paradisalost | there is a place that still remains

Entry tags:

there is a place that still remains

Who: Legato and the Fifth Doctor
What: Waking up from a long nap
When: September 18th
Where: TARDIS
Rating: PG-13

Sooner or later, he had to wake up.

The gunshot wound didn't kill him, and there was just enough of his mind leftover from the Doctors' invasion to slowly piece itself back together, so... the sluggish current of time had no choice but to eventually carry him to the edge of the black-- washing up on shore, exhausted and half-ruined from his time spent adrift.

His eyes slid open before he was really awake, bringing him bumping into the realm of consciousness without his notice. Just going from one sea of detached sensations to another, this one no more or less real than the fragments he'd been floating on for the past few weeks. Everything that the Time Lords had flooded his mind with, diluting it, overlapped with what he was experiencing now.

It was a seamless transition from endless black to nearly-endless white, mostly silence but with the buzz of... something. He could feel it, almost hear it, busying along on the other side of some wall. Something like trying to listen to a conversation happening on the other side of the room, his mind reflexively drifts to it without thought. Just listening, as the rest of his mind quietly goes about the task of preparing to properly wake.

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Five was waiting quietly, of course, lingering at the doorway to the Zero Room. He had been checking up on Legato daily - making sure that the medical apparatus he'd been hooked up to still functioned, seeing how close his mind felt to consciousness.

Today, he didn't even need to brush the telepath's mind with his own to see that he was coming around. His vital signs had shifted subtly, tiny curves to the lines on the monitors that signified the crucial shift into waking. It was time to put things in motion, properly.

He'd finished the Zero Cell shortly before their rooms had been overrun by psychic manifestations - and spent the time since fine-tuning the construct, making sure that it mirrored the room in his TARDIS perfectly. Now it was ready - and Five knew he'd have need of it shortly. He'd reconfigured the Zero Room itself to stand nearby the console room, and popped out to move the TARDIS down to the Peace Patrol headquarters. It was in his best interests to have the least amount of distance between the two Zero environments as possible - after all, the less he had to deal with a fully-influenced, psychically aware and vulnerable Legato, the better.

For Legato's part, that vague buzz was about to get slightly more prominent as the TARDIS prepared to relocate herself.

It was enough of a catalyst to help perpetuate his mind into motion. Very rarely did any of the mental flotsam of the past few weeks ever actually change, so the fact that this tangible buzz began to wind up and shift gave him a starting point to wrap the rest of his mind around.

Little alerts were going off in his head. Things were happening. It was time to wake up.

With the hitch of an uneven breath, his eyes twitched, pupils constricting. The first thing that registered in his brain as a real thought was the fact that he felt blind, with all the white, the startling lack of presences to brush his mind against. The second, as tried to roll onto his side, was the fact that he couldn't move.

Alone, detached, arms restrained, and nothing to anchor him to a time or place-- his pulse spikes.

Well, that was about what he was expecting. Five's complete lack of bedside manner was belied in the way he moved to the foot of Legato's guerney, already making the necessary changes to the monitors and wires that would allow him to wheel the telepath out of the Zero Room.

"Do calm down, before you hurt yourself."

His words are conscientious enough, but his tone is clipped, flat - neutral. Ever since what he saw inside Legato's mind, he's been disinclined to sympathy, for the most part. He'd resigned himself to a life of repression and derangement, and if there was absolutely nothing to be said for it, the Doctor wasn't going to expend any more energy trying to save him.

Just as it had in the diorama-version of Legato's mind, the Time Lord's voice triggers a dramatic reaction. With that voice comes the relevant memories, suddenly giving the mess in his head a point of reference.

He... he'd been heading for the end. He was marching toward the final act with open arms, fatalistically triumphant. And then something had gotten in his way. It all fell--

Before he can even fully swallow the last memories he'd experienced before the black, before he really realizes what they all mean, Legato is overwhelmed. An anguished sound pushes itself out of his lung as he pulls on the restraints holding his wrists to the bed.

"Oh, and now you're going to cut off the circulation to your hands. That's nice and counter-productive. Don't worry, those chains of yours will sort themselves right back out soon enough, if I know you. You'll be right back to that moroseness you're so fond of."

He flashed Legato a terse, flippant smile and started wheeling the guerney out of the Zero Room.

"In the meantime, hanging on might be a good idea."

Chains. Why was that familiar? Why did he have the distinct image in his mind of slowly falling into a pit, while chains clattered away and the earth shook? And it had been the Time Lord's fault, just as it was now. He didn't know where he was or why, too maddened to put the memories properly together, and it was this man's fault.

Without being able to pull his hands free, and without something else nearby to mentally grab and wield, he instinctively turned his mind on the Doctor. Thoughtlessly grabbing at his nervous system with whatever energy he had to his name, as if Five was anyone else, rending at the crackle of nerves to try and get him away.

If Legato was trying to rend Five's mind like a blade, than the mental force that pushed back and clamped down upon his was comparable to rock beating scissors - sudden, weighty, and absolute. The Doctor responded in a sort of stereo, backing up the force of his mind with the spoken word, stopping the guerney at the doorway to the Zero Room.

"That's enough."

He didn't have the energy to even attempt to fight that. Easily shut down, shoved back into his head without resistance, his only protest was a tense sound of agitation-- still too scattered for words.

