completely still. 

He bites down hard on his lip until he tastes blood. Donna can’t be here. He can’t bring her here. Donna is safe, with her family. He can’t taint her memory with this place, he can’t .

He parts his mouth and stares pointedly at Felicity — if a little blearily — the tongue immobiliser digs into his gums and it makes his eyes water. She sighs.

“You’re being very demanding, you know. You could at least say please.”

The Doctor's vision swims, and he struggles to focus on her, his mind swamped by the fog of the drugs. He wants to pull away from her touch at his tender wrist, but his muscles feel weak, useless. He wants to argue with the notion of begging. He doesn’t beg — but he has. He’s not being demanding, Felicity had changed him, forcibly altered his body and rendered his words illegible, then she’d complained that she couldn’t understand him? If he were fully in the right mind, he would’ve laughed hysterically at the hypocrisy. But he’s not, and the midazolam in his system is making it hard to form proper thoughts. There’s little whispered words in the back of his mind; ‘ it’s just survival.’ ‘She just wants you to use your manners.’  

The idea of submitting so easily is a notion put forward that he’d usually recoil from. But her words twist in his drug-addled mind. They could mean everything and anything at once. His incessant yapping had gotten him nothing but abuse and assault. She did have his best interests in mind when she’d torn his teeth out, replaced them with metal and forced his mouth closed. If he argued back now, he’d be proving her point. He doesn’t want to know what she might do to him to ensure his silence remains top priority. His tongue is bound in metal, she might cut it out instead. His teeth were altered so that she can close them at will, might she remove them altogether instead? 

She’s looking at him patiently, and he’s being unreasonable. Back on Gallifrey, being so rude to a superior would have him publicly flogged for insolence.

He tries to piece his thoughts together, gathering enough of himself to at least have an answer that sounds like him and not some broken animal . He wants to respond with just enough defiance that she knows he doesn’t want to submit. He wants her to know how much he hates her, and this place, and his position.

He can’t find it. Instead he chooses the path of least resistance. 

“Plea’thse…” he mumbles, barely audible, all of his protests dying in his throat. His cheeks fill with heat as Felicity appears surprised he’d given in so easily. He wouldn’t have. He didn’t… But he had. She had all the cards here. If he played along, he might come out the other side in less pieces— a little more whole.

“That’s good,” Felicity responds after a moment, almost tenderly, her hand now hovering over his wrist instead of digging into it, the pressure a sharp contrast to her soothing tone. The Doctor has finally done something right, the tension fades just a little and he sags in the exhaustive relief it brings. “Much better.” She reaches forward, and fiddles with the metal in his mouth until it comes loose. “Now, where were we?”

The Doctor rubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth, his movements sluggish as he attempts to work feeling back into the muscle. It's incredibly dry and cracked from the metal and he winces as he attempts to get it to work.

“Ah, your wrist.” Felicity sits back down in her seat and looks at him expectantly.

The Doctor’s mouth goes drier. He can’t remember what she’d asked.

“Will it heal on its own?” Felicity’s voice is slow and patient, as if she has all day. It reignites his memory and the Doctor is grateful she hadn’t felt the need to torture him to have him remember. She wasn’t like the others. She’d simply repeated the question for him.

No.

That was the bare minimum. He shouldn’t be feeling grateful for the basic human right to not be tortured. Wasn’t that in the constitution? The UK one? The one about human rights? Article 4? — no… 3. The right to not be tortured, or treated in any inhuman or degrading way.

He does laugh this time. He’s an alien. Torchwood is in no way bound to abide by such rules. They’d probably dismiss him if he brought it up. This version of London probably had some rewritten Alien rights document with only one article. And it probably read something along the lines of: ‘ Aliens have no rights, feel free to torture and degrade them as much as you please.’

“Something funny?”

The Doctor goes still and swallows his hysteria before shaking his head.

He considers the previous question again. Both answers would probably lead to the same result. If he said no it’d give Felicity the right to try and fix it. If he said yes Felicity would probably do the same thing. Intervene and see how it worked. Re-break it and re-break it and re-break it.

He shrugs and immediately regrets it, the movement pulls at his bound wrists and his vision flickers as he attempts to stay conscious and not black out from the pain and the drugs. He’s struggling to think straight, he’s certain Felicity might try to convince him of something that isn’t true and he wouldn’t be mentally prepared to deny it.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

The Doctor bites down on his newly released tongue to stop himself from snapping something stupid at her.

“I’ve ungagged you,” Felicity continues, “you might as well use your words.”

“I don’know.” He’s still tripping on his words and he hates it . “V’never broken anything.” It’s a lie, and Felicity probably knows it. She doesn’t call him out for it though, doesn’t even mention it. Her eyes slip back down to his wrist which is steadily turning an ugly shade of purple. They’re filled with a curious consideration that sends a shiver down the Doctor’s spine.

“The day might not be all wasted then,” she says after a while. “I’ll postpone the respiratory experiments I had planned. They’re dangerous with ketamine influence anyway. I’ll try something spontaneous. I was also down an assistant anyway, so maybe it’s for the best.”

“Oh, joys.” The Doctor mumbles. His head is beginning to pound again and it's probably the ketamine finally leaving his system. 

“No need to sound so glum.” Felicity chides. “This is huge, actually. I’ve never studied a natural break before. Usually we have to surgically break bones.” She stands up, ignoring the incredulous look on the Doctor’s face. “Maybe this will be where we find out what makes it heal so fast? Or maybe it’s just your flesh that heals faster… Your sternum hadn’t quite done much when I opened you up the second time. But that was only really a day later, perhaps it’s healed now?”

“S’not.” The Doctor promises quickly. He can still feel the deep ache in his chest from where the bonesaw had torn into him. He wasn’t about to start encouraging Felicity to cut him open again to check.

“Mmm,” Felicity hums, and it takes the Doctor a little too long to realise that her questions were rhetorical. She wasn’t looking for his participation in her thinking out loud. Her dismissal was enough to prove that. It gives him a brief moment of vertigo. He can’t get a grip on the woman. There was no tone deviation between questions she demanded answers for from him, and statements she was merely musing out loud.

She wanders over to one of the cupboards in the Doctor’s peripheral and comes back a few moments later with a slab of metal. “I’ll check on it later. We’ve got work to do.”

She hooks the metal slab to the side of the table, – fiddling with something metal that could be bolts, – in line with the Doctor’s right shoulder and he really doesn’t like where this appears to be going when she finishes up by folding out a support leg for the slab.

“You’ve got an interestingly strong tolerance to Midazolam,” Felicity murmurs as she works. It’s a jarring contrast between her nonchalant tone and the nature of the sentence. “Especially since I’ve given you a triple dose.” She places a collection of items onto the newly secured slab and the Doctor manages to decipher a wad of bandages, a roll of medical tape, and a few other various blurry shapes in front of his fuzzy vision.

Then she stills and stares down at him. Waiting patiently for him to meet her eyes.

“Are you going to be cooperative? Or will I have to sedate you more?”

He doesn’t want more drugs.

He can’t have more drugs.

He swallowed thickly. Searching for the fight he knows he still has. “What’re y’going to do?”

“Does it matter?”

He stares up at her, working his tongue in his mouth to try and moisten the dryness. There’s a beat before he builds the will to speak again. “Con- considering past events, yeah.”

Felicity frowns at him, her eyes filled with something that could’ve been annoyance, and could’ve been amusement, and could’ve been offended. Or, the fourth option; it could’ve been all at once.

The Doctor digs his nails into the palm of his left hand, he can feel the sharp searing heat of the bloody half-moons they leave behind. It pulls him from the void. Keeps him tethered in his swimming vision and scattered thoughts.

