Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [125]
Sarah found him, eventually. It had taken her a lot longer than usual to ignore his instructions, to leave the TARDIS and come looking for him. Which was ironic, under the circumstances.
To be honest, he had no idea how long he’d been lying there, with the sky getting darker over his head and the blood making bigger and bigger smudges across his shirt. Every now and then he’d sensed the townspeople moving close to him, crawling from the rotting woodwork of their homes and watching him die from their doorsteps, but none of them had tried to help him. Whenever any of them had passed by the part of the square where he’d fallen, they’d seemed to move very, very slowly. Which was only to be expected, the Doctor supposed, seeing as he’d slowed down every part of his body that he still had some degree of control over. On the plus side, he’d brought his pulse down to a crawl, so he hadn’t suffered as much blood loss as he might have done. On the minus side, this had stretched out his final moments until he couldn’t exactly remember what it felt like to be alive.
The real irony was that he could feel the life in the dirt underneath him, as Number Thirteen went about its work and rebuilt the planet from the inside. If he didn’t get back to the TARDIS in time, his body would probably be feeding the grass in a week or so. It seemed odd, somehow, that he was going to be the very last casualty of the planet Dust.
He felt himself being pulled upright. Sarah was kneeling by his side now, trying to rest his head in her lap, gasping into his ear while she stroked his hair. He wasn’t sure what she was saying, but he doubted she knew either. Random words of consolation, probably. She sounded like a six-year‐old, doing her best not to burst out crying. Poor girl.
He felt every cell in his body go into spasm, then relax again, giving up the last of his energy. The cells didn’t have the strength to keep him together any more. He remembered feeling the same thing just before his first regeneration, that moment of weakness when your body tried to tell you that being solid was overrated anyway, that it’d be much easier to let yourself melt back into primordial soup. Back at the Academy, the students liked to say that a Time Lord who died his final death would degenerate into a sticky puddle, leaving nothing behind but an ugly stain and the memories in the Matrix.
It suddenly occurred to him that he had no idea whether this was actually true.
‘It’s all right,’ Sarah was saying, finally managing to put proper sentences together. She didn’t sound as though she believed a word of it. ‘You’re going to be all right. I’m going to get you back to the TARDIS.’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘Too late,’ he said, and his voice was as dry as the dust, as quiet as the desert. This is… the end, I’m afraid. Not… quite how I imagined it, but…’
He felt the cracks in his throat, and heard the sand sticking to the words. Sarah held him tighter, so he could feel his biofield rubbing against hers.
‘You can’t die,’ she told him. He could imagine her saying the same thing to her first pet hamster, moments before it passed out of her life for good. ‘You can’t. Not now. Not like this. Please.’
But the Doctor couldn’t see her at all now, not through the cocoon of pure life force his body was building around itself, keeping him safe and warm during the time of crisis. This was what the TARDIS had been trying to warn him about, then. The old girl had known it’d end this way. Still, how could he have understood? The rules were different here. Dust wasn’t the kind of place he ever would have chosen to go.
He had the funny feeling all that was going to change soon.
The Doctor felt his hand brush against something. Sarah was squeezing it, he realised, pressing his fingers against her face. He thought he felt a spot of liquid there, warm and sticky against her cheek. One of those little details that made the pain of existence worthwhile, really.
‘A tear, Sarah Jane?’ he said.
* * *
It’d be nice to record that those were the last words he said to her, before the change