Chapter Text
A flashing strobe light — or no, a lantern — or is it a police car? There does seem to be something reminiscent of the police, but it’s — it’s…
Stars. So many stars. Passing through the darkness at warp speed. Propelled through time. Getting faster; faster still, until they seem to turn in on themselves; turning and turning into an infinite spiral in shades of deep, dark red. Magenta. Purple. Blue.
More flashing. Round and round, and the sound it makes… Like mechanical breathing; like a muffled grating of metal on metal.
It fades, fades far, far away; distorting; falling through the darkness like books slipping off a faulty shelf into an infinite, timeless abyss.
A young woman wakes with a gasp, feeling as though the oxygen has been siphoned from the room. She jolts upright as she fights to catch her breath.
The first thing she realizes is that it’s very dark. There’s no light whatsoever, not so much as a pinprick. She blinks hard, then rubs her eyes even harder, and then there are brief little bursts of light — but only in the form of colorful phosphenes that break across her vision.
It’s the only way she knows she hasn’t gone blind.
There’s a metallic scent hanging in the air; a low humming all around her, and she’s aware rather quickly that it doesn’t feel like she’s lying in a proper bed. It feels like some sort of thin mat on the floor. The blanket covering her isn’t much better, but thankfully, it’s warm enough from her body heat. Wherever this is, she’s not going to freeze.
Only… Where is this, exactly?
She thinks she’s experienced this before. Thinks she remembers what it’s called. Peri… Para… Para-something-or-other. She learned it in school, she thinks. That feeling of waking up and forgetting things. It’s usually a fleeting thing as your senses come back online, but…
It’s with a hard knock to her brain that she realizes she not only can’t recall which grade she was in, but she can’t even think of the school. What’s worse — she can’t seem to recall any she’s ever been to.
Her brow wrinkles in the dark. Surely she could think of… Or maybe… Wasn’t there…?
The cold bite of fear rips through her as she realizes she can’t remember… well… anything. Nothing at all. Not where she is, nor how she got there.
Not even her own name.
She can feel sweat collecting on her palms and forehead, her heart beating its way up into her throat. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong, and she has to get up — has to find a light switch. Or something.
Planting her hands on either side of her hips, she weakly pushes herself up, using the shaky planks of tired arms and legs to lift herself so she can stand. She barely rises from the ground when her head crashes into a cold metal roof, and she yelps, her own startled voice sounding foreign to her ears.
Her head is pounding as she drops back down onto the pad beneath her, but the rush of panic beginning to spark up and surge through her is enough to propel her to her side, where her hands shoot out and feel a wall. The surface is cold wire mesh, sturdy with holes only big enough to poke the tip of her finger out. She feels herself gasping for air as she reaches out to the other side and feels the same thing there — another cold metal barrier.
Uttering a shaky breath, she presses her hands flat into the walls on either side, barely a meter apart. “Oh… Oh, no,” she whispers. The alarm ringing in the back of her mind is sharp and visceral, flowing like icy-cold water into every corner of her awareness.
She’s in a bloody cage.
Naturally, her first reaction is a crippling onslaught of anxiety, which she tries to tamp down, but she’s got no stable ground to stand on — she’s in a cage in the dark and she can’t even remember who she is. Her eyes burn as tears form and fall within a few seconds, and between her soft little whimpers, she attempts to call out.
"Hello?" She’s pulling her breaths with such intensity that her entire body shifts, her chest rising and falling rapidly. "I-Is anyone there? I don’t know where I am, I-I don’t know — oh, please, somebody! Anyone!”
Her sobs are strained and quivering as she keeps feeling her way around, now crawling about the small cage. It’s about six inches taller than her height sitting up, but about two feet longer than her full height lying down. The entire thing is surrounded by wire mesh, with no access to any lock or handle from the inside.
As she blindly maps out the confined space, attempting to make sense of her situation, she finds herself sobbing unremittingly. True panic is beginning to set in, and she slides her trembling hands along the ceiling, where she feels a small vent in the center. She sniffles hard as she prods at it, but there’s no information to be gleaned — only the recognition of what it is.