“I can make this worse for you if you’d like.” Felicity says after a long moment of contemplative silence. It makes his skin crawl. “I’ve been quite tame, I think. It could be a lot worse.” She blinks down at him. “I don’t appreciate the accusations. I’ve explained to you your circumstances. Your place . Don’t make me do it again.”

The Doctor scoffs. It makes his throat hurt. “Tame?” He says hoarsely. “You call gouging ‘nto m’chest n’putting my guts on display for your own sick ‘musement, tame? ” His wrist throbs, his chest burns, his eyes sting, every tube in his body twists and a growing sense of claustrophobia begins to overwhelm him. He’s trapped, in every sense of the word. He’s crumbling, in every sense of the word. He’s tired of hurting. He’s tired of being strapped to a table and treated like a specimen under a microscope. He’s tired of being naked. On display and open for anything and everything his captors decide to do to him.

He’s cold, and he’s hot, and his skin is bare and available. His feelings are locked away in a box at the back of his mind, forced into an artificial calm that makes him angry. Felicity insists that she’s been kind to him. That she’s tame . She could make it worse. It could always get worse.

But he’s been drugged, and stripped of his clothing, his hair, his name. He’s been beaten, and electrocuted, and smacked. He’s been torn open in a conscious thoracic vivisection twice. He’s been tortured and intubated and left in a stress position to be raped . He’d had his teeth torn from his skull and replaced with metal under the pretense of helping him and the reality of silencing his pleas. He’s been violated over and over and over again. And they’re taking and taking and taking and he’s not sure there’s anything left for them to take anymore. What happens when there’s nothing left for them to take?

Felicity doesn’t speak again. Doesn’t respond to his accusations.Her lips press together in a line. Her movements become mechanical as she stabs him with yet another dose of Midazolam. She watches as his movements become feeble. She watches as his glare dims in useless defiance. She watches as his railing struggles become pitiful twitches. She doesn’t listen to his spits of anger and desperation. She doesn’t listen as his words become slurred and fragmented again. He hadn’t even realised he had been gaining more control until it was once again torn away.

He could’ve just cooperated. Let her do whatever she was planning and keep himself together. But he just had to fight back. Had to give her a reason to abuse him again and still do what she was planning anyway.

“For the record, I don’t enjoy this.” Felicity tells him. And it’s a lie. She knows it is.

The Doctor doesn’t respond. He clenches his jaw and tries to hold onto reality as his thoughts fumble for purchase. 

Felicity picks up the roll of medical tape and begins wrapping it around each of his fingers. Winding it up each individual one, before winding it around all four at once. The Doctor tries not to think about tape. Tries not to let it spiral into thoughts of duct tape, and the feeling of tape on his lips and leather keeping his legs parted, and the hot breath of the guard from the last few nights—

Felicity wraps his thumb in tape and crosses it over his palm before binding it in place with another few rounds of the stuff. It’s not going over his lips, or in his hair, or on his cheeks.

“F’licity.” The Doctor tries.

She ignores him. Her hands carefully wrap his immobilised hand in a few rounds of bandages. She does the same to his upper wrist, and elbows. Once she’s happy, she gets to work unhooking the leather straps from the table and manoeuvring his arm into a ninety degree angle from his body and across the added metal slab. She buckles his arm back down, adding an additional strap across his immobilised fingers. The straps leave his forearm exposed. Painting a grotesque picture in the Doctor’s mind of what Felicity intended to do.

The Doctor regrets his previous statements. His wrist would heal on its own. If he’d just told her that maybe it would have pacified her curiosity and she’d leave it alone, – Or maybe she’d cut it open anyway – maybe she’d jot down a few things in that notebook of hers and leave him alone. And he wants her to leave him alone, but if she leaves him alone, then he’s alone and then that guard would come back and—

He bites down harshly on the inside of his mouth as the movement sends a jolt up his broken bone and he’s certain he begins to see stars. He struggles to gather himself back together, his mind floating hazily in the embrace of the drugs in his system. By the time he’s regained enough consciousness to figure out what was happening in front of him, Felicity had fitted the metal cuffs from earlier over his wrist and elbow and was bolting them down over the bandages.

“It’ll heal n’it’sown.” The Doctor manages to slur. He attempts to concentrate on how his lips move, and how his mind works, and it’s so hard when all he wants to do is sleep. His head lolls sideways as he watches her work. “Y’don’ have to fix it.”

Felicity hardly glances at him, “so you have broken a bone before?” She sounds disappointed and the Doctor squashes down the guilt that rears its head.

“n’I haven’t.” He lies. “But I know how Gal–” He trips over the multiple syllables of his own planet and it makes him want to cry. He needs his body to hurry up and metabolise the drugs again. He can’t focus. He can’t move. He’s breaking down and there’s nothing he can do to stop it when the midazolam keeps telling him to give in, give in, give in .

“Galth–” He squeezes his eyes shut as Felicity continues bolting his arm down. “Gal-I-Frey.” He finally manages. “I know how Ga’freyan injuries work.”

Felicity hums, tugging on the restraints to check their firmness. It sends pain ricocheting up his arm and into his shoulder and he whimpers.

“I’m not interested in whether it’ll heal.” Felicity says. “It will heal. I know that much. I want to know how it heals.”

It hits him like a knife to the chest. Arguing is pointless. There is nothing he can say to stop Felicity’s insatiable desire for knowledge. He can’t just tell her how it should heal. Can’t just describe how the bone realigns itself and binds itself back together. She wants to see it happen. And she has the scalpel, she has his arm immobilised and ready for study.

“Would you like something to bite down on?” Felicity asks.

Something to bite down on means something in his mouth and something in his mouth means he can’t talk, and if he can’t talk he can’t defend himself and it’s the only way he can defend himself right now, even if no one cares to listen.

He shakes his head and Felicity tilts her head sideways in acknowledgement before pulling on a pair of gloves and wiping his exposed skin down with antiseptic.

Then his forearm erupts in heat as Felicity drags her blade through his flesh without any prior warning. The Doctor grits his teeth as tears spring to his eyes, he can’t pull away, his arm is trapped beneath metal, and leather, and gauze, and tape. His weakened body jolts in agony as Felicity tears through flesh and fat to reach the bone underneath. She pins the flaps of flesh backwards with carefully placed sutures.

He can hear his heart monitor’s beeping begin to speed up again, the sound pulsing through his skull like a third heartbeat. He’s had this happen to his chest, she’s torn him open before. He should be used to it. But it’s as if he’s experiencing dissection anew. Everything aches with the pain of a thousand cuts. His nerves are alight with agony. The movement of the blade jostles his broken bone and he fights to stay conscious, though he knows slipping away would mute the pain. His body reacts instinctively, trying to pull away but the metal holds him tightly and the pain has nowhere to go. It ricochets like a live wire through his skin.

She snips through muscle with a pair of scissors, like he’s an art project. He can see when her jaw clenches in frustration as his body attempts to fight back.

“I’m going to have to cut through some major muscles and tendons.” Felicity murmurs and he’s not sure if it's to him, or to herself. The statement drags the Doctor back to reality. The intention to mutilate him. To destroy him beyond repair.

“Don’t.” The Doctor gasps as Felicity presses a gloved finger into exposed muscle. “Don’t d’this.”

“This might feel a little strange.” Felicity speaks over his pleas. She doesn’t look at him either, her gaze fixated on something inside his arm. “You’ll probably lose feeling for a bit, but it’s nothing I probably can’t fix later.”

“Felicity, y’can’t d’this.”

