Rebirth - Chapter 14

Madison opened her eyes very slowly.

Not that it made any difference weather her eyes were open or not, the room was so full of dust that is was near impossible to see anything… but the fact that her eyes were now open at least proved to her that she wasn’t dead, something which she found grimly comforting.

From somewhere within the thick, waxy cloud of dust, a small voice made a small sound that sounded… Madison frowned, well, small.

‘Oh,’ said the voice. It sounded very familiar.
‘Fyffe?’ Madison called out before inhaling a large amount of smoke and lapsing into a coughing fit.

‘Fyffe!?’ she chocked. There was no response of the child from within the powdery environment, so she fought for control over her breathing, and pulled herself up, feeling her way along to where she remembered the window to be.

It came as a bit of a shock to find that there was no window.

It came as even more of a shock to find that it had been replaced by a hole in the wall.

It came as an even larger and more horrifying shock to find that there was in fact no wall at all.

Madison stared at it, or rather, the lack of it.
'Oh, wow,’ she said glumly.

Even as she stared, the layers of heavy dust pored out of the hole like an extremely dirty waterfall, and the room behind her began to clear. Almost fearful of what she would see, Madison turned around.

Half the room was gone. If she had had a clear head at this point, Madison would have mentally corrected herself by concluding that only a quarter of the room was actually gone – that was the part that had been blown up along with the missing wall. The rest of the room was still here, it was just buried under about a tone of rubble: rubble which, if she was any judge, used to be the ceiling. She briefly wondered what the Doctor would have said about this, before the thought of him brought a pang of horror to her, and she quickly pushed him out of her mind.

Then she realized what she had been staring at for the last three minutes, as standing in front of the rubble and gazing serenely at the disarray of bricks, was Fyffe.

‘Fyffe!’ said Madison stupidly, as though she didn’t quite believe her eyes and wanted to confirm the girl’s existence verbally.

‘The moth’s dead,’ Fyffe said despondently.
Madison blinked.
‘You what?’

Fyffe turned around slowly. ‘The moth,’ she said carefully, ‘is dead.’

Madison was unsure of how to reply to this so she turned her attention the mass of rubble in front of her. It looked very heavy. From the corner of her eye she saw Fyffe shake her head sadly, and Madison realized that she actually cared about the moth… small things like that actually mattered to her.

Fyffe turned and let out another small noise of surprise.
‘Oh!’ she said.

Madison jumped in surprise and spun around quickly. ‘What? What?!’ she said.

Fyffe straightened up and turned back to Madison, her face pinched with new founded concern. ‘He dropped the stick!’ she said. Her face was so generally crushed that Madison actually pitied the girl.

‘But… it’s only a stick,’ she said gently.
‘He should have it with him,’ Fyffe murmured to herself.
Madison bit her lip. ‘Fyffe…’ she began.

Fyffe turned away and walked towards the still locked door. The giant hole in the wall had ensured that all of the smoke had cleared, but unfortunately, the only thing that it led to was a large drop to the far away street below. Despite their survival of the explosion, they were still trapped in the room. Under Madison’s pitiful gaze, Fyffe pressed her hand against the cold door as though hoping she would pass through it like the Doctor had to the wall.

‘Fyffe,’ Madison said again, ‘the Doctor… won’t need the stick.’

Fyffe pushed gently against the door, almost as if she was testing it. ‘He will need it,’ she said, ‘he can do without I suppose,’ she twirled the twig between her fingers and looked thoughtfully at the door. ‘We probably need it more,’ she said after a while.

Madison stared at her. She felt like an inexperienced parent who was trying to explain to a child where her favourite cat, Mr Tiddles, had gone after the two tonne truck had hit him. ‘Do you understand what happened after the Doctor vanished?’ she asked.

‘He didn’t vanish,’ said Fyffe. She twisted her head around and glanced at Madison, before turning her attention to the door. ‘I know where you’re going with this,’ she commented casually. ‘Stop it.’

‘But…’ Madison mouthed silently, ‘he walked through a wall!’
Fyffe let her hand slowly slip off the woodwork.
‘The bomb…’ Madison hesitated, trying to make the girl understand. ‘He blew himself up!’

‘I feel bad for the moth,’ said Fyffe, glancing back at the misshapen pile of rubble.

Madison smacked a hand to her head. ‘Fyffe, do you ever just listen to yourself when you talk?! A moth has nothing to do with anything! The Doctor’s dead!’

Fyffe turned around slowly and gave Madison an acute stare. ‘There’s a perfectly reasonable explication to everything,’ she said carefully.

‘I know there is, Fyffe!’ Madison replied exasperatedly, ‘and I’m telling you it now! The Doctor walked through a wall with a bomb and now he’s…’ she faltered, unsure if she wanted to repeat what she has said only moments before.

Fyffe cocked her head to one side. ‘He probably just used the spatio-temporal mass converter to firstly change the molecular structure of the components atoms, and then of his bodies own atomic configuration so that they could shift through impermeable matter,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t explain the explosion,’ said Fyffe, ‘but if he were dead, it would feel different… there’s no sorrow, no feeling of remorse of grief. I like to trust my impulses, which is why there must be a perfectly good explanation for everything… Maybe his distorted composition meant that the emission of the discharge passed through his permeable state, rather that rebounding off the usual impervious one.’

