Chapter Text
The world was off-balance, he was off-balance, and it was just like every nightmare the others had said it would be back when he first arrived. Not like every nightmare he’d ever had personally - there were no ghosts, no faces twisted by horror, no sinking beneath the waves - but there were generalized nightmares that everybody was afraid of in the pit of their hearts. And he was in one right now.
It wasn’t just that everyone else was dead or dying. It wasn’t just that the little hellscape he was trapped in was the home territory for the monster hunting them, and therefore made it a hundred times easier to get found and caught. It wasn’t just that outside of this he was having other problems, swearing he could see things again, his mind picking up on the stray or latent psychic energies of this place and forcing him to see what they could spell.
No. It was that he knew one thing right down to his bones.
Something was going wrong.
In the distance he heard a scream. One of the girls. Meg, that was her name - the scream was one of someone getting hit by a heavy stick embedded with spikes and sparking with electricity and crashing to the ground as the agony got to be too much to deal with. It was her last life.
And she was too far away for him to do anything about it.
Yoichi stared into the distance where he thought she was, torn by indecision. Try to run and save her? But he wouldn’t get there in time, and then he’d be in range for one of those massive static blasts to find him. Finish that last generator instead to get the doors open? But that would give his position away the second he was done. He could hide, and hope not to be found, but …
It was his best bet. It was his only bet. If he could hide, he could find the hatch, they all said. Or wait by a door for the monster roaming the halls to find it first, and close it, and give him the chance to escape before he got found out. He wasn’t fast, he wasn’t strong, he wasn’t a fighter. He wasn’t even stealthy. The best he had was his own mind, and right now, rattled by electric shocks and his own uncertainty, that wasn’t much of a help.
Yoichi moved as quickly as he could for a locker and opened the door just as he heard Meg’s scream cut itself off sharply. He stepped in and pulled the door shut behind him and winced as something like a shockwave rolled through the halls of the institute. Then, in a moment, she was gone.
Something other than the electricity was putting him ill at ease in the trial itself. He’d been nearly dead. One hook away from sacrifice, bleeding from a blow to the ribs, trying to hide in a corner, and then he’d turned an opposite corner and their eyes had met. In that moment Yoichi had fully expected to die.
But then … he turned away.
It didn’t take long for Yoichi to realize that there was no way he hadn’t seen him. That, in fact, he had been deliberately left alive.
The others had warned him about that.
The locker was cramped, chilly, and uncomfortable, but it was better than being exposed out in the halls, no matter how much the lights flickered. He waited, anticipating the sound of a heartbeat and then hearing it start to pick up. A pulsating noise in his head that reminded him of the start of a migraine, or waves pounding on the beach.
Electricity charged up, then exploded, following every exposed wire and piece of metal in half the building. He could see it - and feel the static - as it rattled along the edges of the locker, but he was safe where he was. At least, safe from the shock that would have made him scream, given him away, gotten him killed.
There was the sound of footsteps nearby, just audible above the heartbeat. He peered through the cracks in the locker door.
The Doctor stepped into the room.
Riddled with metal and wires, skin burned, face pulled into a staring rictus grin by force … he was his own nightmare, and Yoichi instinctively wanted to press himself against the back of the locker to avoid even the idea that he might be seen. But the doors were shut. He was safe, for the moment.
For a few seconds the Doctor stood still in the room, his heavy, broken breathing the only thing to hear other than the heartbeat.
And then he turned, slowly and deliberately, to the locker where Yoichi was hiding.
There was no time to make a run for it. By the time he realized he wasn’t safe at all the looming figure had already closed in. In one second he wrenched the doors open; in the next, the weapon -
Vanished.
The Doctor grabbed Yoichi by the head with both hands. Fingers closed around his skull, gripping hard and tight like he intended to crush it but he only slammed him back instead, stunning him for a moment, which was long enough for him to dig both thumbs into Yoichi’s eyes.
His scream was muted and stuttered in his own head. Probably shock, or maybe the pain, consuming his entire world. But somehow the Doctor’s voice cut through all that and came through clear, like the electricity inherent in him was taking the words and bypassing his ears to imprint them directly on his brain.
“Nice try, but there’s no hiding from me on my own property.” His thumbs dug in deeper. The pain ratcheted up another gear. “You really should have moved a little faster. Or been a little smarter. But I do make the intelligent mind a difficult thing to use, so maybe I can’t fault you completely for this.”
There was blood - god, he hoped it was blood - running down his face from the ruin of his eyes as the Doctor ground his thumbs into the sockets. Despite everything, he hadn’t gone deep enough to hit the brain. He hadn’t gone deep enough to kill yet.
“I hope you didn’t think I was being nice and sparing you earlier.” The grip forcibly tilted Yoichi’s head back further, letting the thumbs hook deeper into the sockets. “I just needed you to survive longer than everyone else. Since you don’t know how to play the game properly yet, that meant giving you the chance to walk away.”