Felicity finally looks at him. Her brown eyes meet his and her expression is detached and emotionless. “I can do what I want.” She tells him. “Afterall, you said it yourself, I’m not tame.”

The Doctor’s hearts hammer in his chest, “please, Felicity. You do this, you could permanently damage my hand.”

Felicity shrugs, “you’ll heal fine. I’ll fix it.”

“You can’t .”

“I can do what I like.” Felicity tightens her retractors in the Doctor’s flesh and he hisses at the pain of it. She moves her bloody fingers towards his face.

The Doctor realises her intentions immediately and jerks his head away from her. “No. I don’t nggk–” Felicity digs her fingers in his face and his hair and forces them past his lips so that all he can taste is his own blood as she locks his teeth back together. His jaw spasms at the tightness she cranks it to, his teeth grinding into each other. He can feel the sticky residue his blood on her fingers leaves behind on his cheek, and matting through his hair.

“That gob of yours is no use if you crack a tooth.” She tells him.

“‘Lish’icity.” The Doctor speaks through his teeth, mind roiling with terror. “Plea’shee.”

Felicity pats him on the head and moves back to his arm, her scissors at the ready and there is nothing the Doctor can do.

“This is going to hurt.” She says. Her voice is blunt and to the point. “I’m cutting two to begin with, and we’ll continue from there.”

“‘On’t.” The Doctor begs but he breaks off in a dismantled scream as Felicity’s blade finds its mark and the entire right side of his body erupts in uncontrolled agony . His vision sputters out, his body seizes and his back attempts to arch off the table. His joints railing in anguish as his bound hand flails and twitches uncontrollably as it attempts to figure out what is wrong.

The second one is just as bad. His eyes roll back in his head and he chokes out another scream as his hand stiffens and curls in response to the severed tendons. His arm radiates with fire. He cries out as Felicity stitches the broken tendons out of the way and continues moving forward.

There’s a numbness that begins to spread through his hand now. Nothing like relief or escape from the agony. It’s more of a deep, tingling, pins and needles sensation that is somehow worse than the pain. It’s deep and all consuming and he can’t move his hand. He can’t move his hand. Felicity has destroyed the motor control of his fingers and his wrist and he’s broken . There’s no coming back from this. He’s destroyed beyond repair.

Felicity keeps going. “Just some ligaments and the joint capsule in the way now.” She tells him. “You’re doing so well. Almost done.”

He makes it through three more slices of blade and a comforting hand pressing circles of agony into his flesh before his mind gives up and he succumbs to oblivion.

Chapter Text

He’s dragged back into awareness by a jolt of white-hot agony that runs through his arm and surges violently through the rest of his body. He chokes at the feeling, hot air from his lungs expelling through his nose, and it’s then that he realises that the curved metal that immobilised his tongue had been screwed back in place. He’s not sure when… Probably while he was unconscious.

His eyes feel sticky from tears and he can still taste blood in his mouth. The air is thick with the stench of it. When his vision clears properly he can see dried blood coating his right arm where the wound Felicity had inflicted upon him was still gaping, flayed skin raw and curling. He stares at it deliriously for a long time. He can see inside himself. He can see his blood oozing periodically down the sides of his arm. His torn muscle, the thick, ugly stitching that holds his skin apart and keeps his tendons and ligaments out of the way. He can see off-white bone stained with red, slick and glistening grotesquely in the sterile light of his prison. The break. The splintered edges.

He blinks sluggishly, his own breathing and quiet whimpering filling the static of his ears as he struggles to comprehend the mutilated sight before him. He struggles to keep his lungs filled between his bodies inability to breathe outside of hitched spasms and sporadic gasps.

He’d been vivisected twice before this, but the neck restraint had kept his vision on the ceiling and he hadn’t actually seen more than the aftermath. Now… Now he could stare right into the disgusting, bloody mess that was his right forearm. He could see the red, swollen and puffy skin around the surgical sight. It was turning every shade of ugly yellow, green, dark red and purple.

The pain of it was inescapable. Deep, unrelenting, and growing with every passing moment. His destroyed and frayed muscle glistened. His arm was limp in its bonds. Felicity had removed the strap that she’d passed over his fingers earlier and they curled painfully despite the medical tape that bound them. His entire body was trembling involuntarily, but he felt hot, his flesh burning as if he’d been trapped inside an oven. His hair was matted with cold sweat as a result, and it only served to amplify how much he was shaking.

He can feel his throat close over with nausea, his stomach clenching at the sight of his insides. Everything felt wrong. His arm felt empty , loose, vulnerable. He can’t will any of his fingers to do more than twitch and when he does, the pain of it rips through him and he cries out with a disgusting whimper. The stench of blood and antiseptic in the air is suffocating. It’s clogging his airways, and it’s as if he’s being waterboarded; drowning in the stench of the festering wound.

His stomach flips and he feels it seize before he throws up the remaining contents of his stomach. His mouth fills with bile and stomach acid, and he chokes violently when it has nowhere to go but his lungs. He can feel it surge up through the nasogastric tube and burn through his nostrils before dripping sickeningly onto the ground beneath where it hangs limply. His body convulses in involuntary panic as he attempts to breathe through the vomit clogging his windpipe.

“For god's sake, Theta.” Hands grip at his face, pressing between his lips and releasing the locking mechanism that holds his teeth together. The Doctor lurches forward against his restraints, coughing violently as he attempts to clear blood and bile and other bodily fluids from his lungs. The hand tilts his head sideways when he slumps backwards against the table, exhausted. The remaining vomit drips pitifully from his lips and pools beneath his head. He sobs hysterically.

A hand rubs circles comfortingly into the small of his back as he cries. Shame filling his very core. He wants to die.

“You’re okay.” Felicity tells him. 

He’s not. But when had she ever cared?

His breath rattles in his chest as he drools onto the table, he stares vacantly at the wall through half-lidded eyes. He’s still alive. He’s still alive. He’s still alive. He’s breathing, he’s not broken, he’s not.

His body aches, throbs in pulses of pure, inescapable agony. There’s not one part of him that doesn’t feel violated. There’s no part of him that isn’t hurting. He shivers, his eyes drifting to the ruined mess of his arm, latching on to the spider web of dried blood rather than the very obvious spill of muscle and destroyed tendons he knows reside within the cavity Felicity has gouged inside him.

She wipes at his chin with a damp cloth, then at the table beneath his head. Her eyes flicker disdainfully towards the ground where he can still hear the grotesque slap of the contents of his stomach dripping from his feeding tube to the floor. “That gag reflex of yours really isn’t coping,” she murmurs, “I’ll fix that as soon as I can.”

She stares down at his trembling form, there’s an eerie kind of sympathy in her gaze. “Your bone has already started forming callus.” She remarks nonchalantly, “it stopped bleeding almost instantly too. I doubt it’ll take longer than two weeks to heal if I let it.”

That last part hangs in the air ominously while the Doctor still tries to catch his breath. He can’t bring himself to look at her while she gestures vaguely. This is stuff he already knows. If Felicity had cared enough to ask, she wouldn’t have had to mutilate his arm to find out.

“I’m curious to see how it heals if I misalign the bone fragments.” There it is. “They’re relatively in place right now, but if I cut through more of the Interosseous Membrane and shift the bones further apart, I wonder if they’ll shift back on their own, or if they’ll heal with a malunion.”

The Doctor swallows thickly, struggling to keep down the sour taste of his own saliva. His mouth is still slick with bile and he longs desperately for a glass of water instead of the saline drip in his arm.