That wouldn't last long, of course. The forced stillness in his head was only making room for the rest of the memories, the other pieces of the puzzle to begin sliding into their proper places.

Five didn't really care why Legato stopped, as long as he did. Moving him out into the Cell needed to be a quick process, and as long as he was too worn out to fight back, it might just end up that way. Nodding once, to himself, the Doctor began to push him out the door, down the short length of corridor that led to the console room and out into the prison.

He wasn't sure what losing the Zero Room's influence for a brief period of time would to to Legato, but he was pretty sure that keeping the restraints on was an excellent plan of action, regardless.

"Right, then. Here we go."

That would be a pretty good guess. That wall fell away as they moved into the console room, the swarm that is the TARDIS's system wrapped around him in all directions, and he reacted something like he did when he first visited her as a wary child.

Agitating, alarming, overstimulating.

He was certainly awake now, and testing the integrity of those restraints.

Thankfully, the restraints themselves were as strong as he'd been able to make them - and they wouldn't need to be in place for long. It was a fair distance across the console room, but the Doctor was glad he'd rearranged the corridors so that the distance between Room and Cell was short.

"You really are going to hurt yourself. Not that I think many people here would mind if you did ..."

"Where is she..."

The words fell out of his mouth so automatically that, at first, it was almost as if he himself didn't know what he was talking about. It was just the first solid thought that he was able to latch onto... but once he did, it unlocked everything else.

Once he located that centerpiece, the single thing that dominated every other thought, everything else in his head suddenly fell into place and spun wildly into orbit.

"--Where is she?!"

"You know, even if I knew precisely, I wouldn't tell you." Five kept them moving, into the console room proper, careful not to catch the wheels of the guerney on the edges or fringes of any of the carpets that covered the floor.

"Even in this state, you really should know me better than that..."

He remembered, now. He remembered.

He remembered how it ended, he remembered her voice in his head, and then--

With the recover of that last memory, whatever bearing he had on place and logic--all reason, really--suddenly slipped. There should be no question now as to the cause of that rift deep in the sand and the bones of his mind.

The rage was abrupt, pitching up inside of him until he could do nothing but throw his weight to the side, rabid desperation suddenly warring against his restraints.

"Where is she! What have you done with her?!... Let me go!"

"I personally haven't done a thing with her, and I had as little to do with the proceedings thus far as possible. I've mostly had my hands full with you."

That, and he knew that the less he knew about where Riful had ended up, the less Legato could potentially glean from him. It was a preventative measure, more than anything else. He kept his course through the console room, the TARDIS kindly opening her doors for him so that he had a clear path to the freshly constructed cell.

He could feel the walls of the TARDIS coming to an end as they crossed over the threshold, and he automatically reached. Through whatever break between TARDIS and cell, no matter how minute, he struggled to shove his mind through, reaching for anything. He needed to grab someone, anyone, make them pay, twist them apart for what they'd done.

"They have her, don't they? They... They have her in their disgusting hands! Let me go!"

He sensed the desperation in Legato's mind - it was difficult not to. He was pretty sure that anyone in the basement at the moment would feel it, telepath or no, even if was only as a creeping shiver down their spine or a crawl in the stomach akin to eating something that had gone a bit off. "Let you go? Well, if you insist."

Factoring in the momentum of Legato's struggling, the Doctor dug his heels into the concrete of the Patrol basement floor and shoved, pushing the guerney the remainder of the way into the Zero Cell. It stopped just inside the door, and the Doctor swung it closed decisively, locking it and leaning against the doorjamb.

The door itself was thick, thick polycarbonite glass, with small round holes in it to allow air and sound through. Originally, the plans had allowed for a thick steel door with a small round window, but ... the Doctor had felt it a bit more fitting for Legato to be able to look out and see the people passing by ... to know what he was being cut off from and better feel the extent of his punishment.

"There. I've let you go. What now, mm? Going to threaten me a bit more? I've already told you, I've not the slightest where she is, and no one else here is about to tell you, either. There's no one to tower over you, now, Legato. You're going to have to learn how to live without orders. And you've got all the time in the world to do it."

The Doctor's words hit all the right places as Legato found himself shut into blindness again, restrained and isolated. They poured right into that destabilized rift in his mind, and he began to quickly erode.

"Insects! All of them! They aren't worthy enough to lay a finger on her...!"

He couldn't comprehend being separated from her permanently. Not now. Every thought was already stuck on the horror of being away from her-- not knowing where she was or how she was doing. Not knowing what had happened. Not being there to free her, save her, protect her, destroy her assailants... He was falling into a maddened spiral, which started out as fury but was quickly spinning toward panic.

Five exhaled, slowly - not quite a sigh as much as a decompression - as he watched the cracks in Legato's composure broaden to canyons. The Zero Cell shielded him from Legato as much as it kept the telepath away from him - and in moments like this, it was a very welcome feature. He didn't want to have to pick up on any of that anger or panic. Truth be told, he realized, as he watched him writhe frantically, he wasn't even sure where this loyalty Legato possessed toward Riful stemmed from.

He smoothed out his lapel, straightening his celery, which had gone a bit askew during the move. "Worthiness, mm? ... What did she do to exalt herself so much, anyway? The last I checked, she was just a voracious, precocious creature with the behavior of an ill-mannered, spoiled child."

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