Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

106(G)

                 where the heart is

                 areyoumarriedriver

She is caged.

The irony is not lost on her that she is jailed for a crime they wanted her to commit, but she says nothing, does nothing, simply observes as she is shuttled to the asteroid where her cell awaits. Stormcage Containment Facility. Desolate, a dismal concrete and metal cage on an abandoned asteroid that no one in their right mind would ever willingly spend time on.

There is constant thunder and lightning.

There is never any rain.

She sits on her cot, staring at the blank grey walls around her, flashes of blue light a constant pattern on her wall. She doesn’t close her eyes, because she will only see acid echoes of it against her lids, reds and greens garish against the dark.

In her lap is her diary – the one possession she’d refused to hand over, the one thing she’d damn near pitched a fit over when they tried to examine it. It’s just a journal. It had been dismissed easily. Let her keep it. Her fingers trace the square panels on the front of it – the bluest blue, a blue she’s only properly seen a few times but she can still see it in her mind’s eye – the bright blue wood, smooth under her hand.
In a grey room, on a cot with grey sheets, in her grey pants and dull white top – a prison uniform designed to bleed every bit of colour out of its wearer’s lives - she stares at grey walls and clutches the one piece of colour she has left tightly in her hands.

It is so blue it almost hurts to look at in here. Each flash of lightening illuminates it almost garishly. She’s already written until her hand has cramped. Every detail she can remember. Fragments of unfinished sentences that represent the things she can almost remember, but not quite. She knows why she is here. What crime she has committed. What punishment was set down. She also knows that she did not kill him that day, on those shores.

He is safe.

Her fingers tighten around the binding of her diary and she drops her eyes to it. It doesn’t matter if she killed him there or not, she knows. Because she is in jail for killing the Doctor, and she did kill him. Just not where and when they think. She killed him in a tyrant’s office in the middle of a war, with the merest brush of her mouth against his and no regret whatsoever.

Not even a second thought.

Their first kiss and the memory of it chokes her now. Serving time for it here – well. She deserves to pay in one way or another. This is as good a way as any, and somehow reviving him and giving him her lives doesn’t seem to be enough. He loved her then, she knows. He had to look into the face of the woman he loved and find nothing recognizable staring back at him. And then on top of all that, she killed him.

So she goes quietly, lead into her transport, lead into her cell. She does not struggle, and she does not fight. She is a picture of remorse, because anything else would be suspect, and they must never know that he is alive still.

Thunder rolls incessantly and she hears the echo of the guard’s footfalls as he passes by on his nightly check. He does not speak to her, merely passes by with a blank expression and she is left alone with the unending flashes of electric white highlighting the nothingness around her.

A siren wails, and the cell is plunged into darkness, the only source of light coming from the flashes of light outside and the low green lighting in the halls, casting a sickly glow over everything around them. A scraping sound echoes around the thunder, and she looks up to see his ship materialize in between her cot and the wall she has been staring at.