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By Root 595 0

or cheese, he turned away. Once, in a fit of pique, she smashed a peach on his forehead and smeared it all over his mouth. He just laughed and wiped his face on the sheet. She huddled in the corner of the bed, pouting.

'I thought I was making you happy'

'I am,' he said, reaching for her, 'enraptured.'

It was true. He had lost all sense of time. He had lost all sense of himself and was not sorry. He would lie embracing her as if he had nearly drowned and she was the shore to which merciful waves had swept him.

One morning when she kissed him he felt something small and hard slip from the edge of her tongue. He spit it out on the pillow. A pomegranate seed. 'You've got to eat!' She beat on his chest in frustration. 'If you don't eat you'll die.'

'If I do eat, I'll never leave.' He smiled and touched her face. 'I know the rules.'

She vanished from his arms. She stood on the hearth in the cutoff jeans and pink jumper in which he'd first seen her and kicked sullenly at the remains of the dead fire. 'You make it sound like a game.'

'It is a game to you. You're outside of time. I'm not.'

'You are here.'

'It's not natural to me. I don't belong in this place.'

She crossed her arms, sulking. 'I got to go. I want you to be here when I come back.'

Go?'

'Back there. I'd have gone already but I had to stay here while I got over the last time.'

'Healed,' he said.

'I guess.'

'Why do you want to go back?'

'I don't want to. I have to.' Her crossed arms tightened; she held herself, shoulders hunched. 'I'm looking for something.'

'So am I.'

Her eyes flicked towards him. 'What?'

I don't know.'

'If you go back, you go back into time,' she said, as if explaining the obvious to an irritatingly slow pupil. 'You go back to death.'

"This is death,' he said gently. 'Mortals only inhabit paradise when we're dead.'

She kicked a burned log and it fell to pieces. A cloud of fine grey ash floated into the room.

'You're the one who shouldn't go back,' he said. 'It's dangerous for you.

There's a man -'

'Don't matter. I got to.'

'Let me help you.'

'You already did, when I needed it. I won't need your help this time.'

'Other people do,' he said.

She looked at him, her slate-coloured eyes indifferent to mercy or kindness or need. But she understood courage, he thought. And justice. And love.

He said, "This ecstasy is also stasis. It will destroy me.'

He saw the flash of her small white teeth. Had she smiled or snarled?

'You're a fool,' she said.

Then rain crashed on the roof, and she was gone.

The Doctor remained still, eyes nowhere, paying no attention to the water that gusted furiously through the window on to his back. After a long time, he got up, patted himself absently with a dry bit of sheet, and dressed. He opened the door and gazed at the pounding rain. It was falling so thickly that just a few metres away visibility blurred and vanished into a grey nothing.

He stepped out of the door and was instantly drenched to the skin.

Shivering, not looking back, he strode down the path beneath the trees. It swam with mud. Uselessly, he pulled his soaked sleeve across his face, trying to wipe away the water.

The forest was dark with rain, and he might have had difficulty finding his way if the path hadn't turned into a sluice of mud, almost a stream. The Doctor walked in this, letting it guide him downhill. Any minute, he expected to slip and land flat on his back. He imagined the hard rain on his upturned face, nearly drowning him, and kept hold of branches and saplings, stepping more and more cautiously. His feet sought out tree roots, felt carefully over stones, searched for sure purchase on the slick ground. The trees around him lashed in the wind, and the thicker-trunked among them groaned as they bent, almost as if they felt pain.

When something nicked his sole he grimaced and lifted his foot. The skin hadn't broken. Beneath his other foot, the ground was also sharply gritty.

He crouched and felt the path with his palm.

Crushed shell.

The