Soul's Shadow (Doctor Who - SI)

Part VII (IV)

For the next few days I did my best to hide from the Master. It wasn't that I was afraid of him maybe hurting me. It was that I didn't want him to lay his hands on the egg.

Sometimes I wondered if it was still his hypnotism that kept me protecting the small thing. Ever since I had spent so much time with it in that room, I had a hard time leaving it out of sight and especially out of reach. Only when I took a shower did I set it down. In all other times I wore it inside a tiny shoulder bag I had crafted from some stuff the TARDIS had offered.

At night - or what would constitute as such inside here - I lay awake for long hours, holding the egg within my hands, watching the delicate pattern pulsate and feeling its warmth and the tiny heartbeat within the shell. During the days I tried to stay close to the Doctor, knowing the Master wouldn't confront me in front of him.

"Up for some sightseeing?" the Doctor asked, grinning, when I entered with my usual mug of coffee in hands. "Nothing big. We'll just hover in space for a while, watching the birth of a double quadroon nebulae cluster. Always fascinating. Happens-" he tilted his head and thought for a second- "only every billion years or so. I think there are only roughly a hundred of those in the entirety of time and space."

"Wait... like... actually going to space?" I gaped at him.

"Well, we're on different planets all the time..."

"Yeah!" I interrupted, excitedly. "But that's on the surface. And not in space itself. Do we have a spaceship? I mean... the TARDIS, yeah, but can it fly through space?"

For the last few days the Doctor had taken me to some harmless places. Cities, forests, a space-station with a black market. Okay, the last one had ended in us being chased by what could be called the local mafia, but it had still been a relatively quiet day. The Doctor did his best to stay out of trouble, even though I sometimes caught him twitching in the direction of certain conversations that hinted at bigger things going on. Once, I only patted his arm, told him to run off and marched straight back to the TARDIS. (He had to follow to open the door, but after that he was gone. And I never learned what had or hadn't happened.)

"Of course it can!" he now told, beaming from ear to ear. "The TARDIS has special protection shields. Not even an army of elephants can get in. Not even a Dalek can shoot through it."

Whatever a Dalek was.

He grinned at my wide eyes and jumped to a set of buttons to get us going. I held tight onto one of the seats, somehow even managing not to spill my coffee. After we stopped I pre-emptively emptied the mug and sat it down.

Meanwhile the Doctor had already hastened to the doors to open them wide. With a grin back at me he waved and when I trod next to him I saw a wonderful sight that is hard to put into words. I'll try it anyway, because it were sights like these that burned themselves into my mind, that kept me moving, even in moments when everything inside of me screamed to just stop.

Before us spread a field of vines - at first it looked like some, at least - their size was unbelievable and the TARDIS was only a speck of dust in comparison to a single colourful strand. Dark blues and purples dominated the palette, weaved themselves through the fuzzy vines, blinked and glowed where they concentrated.

And all of those strands ran together in the middle, a point I was only able to make out after several minutes of trying to comprehend the massiveness of this. The centre, now, was an enormous sphere of colour and dancing lightning, so far away that it would take a century to reach. A storm cloud of matter, a blazing nest of energy, sizzling and compressing itself to something new, something rare and spectacular.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?"

The voice startled me. Firstly, because of how consumed by the sight I had been, Secondly because it belonged to the Master.