Twelve: The Doctor And the Lady (ep.1)
Dreyk
Well, here we go again…
The Doctor lay in a crumpled heap at the base of the console, a brief moment of panic washing away as he heard the soothing hum of his beloved TARDIS. Using the console to pull himself to his feet, he swayed a bit on shaky legs and, with his eyes still closed, he took assessment. Two arms, two legs, two hearts, one head, one nose…memory’s a bit dodgy, but I’ll think about that more when I don’t feel like my head will cave in.
“Dreyk? Yes, it was Dreyk wasn’t it? I’m sorry I didn’t warn you about this, but…I seem to have died and regenerated, and–“ He paused, blinking his eyes open so he could look around. From what he could piece together in his memory, he should have been interrupted several times already by a charmingly impatient young human man with a rather scrawny build and black hair hanging in front of keen black eyes, asking him who the bloody hell he was.
Instead, he was explaining the dodgy process of regenerating to the empty console room in the TARDIS.
“Dreyk?” The Doctor called, to no response. He strode over to the TARDIS doors with a renewed vigor and flung them open, calling out the young man’s name over the expanse of snow-covered field to have only his own voice echoing back at him.
His mouth set in a grim line, The Doctor turned and began a trek through the golden-lit corridors towards the room he had given Dreyk for his personal effects and a place to rest whenever his human biology required him to. He paused as he rested his hand on the door knob. His companions’ privacy when it came to their personal rooms has always been something he kept sacrosanct, except in emergencies, and without another moment’s hesitation he decided that his companions’ disappearance during the Doctor’s most recent death was emergency enough.
“Dreyk?” He said quietly, in case somehow the boy had been injured during whatever killed the Doctor and was resting. Memories overcame him like a high tide when he opened the door for the little room to be in view, causing him to grip the doorjamb and gasp for breath.
“DOCTOR!” Dreyk screamed as this new form of Krillitane, long bat wings like their previous form spread wide from its new humanoid back, the eyes nothing more than glowing energy, peeking from behind stringy white hair, wrapped its elongated fingers around the boys head with one hand, while the other drug him back away from the Doctor and toward its brethren.
“Brother Lassar was among our greatest leaders, Doctor.” The Krillitane growled in the Doctor’s mind as its pale lips twitched with mad glee, “We retreated into the Darkness when we sensed him and those of our brethren that went with him had been slaughtered by you and your little humans.”
“I did what had to be done!” The Doctor mentally shouted back at him, slowly trying to approach the Krillitane holding his companion, not wanting to make a sudden move that would endanger Dreyk’s life, “Your brethren were using children, and trying to work out the Skasas Paradigm! The power to rewrite time and space itself? I had to stop you.”
“Brother Lassar was certain you’d join us, but you Time Lords have always too arrogant for your own good. You forgot one thing that our method of evolution has instilled in us, Doctor…”
“Just let him go!” The Doctor screamed in his mind again, but the Krillitane simply grinned wider and continued, tightening his grip on Dreyk’s head.
Through Dreyk’s screams, the Krillitane whispered in his own physical voice, as if the use of verbal speech was foreign to him, “We learned patience. What is that human expression? Revenge is best served cold?”
The Doctor held his hand out, torn between the dangerous prospect of lunging towards the Krillitane to grab at his companion and standing there to try to convince the creature that hurting the boy was unnecessary. “Please,” he said with a shaking voice, “Please, let him go. Do what you need to with me, but let him go. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Revenge against me? What has he done, eh?”
The rest of the memory dissolved into a blinding light, and a cacophony of the Krillitane’s laughter and Dreyk’s mentally broken screams.
As the memory faded, the Doctor found himself on his knees in Dreyk’s room — or, what was Dreyk’s room — panting heavily, his hands balled up into fists at his sides so tightly that his nails were puncturing the skin of his palms. Another companion, another dear friend, lost. Another companion he couldn’t save from a danger that he himself got them into.
“It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. Oh, Dreyk…I’m so sorry.”