HARMONY (a Doctor Who Novella)

Chapter 2

Someone spoke his name.

Help me. Won't you help me? Don't you hear me?

He swallowed hard. This was getting entirely too strange. Half of UNIT and much of Torchwood already thought him to be bonkers. Pete Tyler's pet alien. Just stand back everyone, prepare to be amazed and get ready to run. No one dared try to keep him on leash. Better to exploit his madness. That's what he'd always done. He worked best under pressure. In fact, the worse things got, the more he liked it. He had always been one to dance in a thunderstorm--or fly a kite. But storms carried an unfathomable energy as of late. He did not understand it, despite the uneasy feeling that he should. That he would, if only he still possessed the heightened sensitivity of a true Time Lord and not this increasingly muddied up part-human cognition. Something was wrong. He could not identify it, but seemed also unable to escape it. Bad dreams. Nightmares bleeding over from a life that had long since flown away in the Tardis. As if he didn't already struggle to get the sleep his half alien physiology now required.

One heart. It still made him queasy.

He caught sight of his reflection as he dressed. His now familiar aspect appeared the same, but the mirror only told half of the story. If it were true that what mattered was inside a man... he didn't want to think about it. This body, this vessel into which so many lifetimes had been poured, no longer kept pace with his feverish intentions. A second heart no longer beat to the rhythm of Time itself. Miss more than a few days' sleep and he was exhausted. More than that and they were secretly delivering his unconscious body to old Doc Sullivan who would, in turn, be ringing up UNIT's extraterrestrial specialist, Dr. Martha Jones. But sleeping meant dreaming, and dreaming meant remembering, and remembering often meant nightmares. At times his whole existence disgusted him. It just figured that he'd inherited both a whopping load of human self loathing and millennia of Time Lord guilt along with all his favourite recipes for bananas. Thanks a heap for that, mates!

The Tyler household was once again quiet and he slipped from the bedroom, making his way down two flights of stairs to the kitchen. He lifted the biscuit tin down from the only shelf they had found so far that Rusty couldn't get to. He twisted off the lid and inhaled. The Tyler's new chef baked the most gorgeous ginger snaps.

Half Three. He wondered what Rose was doing right now. Wondered if she was out on the moors tracking aliens, verifying Rifts, or snuggled warm in bed, missing him as much as he was missing her. Was it still raining there? More importantly, did she feel this new rising storm, as if something were racing toward them on the winds of Time and Space? She had before, a long time ago. She had shared his dreams. Dreams dark enough to wake her from her slumber, reaching for him, beseeching him for answers he could not provide. No matter how terrible her dreams had been, his were worse. All he could do was hold her close, waiting for the foreboding to fade with the dawn. Not that it did.

I'm so sorry.

He shook his head to clear it, exhaling deeply.

Rose had taken it in stride, like so much else, chalking it up to being a parting gift, courtesy of the Time Vortex. One did not look into the Heart of the Tardis and come away unchanged. He had only to look into the mirror to remind himself of that.

What an effort it had been the following night to act like nothing was wrong though. Rose advised him to ignore what remained of his Time Lord senses just this once, embrace his Inner Englishman, and soldier on. So he had donned a dinner jacket for the Tyler's posh New Year's Eve gala and had even made a go at styling his hair into a semblance of order. Surely he could feign dignity for a few hours, and if not, was reasonably sure he could concoct a rapid escape with the aid of one small boy, a few bangers, and a West Highland Terrier.