Chapter Text
Screaming. She was awake but not aware, a fear without a source or a name. The last thing she had felt before- before-
Nothing.
A shout and she was awake. Unfamiliar environment, bright lights and the smell of disinfectant. Get up. Get up. Get up. Arms tied down, legs tied down, someone in the corner of her eye. Heart pounding, head swimming. A fear without a source or a name. The last thing she had felt before- before-
A voice tutted in disapproval, and then, simply:
Nothing.
Peri awoke in an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar room. She stretched her arms up and stared at them a moment. It was unclear what she’d been expecting to see. Nevertheless, the fact that they were her arms, present and whole, under her command as they had been her entire life, came almost as a surprise.
Letting them drop back down, Peri pushed herself upright. It took more effort than it should have, like her muscles had gone and atrophied in the days since- no, weeks? Longer? When was she? Time had passed, Peri was sure of that, but time since when she couldn’t say. She remembered the Daleks, then Sabalom Glitz, then… waking up, just now. There wasn’t so much a gap in her memories as a slight friction, a capital-S sort of Something so tiny she might not have even noticed it if she hadn’t been looking.
“God, Doctor, what the hell have you gotten us into now?”
First step: take stock of the situation. The bed was in one corner of the room; the wall opposite was maybe a bit under 10 feet away and the one to her left was maybe a bit over. Two doors in the far corner of the room, each with a sign on, but Peri couldn't make out the words from here. Something that might have been a mirror immediately opposite. A desk and chair between that and the bed. The whole place felt like a hospital, all rounded edges and clean off-whites.
Great.
Peri didn't run a hand through her hair. That's to say she tried to run a hand through her hair and jerked it away in shock when it met something else entirely. When had her hair gotten buzzed? “Doctor?” The word was a hushed call, for all the good that would do in an empty room with closed doors and no windows. Not like she could rely on him to help anyway, not after-
Once again, Peri stumbled over the Something in her memories. Disconcerting, but she wasn't afraid. Travel with the Doctor long enough, probably, and nothing would scare you again.
Carefully, Peri eased herself out of bed, standing on weak, shaking legs. It wasn't cold, despite her feet being bare and her pants only reaching mid-calf.
Hang on.
It was the first time Peri had paid attention to her clothes. Well, they weren't her clothes at all. A boxy top and pants, simultaneously too big and too small. Hospital clothes that matched the hospital room. God… Had something happened to her? Again though, like the Something in her memories, the fact didn't scare her. It should have done. In her logical mind the idea of someone shaving her head and changing her clothes and leaving her in this room sickened her, but emotionally there was nothing. Even that fact couldn't raise more than slight concern.
Collapsing into the chair, Peri told herself to focus on one thing at a time. So she couldn’t feel scared. Well, maybe that would come in handy. Wasn’t fear the mind-killer, or however that book had worded it?
It sounded unconvincing even inside her own head.
The chair, despite looking nothing like an office chair, moved like one. Probably a better idea than walking in this state. Peri used her feet to push herself across the room, wanting to see the signs on the doors better.
In small, looping handwriting, one read BATHROOM. Andy, yeah, it was: sink and toilet and something that was hopefully a shower. The other sign, longer, read DOOR LOCKED. WILL CHECK ON YOU EVERY HOUR. There was no indication of who had written them.
“I suppose it would be too much to ask for a clock in here?” Peri asked nobody in particular, rolling slowly back towards the bed.
“This isn't a hotel,” snapped a voice from the door. A cold, familiar voice. A voice belonging to someone who would take the universe apart, not out of malice, but just to see how it worked underneath.
“The Rani,” Peri groaned. “I would've expected more plants, or specimens in jars.” Unless Peri was the specimen in the jar. That mirror could be a two-way one, but she wasn't sure what good a narrow vertical observation window would serve.
The Rani paid no mind to the comment, moving past Peri to lay a tray down on the desk. “You recognise me then.” It wasn't a question.