He tried to respond, but there was no way he could get anything out except the pain. He tried clawing at the hands on his face, tried ripping himself free, to no avail.
“You see, I need to test something. And since you’re probably not about to wander in here outside a trial, inside one will have to do.”
He felt the Doctor’s presence get closer. Felt the spark of static, the heat of the electricity and hatred.
“Your mind’s a lot more powerful than you lead people to believe, isn’t it … ?”
That was when the panic set in.
Something in his head - not physical - snapped, and lashed out, and as his nails dug into the Doctor’s burned wrists he saw - images. Pictures of other people, caught and bound, strapped down, tortured, mutilated - all from the perspective of the perpetrator. Like he was the one who’d done it.
And he thought: not this. Not again.
The grip on his head jerked slightly, but didn’t let up. He heard a laugh, high and split and awful.
“So he really wasn’t lying. I’ll have to give that insufferable little bastard some credit.” There was a sigh. “And here I never thought I’d find a real psychic. Especially in this place.”
Psychometry. Mikaela called it that. And had followed up with postcognition. Things he knew about but had never experienced. Things that shouldn’t have been within the range of his powers but were, in this place.
All he’d done was touch one of the killers on accident, in self-defense, and then he’d - seen something. Some piece of their past. It hadn’t ended well. Apparently word had gotten around.
Back before there had been the occasional interest. A phone call or letter or e-mail asking him about his … abilities. Asking if he wanted to volunteer, just for a little while, even for compensation, to see what he could do. He’d considered some of them if only to pay the bills, but never did it. What he could see wasn’t important - the curse and what it had done was his whole damn world.
Did his father have to put up with the same things? His mother had said he’d inherited his abilities. Maybe he’d been strong enough to not let it slip. Maybe people just hadn’t cared as much.
He’d never really been worried about it. People’s interest inevitably waned. There was always something more exciting, and less of a liability, to focus on.
Maybe he should have been.
The hands on his head lifted him up so his feet just barely scraped the bottom of the locker. He felt - and heard - the slow charge of electricity.
“Why don’t you show me what you can do?”
His head probably should have exploded. The sheer power that ripped through him should have killed him, left him mostly splattered across the locker. But some part of him reacted in the only way it knew how, the only way it knew he could survive.
It lashed out. The electricity split and surged back down along the conduit that led it into his brain in the first place - back into the Doctor, who was used to it and barely even shuddered. But with it came a connection. For one instant, he could see into the deranged mind of the man torturing him. See what he’d done. See the terrible pieces of his past.
People watching him. Sitting quietly, waiting, the dull expectation turning into concern and then anger and then fear and then - and then there was pain, so much of it, but not his.
People bound to chairs and beds with wires running into them, IVs attached to strange-looking bags sending who knew what into the bloodstream - and for one second he did know what, and it wasn’t good. There was no begging, just screaming. Sometimes words. Sometimes phrases. Sometimes - whole histories. Once or twice he heard them yell you were supposed to stop!
But he - the Doctor - didn’t stop. And the sense of self-satisfaction Yoichi could feel was so strong he almost threw up.
What he saw lasted about two seconds in reality. It felt like it went on forever in the hot dark nightmare behind where his eyes used to be, but it wasn’t long before he heard that awful split laughter again, cutting through his rattled thoughts like a rusty knife.
“Oh, I see. You went back pretty far.” The grip on his head didn’t let up. He tried to kick, but didn’t have enough strength left to do it. “Hm … I was expecting something more … explosive. Maybe another round will do it.”
“No,” he managed, barely a whisper through the pain.
“No? You don’t think so? That’s a shame. You should really have more confidence in yourself.”
He was lifted up a little higher. His whole face was wracked with pain, the place where his eyes had been throbbing in time with the heartbeat he could hear pulsing in his head. One hand slipped off the wrists supporting him.
“This is worth looking into further. I’m sure you understand.”
He did, unfortunately. Yoichi’s other hand dropped, the pain too much to deal with anymore.
“Don’t give up so easily.” The Doctor’s unsteady breathing was too close now. He could feel it against his throat and jaw. “You’re going to need all that inner strength to survive this place. Metaphorically speaking.”
The grip shifted. Yoichi tried to focus again, but then he was slammed back into the locker again, the hands on his face moving, the pain spiking out of control and making him scream again until something slipped and tore inside his head, and for a second he was still alive without any ability to feel or hear -
And then the world was drifting back into place, the sky overhead obscured by trees, the smell of woodsmoke close at hand, his head pounding with something that felt like the aftereffects of the worst migraine he’d ever had.
As he pushed himself up, dread settled itself on his shoulders like a blanket. He wished he didn’t know why.