He hisses out in pain when Felicity taps something against exposed bone, his stomach lurches and his throat spasms as if it wants to throw up again, but there is literally nothing left inside him to be able to. The effect is a weak convulsion that runs through his body and makes his head spin and all his injuries scream out at once. A wet line of something drips down his chin and makes a mess of the table Felicity had just wiped. He squeezes his eyes shut and drags in a shuddering breath. He longs to curl in on himself, but he can’t.

Felicity wipes at his chin again, “messy,” she scolds, her tone is that of an impatient mother.

“Sorry.” The Doctor mumbles, though with the tongue immobiliser still in place it comes out as more of a ‘sth’orry,” and he’s too exhausted to deal with the mental repercussions of apologising for something that wasn’t his fault.

Felicity merely hums at him in response, her eyes are on his arm. “I’ll give you a wash before I go home.” She promises, “you’re filthy.”

And whose fault is that?

Probably his.

A routine is developed. Time passes. A month at least? Though it could be shorter or longer, he’s not entirely sure. He spends a lot of time drugged out of his mind with whatever Felicity’s intrigue piques to, which makes keeping track of time quite difficult. She sticks with midazolam for a long while. Often having it laced in his saline IV. Time keeps slipping away from him. It could’ve been days, hours, seconds even since the last time someone had decided to tear him apart and piece him back together again. It messes with his memory too. He can hardly remember what happened a few moments ago, let alone how long it had been since Torchwood? Was it even Torchwood? Had captured him.

She does test a few other drugs during the time he notices passing. A few times getting dangerously close to convincing the Doctor of things that aren’t true. He can’t even remember correctly much of what happened when she’d tried to test different dosages of what he thinks she’d called clonazepam. The drug had twisted so much of what he’d thought was real that he wasn’t entirely certain he could rely on his recollection of events to be true. 

It had taken a while to kick in and Felicity had spent that time digging around in his arm, her hands carefully shifting his bone fragments around. He’d become desensitised to the feeling after a while. It was still agonisingly painful, but it had become something he was used to and could deal with. When the clonazepam had kicked in however, it had hit him like a truck. It was as if he’d been wading through a pool of water only to discover it was quicksand as it suddenly began to close over his head. He’d fought to stay conscious, his memory and thoughts ran circles around his confused mind, and the world struggled to stay still around him.

“You’re okay.” Felicity had murmured, pausing in her progress after noticing the sudden eerie stillness of the Doctor’s body after the previous rigidity as he’d attempted to fruitlessly fight her and the drugs off. He stared up at the ceiling for a long moment, struggling to lock onto anything else because everything that moved made his head spin if he looked at it too much. “Let yourself get used to it.” Felicity had continued. “It’ll feel normal after a while.”

The Doctor struggled to hang onto the memory of what she’d given him. It couldn’t have been more midazolam… this, though similar, was definitely different.

“Wha—” His eyes rolled back in his head and he fought to keep his lungs still fighting for air. His tongue catches on one of the bolts in his ‘teeth’ and he has to swallow down a mouthful of bile.

“Shhh.” Felicity shushed him, “it’s just a little different to what you’re used to.”

His stomach roiled at the infantilising words and tone of voice, and it churned as he let his head fall sideways to focus on her more. Her words were bouncing around his skull and it was beginning to make him feel sick. He caught sight of his arm and nearly broke down in tears. He remembered it happening, he did. Just… when? How long…? Surely it should’ve healed by now.

Felicity must’ve noticed the confusion in his eyes, her lips turned upwards in a comforting smile. “You broke your arm, remember? One of the bad casuals gave you ketamine that I didn’t approve of. They’re fired now, but I need to fix you up anyway.”

He’d swallowed thickly, trying desperately to remember the finer details of what had happened. That had been… yesterday? A few hours ago? He can remember Rose, why was Rose there?

He pressed his eyes closed in an attempt to clear his head, “I don—”

Felicity stares him down with quiet contemplation. If he’d been in his right mind he would’ve been able to see the cogs turning in that phenomenal brain of hers. She was so intelligent, in such an insidious way.

“The ketamine set off your severe anxiety, triggered some kind of psychosis. I couldn’t stop you from snapping bone.” Felicity tells him after a moment. Her eyes are sympathetic. No— she’s his captor. A sadist. He needs to get away from her. The Doctor bites his tongue in an attempt to clear his head… It doesn’t work.

“It’s tied down a little tighter to keep you from hurting it again.” Felicity reassures him, her hand brushes his unbroken wrist gently, stealing his attempts to twist it in its bonds. “The psychotic break gave you some self destructive tendencies,” she gestures at the deep gouge in his flesh that exposes his splintered bone. The Doctor squints at it, his eyes struggling to focus on the stitches and the scar tissue buildup that was struggling to close the wound up. Felicity’s story didn’t seem right… He remembers breaking his wrist… he doesn’t remember severing skin. Hadn’t she cut into it to study the bone?

“That’s not—”

“I’m fixing you.” Felicity promises, cutting off his slurred attempt at speech, she brushed her hand against his moist cheek. “It’s okay if you don’t remember things, you were pretty out of it. You can trust me, I promise.”

The Doctor had hummed at her uselessly. Too tired to argue. She probably wouldn’t listen anyway.

Later, when the drug had worn off, and Felicity had weighed the pros and cons of how it had worked, — took too long to kick in, made him a little too dissociated to be useful, definitely heightened his suggestibility, etcetera, etcetera. — he’d connected the dots and realised she definitely had been lying to him. He couldn’t quite shake the horror of nearly losing himself after that.

He’s kept strapped to the same table the entire time. His arm remains pinned and on display for weeks while Felicity experiments on it. She lets it heal over and over and over again while she repeatedly scrapes away formed callus and his body’s other attempts at fixing it. Never quite letting it finish before the bone is parted again and again. He’s not entirely certain he’ll recover from the injury, even if Felicity reconnects his tendons. It’s a mess of scar tissue and mangled muscle and aches in constant anguish. When he’s able to think properly, the idea of never regaining proper use of his right hand sends him into a sort of spiralled depression. He’d been attempting to avoid permanent damage and now somehow he’d caused it on his own? If he hadn’t struggled, broken his wrist, Felicity wouldn’t have been urged to study it. Or if Felicity was right and he’d torn it open himself?

He’s not sure if can handle the idea of it being his own fault that he’s ruined. Though it probably is.

Felicity diagnoses him with depression. She sits across from him, not doing much else than studying her notebook that held all of her notes about him. The Doctor had stopped sleeping, he can’t remember the last time his body had slipped off into any sort of rest. During the day he was tormented by Felicity and Drabek and the other Torchwood staff maintaining his body like an object. During the night he was plagued with waking nightmares and that guard who took advantage of his increasing inability to fight back. Everything Felicity did to him during the day seemed to accidentally – or intentionally, who knows? – work in the guards favour. The gag surgically implanted in his jaw gave him control over the Doctor’s mouth. The extreme mutilation and immobilisation of his limbs prevented him from fighting back. The Doctor was always drugged with some sort of dissociative sedative at night and it was becoming increasingly difficult to frame the assault as something other than his fault. The confusion and lethargic state it left him in made it impossible to do anything other than lie there and take it.

“I worry about you, Theta.” Felicity had said after a long moment of sitting and staring. The Doctor’s skin prickled, he was coming down with something. His body was trembling with some kind of fever and every so often he hacked out a cough that was agonising with his jaw locked shut.

The Doctor stared blankly at the ceiling. He’d given up arguing and attempting to speak. He needed to conserve his energy for survival if he wanted to escape. Regardless of that, his mouth was locked closed and his tongue was immobilised. He couldn’t speak even if he wanted to.

