Chapter Text
V sat at her station, tapping the dead computer screen in a vain attempt to jolt it the life. The monitor had long-since fallen asleep, and she fought not to follow it down - her eyelids growing heavier with each passing moment, the desk appearing closer each time she succumbed to a longer blink. This stage of development, the longest and least intensive by far, had proven to be the most agonizing. With the work behind them, all that was left to do was monitor the subject and let the machines do their jobs. Easy, she had thought. Yet, during those first few weeks, she never felt quite settled. Any indication from the screen would be to inform her of some complication requiring her attention. With nothing to do wait, she always felt a nauseating sense of dread. What if she missed something? Was a few minutes shut-eye meant worth losing a year’s worth of work?
When she’d finally grown confident that nothing would go wrong, the time became more torturous. Enough that she almost wished for some disaster to befall them. What she wouldn’t give for her screen to glow bright red, signaling an emergency. One which required humans hands and clever minds to solve. Even the threat of losing everything was somehow more appealing than these sepulchral hours doing nothing. She’d prefer the bit of danger to the vacancy of consonant days - each passed without any mark to differentiate it from any other.
The darkness of the screen meant nothing had changed, but as she peered dazedly at her own reflection in the black mirror, she realized just how much she had. Her eyes seemed to have fallen victim to gravity. The dark circles beneath threatened to swallow them whole. Her hair was more of a mess than usual, with only a few errant pins and one re-worked paper clip holding her sandy, red braids in place.
Tired. She looked so tired.
She hugged her legs up against her chest to warm herself, the old office chair wavering slightly as she lifted them towards her. She helped the chair along with her hand, spinning in a full circle, casting her eyes about the room and stifling a yawn.
Another day, she thought.
The lab remained impeccably tidy, everything in its place. Nothing to clean and nothing to sort. The blue pens were with the blue pens, the red pens in a coffee cup of their very own. Normally, it was the doctor who was the most insistent, lecturing V on her messy habits. “Time spent wondering where they’d last set something down was time wasted,” he’d said. Though V felt that wasted time and time well-spent looked an awful lot alike these days. Wearisome hours passed as they monitored the steady, pinging levels that denoted life. Or, stared at a blank screen awaiting a call to action. Each was a necessary assurance that the being floating before them was not just a corpse suspended in fluid. The stillness in the lab was a noticeable difference from the long months beforehand, where robotic arms worked diligently - stitching, cutting, shaping a man from meticulously measured ingredients. Stray cells were molded into what might amount to the greatest achievement in history, or so the Doctor kept boasting. True genius often promotes an inflated ego, but it takes a special sort for the product of your greatest work to be one, quite literally, made in your image.
V’s face flushed a bit as she envisioned how much he’d changed, too. The pressure of impending public scrutiny for had inspired more emphasis on his own physical fitness. A being created in his image was to be like a snapshot in time, and he wanted to look good for the photo. The Doctor had always stayed fit, however. In the past, V had forgiven plenty for the sake of his square jawline. The way he stroked it thoughtfully as he poured through the research had used to cause V’s stomach to flutter. The long days spent in the lab used to inspire longer, fitful nights between them.
Now, though he’d become even more chiseled, he was far less accommodating to her needs. These more recent failures had made him sour, moody, and tense. She found she could rarely rouse his attention, and so hers had begun to wander. She had been faithful to him, of course. That is, in all but her mind and spirit. Those she had relinquished to desire. She yearned for hands to be on her again. Strong hands, calloused and new, rendering her helpless. Breaking the pact her body had made, that her thoughts betrayed each time she felt that rousing warmth in her belly.
Her unfulfilled desires had begun to grow more punishing. Her commitment, the promises she’d sworn to uphold, felt like chains which bound her neck. She would lash against them, struggling to break free. She felt emboldened by the tension - always trusting that they’d never break. She was safe within the fiction of her mind, never acting on her impulses, but the bitter dream for liberation caused a swell within her. A swell that rebelled, one which called for something wilder, more feral, more animal. She felt caged, gnawing at the bars, imagining the world beyond. A world with someone new in it – a world with him in it, however forbidden and wrong it was to imagine it. His taste, his sweat. For days, she would fixate on the hazy perfume of something careless. A feverish mistake, her instincts unbound. A world with so many different hot, heavy ways to…
“Veeee, dear!” a sobering voice came from the small speaker on her desk, and a dramatic throat clearing followed. “How are we fairing down there? Any changes?” The Doctor paused a minute, not wanting to sound over-eager. He likely presumed she’d fallen asleep again, and he knew she wasn’t a fan of being woken up with too much enthusiasm. Sweetness always tastes bitter in those first few seconds of wakefulness. “I know it’s been a long day, a long week, my love, but we are so, so close now!”
Close, yes. She certainly had been. She removed the hand she had hidden behind her upturned legs in the chair. She cleared her throat and smoothed her ruffled white skirt a bit as she sat up, shaking her head to re-focus. “Yes, of course, Doctor,” she said, fully expecting her annoyed tone would be ignored. Which, of course, it was.
