#drifvoid

life, one ultimately learns, is nothing but an eternal cycle of one thing or another. nature is in a perpetual dance of impermanence; it's something she's read once, & belinda is pretty sure she's misremembering some bits as she traces the doctor's steps around his library, well, if libraries came equipped with a hexagonal cassette futurist console whose middle pillar reaches into a ceiling of clockwork gears. it's like some terrible all-nighter, as if she is a student again & her mind's frazzled from too much caffeine & too little studying, drawing invisible lines between her textbooks & her father's collection of novels, between what she was forced to read & what the curious mind of a child plucked from her family's bookshelf.

everything is a cycle, & right now belinda is chasing the doctor, a doctor as he'd like to stress, around the TARDIS interior wanting to beg to be taken back home. she stops short of just saying the words, because that would just be needlessly repetitive, & she wants to try & focus on the differences between this doctor & her captor. between this predicament & her prior kidnapping. belinda came willing this time, not that she had much of a choice given that whatever the other doctor did to save that child made her the mother & truncated her life in a mismatched set of memories, turning her into a fine meal for some anomaly eater that dragged her out of one continuity & into this one. this doctor is a lot more agreeable, less a physician & more of a scholar, as earnest as he is aloof & a little absent minded, but she finds she doesn't really mind.

he's less of a devil with a charming smile, that's for sure, & his other half who is currently lost in this labyrinth of shelves keeps his ego in check.

it could always be worse, it was almost living a lie, a life she didn't ask for, locked down to her nursing job in london for a greater reason than absent finances. travelling about as far as one tube station to another. belinda stops when the doctor finds a space for the book he's been carrying, she really shouldn't have told him her old family stories, because to him it means detours on their way back to her reality. it's only when he turns around to greet her that belinda realizes just how tired she feels. it's the curse of her work, long nights on double shifts pushing her far beyond exhaustion.

well, rotten luck, belinda chandra. her internal commentary runs a scathing routine, with the rigorously applied measured self-critique that ignores any factors outside of her control, because she really shouldn't have chosen a night out over precious, precious sleep. it's her fault for allowing a few work friends to drag her out from her prison-like flatshare & to a gleaming party in old london town, to dress her in a very flattering yellow gown far above their paygrade & tell her to have fun for once. with the kind of zeal for distraction that reminds her of the two, no, three time lords she's traveled with. maybe she's subconsciously trying to recapture her repressed sense of adventure, which would be silly, or maybe the universe really does conspire to put belinda chandra in the middle of any given genre of mystery.

tonight's flavor is murder, & to the universe's credit this kind of scenario hasn't yet befallen her, or the doctor, the other doctor or romana. at least, not the kind of poirot inspired everybody is a suspect & we have a great detective on the scene setup that's less common in the real world than in agatha christie's stories. the backscratcher monster on the abandoned mining colony was a different horror entirely. the only problem now is that belinda is the patsy, the red herring, the nurse caught over the body holding the murder weapon after the real murderer ran out of the room & planted it onto her. of course, she didn't get a good luck at the killer in the commotion, & now she's hovering inches away from a corpse, holding a bloodied stiletto & doing her best impression of a dear caught in the headlights—big brown eyes & everything. they should see that neither her dress or hand are stained red.

her hope, well, her only hope now is for that great detective to show up & get the accusing stares of the crowd turned in their direction, to exonerate belinda to the other attendees & get on to solving this case while she can scurry away. if such great detectives exist outside christie or doyle's work, or if they attend glamourous parties in the center of london where the middle class comes to pretend to be rich for a night. belinda can really only cross her fingers, figuratively speaking, because her hands are raised before the crowd for the moment.