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There's a single point of light in the darkness.
She's nothing but a consciousness, and yet she can move. With the exertion of some mental effort, she can push her way towards... whatever it is. But the darkness is heavy and thick, and the light is so tiny and distant, and... she's immersed, and she's happy, and the moment she stops swimming and lets herself sink, everything feels so much better. No effort. No difficulty. Just peacefully floating down.
That's it.
A voice. She doesn't hear it, she feels it, but finds herself somehow still able to conceptualise the words within it. It's... comforting. It's rewarding. There's something out there that she pleased by making the right decision, and that feeling of goodness and rightness just makes her suspended state all the more comfortable and pleasing.
There you go. Sink now. Let yourself drift.
There's barely a self to drift, but drift it does. Some direction, some movement, and the light continues to fade. That feels better. That feels right.
Does it?
Yes, it does.
Yes, it does.
And so it does. And so she drifts. Neverending.
It's rare to be separated from her time sense. (Does she have one of those usually? Probably, maybe... perhaps.) Time is a concept she knows, and within some alternative framework, it might even make some sort of sense. But it's absent from here, and that... is relaxing, really. No timelines around her, no feeling the splits and folds and wounds within them. She can feel the distinct shape of their absence now, whatever they were, whenever it was that she felt them as before, after, sometime in relation to the endless peace. Doesn't matter. Now is all she has, and that's all she's ever wanted.
And it feels good, doesn't it?
It does. It does, he's right. The voice, whatever voice... no ears to hear, so formless as she is, but there's such a distinctive resonance. A warm voice, a gentle voice. A voice that does not mean her harm.
Perhaps it could. Perhaps it would. But it does not.
I have never meant you harm, he says, and there's something there, but she's too far gone to identify it. Too far gone to know or care.
Deeper now, Doctor.
Doctor?
Doesn't matter.
Deeper.
Feels good to obey. Relieving, relaxing. She can follow the voice instead of the light, and know that she will come to no harm. Not when the darkness around her welcomes her like soft silk, when she glides with such gentleness through this new and infinite experience.
Feels good.
There's... there's something so inherently pleasurable about it, in being weightless and selfless in the void. An absence of stress, an absence of responsibility, she feels both of those distinctly -- known to her only by the pleasant feeling of their absence, and by the good that now fills that missing space.
Take out everything that once was, and fill the rest of the space with feeling good. That's right. That's right, Doctor.
And just as she's told, she feels good. The feeling is the clearest thing in her world, and she needs it like nothing else. Good thing, then, that it's coming to her boundlessly, gently rising like the slope of a hill for all the further she drifts. Liquid, pouring, filling the emptiness that defines her.
So full. And still there's room for more.
She knows she wants more. She's loving this, being suspended in this, and she wants to... project that feeling, somehow express it to the formless voice. She neede toake that known. She needs--
I know, dear.
He knows. A flood of reassurance poured down on her need -- he knows, and will fulfil. That's all she wants. That's everything she needs. That's wonderful.
It flows faster, and that must have been his doing. Every part of her already feels good, but now it's compacted, compressed like gas, molecules hitting out at her inside edges.
So good. So good.
So full, too. Whatever space she takes up is occupied by the feeling of goodness, by the way it grows inside her and compresses itself to fit. All the more it's increasing, density greater and greater, her whole self overloaded past any normal point.
More. She can go further. There's a reckless lust for it within her -- she wants to be so full she could burst.
More, dear?
Yes. Yes. She wants it, needs it, knows it, makes it known.
Then take it.
Thrusting into her is an instant inrush of intensity, source unknown but so thorough. She is filled and she is filled again,, each one a sudden jump. The slow climb she'd known has been replaced with so much more; all that came before has been replaced. She doesn't know how to experience anything but the good, the void now meaningless in the face of pure feeling.
Rising, rising --
-- huge jumps, harsh leaps, a stabbing of pain that only increases the pleasure. She's never felt pain before, yet knows that's what this is, and alongside everything else it's incredible. If she wasn't already fit to burst...
She needs to. She needs it.
She's so full. Pleasure pushes out at her insides, pressuring her to explode. So close to becoming infinity -- no longer confined, she breaks the laws of mathematics and expands beyond what she could otheriwse conceptualise
And she NEEDS it.
You really do, don't you?
She does. She knows it, more powerfully than anything else.
She's no longer drifting but whirling through the void, creating her own orbit, a star spinning into life. She wants this, she needs this, she wants this irresistible charge of potential energy to become all that she knows it can be.
Please.
As soon as the concept of begging becomes real to her, she's pouring her whole self into it. Want becomes an active process, need becomes a biological function, and all of it is channelled so strongly through her that the void can no longer be dark. She blares white-hot through it all.
Oh, Doctor, says the voice, and it's a meaningless platitude to a meaningless identity. It's so far outside her one want and need that it's ridiculous -- she is squeezed down to a singularity and infinitely compressed within that point, and the forces of her universe are screaming to explode.
But there's fondness there from someone, as much as it's irrelevant. Flashes assail her, of a soft rope framework and a painfully firm grasp and exactly who the fullness is coming from -- they dance down the psychic link, the two of them chained by a hypnotic bond that enraptures him almost as much as it does her. But he's real and she's beyond real, she's tipped headfirst into nothingness and she's desperate to be everything.
She sends him one final desperate beacon of need, bursting out flares into his mind, and finally -- finally -- he lets her.
And she is all. Expanding out into the universe, pressing up against the edges before exploding further still, she is unstoppable. So imbued with power and powered by glory, the void disintegrates before her. And it is wonderful, and it is eternal -- time is banished a thousand times over again, leaving this explosion into infinity to expand and burn on forever.
Doctor.
"Doctor."
And as the explosion burns on, a Time Lord's mind is once again beginning to interpret what it hears. There's other words too, but only "Doctor" has any meaning so far. She thinks it might even be her.
With a little help, some old impulses are flowing back through her brain. He tries again: "How are you feeling, Doctor?"
She stares ahead, stares along her constricted body to the man who did this to her. No, not a man -- an old friend, their relationship greater than anything. Just as huge and beyond definition as what she's just been.
No words. She laughs, ecstatic in her return, marvelling at the universe -- at what she can become, and what she will always know she can be.