fic: incubus, 1/2
title: incubus
rating: R
pairing: eleven/amy
genres: horror, drama, angst, romance
warnings: graphic violence, references to rape, very dark.
summary: Something terrible is trapped in the TARDIS with Amy, and the Doctor is powerless to stop it.
Author's Note: This took me about twelve hours total to write, and only the first half has been beta'd. If, therefore, you discover any obvious errors in the second half of the story, blame me, but if there's something in the first half, I'm pointing my finger at the_great_snark .
Amy’s throat is hot and pulsing in his hands, her terrified eyes beginning to cloud as he squeezes harder, his fingers lacing together beneath the back of her hair, pinning her to the floor by her neck, the bucks and squirms of her body beneath his growing weaker by the second
and he reels back, throwing himself away from her, horror and bile rising in his throat.
“Amy-” and she is choking, her gasps coming in little screams, and she scrambles backwards, her boots squeaking against the glass.
“Amy, what happened-” She is pushed back against the railing and staring at him the way an animal stares at its hunter. He feels frozen. There is blood everywhere-her face and her arms are streaked with it, bruises have exploded across her cheek, and her eyes are swollen with tears.
“Amy-Amy-” “Doctor,” she whispers, and he crawls to her. She is coughing and crying and paler than he has ever seen her; he kneels there and tries to touch the welts blossoming over her white neck, but his fingertips falter. “I’m…” He swallows. “Amy, I’m…”
She is flinching, though she tries to hide it. He feels himself overwhelmed with tears.
“What was it?” she rasps, and he cannot hear that brokenness in her voice-he seizes her head in his hands, stroking her face, her hair, he must make her better, he thumbs away her tears and kisses her forehead with his own. “I don’t know,” he says, and his voice sounds strange, flooded. “Amy, tell me what happened. I don’t remember.” His words drown in their own grief. “Amy, tell me you’re okay.”
“It took over you,” she half-sobs. “It wasn’t you, Doctor, what was it?!” she screams. “What was it-”
“…no, no, no, no…” He clings to her, his own terror slowly building. This is bad. This is deadly. This shouldn’t even be possible. He feels Amy shaking against him. She smells of blood and sweat, and his lips find their way into her hair, kissing and trembling. “Amy,” kiss. “Tell me what happened,” kiss. “Amy, Amy…” kiss, “…brave, brilliant Amy…” kiss. “Please, you’ve got to tell me everything.”
He is collapsed on the lower deck, limbs screaming pain, mouth filled with blood. The stone of the floor is cold against his throbbing cheekbone. Groaning, he forces himself upright and feels his head spin.
“I’m sorry!” shrieks Amy from above him. His eyes snap to her, sharp in focus against the blurred brightness of the rest of the room. She is gripping the railing with white knuckles and her arms are bare-her jacket has been torn off, he realizes, and a sudden wave of nausea hits him.
“What happened?” he shouts, his voice cracking.
“It came back!” She leans forward over the rail, her hair falling over her shoulders. “I had to push it over, it was going to…I don’t want to think about it…I’m sorry…”
“Right!” He jumps to his feet, and takes the stairs to the console three at a time. Amy is breathing heavily but standing on her own. His nose is bleeding and there are aches along his ribcage and his jaw, which he catalogs in some relief-she was able to throw him off the platform, that’s good, she can defend herself. She will never have to again, he vows, approaching her and seizing her hand. “Follow me,” he commands, and he races down a corridor he hasn’t seen before, praying it’s still the right one.
It is. He palms the lights on and throws himself inside the rusted-over Derenuevian cage: a jail cell of sorts, liberated for TARDIS use from its host facility decades ago, he can’t even remember which of his past selves had been involved. Amy watches in suppressed panic as he swings the door shut with an awful clang and fumbles with his sonic, both hearts pounding, until the lock is secure-he tests it, rattles the bars of the door with all his might, throws his shoulder against it, until he is satisfied-he throws the sonic through the bars, across the small room, where it clatters to the floor and comes to rest beyond his reach. Amy’s hands are over her mouth. He closes his eyes and sinks to his knees. He can breathe now.
“Amy,” he says when he thinks he can speak normally again. He hears her step closer-“No, don’t-stay where you are. It’s not safe.” He opens his eyes and looks up at her. “It could come back.”