Near what she assumes to be the door of her enclosure, she feels a rectangle of metal with a few grooves, but she ignores it, trying the door again. There’s nothing; no handle, no lock. Just a round, circular piece of metal that lies flat, likely attached to a locking mechanism on the exterior.
She curses out loud, grabbing her thin blanket and wiping her dripping nose on it before she gives up on feeling and just tries to ground herself.
“P-Please,” she stammers, brushing the fabric beneath her eyes as more tears continue to fall. “Please, please, if th— there’s… anyone, please…” Her voice grows small; feeble. Her chest constricts with a throbbing ache. “I’m so… scared…”
Feeling helpless, cold, and terrified, she lies back down, pulling the blanket up over her head as she weeps. She’s gone into a spiral, absolutely without answers and no way to even know which questions to ask. She’s racked with tremors as reality settles in around her like hard, immovable steel; because she’s alone, she’s in danger, and for all she knows, her life may well be on the verge of ending.
In an attempt to cling to any fragment of a memory, any drifting piece of some long-lost identity, she desperately searches for even the slightest hint to latch onto. If she could just recall one specific detail…
She tries to imagine her father’s voice. Her mother’s face. Her first dance. First kiss.
She instead finds a stubborn, deadlocked matrix that leads to nothing at all.
Within moments, finding herself scarce of options that don’t involve screaming endlessly, she curls up in a fetal position beneath the covers. She tries to make herself as small as she can, tucking her body into a ball as the freezing chill of worry overrides every other thought; every emotion.
Her mind feels like an intricate puzzle made up of a million itty bitty pieces that have all fallen apart on the floor; no way of even beginning to decipher what the finished picture might make.
She slips into a hole within herself; sharp sounds of anguish pouring from her inflamed throat until her voice grows hoarse, feeling the small space closing in on her. Crushing her.
After several moments of increasingly muted, muffled cries into raspy cloth, she hears a loud click, followed by the soft squeak of a door opening. For a moment, she stops breathing.
There’s light pouring into the room from whatever’s on the other side of the door, but it’s the first time the woman realizes her ‘cage’ is veiled by a thin, cream-colored silky barrier, concealing her view. Her heartbeat grows thunderous and fast again, her face turning cold as blood drains from her cheeks. Whoever is on the other side of that covering doesn’t even want her to see them.
“Please,” she finds herself pleading suddenly, squeezing her eyes shut, and then she hears a distant sound of something being wheeled down a hallway. A cart, of sorts, she realizes with a fresh wave of terror. In her mind, she sees a bevy of knives, needles, a saw; various medical instruments. Chemicals. Hammers. All of the worst things she can possibly imagine.
She instinctively flips herself onto her back and starts propelling herself away from the sound, swiftly sliding backward until she presses into one of the corners of her cage. The wheeling gets louder and louder, creaking and metallic, heavy as though toting all sorts of things, and the realization is almost enough to make her sick all over her makeshift bed.
The cart is pushed (or pulled… no telling) into the room by a silent delivery person. The woman in the cage feels the mesh wire pressing into her skin through what she now sees as a thin, soft dress of some sort, not unlike a nightgown. She doesn’t stop pressing herself into the wall, turning her head and tucking her chin close to her body as she draws her legs to her chest. She drops her face between her knees as the cries recommence, wobbly and broken off, her head starting to ache from all of the fluid lost down the sides of her cheeks.
Her body stiffens as the cart slides up alongside her cage with a metal-on-metal squeal. This is it, she realizes. This is it.
Right when she’s expecting the worst — for a bright light to come on and the veil to be lifted, revealing the person who will deliver her most unbearable fate — it’s over quickly, with a single pair of footsteps retreating and pulling the door shut behind them.
She’s alone again, and the relief is a solid, tangible thing that sinks her tense shoulders only briefly before she’s swept back up with the full brunt of terror.