She sighed and spun in her chair again to reset, before focusing on the dead screen again - waiting for a blip, a sign of life, a pulse on those dials. She shook her head a bit, erasing the shameful fantasy from her mind. “All systems go, everything normal.”
Why is it always his face I keep seeing, she thought. It would kill the Doctor to know that I –
“I’m sorry, V.” The Doctor’s voice cut through her thoughts. “I sound like such a stiff these days, I know.” His crackled voice through the speaker sounded so small.
V could not see him. His viewport stage was above hers and hung further towards the center of lab than her own, closer to the subject. His words were like the mournful apology from a ghost, hidden somewhere in the gray and white fluorescence of a sterile lab. She’d not physically seen him in days, and it was the vacancy that truly haunted her.
“It’s cute when you act like you’re in charge,” she laughed. “Like you’d have gotten anywhere without me.”
“Certainly, nowhere worthwhile,” he said, sweetly. “Honestly V, I hope you know I want you here just as much as I need you here.”
She wished she could believe him. Actions speak louder and all that. “I’m just tired. Long day.”
“A long day in a longer list of long weeks and months, I know. But we’ve got to be close. Just a little bit longer, ok? And then we can celebrate!”
“Pierogis and beer?”
“By the truckload!” he boasted.
V remembered when the lab had been new. How exciting it had all been. It was a product of her own design, after all, and seeing it come to life with the Doctor’s engineering know-how had been an unbelievable journey. The whole massive lab revolved around the subject at the center, everything arranged in a circle surrounding it - like it were a steeply constructed amphitheater with enormous, vaulted ceilings shooting skyward. Above and below the tank where the subject lay dormant and amidst the tangle of wires which brought life to the machines, were a series of pencil-thin tubes. Those on top would introduce new material into the tank, while those beneath would work to remove what was no longer needed.
Encircling the tank along the ceiling were mechanical appendages constructed to look and behave like arms. Each was affixed with a tool at the end to best perform its assigned task. The arms were set upon several circular dials on the ceiling that circumvented the whole room, allowing them to move easily around the tank. To see them move, each dial independent of the other, each arm performing its task with perfect precision – it looked like an automated can opener, but with greedy little fingers that prodded at your cold soup as it tore the top away.
To V, the lab resembled a disc cypher – inset circles aligning themselves in such a way as to unlock the mysteries of life itself. The same code she and the Doctor had sought to crack. There were three tiered platforms jutting out from the far walls to face the center, each stacked atop one another with manual controls and monitors affixed to each. V was on the second of these, while the Doctor was on the upper-most. The stages got closer to the tank the higher up you went - the topmost stage being closest to it. This allowed the Doctor, on his hallowed throne, to observe most carefully. To gaze down at his own visage and delight, that the world might be blessed with a second him.
He can barely stand the one of him, V thought, with no small amount of bitterness. I might enjoy the extra company though.
She gazed up at the figure of the man in the vessel. A near perfect copy of the Doctor – his strong, greedy hands. The curve of his jaw, refined by a soft beard in its infancy. His thick legs, bulging chest muscles colored with hair, just enough to run her fingers through as she lay breathless against him, lips pressed against his neck, speaking hushed nonsense in soft exhalations…
Fuck, focus.
Somehow, seeing him there in this tube stirred something within her. Not so feral as her other fits of fantasy, but no less exciting. His innocence, his raw potential, the tension in his jaw seeming so relaxed. The exhaustion she had come to recognize in that same face had faded. He looked calmer, like new.
Her fingers lingered on a joystick in front of her, biting her lip, staring up at him from below. A flick of the wrist and the restraints, the ones keeping him suspended upright, would tighten. She imagined him bracing himself against them, waking with surprise, shocked into life by her boldness before settling into his newfound vulnerability with a knowing smile. His eyes might sparkle with invitation. That is, if he ever opened those eyes of his.
Her mind kept getting away from her, fantasies assaulting her, clouding what was real. An escape, of sorts, from a reality fraught with loneliness. For her and the Doctor, it had been clawing, desperate pleas hidden behind gentle suggestions. A kiss held for too long, a hand grazing his, a darkening of her eyes as they met his own. His ignorance of her advances just spurned her fantasies. They became more honed, more specific. They became riskier and more forbidden. Pent up. That’s all she was. She would be ok. This just needed to work. Then his focus could shift back to her, back to the way it was. Pierogis and beer. Sex and attention. Something new, but familiar. How it should have been all year.
V tapped the glass monitor in front of her, willing it to life. Waiting for that jolt, to bring new life to the world or end it. Either would bring some life back to hers. She looked back up at the subject. Grimacing, almost letting herself hate him for what he had done to them.
A beep. A second. And a third, a rhythm starting to form as the heart monitor cut on, signifying danger.
She gazed down as the console came to life, then looked up again…
… to a pair of green eyes glaring down at her.