After a while she’d pumped him full of some other drug. An antidepressant that made him feel nothing but flatness. It forced him into a state of half awareness and he found himself unintentionally asleep a lot of the time. It made it worse, somehow. He’d wake up to Felicity cutting into him. Or he’d wake up to the guard having his way. He grew terrified of the idea of sleep and despite being unable to feel the fear itself, it overwhelmed his system with the inescapable need to die.

Felicity eventually grows tired of cutting away healing flesh and scar tissue to continue her assault on his arm. His body’s unique tendency to heal before she wants becomes more and more of a frustration to her as her methods grow increasingly severe. She comes to a solution one day, her eyes gleaming as she enters the room, still oblivious to the Doctor’s sedated, yet still sleep deprived form, lying slumped in his restraints and sticky with the residue his nightly assailant left behind.

He’s not sure if she realises what happens while she’s gone, or if she just doesn’t care. She seems a little too preoccupied with her own thoughts and endeavours to mention anything and the Doctor isn’t sure if it’s worth mentioning anyway. He’s not sure if he’d cope with the idea that she knew and didn’t care. Or if she knew and saw it as a further opportunity for study. He’s not sure she’d do anything if he did tell her, she’d probably make the assumption that his mental faculties were stronger than a humans and see if she could replicate it in her studies. And if he did tell her and the guard found out? The previous incident with the cattleprod was definitely not the worst that could happen.

She didn’t stop to speak to him, the novelty of explaining her work had long since worn off, replaced by an irritability when he failed to respond properly. Her hands went immediately towards a fresh pair of gloves. A wide metal ring – though more of an oval – the topic of discussion. She didn’t bother with any preparation, didn’t bother with her usual condescending explanation of the horrors she intended to inflict. She snipped through the ever sloppy stitching that held the festering skin of his arm apart and replaced it with the metal ring. From there she began the painstakingly long and detailed process of stitching his sallow and dying flesh to the metal of the ring, tugging it apart and taut. She hadn’t stopped when he’d cried, hadn’t stopped when he went silent, the drugs dragging him back into submission and the no longer comforting lull of numbness. Hadn’t stopped until his mutilated skin was held permanently apart and forced to heal around itself rather than over the gaping hole in his arm. 

His limbs cramp and he can feel his muscles begin to deteriorate the longer he lies immobile. Like a rusted-over hinge. He probably wouldn’t be able to walk if he’s ever released from the table. His escape plans have been written and discarded at least a hundred times. No one ever seems to make a mistake. He’s always bound, always silenced. The plans are pointless if he can’t even get off the table to initiate them.

It becomes long enough that he’s begun to memorise the work day and shift patterns as well. They become more regular the longer he’s there. As if someone has finally worked him into daily work life. Tracking it gives him something to do. Something to think about other than his unending torment and need to cease existing. Something to do other than gouge holes in his lips with his teeth or tear crescents into the palms of his hands with his nails.

Felicity comes in every day, her dark hair swept back in a neat ‘out of the way’ hairstyle. She starts early and quite often leaves late, though the Doctor is certain that most of her time spent is overtime. He can’t help but crave her presence though. Felicity being there means that no one else is. He can handle whatever she wants to do to him. The moment she’s gone he’s up for grabs and usually it's worse than anything she’s ever done.

She’s always lingering. Always somewhere in the corner of his mind. She argues a lot. If there’s anyone else in the same room as her and they have a differing opinion, she’s always in the right. She argues with Drabek the most. Despite the fact that he’s her superior, he spends a lot of time apologising for getting in her way. There’s quite often times that he opens the door while Felicity is actively in the ‘experiment mindset’ and immediately closes it again because she is impossible to negotiate with when set on a mission. He’s not very confrontational.

Drabek works early morning to early afternoon, though the Doctor has seen him in passing later at night so he might have an alternating day/night schedule. He enters a few times a week to check on progress, complain about progress, and continue on with his day.

Hawthorne, the woman who had allowed, and goaded the guard into assaulting him does not show up regularly, but when she does, she’s arguing with Felicity. The Doctor is certain that Felicity is always the initiator to the arguments, however there has been a few times that Hawthorne couldn’t have not started it.

“Have you made any progress?” Was usually the topic.

Felicity would shoot back a long list of things she’d done to achieve progress. She just needed more time .

He doesn’t remember any of the conversations after they happen.

He’s kept gagged unless Felicity is the only one in the room, or unless the guard chooses to crank his jaw wide open for his own sick, disgusting pleasure.

The Doctor doesn’t remember much at all…

Felicity cleans him twice a week, a harsh, lemon detergent that is used on the benches and floors as well. He loathes the smell of it, though he craves the feeling of being clean more. He longs for a boiling hot shower. He longs to scrape his flesh from his bones. He feels disgusting. No amount of soap seems to be able to clean the reek of every bodily fluid imaginable.

His feeding and waste collection are changed morning and night by some faceless individual. He has to fight the urge to throw up everything that’s pumped inside his stomach for fear of giving Felicity a reason to remove his gag reflex like she’d threatened. 

He’s inspected and abused and taken from day and night and day and night and day and night and day and night. And there’s nothing left for them to take, and yet they still do. Take, take, take, take, take, TAKE.

He is nothing but a body. A slab of meat. A conduit for someone else’s gain.

Felicity makes a mistake.

She leaves for the day. Her work finished. She’d hacked away at his bone, carved into his hip and sewn it back up after extracting blood and muscle and who knows what else, for reasons he can’t figure out. He’d been asphyxiated half to death just so she could see how it affected his body’s ability to continue the blood supply to his ruined arm.

She writes notes upon notes upon notes. She cleans him, scrubs at his flesh until she’s certain it won’t get infected. She covers the gaping hole in his arm with a thin cloth to keep germs at bay.

Then she leaves. She says goodnight and she leaves .

It’s a trap. It has to be. Felicity never makes mistakes. Especially not one as big as forgetting to refill his supply of drugs. It had to be intentional. She was testing him. Letting him see a glimpse of freedom only to tear it away from him. He wasn’t going to buy into it. He would stay right here. Give no excuses into letting them break him more.

Of course it might not be a trap. He’s been relatively clear headed before and he hadn’t seen it as an escape opportunity. There really was not a way for him to get off the stupid table without extreme bodily harm…

He twists his wrists in their bonds restlessly, not used to being in his head quite as much as he was in this moment. His right arm had gone numb, it was cold and buzzed with pins and needles, and every movement sent his mind alight. It felt like something and nothing all at once. It grounded him in the ocean of uncertainty and pain and fear.

He finds that if he pulls hard enough, the ruined ligaments that connect his thumb to the socket are loose enough he’s sure he’d be able to fully dislocate the joint. If he pulls hard enough from there — and manages to stay conscious throughout the process and the overwhelming amount of pain it causes — he would probably be able to get free of the metal that had held his arm immobile for however long he’d been here now.

No. There’s no reason to attempt that. He just needs to keep waiting for an opportunity. If dislocating his thumb would work, he would’ve tried it by now.

Unless he had and just didn’t remember it. It wasn’t too far-fetched. His memory was in tatters.

He turns his head sidewards and stares at the metal cuff. His lax hand beneath it. Even if he got it free, he’s not certain he’d be able to get his hand to move enough to get his other one out. The tendons that controlled finger movements were severed, if the cloth wasn’t there, he’d be able to see the two halves stitched to the side in the gaping hole of his arm. Felicity had removed the original tape bindings after a week or so. All he had to do was pull hard enough his thumb and possible other finger joints detached from their sockets and compressed small enough to fit through the cuff. He’d be able to roll sideways and shimmy his arm out of the other one from there and then flop his fingers around uselessly until they found enough grip to unbind his chest and other arm.