“You don't recognise me? We must have sent your TARDIS further than the Doctor had thought if you've gone and forgotten us.”
Spinning back around, the Rani's face twisted into a snarl. Pushing hard on Peri's shoulder she slammed the chair into the wall and drew close enough to tower over her. “You! The Doctor's idiotic tag-along. That stunt you pulled with the Tyrannosaurus rex destroyed months of valuable research.” She was all in Peri's space, rage pouring out of her like a physical force. “I ought to have turned you into a tree and left you there, at least then you would've been useful!”
Peri met her eyes. “I'm not scared of you.” She should have been. She really should have been. This fearlessness had crossed the boundary into stupidity and was making a break for the lands of self-destructiveness. But, God, it felt satisfying. “Tell me what you've done with the Doctor.”
There was a long moment where it seemed the Rani didn't hear, gripping Peri hard enough to leave a bruise. Then she spat out a mocking laugh, anger shattering. “Me? Nothing. My plans have nothing to do with him. You neither; it's simply bad luck I didn't recognise you with no hair.” Rolling her shoulders, the Rani stepped away. She pointed at the items on the tray. “Blood pressure; blood oxygen and heart rate; neural oscillations. I'll take them all now and will be back each hour to repeat the process.”
Surprisingly, Peri found herself believing the Rani. The woman was cruel, sure, and could be petty when time called for it, but she wasn't the Master, seemingly obsessed by the Doctor beyond all else. Plus, god only knew how many times the Doctor had called her by the wrong name since his regeneration: maybe all humans did look the same to Time Lords. “Fine,” Peri said. Pushing her sleeve up, she rested her arm on that of the chair. “But you’re telling me what’s going on.” Because even if Peri’s arrival was accidental, she was sure the plans would be something awful.
The Rani clipped a little machine around Peri’s finger and stuck another behind Peri’s ear, her motions elegant and practised. “This is the first day in a number of weeks where you’ve been awake without immediately trying to claw your own skin off or put your eyes out, let alone leave the bed.” The blood pressure collar went around Peri’s upper arm. “When I say you're not ready to hear it, work on the assumption that I know what I'm talking about."
Peri frowned. Funnily, that explanation didn't make her feel better about anything. The fact that the Something in her mind was the scab left behind from - apparently! - repressing a memory wasn't reassuring. Not just any memory either, not with that scale of reaction. God, what had happened to her?
“That means,” the Rani said, the instant Peri was about to start talking, “be quiet.”
Maybe her first day awake wasn’t the time to push it.
When the Rani at last finished scribbling down her readings, she took the final object off the tray and handed it to Peri. “Food,” she said. “I'd advise not looking at it first.”
And with that, she left, taking the equipment with her.
The thing in Peri's hand looked like a tube you'd get paint in; it even felt like it contained paint. She squeezed a small amount onto a finger and grimaced. Once again, the Rani had been onto something: the lumpy grey sludge wasn’t appetising in the slightest. Tastier-looking mould had grown on her college dorm's bathroom ceiling.
Except… it tasted of bananas. Not of banana flavoured candy, sickly sweet and artificial, but of actual bananas. If Peri made sure to screw her eyes shut and not look at what she was eating, she could pretend it was, in fact, a banana, just pre-mushed.
Surely the Rani hadn't done that intentionally. Surely.
The days blurred into each other. Peri spent most of it in a fuzzy halfway-conscious state, seconds dragging into weeks and hours passing in the blink of an eye. According to the sign, the time between the Rani’s visits gradually lengthened until she was only around once every 6 hours - but Peri had no idea if that was true or not.
When she was most awake, Peri did laps of the room until the floor threatened to become the ceiling. She'd try and talk through the modules she'd been taking at college and when that was too hard she'd start recounting her adventures with the Doctor in as much detail as she could manage. Other times she'd lay with her head at the foot of the bed, just for a change of scenery.
