Midnight ⋆ Doctor Who²

51. The Hollow Promise

AURORA STARES BLANKLY AHEAD. Her room doesn't make any sense anymore. Well, truthfully, at this point, nothing has sense anymore. Aurora Barnes, it's time you stop loving me.

It's even worse than when the minotaur was hijacking her brain. The Doctor's sentence just keeps repeating itself in her brain, again, and again. Aurora Barnes, it's time you stop loving me.

She slowly stands up, her face wet with tears, but terrifyingly blank. She doesn't know what to believe now. She can feel some remnants of faith for him because of course she can't stop loving him. But all of it doesn't make any sense.

Saving him wouldn't make the Time Lady Victorious. Would it? She really wouldn't know, right now. She really wouldn't care either.

In the corridor, the minotaur is lying on the ground, and the Doctor tends to it as the lights flicker. "I severed the food supply, sacrificing her faith in me," he tells him, so flatly. A piece of him has been chucked away. "I gave you the space to die. Shush, shush."

The hotel dissolves into a hologrid, but Aurora isn't even phased by it. No matter where she stands, she falls. Rory slowly walks to her and gives her a side hug, and she can't even find it in herself to return it. Nothing to save now. That cold dead look in her eyes should've been a giveaway of what's to come.

She must've done something. Something to make him believe that she's the end of the universe. She cares more than anyone, cares about him more than anything – and he used it? The end justifies the means, it seems.

The Doctor stands up, and stares at her. She looks away.

"What is it, a minotaur or an alien?" Amy asks, trying her best to distract her best friends. "Or an alien minotaur? That's not a question I thought I'd be asking this morning."

"It's both, actually. Yeah. Here we go." There is a floating holographic database that he starts to read, turning away from Aurora. "Distant cousin of the Nimon. They descend on planets and set themselves up as gods to be worshiped. Which is fine, until the inhabitants get all secular and advanced enough to build bonkers prisons."

Rory lets go of Aurora, who's shoulders just slump, but she doesn't move. What's the use anyway?

He notices the window at their feet, and looks out into outer space. "Correction. Prisons in space."

"Where are the guards?" Amy asks.

"No need for any," he answers, still flatly. "It's all automated. It drifts through space, snatching people with belief systems and converts their faith into food for the creature."

Gibbis nudges Rory. "See that planet there?"

"Which one?"

"There. The gray one there."

"Mmm hmm."

"That's where I'm from."

Great, the planet of happy slaves. Who cares? Not her anymore. Look where it brought her? Heartbroken.

Aurora's feelings take a sharp turn as anger starts overcoming her. "It didn't just want me," she says, and everyone freezes and turns to the oh so broken shell of a girl. Her eyes are focused on the Doctor. "So you must believe in some god or someone, or they'd have shown you the exit too." She shrugs. "So what do you pray to?"

The Doctor frowns a bit. Once, he stood in front of an angry god, or devil, he's still not sure to this day. After so long, he told him that the only thing he believed in was her. Dawn Stark. His best friend at the time. A woman Aurora has more than lived up to.

If he does pray to something, he prays that somehow, his last moments would be with her.

"According to the in-flight recorder, the programme developed glitches," he says. "It got stuck on the same setting, the fears from the people before us weren't tidied away."