From there it was just a matter of one handed unbinding the rest of his body and managing to find a way out without being caught. The odds of this actually working were a trillion to one, but since when had that ever stopped him? He’d defeated the Daleks, hadn’t he? He’d ended the Time War. He’d defeated the Master and the Racnoss and the cybermen. Probably with worse odds.

The anti-depressants are a blessing in disguise. As much as he hates it, now that the sedatives had mostly worn off, the emotionless stupor they forced him into had left him almost clear headed. Funnily enough— hysterically actually —he’s almost glad Felicity had chosen to keep him on the ‘ longer lasting, more side effects though ’ ones because despite Felicity forgetting to give him more alongside the usual triple dosage of sedatives, they were still numbing his panic and depression just enough that his thoughts were coming a lot easier than they’d usually be — albeit a little detached. It was easy to forget about how much it hurt when the drugs warped his perception of it. It was easy to stop worrying about the ‘what if you get caught?’ mentality when the drugs stole his ability to care. It was easy to brush aside the fear of permanent damage when his self-preservation was shot to death weeks ago by the desperate need to escape.

He tugs at his wrist, steeling his resolve and for a fleeting moment the thought of destroying his hand more is paralysing and he considers the repercussions of just lying there and waiting for Felicity to come back.

But then the drugs in his system take back the hold of his psyche. Forcing the emotions away and giving him the numbness and nonchalance required to tug harder. They did this in movies. He’d watched plenty of action films with Donna. Surely it couldn’t be that hard. The ligaments in his thumb were already destroyed, his thumb was barely holding on as it was. Breathe, wedge it into the edge of the cuff, pull. Run, escape. The TARDIS would know what to do. He just had to get there.

No amount of drugs would be able to suppress the scream of agony he releases behind locked teeth when his plan actually works and his thumb tears from its socket with a sickening popping sound that sets his entire body on edge and sends him into the urge to throw up. He fights it back and attempts to wriggle his hand free, teeth clenching violently against the metal in his mouth. He blinks back frustration when he realises his hand still won’t fit through the metal cuff.

It can’t have been for nothing. He has to keep moving forward. This is the first chance he’s gotten to get out. He can’t waste it. He’ll never forgive himself if he wastes it.

The Doctor takes a deep breath in through his nose, leans to the left, twists his hand and yanks .

The crunch that fills his ears is drowned out by yet another shriek of agony he can’t restrain. Pain lances violently through his thumb, pinky, and ring fingers and his vision cuts in and out of black static as he fights the urge to pass out from the sheer agony. He pulls again in desperation, the pain not quite growing to panic yet and he knows it’s because of the anti-depressants dulling his emotional range, but he can’t afford to stop now. Not when he’s so close.

He pulls again and his hand erupts in heat and he cries out again before his hand finally passes through the metal ring that bound it there. It feels sticky and he lies still for a moment, chest heaving with the effort of continuing to breathe. He can’t bring himself to look at it because he knows he’s messed something up. Something had gone very wrong, he can feel it as heat trickles down the side of his wrist.

Breathe. In, pause, out. In, pause, out. His breaths are ragged as he works through the pain. The full weight of whatever he’d done hadn’t quite clicked yet and it won’t until he gives his brain a visual. He stares at the wall, eyes locking onto a crack that he hadn’t noticed before. He can’t afford to break down. Just breathe. In out, in out, in out, in out.

It was his fault this time. His useless, spasming, mutilated hand was his fault. He doesn’t look at it.

He attempts to roll sideways, to his left, leveraging his arm forward and hopefully out of the last metal cuff. Leather bites into his chest and hips. Tears streak down his face as he regains his composure. He can’t stop now. He’ll be fine. He pulls his shoulder inwards and he cries because it’s still not enough. The metal is still hooked around his forearm and he can’t quite get the right angle to pull it any further and he’s failed. He’s got less than an hour until the guard shows up for his nightly round of assault. His stomach twists at the thought. That disgusting man. He would find some sort of sick pleasure in the Doctor’s suffering. Use it to enjoy him more. Felicity would find him a shell. He’d be broken. Destroyed. It’d be his fault.

He tugs at his arm. There’s a little more give due to muscle deterioration. If he could just get the right angle…

His elbow bends unnaturally when he gives one last ditch effort thrash. It gives, and then it keeps going. He goes rigid briefly in shock as the white hot agony of it all doesn’t quite register. He manages to flop his destroyed arm forward, over his chest before his body convulses with a sudden anguish as it finally hits. His eyes roll back in his head and he loses time for a few moments. 

When he comes to he fumbles his arm around unseeingly at the leather across his chest. He manages to get one of his rigid, destroyed fingers to hook under the buckle and it comes loose and he’s almost there. He’s almost there. He can’t afford to stop. He’s on a tight schedule. It’s now or never.

He attempts to detach his brain from his arm. He’ll worry about that later. It moves robotically and twitches and spasms violently as he hunches forward and fumbles with the leather on his left arm. He won’t focus on whatever he’s done to his right. The minute he comprehends the damage he’s done for.

He gets his left arm free and it’s merely a matter of moments before he’s hunched over his legs and releasing the rest of his limbs, fingers bending awkwardly as he does it one handed. He tears the IV from his elbow once he’s free of leather. Yanks the tube from his nose in a few jerky movements and ignores the ripping, burning sensation it tears into his throat. He yanks at the locking mechanism between his teeth, the skin of his fingers tear and his gums bleed and his jaw crunches, and he doesn’t care. He needs it gone . Eventually he snaps something — metal? Bone? He gulps in a greedy breath of oxygen. He just needs to get to his TARDIS. He’ll figure out the ‘how’ later. He’ll fix everything later. He just needs out…

He crumples the minute he attempts to put weight on his legs. They buckle uselessly beneath him and he goes crashing forward into Felicity’s tool table, his head collides with something hard and he’s not sure how much time passes before he comes to, shivering on the floor. Spots dance across his vision, something wet drips into his eyes, his nostrils flare. His lips are parted slightly and the back of his throat was finding it hard to breathe through the blood that had pooled there.

He rolled over onto his stomach, all his weight on his left arm, eyes fluttering, biting down hard on his tongue and whimpering at the pain that seared through his jaw and arms and chest and everything, at the movement. His body screams at him to stop, to give up but he can’t . He’s so close. He’s almost there.

His legs are tangled in tubing that is still connected from deep inside his body to the waste collection bags hooked to the end of the table. He drags himself feebly to his knees, shaking pathetically and almost overwhelmed by a wave of cold that descends upon him like a blanket of ice. He manages to unhook the bag from the table and drag himself to a clear corner of the room where he can see the door. His hand closes around some sort of metal tool along the way, a broken blade of sorts, a weapon. He slumps against the wall, shivering and trying not to cry as his dying adrenaline rush leaves him in a mess of his own mangled body.

Through the haze of his flickering vision he can see blood and muscle and exposed bone, his right hand is a limp, useless mess. His elbow is on fire and he can’t bend it enough to curl the limb into his chest, so it hangs at his side instead.

His throat burns and his jaw throbs and everything is wrong and the crushing realisation that it’s his fault is becoming unbearable.

He bites down on his lip before wrapping trembling fingers around the rectal tube. Pause— deep breath.

The guard leers down at him, hands touching his shivering body, hot breath breathing down the Doctor’s neck and he sobs as the rectal tube is slid out, paving the way for more abuse. His lip splits from the pressure of his teeth until the tube is finally gone and his vision clears. It leaves behind a deep ache, but it’s gone.

He presses his thighs together and swallows back a wave of nausea. One more. Just the catheter and then he’s out. He’s free. He’s alive .