‘What?’

Without warning, Fyffe thrust the twig into the keyhole of the door and began to twist her arm sharply. She flashed Madison a wide grin as she attacked the door viciously.

‘What?’ said Madison again.
‘What what?’ said Fyffe, her attention focused on the twig.

Madison was about to open her mouth and say ‘what’ again, when something deep inside of her sent up a rapid volley of warning sparks and she took two sharp steps towards the girl. ‘Don’t, what ever you do, start that off again!’ she said.

Fyffe shrugged but didn’t turn around. Madison watched her as she twisted and wiggled the thin sliver of tree inside the lock… there was something almost faintly depressing about the girl’s undying sense of hope.

‘Do you honestly think that you’re going to open the door with– ?’

There was a sudden sharp click that filled the room with an irritatingly smug noise.

Then a silence followed.
Very slowly, Madison took two steps backwards, her eyes wide in disbelief.
Very slowly, Fyffe pulled the stick from the key hole and gave the door a tentative push.

Very slowly, the door swung open, accompanied by a faint creaking noise, which sounded to Madison, almost as smug as the click of the lock.

Fyffe leaned casually out of the door and glanced around at the deserted hallway beyond. It was hauntingly empty, which made perfect sense considering the building had just been savagely bombed. Within the long stretch of the dim and hollow corridor, Fyffe’s small blond head shimmered as she twisted it left and right, then, coming to a final decision, she stepped out of the room and grinned.

‘Fyffe…’ said Madison cautiously.

The girl took no notice and bounced slightly on her feet as she considered what to do next. Madison stood stock still and watched her image, framed in the doorway. She opened her mouth to say something else, but before she could speak, Fyffe flung out an arm and pointed to her left.

‘This way,’ she said, before turning smartly to her right and disappearing from Madison’s sight.

There was a moment’s pause as Madison stared unblinkingly at the snippet of hallway that she could see through the doorframe. Then Fyffe suddenly appeared again, walking in the opposite direction with her head bowed, as though in deep concentration.

‘Fy–’

But before Madison could even call out the girl’s name, Fyffe disappeared left again. She was gone slightly longer this time, before she reappeared once again in the doorframe, stopped dead, span twice on the spot, and walked off the exact same way that she had just come.

Within the room, Madison rubbed her eyes. When Fyffe briefly appeared again, this time walking towards the right, Madison called out her name quickly. The girl stopped and looked at Madison expectantly.

‘What are you doing?’ Madison finally asked.
Fyffe raised her arm and pointed to the left, ‘going,’ she explained.
Madison nodded. ‘… and are you going to go left now?’

Fyffe looked in the direction she was pointing and lowered her arm. ‘Maybe,’ she said, and tucked the twig behind her ear.

‘Okay, well just don’t move for now, got it?’ said Madison. She sighed and wondered what actually went through the head of this strange girl. ‘Look,’ she said as a thought sprang to her mind, ‘how the hell did you open a locked door with a twig?’

Fyffe blinked. ‘Did I?’
Madison gaped at her. ‘You know you did!’ she cried.

A wide smile spread across the girls face. ‘That’s right, I did,’ she said triumphantly, ‘and now we go and do whatever we have to do to make things good again.’ It sounded so simple when she said it.

Before Madison could think of anything to say in response, Fyffe turned smartly on her heel and marched off to the right. Madison found it very difficult not to sigh, before she skittered out of the room after Fyffe.

A small problem arose when, steeping into the hallway, she found it was completely devoid of anything that even remotely resembled a manically happy girl. In fact, it was completely devoid of anything at all.

‘Fyffe?’ she called cautiously.

There was no response, and Madison couldn’t see the girl at all, not even when she ran the length of the corridor and checked round each of it corners. Somehow, from desperately wanting the Doctor and Fyffe to leave her alone, she suddenly felt very small and empty without them. Even their stupid and never ending obsessions over silly, pointless things would have been welcoming to her now. But as it was… she was alone.

*****

Within the empty city streets, a small cluster of blackened figures stalked along the winding roads. There was nothing tense or fearful about their movements, almost as if they didn’t understand the meaning of the word, instead they moved with a calm grace and perfectly calculated prowess.

There was nothing that they feared within the broken and ruined city walls… they were the hunters that were poised to strike. Whatever they were searching for, it would be found. But, for all their unflinching presence, they were unaware that they were being watched.

From a safe distance behind their footsteps, Fyffe crouched behind a blackened crate and watched as their forms steadily moved away. Her blond hair was tucked behind her ears, her mouth twisted in a calculating expression, and her crackling blue eyes held something deep and calculating.

****

Over half a mile below her, the sewers of the city sulked and crept in their sluggish movements. They were the first thing that had been built when Tendra has been founded and as a result, they were the most well built thing of the city, meaning that on one ever went down there.

On a small ledge that was squashed into the curve of the sewer wall, the Doctor lay unconscious. His left arm was thrust outwards and dangled off the edge of the ledge, and his face was contorted into a strained expression. The fingers of his right hand rested lightly on his stomach and were clenched together as they gripped onto a strange oval shaped lump.