So my doc didn't saved sooo i was late
My sleep schedule is so shit nowadays without class, plus being tired even tho i didnt do anything
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Druid did not remember falling asleep.
One moment, he had been sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, shaking so badly his teeth hurt, trying not to listen to the thing scratching inside the wall. Next, the room had changed.
The hospital was gone. No, not gone.Replaced.
The walls were still there, but they no longer looked like old plaster and Gallifreyan zinc. They looked like black glass, smooth metal, and pale blue light running in thin lines under the surface. The bed beneath him was not a bed anymore but a medical platform. The air smelled really clean, like there was never pollution here, sharp, almost cold.
He sat up too quickly and nearly fell off.
"Easy," a voice said.
Druid froze.
The woman from the hospital room stood near the far wall, but she was not the same. Not exactly. She looked older.
Not physically by much. Time Lords were strange, basically immortals that way. Her face was still pale and sharp, her black hair still marked by white streaks at the front, though now it was shorter, cleaner, cut in a way that made her look less like a runaway patient and more like someone who had survived long enough to stop caring if anyone liked her.
Her old hospital garb was gone.
So was the gothic coat from the photo.
Now she wore armor.
Not bulky soldier armor. It was sleeker than that. Futuristic, layered, and plated close to the body like a second skeleton. Dark graphite plates covered her shoulders, chest, forearms, and thighs, each piece edged with faint violet light. Flexible black material connected the armor at the joints, moving with her like it had grown around her instead of being worn. A long split coat of armored fabric hung from her waist, half mantle and half battlefield cloak, with the Omega symbol worked into the back in dull silver.
Her boots were reinforced and quiet. Her gloves were plated at the knuckles. Her eyes were still purple.
But they were not lively now. They were tired.
Druid swallowed.
"Where am I?"
The woman looked at him for a moment before answering.
"Safe."
That was all.
Druid waited for more. None came.
He rubbed his face. "That's not really an answer."
"No," she said. "It's the only one that matters first."
There was something different in her voice. The younger woman he had met in the hospital room had been calm in a strange, empty way, as if depression had hollowed her out. This one was not empty.
She was controlled.
That was worse.
Druid looked around again. "Am I still in the hospital?"
"No."
"Still near the Time War?"
Her jaw tightened."For the moment."
Druid's stomach dropped.
The woman noticed. Of course she did. Time Lords noticed everything, even when they pretended not to.
"You are not on the front," she said. "You are inside one of my temporary shelters. It is folded between nanoseconds. Very small Daleks won't waste time on it while their big things to get."
Druid blinked. "Between seconds?"
"Yes."
"That sounds impossible."
"It is impossible. I got bored with that word. I learned the hard way when I just spawned to life, nothing is impossible…well, for me."
She turned back to a console built into the wall. The surface lit beneath her fingers, responding before she fully touched it. Symbols moved too quickly for him to follow.
Druid stared at her back."Who are you?"
Her hands paused. For a second, he thought she would not answer. Then she said, "The Engineer at your service."
He remembered the name. He remembered hearing it whispered by nurses and wounded soldiers, always with the same mixture of awe and caution. It had not meant much to him then. A title. A designation. Another Time Lord thing.
Now, standing in front of her, it felt heavier.
"You saved me," he said.
"Yup." She popped the p loud
"Why?"
This time, she did look at him.
It was not a warm look. It was not cruel either. It was the expression of someone who had been asked a question with an obvious answer and did not understand why the universe kept pretending it was complicated.
"Because you were there."
Druid did not know what to do with that.
The shelter trembled.
Not much. Just enough to make the walls ripple and the lights dim.
The Engineer looked up.
"Something found our wake."
Druid went cold. "Daleks?"
"Not yet."
"That doesn't make me feel better."
"It wasn't meant to."
She moved to another panel and dragged a line of light sideways. The room's far wall became transparent.
Druid wished it had not.
Outside was the Time War.
Not a battlefield now. A whole layer of reality at war with itself. Ships burned in silence. Shapes moved through the dark that his eyes refused to understand. A planet flickered in and out of existence, each time with a different scar across its surface. Far away, something screamed in reverse.
Druid staggered back.
The Engineer watched the view without blinking.
"How do you stand looking at it?" he whispered.
"Am not really looking."
"You are looking at it."
"Yes, but no time lords see things differently from others, something time-sensitive people can barely semi-see what most children of Gallifrey see at birth."
"That's not the same thing?"
"Nope." She shut the view off. The wall became black glass again.
Druid stared at her, trembling. "You sound like someone who hates being alive."he silence that followed was not comfortable. He regretted saying it immediately.
The Engineer stood very still. Then, without turning around, she said, "I did, problems with being near immortal."
Druid said nothing.
She continued working." When you were passed out its was a few hours to you, but to a time lord, that could be 100s of years for us. Time moves fast for us
"I was younger when I found you. Younger than I looked. Younger than I had any right to be. I thought the war was something that happened in history. A terrible thing. An important thing. The kind of thing people talk about afterward because afterward exists."
Her fingers slowed against the console.
"Then I was inside it."
The room hummed quietly.
"I saw Time Lords become things they would have called monsters a lifetime earlier. I saw Daleks use children as probability traps. I saw hospitals that healed soldiers during the day and ate patients at night because someone decided fear improved survival rates."
Druid remembered the nurse. The teeth. The photo. The scratching wall.
He looked down.
The Engineer's voice remained steady.
"That place you found me in was not an accident. It was a policy. Someone designed it. Someone approved it. Someone justified it with numbers."
Her hand curled into a fist against the console.
"The worst thing about the Time War is not that everyone became monsters. The worst thing is how reasonable they all sounded while doing it."
Druid looked at her armor again. The hard plates. The violet lines. The cold, precise way she stood.
"What happened to you?"
She almost smiled.
It was not a happy expression.
"I got really older."
The shelter shook again, harder this time.
A warning flashed red across the wall.
The Engineer turned sharply.
"Enough talking."