It’s pitiful, she thinks; the way her mouth falls open with a choked cry as she crawls forward, tugging the covers back over her as though it’ll protect her; shield her from that mysterious, dreadful fog of the unknown that hangs around her in a miasma.
All she wants in the universe is to feel safe, to feel warmth — as though she’s got any sort of anchor to reality outside of this fear-steeped tether.
In a moment of desperation, she finds herself taking her pillow and trying to imagine it’s a stuffie of some sort; a flimsy little teddy bear. She hugs it tightly as she snivels and sobs, nuzzling it, feeling the faint tendrils of comfort as her brain eagerly seeks and clings to any remote inkling of solace it can find. She tries to picture little pink button eyes; patchwork overalls sewn directly into cotton ‘fur’.
The very real and haunting reality of what she’s resorted to claws at the forefront of her mind, never gone, and her tears consume her with renewed vigor. She’s lost. Alone. She’s no one.
She’s so far gone that she hardly registers the soft hissing sound coming from a vent nearby.
But she does hear the very distinct sound of somebody waking suddenly, gasping and jolting upright the exact same way she had.
Her eyes open wide when she hears it, holding her little pancake pillow teddy bear to her chest with an iron grip as she burrows her face into it, dampening the fabric. She has no idea what to feel, but her tears stop dead, as well as her breathing.
“Wh… What?” the other person — a man — murmurs dazedly.
The woman swallows hard. Even with the hum of whatever air conditioning unit is running through the building, it’s so silent in the room that she’s sure he must hear how hard her heart is beating. But she can’t speak, not yet.
Just a few feet away, she hears soft rustling, followed by the gentle clinking of hands running over metal. So this man is also in a cage.
The woman, having not registered how long it’s been since she’s taken a breath, sucks in a heavy, shuddering gulp of air before she can stop herself, and there’s a soft gasp in the other cage.
“Wait — hold on. Erm, hello?” he asks, ruffling his thin blanket as he seems to turn in the small space. “Who’s there? Are you alright?”
Well… His first move is to inquire about the well-being of a stranger, which is… a good sign, she supposes, but it’s difficult to feel comforted just yet. She sniffles hard, turning her head to brush her nose on her blanket, then attempts to reel in her shivers.
“I-I… I don’t know,” she admits quietly. “I don’t know where… or who… I am, I don’t know how I got here, I-I don’t know who I am, I don’t know who I am.”
By the end of her declaration, the fright and foreboding have taken precedence again, mowing over infinitesimal strands of relief to usher in a parade of dread. There’s no stopping the way she curls back in on herself, wracked with inconsolable sobs. Now that there’s a ‘witness’ to what’s happening, it somehow feels all the more real.
“Wait, wait — shhh, shhh, it’s alright. Hey — it’s okay,” the man soothes, sounding closer; like he’s practically pressed his mouth to the metal that separates them. “Can you remember anything? Anything at all?”
“N-N—... No,” she finally manages, the last word cracking on a whimper. “I-I c-can’t—”
“Shhh — you’re alright. Try not to think too hard on it just yet. I’m certain it’s deliberate, the, erm… amnesia. S’probably more or less impossible to recall much of anything at the moment.” In spite of the all-consuming horror of the situation, he chuckles just a bit. “I say this, of course, because I can’t seem to remember anything, either.”
Oh… Oh.
It’s both of them.
Something about that is strangely comforting, knowing she hasn’t just properly gone mad — or perhaps she has, there’s still no way to tell — but she isn’t alone in this.
“Nothing?” She finally crawls out from beneath her little blanket, pushing herself up with her palms on the pad beneath her, facing the man who’s so close to her. “Really?”
“Nothing!” he confirms almost jovially, inspiring the woman to arch a brow. How is he so… so calm? How is he not breaking down?
“Why… Why would they… I mean, whoever they are, why would they want us to forget?”