She nods, clasping her hands and crouching to sit at eye level with him.
He speaks slowly, as clearly as he knows how, gripping the bars before him. “I need to know what happened. You must tell me every detail, however unimportant-everything you remember.”
She nods.
“We don’t know anything about this...creature, we don’t even know if it is a creature, it could be anything-psychic parasite, mind worm, a Fearbeast, the extension of a telepathic swarm species, some sort of ancient nanocognitive program gone wrong, leeching or something-I have no idea, and I can’t hear it when it takes hold of me. I go away. When it possesses me, you are the only person who can fight it.”
Amy swallows, but she nods.
The Doctor takes a deep breath. “Do not come any closer to this cage. Don’t undo the lock. You couldn’t even if you tried, I sonicked it shut, but don’t try. It wants to hurt you, I don’t know why, but you must not, under any circumstances, allow it the opportunity. Amy.” He presses himself up against the bars and feels his heart go tight. “I cannot lose you. I don’t know how. Don’t make me.”
She nods for the fourth time, and behind the blood and the bruises on her face he sees heartbreaking trust.
“Okay,” he breathes. “Tell me what happened.”
Amy steels herself and squeezes her hands into fists, fingernails digging into her palms, to stop them from shaking. “Um. We got back from Aaeton. We came into the TARDIS. I closed the door, you ran up to the console and started mashing buttons and things. It was really hot, and I took off my scarf.”
The Doctor is nodding, his hands wrapped around two rusty bars. His eyes seem to captivate hers-neither of them looks away, and even as she forms new words she is staring at their impossible color, brown-grey-gold, green-brown-blue, holding onto her own, like their gazes could touch each other.
“I came up to the…time…rotor…thingy, and I made a stupid joke or something, I don’t know, and you laughed, just your normal laugh…” She struggles remembering. “You were looking at me with this normal, everyday smile on your face, and laughing. And then you…you said half of my name. You just said Am-.” She pauses. “You stopped smiling. It was…like someone cut your laugh in two.” She snaps her fingers. “And then it was…it. Not you. It attacked me.”
“What did it do to you?” asks the Doctor quietly. “Where are you hurt?”
Amy looks away, running her eyes over her body, her knees, bare arms and painted fingernails. “Threw me around a lot. Against the console and the…whaddoyacallit, that hangy monitor screen. Beat me up. My face and my arms. Kicked me. It was trying to kill me when you came back. I couldn’t breathe.” She frowns. “Why did it go away? How did you get back?”
She looks up.
The Doctor’s eyes are black.
He wakes up with rust slicing into his palms and his own blood dripping from the bars of the cage and down his face. His forehead is on fire. The room is dark. He shouts Amy’s name, and the lights flicker on. She is standing by the door, sonic screwdriver clutched in her white hand.
“Put that down!” he says, startled.
Amy drops it. “It told me it could take it from me-get inside my head and make me let it out. I was going to get rid of it.”
“It can’t do that.” He sighs and gingerly examines his forehead with his fingertips, wincing at the pain. “If it could possess you, it would have done so already. It’s bluffing.” He wipes the blood out of his eyes. “Did it say anything else.”
“It doesn’t know who I am,” Amy says, shutting the door and moving to stand several yards in front of the cell. “It got really angry when I wouldn’t tell it.”
He feels the corner of his mouth quirk upwards. “That’s my girl. What else did it say? Did it ask you anything?”
“Where are we, who am I, what species, how did I get here.” Amy hugs her shoulders. “It threatened to kill me about six thousand times.” A very small, grim smile crosses her face. “I don’t think it likes me.”
“But why?” The Doctor stands and paces, as much as the tiny cell allows. “It doesn’t know you, it’s never met you.” He feels the sparks flying in his brain as he moves. “It’s here by accident, or it sounds like it. It can’t control when it comes and goes, otherwise we’d both be dead right now. It could have killed you-it almost did. Wait! No. Wait!” He stops and slaps his forehead, and curses loudly at the blinding pain that follows. “Amy. Tell me it just wanted to kill you. It ripped your jacket off-it was after something else, it wanted to hurt you in every way possible, to violate you emotionally as well as physically-to be tortured by your own best friend, what could be more painful? It might feed off that pain-raw emotional energy, it’s perfect, it terrifies you and then makes me watch, it enjoys it-but why is it so angry?” He’s talking faster than he can think right now. “It should be gleeful, that can’t be right. Amy!” He spins around and seizes the bars of the cage door. “Get the sonic, set it to number thirteen, and scan me. No!” He slams the door with his palm. “Scan the room! It’s not inside of me, it’s trapped in the TARDIS. It keeps bumping back into me, why isn’t it going into you?”
