Doctor Who fic: The Wound and the Stone Become Lovers
When the TARDIS lands in an ancient stone chamber, a creature formed of fear and cruelty seizes the Doctor's mind in a psychic trap. It's up to Missy to confront this monster and rescue the Doctor—at great risk to herself. Inspired by Shalkaverse short story "The Feast of the Stone", 1996 children's science fiction drama Delta Wave, formative Tam Lin retelling The Perilous Gard, and Dinsdale Draco's white dancing gloves.
“Look! I’m you!” The Doctor waggles his fingers, white and slender in a pair of dancing gloves. Missy, up to her elbows in a tangle of fiber and circuitry, extricates herself from the hole in the deck plating, the better to appreciate his gangly hands and cheesy smile. He’s found a top hat, too, perched at a cant with tufts of hair poking out between its brim and his ears.
Missy tilts her head and shakes it. “No...not even close. But if the glove fits…”
His face falls. He removes the hat, spinning it as he puts it on the console. “How are the repairs going?”
Missy braces the heels of her hands on the floor and arches her back in a luxurious stretch before bothering to answer him. “It’s a bit difficult to find the thing that needs repairing when you’ve made such a mess of the things around it.” The floor hums, warm, as though in agreement.
“Maybe it’s time for a break. Nardole’s made tea.”
“Oh, I suppose I wouldn't mind.” She sits up to roll her sleeves down.
“You’ve got a smudge—” the Doctor leans in and rubs his thumb against her cheek. His glove comes away with TARDIS residue on it. He turns his hand over to inspect it, the fabric stretching over his knuckles.
So that’s what this is about. The safety of putting a barrier between them, like the safety of a forcefield or of the distance of a magazine cover and a table with a thermos on it, which allows them to be close. His wrist shows under the glove and his sleeve, the only chink in this armour.
“I’m coming up the stairs, and I had better not see anything I shouldn’t see when I get to the top!” Nardole is conspicuous about clattering the tea tray, but he needn’t be. Already, the Doctor is moving away, slipping his hands into his pockets.
“What’s the sticky bun situation?” he asks, dropping sugar cubes into a cup.
“Bill’s coming with them. There’s sticky buns with jam, sticky buns with cream...”
A block of sugar strikes an off note against the pile already in the cup, tink-tinkling when it should be thunking. There’s sudden silence in the capsule, a full stop. Nardole is still listing buns, oblivious, but the silence swallows his words. Missy’s already on her feet. The Doctor stares up at the rotor.
“...typical. They’re not listening to me. Why ask? More importantly, why bother to answer?”
“Shush!”
The TARDIS hasn’t materialised, but neither is the TARDIS still in motion; they were in the vortex, now they’re not. All the mechanisms and machinery of movement--stopped. Something has pulled them out of their trajectory as though plucking a bird out of the air. Futile flutter. The Doctor flips switches and depresses keys. He turns knobs. Nothing happens. He shoots a look at Missy, all hawk and owl.
“I didn’t do this,” she says, serious.
He tugs the viewscreen around to him. The cameras work, at least. They see a long stone room, bowed edges barely discernible in the dark. A natural cave? Or was it chiseled out by hand?
The Doctor turns his head to the door.
Bill, showing up belatedly with the sticky buns, comes around to peer at the image. “What’s going on? Something felt really weird and...not-normal?”
“I don’t know.” Then, the Doctor grins, happy. “Want to find out?”
It’s his favourite pastime: a mystery, a place gone wrong, the opportunity to fix it. He never takes precautions and he doesn’t bother to pause, and maybe it’s something he’s good at, or maybe he’s just lucky. Always lucky. Missy’s hesitant about this one, but if she’s coming along, he’s going to keep her by his side, he says, and so she is second out the door, no time to retrieve her jacket from the railing, much less her umbrella from its hook.
Lucky—or foolish, and too practiced at paving over the costs, at pouring fresh material over the damage.
The stone chamber is subterranean, lightless but for the light they’ve brought with them. It smells of the stillness of deep rock, mineralised and inorganic, isolated long ago from the emissions of any star. In its centre, it’s worn as though someone once walked here and, around those paths, squared off with the precise approximation of primitive architecture—Missy is reminded at once of ancient ceremonies, of embroidered robes and decorated implements and measured footsteps heavy with import. Along its edges, the tool-touched walls turn wild again, winding into ropey, undulating surfaces, where burnish becomes gloss or sheen, and the carved space becomes raw tunnel, a great throat, an esophagus, an intestine of rock and weight.
She sees him for a second, stock-still and stiff with pain, and has time to think how familiar a sight it is, the Doctor with his back like a mast straining under rigging taut with sail, before it has her too. It wants—it’s known them before, and it has riffled, heedless of reality, patiently and comprehensively through all the sheaths of all the universes to find them.
They’ve changed so much. It tastes her and discards her. Wraps a line of silk around her and saves her for later.
Him, though...
[11,000 words (what??? how??) shameless Twelve/Missy porn with an evil rock]
