Blue Christmas

Part 9:

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Missy couldn't sleep and for once it had nothing to do with her two children. True they had been as difficult to settle as always. Mae had cried every time Missy had tried to set her down even after Missy had been certain she had fallen asleep and Sam had soaked two baby grows with his dribbles. Finally however they had gone down and an exhausted Missy had settled down eager for at least an hour or two of sleep.

Well she had fallen asleep easily enough but her dreams...

Vivid wasn't the word, yet they were not exactly pleasant, and over and over again the same whispering voices talking to her. Open me, open me and remember...

The Doctor had been in them too, first as a young man and then older and different faces yet somehow Missy had known they were all him.

Yet in her dreams he seemed angry, violent often towards her, and he had left her to burn. That had been too much and Missy had jerked awake still able to smell the stench of burning flesh and smoke in her nostrils and shivering as her skin shuddered with the phantom pain of flesh being burnt off of her bones.

As if sensing his mother's distress Sam woke too and Missy quickly gathered her tearful son into her arms before he could wake Mae and the two of them together would wake the entire apartment block.

"Shush Sammy it's alright it was just a bad dream." Missy rocked him gently, trying to act reassuring when even her own voice trembled. They had just been dreams, no matter how vivid or terrible they were just dreams.

When he continued to whimper she reached about for something for him to chew on, fingers trailing across Osgood's bedside table before they landed on...oh...the electric tremor was back and the sensation of pins and needles radiated out from her fingers and up her arm. Fumbling with the pocket watch Missy brought it up to her face.

Fingers traced the circular script imprinted on the back even in the dim light and Missy winced as the low level headache she normally got when trying to read the ancient language erupted into a full blown migraine.

"Ow." Missy huffed rubbing the back of her free hand across her forehead, surprised as Sam reached up and tried to tug the watch out of her hand.

"Hmm you guys really do like this don't you?" Missy muttered as her son tried to shove the watch back into his mouth.

"No Sam Skip is right that could be dirty." Missy sighed reaching out to take it back, yet her son didn't want to let go.

"Sam let go let Mummy have it!" Missy snapped her fingers closing around the watch and knocking the flimsy looking clasp, pressing it down just as she wrenched the watch free from her son's grasp.

The lid snapped open and out swirled golden swirls of light. For a moment they bathed the room in a golden glow and Missy stared up in wonder as the voices from before cried out in relief and joy. Then it was descending in a swarm, seeping in through Missy's open mouth, her nose, through her eyes.

For a moment it felt like that dream, like she was been burned alive and somehow drowning at the same time, yet unlike her dream this fire was purifying, the cocoon that was Missy Saxon was stripped away like dead skin, she wasn't loosing herself she was gaining....

A thousand years of memories burned fresh and vivid behind her eyes. New old senses woke up and stretched, the taste on her tongue picked out the ozone concentrate, the swirl of the planet spinning beneath her feet and the instinctive time sense kicked in, and knowledge...

Oh how could she have forgotten? How could she have allowed herself to be so diminished?

The now empty watch fell from Missy's hand onto the duvet spent and useless and a reborn Time Lady opened her eyes, blinking bright blue even in the dim light. Then for the first time she looked on her son with her real eyes.

Mesmerised...Sam looked at her and Missy stared into him...all of him open like a book waiting to be read and he reached out so trustingly; his mind brushing with joy against his mother's for the first time. Reaching out a finger that Sam grasped greedily before bringing it to his mouth to chew, Missy didn't even flinch; instead a wide smile pulled at her lips as she reached down and bumped their foreheads together.

"Hello my son."

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