He closes his left hand around the tube, his breath rattles in his chest. Everything hurts. His head pounds where he’d hit it. When he tugs at it, it drags a hoarse scream from his destroyed throat. He sinks his teeth into his lip when he hears footsteps, desperately trying to remember if Martha had mentioned anything about catheters. There was a balloon of some sort. To keep it in place within his bladder? How does he deflate it? The footsteps stop outside his door and he’s failed.

He tugs at the tube again with a frustrated sob. Something tears and he can feel blood soaking into his hands. He’s ruined. He’s ruined and he’s still trapped. He’s ruined and it’s his fault and he couldn’t even escape properly.

He curls his left fingers around the broken scalpel, perhaps he should kill himself. Refuse to regenerate. Sink into oblivion.

He holds the blade against his destroyed arm, eyes refusing to focus on the damage, a growing lump in his throat and—

He can’t do it. He’s a coward. He’s so fucking pathetic.

The Doctor lets the blade clatter to the floor, tucks his shaking legs into his chest and cries.

Chapter Text

2011 – August 23rd.

The United Kingdom and allied forces had just nuked the Alien Mothership attacking them, when the savage creature with tusks and slit eyes had run Alistair Vale’s Chief Commander through the middle with a double edged blade.

She hadn’t even cared that the war had just ended. All she could see was the light in Joel Vale’s eyes blink out in the few seconds it took her to shoot a hole through the alien’s skull.

Several more shots were fired. All of them were non-fatal. All of them but hers. They wouldn’t fault her for that. The war was over. The aliens had lost, surrendered even, she can see a few of them raise their hands in desperation for their lives. Her shot was in retaliation to the cold blooded murder of the last person standing between her and full control of the UK military.

Alistair dropped to her knees. She didn’t cry. Not in the traditional sense, no tears fell from her eyes, she wasn’t even sure she knew how. But an involuntary wail erupted from deep in her chest that she couldn’t suppress.

The alien that had killed her chief crumpled slowly to the ground, but not even the blood that spilled from the gaping wound in its head could console her as she crawled towards her husband’s limp form. Blood bubbled on her lips from an internal injury that burned but wouldn’t kill her, she wasn’t that lucky.

She cupped Joel’s head in her hands, hands trembling as she closed his eyes for the final time. The war was over. But nothing had been won… Not really. Just the final, desperate end, of a childish skirmish sparked by something that ultimately, could’ve been avoided. She was certain humans and aliens could live in peace. But the nature of humanity was violence, and violence it had become.

“Chief!” Someone calls out behind her.

She stares numbly at Joel’s still face. If it weren’t for the bruises, and the gaping hole in his chest, he could’ve been sleeping. She wished he was sleeping.

“Chief, Chief Vale!”

“He’s dead.” Alistair mumbled as a hand warmed her right shoulder and pulled her ever so slightly from her stupor.

“Chief Commander, Alistair Vale.” The person says, and it hits her that with Joel gone, she was the Chief Commander now. From now until forever… Or until a better candidate was chosen.

Alistair swallowed the lump in her throat. “I’m not—” Her voice cracks. “I can’t…”

Ebony Banks— her lieutenant… or more so her general now… If that was no longer her— takes a firm hold of her chin and forces Alistair to meet her eyes.

She does cry then. Real tears this time. The sympathetic and devastated look in Ebony’s eyes makes the dam spill over and she breaks down.

Ebony wraps her in a hug, holding her trembling form.

Poor, poor Alistair Vale. Poor, poor, fatherless, motherless, brotherless, Alistair Vale. Poor, poor, Husbandless, widowed, forever alone, Alistair Vale.

The worst general in history. Promoted because of her incredible shot, negotiating skills, and nothing else. Probably promoted because Joel asked for her… or at least that’s what the rest of the UK military thought. 

She would be the worst Chief in history too.

“I can’t do this.” She mumbles into Ebony’s shoulder.

Ebony holds her closer, “you shouldn’t have to.” She says, “but we need you to.”

When Alistair pulls away, a group of medics are already covering Chief Joel Vale in a white sheet, ready to take him away from her. Her knee is against his, and he’s going cold already, and they’re taking him away from her.

She can’t even stop them. She has a win to finalise. Probably a meeting to attend. A surrender to supervise. And now, she swallows. Also a funeral.

A couple hundred. Funerals.

Someone passes her Joel’s dog tags, they clink in her hand as she trembles and runs her fingers over the small metal engravings.

VALE J

07453829

AB POS

CHURCH OF ENGLAND

UK ARMY

Ebony helps her to her feet and she’s led through the fields of injured humans and aliens alike. The aliens have lost. And they know it. There’s shrieks of disarray as they’re rounded up like animals— which she supposes some of them are. Some of them still attempt to fight, she sees a few dead soldiers that weren’t a few moments ago. The aliens were scattered, fighting back in some desperate attempt to reclaim themselves.

She disassociates, the next thing she’s aware of is the inside of a temporary camp, medical stretchers everywhere. The moans of injured soldiers fill her ears, the sound of dying fires, and wailing creatures. She can see a few of the more animal-like aliens in piled cages. Muzzled and drugged with a glassy sheen in their eyes.

“The war’s over…” She mumbles thoughtlessly to Ebony, “we can’t keep prisoners anymore…”

“They need to negotiate the terms of surrender,” Ebony responds, “they’ll be released once that’s over.”

Alistair can’t do much more than nod numbly.

She’s brought briefly to the medical aid tent, someone checks her pulse and shoves a few pills in her hand which she swallows without the aid of water. They could use it elsewhere. There were plenty others who needed it more than she did. 

A few seconds later she finds herself in front of the Prime-Minister… Or the leader of the country? Democracy had kind of fallen apart after the war had started. The Prime-Minister had been assassinated and the UK military had taken emergency powers. It had been three years since there’d been proper leadership.

“Chief Commander Vale.” The Prime-Minister's name was Thompson…? She can’t remember his first name. She nods, the world spins.

“I assume negotiations will be taking place soon?” Alistair asks. “If you need neutral ground, I’m willing–”

Thompson waves a hand, cutting her off, “negotiations are for humans. What we need is a punishment for the genocide we’ve survived at the hands of these animals . These monsters .

“It was a war, sir. In all due respect–”

“We haven’t gotten anywhere near a finalised death count, Vale.”

“We won.”

“They surrendered.”

“Hardly sounds like the actions of the ones allegedly committing war crimes.”

“Hardly matters.” Thompson narrows his eyes, “unless you’re siding with them.”

“Of course not,” Alistair defends herself, “I just think that given the chance, we could have them leave, never have to deal with them again. I worry that anything different would just aggravate them further.”

“Pfsh.” Thompson shakes his head, “you’re just like your husband, I need you to toughen up, Vale. The aliens need punishing, not coddling. Letting them go free would just give them the idea that they can try again.”

Alistair clutches Joel’s dog tags tighter and bites her lip, “punishing them will give them a reason to try again,” she insists, “let me lead negotiations, we can come to an agreement–”

“Do I need to appoint someone different?” Thompson warns, “someone who shares my views, because I will Vale, don’t test me.”

Alistair’s mouth clicks shut in contemplation. She can’t get fired now. Not after… she swallows…not after Joel had lost his life to win this. She needs to keep a level head. Perhaps she can still turn things around if she maintains her current position. “No.” She mumbles, “I’m sorry, you’re right.”

Thompson pats her on the shoulder sympathetically, “I know I am.” He wipes his hand on his coat, “now, to the point. I want you, and everyone else you can find in a room together. Perhaps the alien leader… whatever that was, as well. We can get papers signed and finalise the terms of surrender there, where everyone stands witness. Can you help me do that?”