Amy is staring at him.
“Keep up, keep up! Sonic!”
“Good lord.” She retrieves the screwdriver and spends the next fifty-three seconds examining it from every possible angle until the Doctor is positive his mind will short-circuit from impatience. He sits on the floor and determines to wait it out.
“Oh, come-it’s the twisty thing in the middle!” he explodes after twelve and a half more seconds.
“Got it!” Amy tweaks the button with her thumb, and the tip of the sonic flares with green light. Amy frowns. “What, do I just…wave it around?”
The Doctor has his head in his hands. “Yes,” he groans.
The familiar warbling whine fills the small space, and after a moment Amy appears satisfied and clicks off. “What now?” she asks obliviously. “Where do I look? I never know where you look at this thing, is there supposed to be a reading somewhere?”
“There’s a number on the side,” he mutters through his hands. “What does it say.”
A pause. “Fifteen…point…two three six seven…cucumber?”
The Doctor’s heart grows still.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Amy asks incredulously. “And please, tell me that’s a cucumber.”
He lowers his hands from his face slowly. Amy is scowling at the sonic like it’s alien technology. “Does it regularly give you vegetables with your decimal numbers, Doctor?” she’s quipping. “Crap screwdriver, you ask me. And anyway what can a number even tell you? Do you have every species from all of time and space in some sort of ditigal catalog system? Which you’ve then memorized?”
She glances over at him, and goes silent. He makes no effort to conceal the gravity in his expression, but speaks carefully.
“It’s…an incubus.”
“What, the…cucumbery thing?”
“No-Amy.” He stands up and leans against the bars. “The creature. It’s an incubus.”
rating: R
pairing: eleven/amy
genres: horror, drama, angst, romance
warnings: graphic violence, references to rape, very dark.
summary: Something terrible is trapped in the TARDIS with Amy, and the Doctor is powerless to stop it.
Author's Note: This took me about twelve hours total to write, and only the first half has been beta'd. If, therefore, you discover any obvious errors in the second half of the story, blame me, but if there's something in the first half, I'm pointing my finger at the_great_snark .
Amy’s throat is hot and pulsing in his hands, her terrified eyes beginning to cloud as he squeezes harder, his fingers lacing together beneath the back of her hair, pinning her to the floor by her neck, the bucks and squirms of her body beneath his growing weaker by the second
and he reels back, throwing himself away from her, horror and bile rising in his throat.
“Amy-” and she is choking, her gasps coming in little screams, and she scrambles backwards, her boots squeaking against the glass.
“Amy, what happened-” She is pushed back against the railing and staring at him the way an animal stares at its hunter. He feels frozen. There is blood everywhere-her face and her arms are streaked with it, bruises have exploded across her cheek, and her eyes are swollen with tears.
“Amy-Amy-” “Doctor,” she whispers, and he crawls to her. She is coughing and crying and paler than he has ever seen her; he kneels there and tries to touch the welts blossoming over her white neck, but his fingertips falter. “I’m…” He swallows. “Amy, I’m…”
She is flinching, though she tries to hide it. He feels himself overwhelmed with tears.
“What was it?” she rasps, and he cannot hear that brokenness in her voice-he seizes her head in his hands, stroking her face, her hair, he must make her better, he thumbs away her tears and kisses her forehead with his own. “I don’t know,” he says, and his voice sounds strange, flooded. “Amy, tell me what happened. I don’t remember.” His words drown in their own grief. “Amy, tell me you’re okay.”