And the days passed by. Allegedly.
"Do you do all this when I'm asleep too?" she asked the Rani once.
"Not this," was the curt reply, which meant: Stop asking questions.
Peri, who had nothing else to do and nobody else to talk to, disregarded the warning entirely. "What would happen if I woke up one day and started trying to tear myself to pieces again?" She hadn't quite been able to shake the thought, not since the Rani had first mentioned it.
"My TARDIS is monitoring your basic life signals and neural oscillations. If you did anything like that, it would notify me immediately." The Rani looked at Peri in the same way Peri had looked at the food sludge. "At the moment I would be inclined to leave you to it and hope whatever was left over was less irritating."
“You call your TARDIS ‘it’.” Peri, who hadn't torn herself to shreds again yet and had decided the time was right to push her luck.
“So?”
“The Doctor calls his ‘she’.”
“Sentimental idiot, I should've guessed. It doesn't matter, they're both imprecise translations of the Gallifreyan.”
“Why do you do it that way, then?”
“Do you ever stop asking questions?” It was a distracted snap rather than a threat, the Rani busy drawing a diagram of smooth circles and lines, “I don't talk in English. I don't translate it in any way. My TARDIS handles all that with the telepathic translation circuits. How it does so is its own business.”
The Doctor had implied his TARDIS was alive, but not like this. Not like travelling inside the belly of the beast. Not sentient. What sort of creature chose to travel with the Rani? Involuntarily, Peri shuddered and, just for an instant, the Rani's gaze flicked up to watch her.
Recently, the food tubes had been getting smaller and were being accompanied with actual food. Nothing that exciting - slices of plain bread, mostly-warm oatmeal - but at least Peri felt more like a real person eating it.
"Why banana?"
For the longest time, the Rani didn't answer. The routine had become familiar by now, all the little machines connected up to Peri one by one. At last, she spoke. "Were you expecting me to read your mind to get the context for that inane statement?"
Peri counted to ten in her head. She hadn't quite shaken the complete lack of fear, but she'd managed to coax out a healthy level of wariness around the woman. Just because the Rani hadn't hurt her yet, or gone through with any of her threats both implied and actual, didn't mean she was harmless. "The food sludge, it tastes like banana. Was that you?"
"Don't waste my time complaining about something so meaningless."
"I'm not! It's… nice, actually."
The Rani gave her a piercing look, one eyebrow raised. "I'm flattered," she said, not sounding like she meant a word of it. "And yes, the flavour compound is one of my own devising."
A laugh escaped Peri before she could think to stop it. "Sorry, but- you're a mad scientist and you're making banana flavoured food sludge?"
“Will you stop calling it-” The Rani bit herself off and rolled her eyes to heaven. "I am a chemist, a bioengineer and several other things I don't have the patience to explain to you. Everyone else assigned my work morals. Hardly my problem.”
It was the incongruity of it that made Peri fight back another giggle, the image of the Rani - the Rani! - spending her time perfecting her recipe for artificial banana flavouring. Peri couldn't wait to tell the Doctor and-
The Doctor.
Well. That sobered her up.
God, but she hoped this would become a funny story she could tell the Doctor about. One day, far from here in both space and time. There was no way to ask around "Will I leave this place alive?" and so Peri didn't even try. The thought didn’t scare her, of course, but some small part of her wished it did. Nothing felt like it had a consequence anymore. Cause and effect. Causes with no effects. She was becoming unmoored from her own future.
Faint amusement tinged the Rani's words. "Do you have somewhere else to be?”
“I-” She trailed off. The Doctor was out there somewhere, he had to be. He would be searching for her by now, any moment and he'd come rushing in with plans for a great escape.
Surely.
Without further ceremony, the Rani piled her equipment back onto the tray and made to leave. She paused just once, right by the door, sparing a moment to look back at Peri. “Here's your answer: right now, you don't.”