Alistair nods numbly. She can do that.

When she enters the room she’d been directing people to all day, her heart freezes in place. Not from awe, or excitement at the prospects of a three year old war coming to the end, but from barely disguised horror.

It’s a small room, a temporary place named as the courtroom after their original had been bombed with alien missiles. It’s about the size of a large office. There’s a circular table in the centre where every person with some semblance of power sat, shoulder to shoulder. There were a few standing against the wall without seats, there were some standing outside the room and peeking in through the door frame.

It was claustrophobic, and Alistair really did not want to sit where Thompson was currently gesturing, right beside him.

The thing that was most horrifying, was not the cruel expressions smeared across the faces of those who were sworn to protect – smug faces of those who know they hold all the power. It was the figure strung from the ceiling by their wrists.

It was an Alien… that much was obvious. One that had not escaped the consequences of the war. They were practically emaciated from starvation, their pale purple sides heaved in pain, their scaled head was cracked and bleeding, their black eyes were glassy from exhaustion and they didn’t even seem to realise what was happening around them.

She doesn’t know its name. She doesn’t know what it even is. She does know that it was the one who had titled itself the leader of the opposition.

Behind the purple alien sat several others, each a different species, each one the self-titled leaders of said species. All of them were gagged with some kind of rubber bar buckled between their teeth. All of them had their wrists chained and bolted to the ground in front of them. All of them were in some stage of injured or dying. There weren’t many. Earth had killed the majority. Most species of alien were leaderless, or looked to the purple one for guidance. The others were animals… primitive, non-sentient and more of weapons than soldiers.

“This doesn’t seem like a surrender.” Alistair whispered to Ebony who had entered just behind her. 

Ebony winced, her eyes wide, she didn’t respond.

They slowly made their way towards Prime-Minister Thompson and their saved seats. Seats that faced the alien prisoners and the other end of the table. Seats that were next to the Prime-Minister. Because Alistair had secured the highest seat in the military. The UK Leaders right hand man. Prime-Minister Thompson who had stood, arms held wide, and begun speaking in a monotonous, yet simultaneously gloating voice.

“I gather us here today. The UK military and allied forces, Torchwood forces, and parliamentary figures, to celebrate the end of a war. An invasion if you may. We may have suffered nearly four years of death and destruction. The degradation of our government, the destruction of UNIT, bombing of cities, assassination of political figures and the desecration of peace. But we stand here today, the winners of something bigger than we could ever fathom.”

There was the sound of clanking chains. Someone snaps a photograph… presumably for the history books. One of the aliens whimpered, another coughed and a trickle of blood leaked from behind the gag. The purple one swung silently, Alistair had decided it was drugged with some kind of sedative. The entire situation was unethical, an abuse of power, and the destruction of some already unstable pillars of constitutional rights. But so was the relentless murder of defenseless humans that the aliens had initiated.

She hung her husband's dog tags around her neck, they twisted around her own.

“The human race has suffered,” Thompson continues, “but we will rebuild. We will thrive. It all depends on today, right here, right now. It all depends on a decision, made by all of us, on the surrender of alien and extraterrestrial forces.”

The table erupted in a cacophony of people yelling over each other. Suggestions — all of them completely abhorrent and would be considered as war crimes had the situation been any other than what it was.

“Execute them! Kill them all!”

“Torture them!”

“Make them feel how we felt.”

“Get rid of them!”

“Not so tough now, are they?”

Alistair presses her knuckles to her lips, eyes scanning the prisoners, because that’s what they were. Not the losing side of the war, not the surrendered warmongers, but prisoners of war. She avoids locking eyes with any single one of them, simply studying them as a collective. She can’t help the guilt that fills her gut regardless.

In front of Thompson’s seat, to her left, is a document labelling all of the offences the alien army had committed. It conveniently omitted the ones the humans had. At the top in bold it stated CONDITIONS OF SURRENDER, then in fineprint it specified, terms of imprisonment and constitutional amendment – human rights.

“Alright!” Thompson raises his voice, speaking over the disorder, “I understand your feelings and will try my best to accommodate them. However, it is also important to understand, I cannot make you all happy,” his eyes turn to the aliens, bound and silenced in their corner of the room. “The United Kingdom’s constitution recognises human rights as any humanoid, sentient, or otherwise intelligent creature. Due to the destruction of other countries' leadership, and the burden of humankind falling to me,” Thompson can’t hide the smile that marks his face. “I will recognise the UK papers as world encompassing. That being said. Article 16 of the human rights act bars aliens.” He gestures at the aliens occupying space in the room, all of which had gone completely silent. “Would you, citizens of Earth, call these war criminals, aliens?”

There are yells of ascent. Alistair bites her lip.

“Should alien’s, all of whom have committed great atrocities against us, be granted the same rights and freedoms as humans?”

Yells of no fill the room.

Thompson’s eyes are malicious and filled with the drug called power. A pit opens in Alistair’s stomach she wasn’t quite certain had ever not been there.

“As such,” Thompson continues, “I am announcing the ratification of the Extraterrestrial Detainment and Security Act , giving the UK government the right to detain any illegal entrants of Earth indefinitely. They will not be free to continue their intentional acts of genocide against us.”

“But they should retain rights to certain articles.” Alistair finally interjects, racking her memory for what article 16 encompasses. 

Thompson blinks down at her. A scowl splitting his expression.

“Article 16 only revokes the rights of article 10, 11, and 14.” Alistair continues, she picks at her fingernails, “alien’s still hold the right to life, to not be tortured or enslaved—”

Thompson’s hand comes to rest on Alistair’s shoulder, it’s firm, threatening.

“Yes,” he says, “we will uphold those rights. However, under the EDSA, they are not recognised as humans.”

“An act that has yet to pass.” Alistair argues.

“It will!” Thompson replies, smiling with the certainty of someone who knows the vote’s already rigged. “After today, who would dare vote against it?”

Alistair adverts her gaze, immediately drawn back to the aliens, wide-eyed, terrified things that gawk at the prime-minister with a primal kind of fear.

Thompson leans down, his mouth aligned with her ear canal, “if you want to keep your job, and your husband's legacy, I suggest you sign the paper.” His voice is silky, he knows he’s already won.

Alistair swallows, her eyes locked on that purple alien, the one hanging by its wrists. Indefinite imprisonment was a lot tamer than she’d expected. The beasts had murdered her husband, and countless others in cold blood. A hatred she had been suppressing since seeing the inhumane treatment the aliens were subjected to, bubbled once more.

“Who’s with me?” Thompson asks.

Everyone scrambles to agree, hands reaching desperately for pens, to be the first to sign.

When the paper is passed to Alistair she hesitates, but she doesn’t bother reading the fine print, her decision is already made.

When she stumbles from that courtroom, three of the six aliens have been declared dead. They had life-threatening injuries they were not entitled to have treated. The other three were to be executed — though that was an aspect Thompson had omitted from record.

Alistair felt numb. As if she wasn’t real. Her husband’s dog tags were around her neck, yet there was no way he could be dead. Her head pounded with a headache and the atrocities she’d just allowed. They were justified — yes. But they couldn’t be ethically upheld.

She staggered and fumbled around for something to lean against, eyes not quite focussing on the gunshots that began to sound around her. They were set to stun, she knew as much. Their leaders were dead, there was nothing holding the war together anymore. Murder, was against the law.

Cages of non-humanoid aliens began to pile up on trucks. Humanoid aliens stood in lines, wrists and ankles shackled to each other. Shrieks filled the air as the ones who ran or fought back were brutalised with fists or other weapons.

It could only get worse from here.