“It took over you,” she half-sobs. “It wasn’t you, Doctor, what was it?!” she screams. “What was it-”
“…no, no, no, no…” He clings to her, his own terror slowly building. This is bad. This is deadly. This shouldn’t even be possible. He feels Amy shaking against him. She smells of blood and sweat, and his lips find their way into her hair, kissing and trembling. “Amy,” kiss. “Tell me what happened,” kiss. “Amy, Amy…” kiss, “…brave, brilliant Amy…” kiss. “Please, you’ve got to tell me everything.”
He is collapsed on the lower deck, limbs screaming pain, mouth filled with blood. The stone of the floor is cold against his throbbing cheekbone. Groaning, he forces himself upright and feels his head spin.
“I’m sorry!” shrieks Amy from above him. His eyes snap to her, sharp in focus against the blurred brightness of the rest of the room. She is gripping the railing with white knuckles and her arms are bare-her jacket has been torn off, he realizes, and a sudden wave of nausea hits him.
“What happened?” he shouts, his voice cracking.
“It came back!” She leans forward over the rail, her hair falling over her shoulders. “I had to push it over, it was going to…I don’t want to think about it…I’m sorry…”
“Right!” He jumps to his feet, and takes the stairs to the console three at a time. Amy is breathing heavily but standing on her own. His nose is bleeding and there are aches along his ribcage and his jaw, which he catalogs in some relief-she was able to throw him off the platform, that’s good, she can defend herself. She will never have to again, he vows, approaching her and seizing her hand. “Follow me,” he commands, and he races down a corridor he hasn’t seen before, praying it’s still the right one.
It is. He palms the lights on and throws himself inside the rusted-over Derenuevian cage: a jail cell of sorts, liberated for TARDIS use from its host facility decades ago, he can’t even remember which of his past selves had been involved. Amy watches in suppressed panic as he swings the door shut with an awful clang and fumbles with his sonic, both hearts pounding, until the lock is secure-he tests it, rattles the bars of the door with all his might, throws his shoulder against it, until he is satisfied-he throws the sonic through the bars, across the small room, where it clatters to the floor and comes to rest beyond his reach. Amy’s hands are over her mouth. He closes his eyes and sinks to his knees. He can breathe now.
“Amy,” he says when he thinks he can speak normally again. He hears her step closer-“No, don’t-stay where you are. It’s not safe.” He opens his eyes and looks up at her. “It could come back.”
She nods, clasping her hands and crouching to sit at eye level with him.
He speaks slowly, as clearly as he knows how, gripping the bars before him. “I need to know what happened. You must tell me every detail, however unimportant-everything you remember.”
She nods.
“We don’t know anything about this...creature, we don’t even know if it is a creature, it could be anything-psychic parasite, mind worm, a Fearbeast, the extension of a telepathic swarm species, some sort of ancient nanocognitive program gone wrong, leeching or something-I have no idea, and I can’t hear it when it takes hold of me. I go away. When it possesses me, you are the only person who can fight it.”
Amy swallows, but she nods.
The Doctor takes a deep breath. “Do not come any closer to this cage. Don’t undo the lock. You couldn’t even if you tried, I sonicked it shut, but don’t try. It wants to hurt you, I don’t know why, but you must not, under any circumstances, allow it the opportunity. Amy.” He presses himself up against the bars and feels his heart go tight. “I cannot lose you. I don’t know how. Don’t make me.”
She nods for the fourth time, and behind the blood and the bruises on her face he sees heartbreaking trust.
“Okay,” he breathes. “Tell me what happened.”
Amy steels herself and squeezes her hands into fists, fingernails digging into her palms, to stop them from shaking. “Um. We got back from Aaeton. We came into the TARDIS. I closed the door, you ran up to the console and started mashing buttons and things. It was really hot, and I took off my scarf.”
The Doctor is nodding, his hands wrapped around two rusty bars. His eyes seem to captivate hers-neither of them looks away, and even as she forms new words she is staring at their impossible color, brown-grey-gold, green-brown-blue, holding onto her own, like their gazes could touch each other.
“I came up to the…time…rotor…thingy, and I made a stupid joke or something, I don’t know, and you laughed, just your normal laugh…” She struggles remembering. “You were looking at me with this normal, everyday smile on your face, and laughing. And then you…you said half of my name. You just said Am-.” She pauses. “You stopped smiling. It was…like someone cut your laugh in two.” She snaps her fingers. “And then it was…it. Not you. It attacked me.”