“Mm, there’s no telling — least, not yet. Could be any matter of things. We might’ve seen something we weren’t supposed to see, might’ve not been meant to get amnesia in the first place, for all we know. Or maybe this is a temporary side effect of whatever they used to knock us out. Although…”
He pauses, and the woman can hear a bit of movement, as well as the soft smacking of lips.
“No… Tetramotranine. That’s not gonna mess with your memories. Whatever they’ve used for that seems to be something different. Something I’m… hmm. Something I’m not… sensing… at all. Nope,” he pops the ‘p’.
In the other cage, the woman’s eyes widen, her fears now getting twisted up in a healthy heap of bemusement. “Wh-What, how did you just… sense that?”
“Erm.” He clears his throat. “Wellll… that’s an excellent question. I can’t say I’ve got the most satisfying answer. Might just have a knack for that sort of thing, I think. Can smell the Klorazan they used to wake me up, too. Must’ve pumped it through… this vent, here.” He pauses. “Have you got a vent, as well?”
She confirms that she does, and good god, she’s weirdly elated that this mystery genius has been plonked down beside her now, realizing the immensity of her gratitude with a deep wave of warmth. He’s clearly… well, a bit mad, she thinks, but his voice is lovely and soft, and he’s kind and he seems like he might even be brilliant, which for right now, is a godsend.
She’d have been happy just to have someone not shouting at her or threatening her life if they came into the room. Instead, she’s got some sort of fearless, happy… geek.
Compared to five minutes ago, it’s night and day to how she was feeling. She wants to cling to that hope — wants very badly to be able to trust him. To trust him with everything.
And she might not know herself — might not know him — but deep inside, she instinctively feels like he would do her no wrong. Perhaps it’s foolish, but right now, he’s all she’s got, and there are certainly worse people to find yourself locked in a cage next to.
“Say,” he asks after a moment, “have you got one of these sort of… metal bits on your ceiling? Near the front end?”
“Yes,” the girl answers immediately, unsure of why she’s suddenly smiling. “I’ve got one. Why?”
“Well… Either the company behind this particular brand of metal cages has enlisted a rather unusual monicker, or I’m called… John.” Next time he speaks, she can hear the smirk on his lips. “John Smith. Blimey, that’s original.”
The woman practically stumbles with how quickly she scurries to the front of the cage, eagerly reaching up and sliding her hands around until she finds the cold metal rectangle. “Hold on…” She finds it, then she finds the edge, getting her fingertips in the shallow grooves engraved into the surface. “Sorry, might take me a sec.”
“You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”
She feels the first letter, looping her fingertip through the groove with eyes closed, as though it’ll help her see in the pitch-dark.
“R…”
The man at her side hums approvingly. “Good. ‘R’ is good.”
“O…”
“Good…”
“S…” She pauses. “... E.”
Rose.
Her name is Rose.
“Rose,” John murmurs, the smile once again shining through his tone. “That’s a lovely name.”
His voice is soft and sincere, and for some reason, his little compliment makes Rose’s heart do a tiny flip in her chest, which she forces herself to brush away.
She doesn’t even know this man. He could be missing half his teeth and weigh twenty stone, for all she reckons — and she’s not necessarily shallow; at least, she doesn’t think she is — but something tells her she doesn’t just go getting all fluttery-chested for every man who shows her kindness, does she?
In fairness, emotional trauma has a funny way of messing with the heartstrings, she thinks. She’s not going to fault herself for that.
This man is kind, and so far, he seems quite helpful. He makes her feel like he’s not only here for her, but that they’re in… whatever this is… together.
Pushing through the little emotional quandary, she begins to trace the surname following the floral first. She has far more ease now that she knows the amount of speed and pressure to use to feel the grooves.
“Tyler,” she says a few seconds later. A part of her — alright, most of her — was hoping that the entirety of the name would be like a trigger, flooding her brain with an identity just out of reach… but there’s no recognition.
Still, she’s grateful nonetheless.
She’s no longer ‘no one’ — she’s Rose Tyler.
“Well then,” John chuckles again, his voice softening. “Wonderful to meet you, Rose Tyler.”