“What did it do to you?” asks the Doctor quietly. “Where are you hurt?”
Amy looks away, running her eyes over her body, her knees, bare arms and painted fingernails. “Threw me around a lot. Against the console and the…whaddoyacallit, that hangy monitor screen. Beat me up. My face and my arms. Kicked me. It was trying to kill me when you came back. I couldn’t breathe.” She frowns. “Why did it go away? How did you get back?”
She looks up.
The Doctor’s eyes are black.
He wakes up with rust slicing into his palms and his own blood dripping from the bars of the cage and down his face. His forehead is on fire. The room is dark. He shouts Amy’s name, and the lights flicker on. She is standing by the door, sonic screwdriver clutched in her white hand.
“Put that down!” he says, startled.
Amy drops it. “It told me it could take it from me-get inside my head and make me let it out. I was going to get rid of it.”
“It can’t do that.” He sighs and gingerly examines his forehead with his fingertips, wincing at the pain. “If it could possess you, it would have done so already. It’s bluffing.” He wipes the blood out of his eyes. “Did it say anything else.”
“It doesn’t know who I am,” Amy says, shutting the door and moving to stand several yards in front of the cell. “It got really angry when I wouldn’t tell it.”
He feels the corner of his mouth quirk upwards. “That’s my girl. What else did it say? Did it ask you anything?”
“Where are we, who am I, what species, how did I get here.” Amy hugs her shoulders. “It threatened to kill me about six thousand times.” A very small, grim smile crosses her face. “I don’t think it likes me.”
“But why?” The Doctor stands and paces, as much as the tiny cell allows. “It doesn’t know you, it’s never met you.” He feels the sparks flying in his brain as he moves. “It’s here by accident, or it sounds like it. It can’t control when it comes and goes, otherwise we’d both be dead right now. It could have killed you-it almost did. Wait! No. Wait!” He stops and slaps his forehead, and curses loudly at the blinding pain that follows. “Amy. Tell me it just wanted to kill you. It ripped your jacket off-it was after something else, it wanted to hurt you in every way possible, to violate you emotionally as well as physically-to be tortured by your own best friend, what could be more painful? It might feed off that pain-raw emotional energy, it’s perfect, it terrifies you and then makes me watch, it enjoys it-but why is it so angry?” He’s talking faster than he can think right now. “It should be gleeful, that can’t be right. Amy!” He spins around and seizes the bars of the cage door. “Get the sonic, set it to number thirteen, and scan me. No!” He slams the door with his palm. “Scan the room! It’s not inside of me, it’s trapped in the TARDIS. It keeps bumping back into me, why isn’t it going into you?”
Amy is staring at him.
“Keep up, keep up! Sonic!”
“Good lord.” She retrieves the screwdriver and spends the next fifty-three seconds examining it from every possible angle until the Doctor is positive his mind will short-circuit from impatience. He sits on the floor and determines to wait it out.
“Oh, come-it’s the twisty thing in the middle!” he explodes after twelve and a half more seconds.
“Got it!” Amy tweaks the button with her thumb, and the tip of the sonic flares with green light. Amy frowns. “What, do I just…wave it around?”
The Doctor has his head in his hands. “Yes,” he groans.
The familiar warbling whine fills the small space, and after a moment Amy appears satisfied and clicks off. “What now?” she asks obliviously. “Where do I look? I never know where you look at this thing, is there supposed to be a reading somewhere?”
“There’s a number on the side,” he mutters through his hands. “What does it say.”
A pause. “Fifteen…point…two three six seven…cucumber?”
The Doctor’s heart grows still.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Amy asks incredulously. “And please, tell me that’s a cucumber.”
He lowers his hands from his face slowly. Amy is scowling at the sonic like it’s alien technology. “Does it regularly give you vegetables with your decimal numbers, Doctor?” she’s quipping. “Crap screwdriver, you ask me. And anyway what can a number even tell you? Do you have every species from all of time and space in some sort of ditigal catalog system? Which you’ve then memorized?”
She glances over at him, and goes silent. He makes no effort to conceal the gravity in his expression, but speaks carefully.
“It’s…an incubus.”
“What, the…cucumbery thing?”
“No-Amy.” He stands up and leans against the bars. “The creature. It’s an incubus.”